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 CSAIL Digital Archive - Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Series Publications - 2004 AI PublicationsLast update Sun Mar 19 05:05:02 2006 AIM-2004-001 CBCL-233 Author[s]: Alexander Rakhlin, Dmitry Panchenko, Sayan Mukherjee Risk Bounds for Mixture Density Estimation January 27, 2004 In this paper we focus on the problem of estimating a bounded density using a finite combination of densities from a given class. We consider the Maximum Likelihood Procedure (MLE) and the greedy procedure described by Li and Barron. Approximation and estimation bounds are given for the above methods. We extend and improve upon the estimation results of Li and Barron, and in particular prove an $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}})$ bound on the estimation error which does not depend on the number of densities in the estimated combination. AITR-2004-001 Author[s]: Oana L. Stamatoiu Learning Commonsense Categorical Knowledge in a Thread Memory System May 18, 2004 If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broad purpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systems that can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsense knowledge that we humans have about the world. This endeavor suggests steps such as identifying the kinds of knowledge people commonly have about the world, constructing suitable knowledge representations, and exploring the mechanisms that people use to make judgments about the everyday world. In this work, I contribute to these goals by proposing an architecture for a system that can learn commonsense knowledge about the properties and behavior of objects in the world. The architecture described here augments previous machine learning systems in four ways: (1) it relies on a seven dimensional notion of context, built from information recently given to the system, to learn and reason about objects' properties; (2) it has multiple methods that it can use to reason about objects, so that when one method fails, it can fall back on others; (3) it illustrates the usefulness of reasoning about objects by thinking about their similarity to other, better known objects, and by inferring properties of objects from the categories that they belong to; and (4) it represents an attempt to build an autonomous learner and reasoner, that sets its own goals for learning about the world and deduces new facts by reflecting on its acquired knowledge. This thesis describes this architecture, as well as a first implementation, that can learn from sentences such as A blue bird flew to the tree'' and The small bird flew to the cage'' that birds can fly. One of the main contributions of this work lies in suggesting a further set of salient ideas about how we can build broader purpose commonsense artificial learners and reasoners. AIM-2004-002 CBCL-234 Author[s]: Lior Wolf, Amnon Shashua, and Sayan Mukherjee Selecting Relevant Genes with a Spectral Approach January 27, 2004 Array technologies have made it possible to record simultaneously the expression pattern of thousands of genes. A fundamental problem in the analysis of gene expression data is the identification of highly relevant genes that either discriminate between phenotypic labels or are important with respect to the cellular process studied in the experiment: for example cell cycle or heat shock in yeast experiments, chemical or genetic perturbations of mammalian cell lines, and genes involved in class discovery for human tumors. In this paper we focus on the task of unsupervised gene selection. The problem of selecting a small subset of genes is particularly challenging as the datasets involved are typically characterized by a very small sample size — in the order of few tens of tissue samples — and by a very large feature space as the number of genes tend to be in the high thousands. We propose a model independent approach which scores candidate gene selections using spectral properties of the candidate affinity matrix. The algorithm is very straightforward to implement yet contains a number of remarkable properties which guarantee consistent sparse selections. To illustrate the value of our approach we applied our algorithm on five different datasets. The first consists of time course data from four well studied Hematopoietic cell lines (HL-60, Jurkat, NB4, and U937). The other four datasets include three well studied treatment outcomes (large cell lymphoma, childhood medulloblastomas, breast tumors) and one unpublished dataset (lymph status). We compared our approach both with other unsupervised methods (SOM,PCA,GS) and with supervised methods (SNR,RMB,RFE). The results clearly show that our approach considerably outperforms all the other unsupervised approaches in our study, is competitive with supervised methods and in some case even outperforms supervised approaches. AITR-2004-002 Author[s]: Jonathan Kennell Generative Temporal Planning with Complex Processes May 18, 2004 Autonomous vehicles are increasingly being used in mission-critical applications, and robust methods are needed for controlling these inherently unreliable and complex systems. This thesis advocates the use of model-based programming, which allows mission designers to program autonomous missions at the level of a coach or wing commander. To support such a system, this thesis presents the Spock generative planner. To generate plans, Spock must be able to piece together vehicle commands and team tactics that have a complex behavior represented by concurrent processes. This is in contrast to traditional planners, whose operators represent simple atomic or durative actions. Spock represents operators using the RMPL language, which describes behaviors using parallel and sequential compositions of state and activity episodes. RMPL is useful for controlling mobile autonomous missions because it allows mission designers to quickly encode expressive activity models using object-oriented design methods and an intuitive set of activity combinators. Spock also is significant in that it uniformly represents operators and plan-space processes in terms of Temporal Plan Networks, which support temporal flexibility for robust plan execution. Finally, Spock is implemented as a forward progression optimal planner that walks monotonically forward through plan processes, closing any open conditions and resolving any conflicts. This thesis describes the Spock algorithm in detail, along with example problems and test results. AIM-2004-003 Author[s]: Kristen Grauman, Gregory Shakhnarovich, Trevor Darrell Virtual Visual Hulls: Example-Based 3D Shape Estimation from a Single Silhouette January 28, 2004 Recovering a volumetric model of a person, car, or other object of interest from a single snapshot would be useful for many computer graphics applications. 