Audio events are quite often overlapping in nature, and more prone to noise than visual signals. There has been increasing evidence for the superior performance of representations learned using sparse dictionaries for applications like audio denoising and speech enhancement. This paper concentrates on modifying the traditional reconstructive dictionary learning algorithms, by incorporating a discriminative term into the objective function in order to learn class-specific adversarial dictionaries that are good at representing samples of their own class at the same time poor at representing samples belonging to any other class. We quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned dictionaries as a stand-alone solution for both binary as well as multi-class audio classification problems.
@cite_14: Many successful models for scene or object recognition transform low-level descriptors (such as Gabor filter responses, or SIFT descriptors) into richer representations of intermediate complexity. This process can often be broken down into two steps: (1) a coding step, which performs a pointwise transformation of the descriptors into a representation better adapted to the task, and (2) a pooling step, which summarizes the coded features over larger neighborhoods. Several combinations of coding and pooling schemes have been proposed in the literature. The goal of this paper is threefold. We seek to establish the relative importance of each step of mid-level feature extraction through a comprehensive cross evaluation of several types of coding modules (hard and soft vector quantization, sparse coding) and pooling schemes (by taking the average, or the maximum), which obtains state-of-the-art performance or better on several recognition benchmarks. We show how to improve the best performing coding scheme by learning a supervised discriminative dictionary for sparse coding. We provide theoretical and empirical insight into the remarkable performance of max pooling. By teasing apart components shared by modern mid-level feature extractors, our approach aims to facilitate the design of better recognition architectures.
@cite_4: It is now well established that sparse signal models are well suited for restoration tasks and can be effectively learned from audio, image, and video data. Recent research has been aimed at learning discriminative sparse models instead of purely reconstructive ones. This paper proposes a new step in that direction, with a novel sparse representation for signals belonging to different classes in terms of a shared dictionary and discriminative class models. The linear version of the proposed model admits a simple probabilistic interpretation, while its most general variant admits an interpretation in terms of kernels. An optimization framework for learning all the components of the proposed model is presented, along with experimental results on standard handwritten digit and texture classification tasks.
@cite_23: Abstract : A framework for learning optimal dictionaries for simultaneous sparse signal representation and robust class classification is introduced in this paper. This problem for dictionary learning is solved by a class-dependent supervised simultaneous orthogonal matching pursuit, which learns the intra-class structure while increasing the inter-class discrimination, interleaved with an efficient dictionary update obtained via singular value decomposition. This framework addresses for the first time the explicit incorporation of both reconstruction and discrimination terms in the non-parametric dictionary learning and sparse coding energy. The work contributes to the understanding of the importance of learned sparse representations for signal classification, showing the relevance of learning discriminative and at the same time reconstructive dictionaries in order to achieve accurate and robust classification. The presentation of the underlying theory is complemented with examples with the standard MNIST and Caltech datasets, and results on the use of the sparse representation obtained from the learned dictionaries as local patch descriptors, replacing commonly used experimental ones.
@cite_2: Codebook-based representations are widely employed in the classification of complex objects such as images and documents. Most previous codebook-based methods construct a single codebook via clustering that maps a bag of low-level features into a fixed-length histogram that describes the distribution of these features. This paper describes a simple yet effective framework for learning multiple non-redundant codebooks that produces surprisingly good results. In this framework, each codebook is learned in sequence to extract discriminative information that was not captured by preceding codebooks and their corresponding classifiers. We apply this framework to two application domains: visual object categorization and document classification. Experiments on large classification tasks show substantial improvements in performance compared to a single codebook or codebooks learned in a bagging style.
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@cite_17: Sparse coding is an unsupervised learning algorithm that learns a succinct high-level representation of the inputs given only unlabeled data; it represents each input as a sparse linear combination of a set of basis functions. Originally applied to modeling the human visual cortex, sparse coding has also been shown to be useful for self-taught learning, in which the goal is to solve a supervised classification task given access to additional unlabeled data drawn from different classes than that in the supervised learning problem. Shift-invariant sparse coding (SISC) is an extension of sparse coding which reconstructs a (usually time-series) input using all of the basis functions in all possible shifts. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm for learning SISC bases. Our method is based on iteratively solving two large convex optimization problems: The first, which computes the linear coefficients, is an L1-regularized linear least squares problem with potentially hundreds of thousands of variables. Existing methods typically use a heuristic to select a small subset of the variables to optimize, but we present a way to efficiently compute the exact solution. The second, which solves for bases, is a constrained linear least squares problem. By optimizing over complex-valued variables in the Fourier domain, we reduce the coupling between the different variables, allowing the problem to be solved efficiently. We show that SISC's learned high-level representations of speech and music provide useful features for classification tasks within those domains. When applied to classification, under certain conditions the learned features outperform state of the art spectral and cepstral features.
In this paper, we will be learning class specific dictionaries that are adversarial in nature. By adversarial we mean each of these class specific dictionaries is learned in such a manner that apart from doing a good job at representing samples of their own class, they also have to do a poor job at representing samples belonging to any other class. This allows us to learn a structured dictionary where atoms have correspondence to the class labels so that the reconstruction error associated with each class can be used for classification and hence can act as a stand-alone classifier as opposed to @cite_23 @cite_2 @cite_17 @cite_10 @cite_14 , which relies on expensive classifiers like RBF Kernal SVM trained on sparse coefficients for making final predictions. We propose a direct method to train these dictionaries in a multi-class setting, unlike @cite_12 @cite_4 , that deal with multiclass problem into multiple independent binary classification tasks and these might not scale well for large number of classes and are often computationally expensive. Our method is unique as compared to previous approaches as they are designed to capture inter-class differences in a much better manner even for multi-class problem instances.