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_7: We introduce a graphical framework for multiple instance learning (MIL) based on Markov networks. This framework can be used to model the traditional MIL definition as well as more general MIL definitions. Different levels of ambiguity -- the portion of positive instances in a bag -- can be explored in weakly supervised data. To train these models, we propose a discriminative max-margin learning algorithm leveraging efficient inference for cardinality-based cliques. The efficacy of the proposed framework is evaluated on a variety of data sets. Experimental results verify that encoding or learning the degree of ambiguity can improve classification performance.
  @cite_3: 
  @cite_11: Many collective labeling tasks require inference on graphical models where the clique potentials depend only on the number of nodes that get a particular label. We design efficient inference algorithms for various families of such potentials. Our algorithms are exact for arbitrary cardinality-based clique potentials on binary labels and for max-like and majority-like clique potentials on multiple labels. Moving towards more complex potentials, we show that inference becomes NP-hard even on cliques with homogeneous Potts potentials. We present a 13 15-approximation algorithm with runtime sub-quadratic in the clique size. In contrast, the best known previous guarantee for graphs with Potts potentials is only 0.5. We perform empirical comparisons on real and synthetic data, and show that our proposed methods are an order of magnitude faster than the well-known Tree-based re-parameterization (TRW) and graph-cut algorithms.
summary: Our approach models a bag of instances with a probabilistic model with a cardinality-based clique potential between the instance labels. This cardinality potential facilitates defining any cardinality relations between the instance labels and efficient and exact solutions for both maximum a posteriori (MAP) and sum-product inference @cite_11 @cite_3 . For example, @cite_7 used cardinality-based models to embed different ratio-based multiple instance assumptions. Here we extend these lines of work by developing a novel kernel-based learning algorithm that enhances classification performance.