3D model estimation in general is hard, and currently requires active sensors, multiple views, or integration over time. For a known object class, however, 3D shape can be successfully inferred from a single snapshot. We present a method for generating a virtual visual hull''-- an estimate of the 3D shape of an object from a known class, given a single silhouette observed from an unknown viewpoint. For a given class, a large database of multi-view silhouette examples from calibrated, though possibly varied, camera rigs are collected. To infer a novel single view input silhouette's virtual visual hull, we search for 3D shapes in the database which are most consistent with the observed contour. The input is matched to component single views of the multi-view training examples. A set of viewpoint-aligned virtual views are generated from the visual hulls corresponding to these examples. The 3D shape estimate for the input is then found by interpolating between the contours of these aligned views. When the underlying shape is ambiguous given a single view silhouette, we produce multiple visual hull hypotheses; if a sequence of input images is available, a dynamic programming approach is applied to find the maximum likelihood path through the feasible hypotheses over time. We show results of our algorithm on real and synthetic images of people. AITR-2004-003 Author[s]: Jonathan A. Goler BioJADE: A Design and Simulation Tool for Synthetic Biological Systems May 28, 2004 The next generations of both biological engineering and computer engineering demand that control be exerted at the molecular level. Creating, characterizing and controlling synthetic biological systems may provide us with the ability to build cells that are capable of a plethora of activities, from computation to synthesizing nanostructures. To develop these systems, we must have a set of tools not only for synthesizing systems, but also designing and simulating them. The BioJADE project provides a comprehensive, extensible design and simulation platform for synthetic biology. BioJADE is a graphical design tool built in Java, utilizing a database back end, and supports a range of simulations using an XML communication protocol. BioJADE currently supports a library of over 100 parts with which it can compile designs into actual DNA, and then generate synthesis instructions to build the physical parts. The BioJADE project contributes several tools to Synthetic Biology. BioJADE in itself is a powerful tool for synthetic biology designers. Additionally, we developed and now make use of a centralized BioBricks repository, which enables the sharing of BioBrick components between researchers, and vastly reduces the barriers to entry for aspiring Synthetic Biologists. AIM-2004-004 CBCL-235 Author[s]: Robert Schneider and Maximilian Riesenhuber On the difficulty of feature-based attentional modulations in visual object recognition: A modeling study. January 14, 2004 Numerous psychophysical experiments have shown an important role for attentional modulations in vision. Behaviorally, allocation of attention can improve performance in object detection and recognition tasks. At the neural level, attention increases firing rates of neurons in visual cortex whose preferred stimulus is currently attended to. However, it is not yet known how these two phenomena are linked, i.e., how the visual system could be "tuned" in a task-dependent fashion to improve task performance. To answer this question, we performed simulations with the HMAX model of object recognition in cortex [45]. We modulated firing rates of model neurons in accordance with experimental results about effects of feature-based attention on single neurons and measured changes in the model's performance in a variety of object recognition tasks. It turned out that recognition performance could only be improved under very limited circumstances and that attentional influences on the process of object recognition per se tend to display a lack of specificity or raise false alarm rates. These observations lead us to postulate a new role for the observed attention-related neural response modulations. AITR-2004-004 Author[s]: Robert A. Hearn Building Grounded Abstractions for Artificial Intelligence Programming June 16, 2004 Most Artificial Intelligence (AI) work can be characterized as either high-level'' (e.g., logical, symbolic) or low-level'' (e.g., connectionist networks, behavior-based robotics). Each approach suffers from particular drawbacks. High-level AI uses abstractions that often have no relation to the way real, biological brains work. Low-level AI, on the other hand, tends to lack the powerful abstractions that are needed to express complex structures and relationships. I have tried to combine the best features of both approaches, by building a set of programming abstractions defined in terms of simple, biologically plausible components. At the ground level'', I define a primitive, perceptron-like computational unit. I then show how more abstract computational units may be implemented in terms of the primitive units, and show the utility of the abstract units in sample networks. The new units make it possible to build networks using concepts such as long-term memories, short-term memories, and frames. As a demonstration of these abstractions, I have implemented a simulator for creatures'' controlled by a network of