text: Many visual recognition problems can be approached by counting instances. To determine whether an event is present in a long internet video, one could count how many frames seem to contain the activity. Classifying the activity of a group of people can be done by counting the actions of individual people. Encoding these cardinality relationships can reduce sensitivity to clutter, in the form of irrelevant frames or individuals not involved in a group activity. Learned parameters can encode how many instances tend to occur in a class of interest. To this end, this paper develops a powerful and flexible framework to infer any cardinality relation between latent labels in a multi-instance model. Hard or soft cardinality relations can be encoded to tackle diverse levels of ambiguity. Experiments on tasks such as human activity recognition, video event detection, and video summarization demonstrate the effectiveness of using cardinality relations for improving recognition results.
  @cite_16: Relevant and irrelevant images collected from the Web (e.g., Flickr.com) have been employed as loosely labeled training data for image categorization and retrieval. In this work, we propose a new approach to learn a robust classifier for text-based image retrieval (TBIR) using relevant and irrelevant training web images, in which we explicitly handle noise in the loose labels of training images. Specifically, we first partition the relevant and irrelevant training web images into clusters. By treating each cluster as a “bag” and the images in each bag as “instances”, we formulate this task as a multi-instance learning problem with constrained positive bags, in which each positive bag contains at least a portion of positive instances. We present a new algorithm called MIL-CPB to effectively exploit such constraints on positive bags and predict the labels of test instances (images). Observing that the constraints on positive bags may not always be satisfied in our application, we additionally propose a progressive scheme (referred to as Progressive MIL-CPB, or PMIL-CPB) to further improve the retrieval performance, in which we iteratively partition the top-ranked training web images from the current MIL-CPB classifier to construct more confident positive “bags” and then add these new “bags” as training data to learn the subsequent MIL-CPB classifiers. Comprehensive experiments on two challenging real-world web image data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
  @cite_26: Video event detection allows intelligent indexing of video content based on events. Traditional approaches extract features from video frames or shots, then quantize and pool the features to form a single vector representation for the entire video. Though simple and efficient, the final pooling step may lead to loss of temporally local information, which is important in indicating which part in a long video signifies presence of the event. In this work, we propose a novel instance-based video event detection approach. We represent each video as multiple 'instances', defined as video segments of different temporal intervals. The objective is to learn an instance-level event detection model based on only video-level labels. To solve this problem, we propose a large-margin formulation which treats the instance labels as hidden latent variables, and simultaneously infers the instance labels as well as the instance-level classification model. Our framework infers optimal solutions that assume positive videos have a large number of positive instances while negative videos have the fewest ones. Extensive experiments on large-scale video event datasets demonstrate significant performance gains. The proposed method is also useful in explaining the detection results by localizing the temporal segments in a video which is responsible for the positive detection.
  @cite_17: We study the problem of learning with label proportions in which the training data is provided in groups and only the proportion of each class in each group is known. We propose a new method called proportion-SVM, or ∞SVM, which explicitly models the latent unknown instance labels together with the known group label proportions in a large-margin framework. Unlike the existing works, our approach avoids making restrictive assumptions about the data. The ∞SVM model leads to a non-convex integer programming problem. In order to solve it efficiently, we propose two algorithms: one based on simple alternating optimization and the other based on a convex relaxation. Extensive experiments on standard datasets show that ∞SVM outperforms the state-of-the-art, especially for larger group sizes.
summary: For example, @cite_16 formulated a prior on the number of positive instances in a bag, and used an iterative cutting plane algorithm with heuristics to approximate the resultant learning problem. @cite_17 proposed @math SVM for learning from instance proportions, and showed promising results on video event recognition @cite_26 . Our work improves on this approach by permitting more general cardinality relations with an efficient and exact training scheme.