Recent convolutional object detectors exploit multi-scale feature representations added with top-down pathway in order to detect objects at different scales and learn stronger semantic feature responses. In general, during the top-down feature propagation, the coarser feature maps are upsampled to be combined with the features forwarded from bottom-up pathway, and the combined stronger semantic features are inputs of detector’s headers… However, simple interpolation methods (e.g. nearest neighbor and bilinear) are still used for increasing feature resolutions although they cause noisy […]

We consider the problem of designing an algorithm to allow a car to autonomously merge on to a highway from an on-ramp. Two broad classes of techniques have been proposed to solve motion planning problems in autonomous driving: Model Predictive Control (MPC) and Reinforcement Learning (RL)… In this paper, we first establish the strengths and weaknesses of state-of-the-art MPC and RL-based techniques through simulations. We show that the performance of the RL agent is worse than that of the MPC […]

Inference networks of traditional Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are typically amortized, resulting in relatively inaccurate posterior approximation compared to instance-wise variational optimization. Recent semi-amortized approaches were proposed to address this drawback; however, their iterative gradient update procedures can be computationally demanding… To address these issues, in this paper we introduce an accurate amortized inference algorithm. We propose a novel recursive mixture estimation algorithm for VAEs that iteratively augments the current mixture with new components so as to maximally reduce the divergence […]

The target identification in brain-computer interface (BCI) speller systems refers to the multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) classification for predicting the target character that the user intends to spell. The EEG in such systems is known to include the steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP) signal, which is the brain response when the user concentrates on the target while being visually presented a matrix of certain alphanumeric each of which flickers at a unique frequency… The SSVEP in this setting is characteristically dominated […]

Out-of-distribution generalization is a core challenge in machine learning. We introduce and propose a solution to a new type of out-of-distribution evaluation, which we call close category generalization… This task specifies how a classifier should extrapolate to unseen classes by considering a bi-criteria objective: (i) on in-distribution examples, output the correct label, and (ii) on out-of-distribution examples, output the label of the nearest neighbor in the training set. In addition to formalizing this problem, we present a new training algorithm […]

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely-used in image translation, but their high computational and storage costs impede the deployment on mobile devices. Prevalent methods for CNN compression cannot be directly applied to GANs due to the complicated generator architecture and the unstable adversarial training… To solve these, in this paper, we introduce a novel GAN compression method, termed DMAD, by proposing a Differentiable Mask and a co-Attention Distillation. The former searches for a light-weight generator architecture in a training-adaptive […]

Instance-specific algorithm selection (AS) deals with the automatic selection of an algorithm from a fixed set of candidates most suitable for a specific instance of an algorithmic problem class, where “suitability” often refers to an algorithm’s runtime. Over the past years, a plethora of algorithm selectors have been proposed… As an algorithm selector is again an algorithm solving a specific problem, the idea of algorithm selection could also be applied to AS algorithms, leading to a meta-AS approach: Given an […]

Machine Learning has proved its ability to produce accurate models but the deployment of these models outside the machine learning community has been hindered by the difficulties of interpreting these models. This paper proposes an algorithm that produces a continuous global interpretation of any given continuous black-box function… Our algorithm employs a variation of projection pursuit in which the ridge functions are chosen to be Meijer G-functions, rather than the usual polynomial splines. Because Meijer G-functions are differentiable in their […]