abstract units. The creatures exist in a simple 2D world, and exhibit behaviors such as catching mobile prey and sorting colored blocks into matching boxes. This program demonstrates that it is possible to build systems that can interact effectively with a dynamic physical environment, yet use symbolic representations to control aspects of their behavior. AIM-2004-005 Author[s]: Howard Shrobe and Robert Laddaga New Architectural Models for Visibly Controllable Computing: The Relevance of Dynamic Object Oriented Architectures and Plan Based Computing Models February 9, 2004 Traditionally, we've focussed on the question of how to make a system easy to code the first time, or perhaps on how to ease the system's continued evolution. But if we look at life cycle costs, then we must conclude that the important question is how to make a system easy to operate. To do this we need to make it easy for the operators to see what's going on and to then manipulate the system so that it does what it is supposed to. This is a radically different criterion for success. What makes a computer system visible and controllable? This is a difficult question, but it's clear that today's modern operating systems with nearly 50 million source lines of code are neither. Strikingly, the MIT Lisp Machine and its commercial successors provided almost the same functionality as today's mainstream sytsems, but with only 1 Million lines of code. This paper is a retrospective examination of the features of the Lisp Machine hardware and software system. Our key claim is that by building the Object Abstraction into the lowest tiers of the system, great synergy and clarity were obtained. It is our hope that this is a lesson that can impact tomorrow's designs. We also speculate on how the spirit of the Lisp Machine could be extended to include a comprehensive access control model and how new layers of abstraction could further enrich this model. AIM-2004-006 CBCL-236 Author[s]: Riesenhuber, Jarudi, Gilad, Sinha Face processing in humans is compatible with a simple shape-based model of vision March 5, 2004 Understanding how the human visual system recognizes objects is one of the key challenges in neuroscience. Inspired by a large body of physiological evidence (Felleman and Van Essen, 1991; Hubel and Wiesel, 1962; Livingstone and Hubel, 1988; Tso et al., 2001; Zeki, 1993), a general class of recognition models has emerged which is based on a hierarchical organization of visual processing, with succeeding stages being sensitive to image features of increasing complexity (Hummel and Biederman, 1992; Riesenhuber and Poggio, 1999; Selfridge, 1959). However, these models appear to be incompatible with some well-known psychophysical results. Prominent among these are experiments investigating recognition impairments caused by vertical inversion of images, especially those of faces. It has been reported that faces that differ “featurally” are much easier to distinguish when inverted than those that differ “configurally” (Freire et al., 2000; Le Grand et al., 2001; Mondloch et al., 2002) – a finding that is difficult to reconcile with the aforementioned models. Here we show that after controlling for subjects’ expectations, there is no difference between “featurally” and “configurally” transformed faces in terms of inversion effect. This result reinforces the plausibility of simple hierarchical models of object representation and recognition in cortex. AITR-2004-006 Author[s]: Artur Miguel Arsenio Cognitive-Developmental Learning for a Humanoid Robot: A Caregiver's Gift September 26, 2004 The goal of this work is to build a cognitive system for the humanoid robot, Cog, that exploits human caregivers as catalysts to perceive and learn about actions, objects, scenes, people, and the robot itself. This thesis addresses a broad spectrum of machine learning problems across several categorization levels. Actions by embodied agents are used to automatically generate training data for the learning mechanisms, so that the robot develops categorization autonomously. Taking inspiration from the human brain, a framework of algorithms and methodologies was implemented to emulate different cognitive capabilities on the humanoid robot Cog. This framework is effectively applied to a collection of AI, computer vision, and signal processing problems. Cognitive capabilities of the humanoid robot are developmentally created, starting from infant-like abilities for detecting, segmenting, and recognizing percepts over multiple sensing modalities. Human caregivers provide a helping hand for communicating such information to the robot. This is done by actions that create meaningful events (by changing the world in which the robot is situated) thus inducing the "compliant perception" of objects from these human-robot interactions. Self-exploration of the world extends the robot's knowledge concerning object properties. This thesis argues for enculturating humanoid robots using infant development as a metaphor for building a humanoid robot's cognitive abilities. A human caregiver redesigns a humanoid's brain by teaching the humanoid robot as she would teach a child, using children's learning aids such as books, drawing boards, or other cognitive artifacts. Multi-modal object properties are learned using these tools and inserted into several recognition schemes, which are then applied to developmentally acquire new object representations. The humanoid robot therefore sees the world through the caregiver's eyes. Building an artificial humanoid robot's brain, even at an infant's cognitive level, has been a long quest which still lies only in the realm of our imagination. Our efforts towards such a dimly imaginable task are developed according to two alternate and complementary views: cognitive and developmental. AIM-2004-007 CBCL-237 Author[s]: Jerry Jun Yokono and Tomaso Poggio Evaluation of sets of oriented and non-oriented receptive fields as local descriptors March 24, 2004 Local descriptors are increasingly used for the task of object recognition because of their perceived robustness with respect to occlusions