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1. Stream-51: Streaming Classification and Novelty Detection from Videos

   Roady, R; Hayes, T; Vaidya, H; Kanan, C (June 2020, CVPR Workshop on Continual Learning in Computer Vision (CLVISION))

   Deep neural networks are popular for visual perception tasks such as image classification and object detection. Once trained and deployed in a real-time environment, these models struggle to identify novel inputs not initially represented in the training distribution. Further, they cannot be easily updated on new information or they will catastrophically forget previously learned knowledge. While there has been much interest in developing models capable of overcoming forgetting, most research has focused on incrementally learning from common image classification datasets broken up into large batches. Online streaming learning is a more realistic paradigm where a model must learn one sample at a time from temporally correlated data streams. Although there are a few datasets designed specifically for this protocol, most have limitations such as few classes or poor image quality. In this work, we introduce Stream-51, a new dataset for streaming classification consisting of temporally correlated images from 51 distinct object categories and additional evaluation classes outside of the training distribution to test novelty recognition. We establish unique evaluation protocols, experimental metrics, and baselines for our dataset in the streaming paradigm. 

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2. Open-world Learning and Application to Product Classification

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313644  

   Xu, Hu; Liu, Bing; Shu, Lei; Yu, P. (May 2019, WWW 2019)

   Classic supervised learning makes the closed-world assumption that the classes seen in testing must have appeared in training. However, this assumption is often violated in real-world applications. For example, in a social media site, new topics emerge constantly and in e-commerce, new categories of products appear daily. A model that cannot detect new/unseen topics or products is hard to function well in such open environments. A desirable model working in such environments must be able to (1) reject examples from unseen classes (not appeared in training) and (2) incrementally learn the new/unseen classes to expand the existing model. This is called open-world learning (OWL). This paper proposes a new OWL method based on meta-learning. The key novelty is that the model maintains only a dynamic set of seen classes that allows new classes to be added or deleted with no need for model re-training. Each class is represented by a small set of training examples. In testing, the meta-classifier only uses the examples of the maintained seen classes (including the newly added classes) on-the-fly for classification and rejection. Experimental results with e-commerce product classification show that the proposed method is highly effective. 

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3. REMIND Your Neural Network to Prevent Catastrophic Forgetting

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58598-3_28  

   Hayes, T; Kafle, K; Shrestha, R; Acharya, M; Kanan, C (January 2020, European Conference on Computer Vision)

   null (Ed.)

   People learn throughout life. However, incrementally updating conventional neural networks leads to catastrophic forgetting. A common remedy is replay, which is inspired by how the brain consolidates memory. Replay involves fine-tuning a network on a mixture of new and old instances. While there is neuroscientific evidence that the brain replays compressed memories, existing methods for convolutional networks replay raw images. Here, we propose REMIND, a brain-inspired approach that enables efficient replay with compressed representations. REMIND is trained in an online manner, meaning it learns one example at a time, which is closer to how humans learn. Under the same constraints, REMIND outperforms other methods for incremental class learning on the ImageNet ILSVRC-2012 dataset. We probe REMIND’s robustness to data ordering schemes known to induce catastrophic forgetting. We demonstrate REMIND’s generality by pioneering online learning for Visual Question Answering (VQA). 

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4. Combining Deep Learning and Verification for Precise Object Instance Detection

   Ancha, Siddharth; Nan, Junyu; Held, David (November 2019, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   Deep learning object detectors often return false positives with very high confidence. Although they optimize generic detection performance, such as mean average precision (mAP), they are not designed for reliability. For a re- liable detection system, if a high confidence detection is made, we would want high certainty that the object has indeed been detected. To achieve this, we have developed a set of verification tests which a proposed detection must pass to be accepted. We develop a theoretical framework which proves that, under certain assumptions, our verification tests will not accept any false positives. Based on an approximation to this framework, we present a practical detection system that can verify, with high precision, whether each detection of a machine-learning based object detector is correct. We show that these tests can improve the overall accu- racy of a base detector and that accepted examples are highly likely to be correct. This allows the detector to operate in a high precision regime and can thus be used for robotic perception systems as a reliable instance detection method. 

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5. Continual Learning with Knowledge Transfer for Sentiment Classification

   Ke, Zixuan; Liu, Bing; Wang, Hao; Shu, Lei (September 2020, Proceedings of European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases)

   This paper studies continual learning (CL) for sentiment classification (SC). In this setting, the CL system learns a sequence of SC tasks incrementally in a neural network, where each task builds a classifier to classify the sentiment of reviews of a particular product category or domain. Two natural questions are: Can the system transfer the knowledge learned in the past from the previous tasks to the new task to help it learn a better model for the new task? And, can old models for previous tasks be improved in the process as well? This paper proposes a novel technique called KAN to achieve these objectives. KAN can markedly improve the SC accuracy of both the new task and the old tasks via forward and backward knowledge transfer. The effectiveness of KAN is demonstrated through extensive experiments. 

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