and to global geometrical deformations. We propose a performance criterion for a local descriptor based on the tradeoff between selectivity and invariance. In this paper, we evaluate several local descriptors with respect to selectivity and invariance. The descriptors that we evaluated are Gaussian derivatives up to the third order, gray image patches, and Laplacian-based descriptors with either three scales or one scale filters. We compare selectivity and invariance to several affine changes such as rotation, scale, brightness, and viewpoint. Comparisons have been made keeping the dimensionality of the descriptors roughly constant. The overall results indicate a good performance by the descriptor based on a set of oriented Gaussian filters. It is interesting that oriented receptive fields similar to the Gaussian derivatives as well as receptive fields similar to the Laplacian are found in primate visual cortex. AITR-2004-007 Author[s]: Lisa Tucker-Kellogg Systematic Conformational Search with Constraint Satisfaction October 1, 2004 Throughout biological, chemical, and pharmaceutical research, conformational searches are used to explore the possible three-dimensional configurations of molecules. This thesis describes a new systematic method for conformational search, including an application of the method to determining the structure of a peptide via solid-state NMR spectroscopy. A separate portion of the thesis is about protein-DNA binding, with a three-dimensional macromolecular structure determined by x-ray crystallography. The search method in this thesis enumerates all conformations of a molecule (at a given level of torsion angle resolution) that satisfy a set of local geometric constraints, such as constraints derived from NMR experiments. Systematic searches, historically used for small molecules, generally now use some form of divide-and-conquer for application to larger molecules. Our method can achieve a significant improvement in runtime by making some major and counter-intuitive modifications to traditional divide-and-conquer: (1) OmniMerge divides a polymer into many alternative pairs of subchains and searches all the pairs, instead of simply cutting in half and searching two subchains. Although the extra searches may appear wasteful, the bottleneck stage of the overall search, which is to re-connect the conformations of the largest subchains, can be greatly accelerated by the availability of alternative pairs of sidechains. (2) Propagation of disqualified conformations across overlapping subchains can disqualify infeasible conformations very rapidly, which further offsets the cost of searching the extra subchains of OmniMerge. (3) The search may be run in two stages, once at low-resolution using a side-effect of OmniMerge to determine an optimal partitioning of the molecule into efficient subchains; then again at high-resolution while making use of the precomputed subchains. (4) An A* function prioritizes each subchain based on estimated future search costs. Subchains with sufficiently low priority can be omitted from the search, which improves efficiency. A common theme of these four ideas is to make good choices about how to break the large search problem into lower-dimensional subproblems. In addition, the search method uses heuristic local searches within the overall systematic framework, to maintain the systematic guarantee while providing the empirical efficiency of stochastic search. These novel algorithms were implemented and the effectiveness of each innovation is demonstrated on a highly constrained peptide with 40 degrees of freedom. AIM-2004-008 Author[s]: Antonio Torralba, Kevin P. Murphy, William T. Freeman Sharing visual features for multiclass and multiview object detection April 14, 2004 We consider the problem of detecting a large number of different classes of objects in cluttered scenes. Traditional approaches require applying a battery of different classifiers to the image, at multiple locations and scales. This can be slow and can require a lot of training data, since each classifier requires the computation of many different image features. In particular, for independently trained detectors, the (run-time) computational complexity, and the (training-time) sample complexity, scales linearly with the number of classes to be detected. It seems unlikely that such an approach will scale up to allow recognition of hundreds or thousands of objects. We present a multi-class boosting procedure (joint boosting) that reduces the computational and sample complexity, by finding common features that can be shared across the classes (and/or views). The detectors for each class are trained jointly, rather than independently. For a given performance level, the total number of features required, and therefore the computational cost, is observed to scale approximately logarithmically with the number of classes. The features selected jointly are closer to edges and generic features typical of many natural structures instead of finding specific object parts. Those generic features generalize better and reduce considerably the computational cost of an algorithm for multi-class object detection. AITR-2004-008 Author[s]: Justin Werfel Neural Network Models for Zebra Finch Song Production and Reinforcement Learning November 9, 2004 The zebra finch is a standard experimental system for studying learning and generation of temporally extended motor patterns. The first part of this project concerned the evaluation of simple models for the operation and structure of the network in the motor nucleus RA. A directed excitatory chain with a global inhibitory network, for which experimental evidence exists, was found to produce waves of activity similar to those observed in RA; this similarity included one particularly important feature of the measured activity, synchrony between the onset of bursting in one neuron and the offset of bursting in another. Other models, which were simpler and more analytically tractable, were also able to exhibit this feature, but not for parameter values quantitatively close to those observed. Another issue of interest concerns how these networks are initially learned by the bird during song acquisition. The second part of the project concerned the analysis of exemplars of REINFORCE algorithms, a general class of algorithms for reinforcement learning in neural networks, which are on several counts more biologically plausible than standard prescriptions such as backpropagation. The former compared favorably with backpropagation on tasks involving single input-output pairs, though a noise analysis suggested it should not perform so well. On tasks involving trajectory learning, REINFORCE algorithms meet with some success, though the analysis that predicts their success on input-output-pair tasks fails to explain it for trajectories. AIM-2004-009 Author[s]: Antonio Torralba Contextual Influences on Saliency April 14, 2004 This article describes a model for including scene/context priors in attention guidance. In the proposed scheme, visual context information can be available early in the visual processing chain, in order to modulate the saliency of image regions and to provide an efficient short cut for object detection and recognition. The scene is represented by means of a low-dimensional global description obtained from low-level features. The global scene features are then used to predict the probability of presence of the target object in the scene, and its location and scale, before exploring the image. Scene information can then be used to modulate the saliency of image regions early during the visual processing in order to provide an efficient short cut for object detection and recognition. AITR-2004-009 Author[s]: Nathan Srebro Learning with Matrix Factorizations November 22, 2004 Matrices that can be factored into a product of two simpler matrices can serve as a useful and often natural model in the analysis of tabulated or high-dimensional data. Models based on matrix factorization (Factor Analysis, PCA) have been extensively used in statistical analysis and machine learning for over a century, with many new formulations and models suggested in recent years (Latent Semantic Indexing, Aspect Models, Probabilistic PCA, Exponential PCA, Non-Negative Matrix Factorization and others). In this thesis we address several issues related to learning with matrix factorizations: we study the asymptotic behavior and generalization ability of existing methods, suggest new optimization methods, and present a novel maximum-margin high-dimensional matrix factorization formulation. AIM-2004-010 CBCL-238 Author[s]: Jerry Jun Yokono and Tomaso Poggio Rotation Invariant Object Recognition from One Training Example April 27, 2004 Local descriptors are increasingly used for the task of object recognition because of their perceived robustness with respect to occlusions and to global geometrical deformations. Such a descriptor--based on a set of oriented Gaussian derivative filters-- is used in our recognition system. We report here an evaluation of several techniques for orientation estimation to achieve rotation invariance of the descriptor. We also describe feature selection based on a single training image. Virtual images are generated by rotating and rescaling the image and robust features are selected. The results confirm robust performance in cluttered scenes, in the presence of partial occlusions, and when the object is embedded in different backgrounds. AIM-2004-011 Author[s]: Lilla Zollei, John Fisher, William Wells A Unified Statistical and Information Theoretic Framework for Multi-modal Image Registration April 28, 2004 We formulate and interpret several multi-modal registration methods in the context of a unified statistical and information theoretic framework. A unified interpretation clarifies the implicit assumptions of each method yielding a better understanding of their relative strengths and weaknesses. Additionally, we discuss a generative statistical model from which we derive a novel analysis tool, the "auto-information function", as a means of assessing and exploiting the common spatial dependencies inherent in multi-modal imagery. We analytically derive useful properties of the "auto-information" as well as verify them empirically on multi-modal imagery. Among the useful aspects of the "auto-information function" is that it can be computed from imaging modalities independently and it allows one to decompose the search space of registration problems. AIM-2004-012 Author[s]: Jaime Teevan How People Re-find Information When the Web Changes June 18, 2004 This paper investigates how people return to information in a dynamic information environment. For example, a person might want to return to Web content via a link encountered earlier on a Web page, only to learn that the link has since been removed. Changes can benefit users by providing new information, but they hinder returning to previously viewed information. The observational study presented here analyzed instances, collected via a Web search, where people expressed difficulty re-finding information because of changes to the information or its environment. A number of interesting observations arose from this analysis, including that the path originally taken to get to the information target appeared important in its re-retrieval, whereas, surprisingly, the temporal aspects of when the information was seen before were not. While people expressed frustration when problems arose, an explanation of why the change had occurred was often sufficient to allay that frustration, even in the absence of a solution. The implications of these observations for systems that support re-finding in dynamic environments are discussed. AIM-2004-013 Author[s]: Antonio Torralba, Kevin P. Murphy, William T. Freeman Contextual models for object detection using boosted random fields June 25, 2004 We seek to both detect and segment objects in images. To exploit both local image data as well as contextual information, we introduce Boosted Random Fields (BRFs), which uses Boosting to learn the graph structure and local evidence of a conditional random field (CRF). The graph structure is learned by assembling graph fragments in an additive model. The connections between individual pixels are not very informative, but by using dense graphs, we can pool information from large regions of the image; dense models also support efficient inference. We show how contextual information from other objects can improve detection performance, both in terms of accuracy and speed, by using a computational cascade. We apply our system to detect stuff and things in office and street scenes. AIM-2004-014 Author[s]: Piotr Indyk and David Woodruff Optimal Approximations of the Frequency Moments July 2, 2004 We give a one-pass, O~(m^{1-2/k})-space algorithm for estimating the k-th frequency moment of a data stream for any real k>2. Together with known lower bounds, this resolves the main problem left open by Alon, Matias, Szegedy, STOC'96. Our algorithm enables deletions as well as insertions of stream elements. AIM-2004-015 Author[s]: Mihai Badoiu, Piotr Indyk, Anastasios Sidiropoulos A Constant-Factor Approximation Algorithm for Embedding Unweighted Graphs into Trees July 5, 2004 We present a constant-factor approximation algorithm for computing an embedding of the shortest path metric of an unweighted graph into a tree, that minimizes the multiplicative distortion. AIM-2004-016 Author[s]: Tevfik Metin Sezgin and Randall Davis Early Sketch Processing with Application in HMM Based Sketch Recognition July 28, 2004 Freehand sketching is a natural and crucial part of everyday human interaction, yet is almost totally unsupported by current user interfaces. With the increasing availability of tablet notebooks and pen based PDAs, sketch based interaction has gained attention as a natural interaction modality. We are working to combine the flexibility and ease of use of paper and pencil with the processing power of a computer, to produce a user interface for design that feels as natural as paper, yet is considerably smarter. One of the most basic tasks in accomplishing this is converting the original digitized pen strokes in a sketch into the intended geometric objects. In this paper we describe an implemented system that combines multiple sources of knowledge to provide robust early processing for freehand sketching. We also show how this early processing system can be used as part of a fast sketch recognition system with polynomial time segmentation and recognition algorithms. AIM-2004-017 CBCL-239 Author[s]: Thomas Serre and Maximilian Riesenhuber Realistic Modeling of Simple and Complex Cell Tuning in the HMAX Model, and Implications for Invariant Object Recognition in Cortex July 27, 2004 Riesenhuber \& Poggio recently proposed a model of object recognition in cortex which, beyond integrating general beliefs about the visual system in a quantitative framework, made testable predictions about visual processing. In particular, they showed that invariant object representation could be obtained with a selective pooling mechanism over properly chosen afferents through a {\sc max} operation: For instance, at the complex cells level, pooling over a group of simple cells at the same preferred orientation and position in space but at slightly different spatial frequency would provide scale tolerance, while pooling over a group of simple cells at the same preferred orientation and spatial frequency but at slightly different position in space would provide position tolerance. Indirect support for such mechanisms in the visual system come from the ability of the architecture at the top level to replicate shape tuning as well as shift and size invariance properties of view-tuned cells'' (VTUs) found in inferotemporal cortex (IT), the highest area in the ventral visual stream, thought to be crucial in mediating object recognition in cortex. There is also now good physiological evidence that a {\sc max} operation is performed at various levels along the ventral stream. However, in the original paper by Riesenhuber \& Poggio, tuning and pooling parameters of model units in early and intermediate areas were only qualitatively inspired by physiological data. In particular, many studies have investigated the tuning properties of simple and complex cells in primary visual cortex, V1. We show that units in the early levels of HMAX can be tuned to produce realistic simple and complex cell-like tuning, and that the earlier findings on the invariance properties of model VTUs still hold in this more realistic version of the model. AIM-2004-018 Author[s]: Ozlem Uzuner Distribution Volume Tracking on Privacy-Enhanced Wireless Grid July 25, 2004 In this paper, we discuss a wireless grid in which users are highly mobile, and form ad-hoc and sometimes short-lived connections with other devices. As they roam through networks, the users may choose to employ privacy-enhancing technologies to address their privacy needs and benefit from the computational power of the grid for a variety of tasks, including sharing content. The high rate of mobility of the users on the wireless grid, when combined with privacy enhancing mechanisms and ad-hoc connections, makes it difficult to conclusively link devices and/or individuals with network activities and to hold them liable for particular downloads. Protecting intellectual property in this scenario requires a solution that can work in absence of knowledge about behavior of particular individuals. Building on previous work, we argue for a solution that ensures proper compensation to content owners without inhibiting use and dissemination of works. Our proposal is based on digital tracking for measuring distribution volume of content and compensation of authors based on this accounting information. The emphasis is on obtaining good estimates of rate of popularity of works, without keeping track of activities of individuals or devices. The contribution of this paper is a revenue protection mechanism, Distribution Volume Tracking, that does not invade the privacy of users in the wireless grid and works even in the presence of privacy-enhancing technologies they may employ. AIM-2004-019 Author[s]: Charles Kemp, Thomas L. Griffiths and Joshua B. Tenenbaum Discovering Latent Classes in Relational Data July 22, 2004 We present a framework for learning abstract relational knowledge with the aim of explaining how people acquire intuitive theories of physical, biological, or social systems. Our approach is based on a generative relational model with latent classes, and simultaneously determines the kinds of entities that exist in a domain, the number of these latent classes, and the relations between classes that are possible or likely. This model goes beyond previous psychological models of category learning, which consider attributes associated with individual categories but not relationships between categories. We apply this domain-general framework to two specific problems: learning the structure of kinship systems and learning causal theories. AIM-2004-020 CBCL-240 Author[s]: Gabriel Kreiman, Chou Hung, Tomaso Poggio, James DiCarlo Selectivity of Local Field Potentials in Macaque Inferior Temporal Cortex September 21, 2004 While single neurons in inferior temporal (IT) cortex show differential responses to distinct complex stimuli, little is known about the responses of populations of neurons in IT. We recorded single electrode data, including multi-unit activity (MUA) and local field potentials (LFP), from 618 sites in the inferior temporal cortex of macaque monkeys while the animals passively viewed 78 different pictures of complex stimuli. The LFPs were obtained by low-pass filtering the extracellular electrophysiological signal with a corner frequency of 300 Hz. As reported previously, we observed that spike counts from MUA showed selectivity for some of the pictures. Strikingly, the LFP data, which is thought to constitute an average over large numbers of neurons, also showed significantly selective responses. The LFP responses were less selective than the MUA responses both in terms of the proportion of selective sites as well as in the selectivity of each site. We observed that there was only little overlap between the selectivity of MUA and LFP recordings from the same electrode. To assess the spatial organization of selective responses, we compared the selectivity of nearby sites recorded along the same penetration and sites recorded from different penetrations. We observed that MUA selectivity was correlated on spatial scales up to 800 m while the LFP selectivity was correlated over a larger spatial extent, with significant correlations between sites separated by several mm. Our data support the idea that there is some topographical arrangement to the organization of selectivity in inferior temporal cortex and that this organization may be relevant for the representation of object identity in IT. AIM-2004-021 Author[s]: Michael R. Benjamin The Interval Programming Model for Multi-objective Decision Making September 27, 2004 The interval programming model (IvP) is a mathematical programming model for representing and solving multi-objective optimization problems. The central characteristic of the model is the use of piecewise linearly defined objective functions and a solution method that searches through the combination space of pieces rather than through the actual decision space. The piecewise functions typically represent an approximation of some underlying function, but this concession is balanced on the positive side by relative freedom from function form assumptions as well as the assurance of global optimality. In this paper the model and solution algorithms are described, and the applicability of IvP to certain applications are discussed. AIM-2004-022 Author[s]: Gene Yeo, Eric Van Nostrand, Dirk Holste, Tomaso Poggio, Christopher Burge Predictive identification of alternative events conserved in human and mouse September 30, 2004 Alternative pre-messenger RNA splicing affects a majority of human genes and plays important roles in development and disease. Alternative splicing (AS) events conserved since the divergence of human and mouse are likely of primary biological importance, but relatively few such events are known. Here we describe sequence features that distinguish exons subject to evolutionarily conserved AS, which we call 'alternative- conserved exons' (ACEs) from other orthologous human/mouse exons, and integrate these features into an exon classification algorithm, ACEScan. Genome-wide analysis of annotated orthologous human-mouse exon pairs identified ~2,000 predicted ACEs. Alternative splicing was verified in both human and mouse tissues using an RT-PCR- sequencing protocol for 21 of 30 (70%) predicted ACEs tested, supporting the validity of a majority of ACEScan predictions. By contrast, AS was observed in mouse tissues for only 2 of 15 (13%) tested exons which had EST or cDNA evidence of AS in human but were not predicted ACEs, and was never observed for eleven negative control exons in human or mouse tissues. Predicted ACEs were much more likely to preserve reading frame, and less likely to disrupt protein domains than other AS events, and were enriched in genes expressed in the brain and in genes involved in transcriptional regulation, RNA processing and development. Our results also imply that the vast majority of AS events represented in the human EST databases are not conserved in mouse, and therefore may represent aberrant, disease- or allele-specific, or highly lineage-restricted splicing events. AIM-2004-023 Author[s]: Kurt Steinkraus, Leslie Pack Kaelbling Combining dynamic abstractions in large MDPs October 21, 2004 One of the reasons that it is difficult to plan and act in real-world domains is that they are very large. Existing research generally deals with the large domain size using a static representation and exploiting a single type of domain structure. In this paper, we create a framework that encapsulates existing and new abstraction and approximation methods into modules, and combines arbitrary modules into a system that allows for dynamic representation changes. We show that the dynamic changes of representation allow our framework to solve larger and more interesting domains than were previously possible, and while there are no optimality guarantees, suitable module choices gain tractability at little cost to optimality. AIM-2004-024 CBCL-241 Author[s]: Charles Cadieu, Minjoon Kouh, Maximilian Riesenhuber, and Tomaso Poggio Shape Representation in V4: Investigating Position-Specific Tuning for Boundary Conformation with the Standard Model of Object Recognition November 12, 2004 The computational processes in the intermediate stages of the ventral pathway responsible for visual object recognition are not well understood. A recent physiological study by A. Pasupathy and C. Connor in intermediate area V4 using contour stimuli, proposes that a population of V4 neurons display bjectcentered, position-specific curvature tuning [18]. The “standard model” of object recognition, a recently developed model [23] to account for recognition properties of IT cells (extending classical suggestions by Hubel, Wiesel and others [9, 10, 19]), is used here to model the response of the V4 cells described in [18]. Our results show that a feedforward, network level mechanism can exhibit selectivity and invariance properties that correspond to the responses of the V4 cells described in [18]. These results suggest how object-centered, position-specific curvature tuning of V4 cells may arise from combinations of complex V1 cell responses. Furthermore, the model makes predictions about the responses of the same V4 cells studied by Pasupathy and Connor to novel gray level patterns, such as gratings and natural images. These predictions suggest specific experiments to further explore shape representation in V4. AIM-2004-025 CBCL-242 Author[s]: Lior Wolf and Ian Martin Regularization Through Feature Knock Out November 12, 2004 In this paper, we present and analyze a novel regularization technique based on enhancing our dataset with corrupted copies of the original data. The motivation is that since the learning algorithm lacks information about which parts of the data are reliable, it has to produce more robust classification functions. We then demonstrate how this regularization leads to redundancy in the resulting classifiers, which is somewhat in contrast to the common interpretations of the Occam’s razor principle. Using this framework, we propose a simple addition to the gentle boosting algorithm which enables it to work with only a few examples. We test this new algorithm on a variety of datasets and show convincing results. AIM-2004-026 CBCL-243 Author[s]: Thomas Serre, Lior Wolf and Tomaso Poggio A new biologically motivated framework for robust object recognition November 14, 2004 In this paper, we introduce a novel set of features for robust object recognition, which exhibits outstanding performances on a variety of object categories while being capable of learning from only a few training examples. Each element of this set is a complex feature obtained by combining position- and scale-tolerant edge-detectors over neighboring positions and multiple orientations. Our system - motivated by a quantitative model of visual cortex - outperforms state-of-the-art systems on a variety of object image datasets from different groups. We also show that our system is able to learn from very few examples with no prior category knowledge. The success of the approach is also a suggestive plausibility proof for a class of feed-forward models of object recognition in cortex. Finally, we conjecture the existence of a universal overcomplete dictionary of features that could handle the recognition of all object categories. AIM-2004-027 Author[s]: Kristen Grauman and Trevor Darrell Efficient Image Matching with Distributions of Local Invariant Features November 22, 2004 Sets of local features that are invariant to common image transformations are an effective representation to use when comparing images; current methods typically judge feature sets' similarity via a voting scheme (which ignores co-occurrence statistics) or by comparing histograms over a set of prototypes (which must be found by clustering). We present a method for efficiently comparing images based on their discrete distributions (bags) of distinctive local invariant features, without clustering descriptors. Similarity between images is measured with an approximation of the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD), which quickly computes the minimal-cost correspondence between two bags of features. Each image's feature distribution is mapped into a normed space with a low-distortion embedding of EMD. Examples most similar to a novel query image are retrieved in time sublinear in the number of examples via approximate nearest neighbor search in the embedded space. We also show how the feature representation may be extended to encode the distribution of geometric constraints between the invariant features appearing in each image. We evaluate our technique with scene recognition and texture classification tasks. AIM-2004-028 Author[s]: Luis Perez-Breva Cascading Regularized Classifiers April 21, 2004 Among the various methods to combine classifiers, Boosting was originally thought as an stratagem to cascade pairs of classifiers through their disagreement. I recover the same idea from the work of Niyogi et al. to show how to loosen the requirement of weak learnability, central to Boosting, and introduce a new cascading stratagem. The paper concludes with an empirical study of an implementation of the cascade that, under assumptions that mirror the conditions imposed by Viola and Jones in [VJ01], has the property to preserve the generalization ability of boosting. AIM-2004-029 Author[s]: Whitman Richards & H. Sebastian Seung Neural Voting Machines December 31, 2004 “Winner-take-all” networks typically pick as winners that alternative with the largest excitatory input. This choice is far from optimal when there is uncertainty in the strength of the inputs, and when information is available about how alternatives may be related. In the Social Choice community, many other procedures will yield more robust winners. The Borda Count and the pair-wise Condorcet tally are among the most favored. Their implementations are simple modifications of classical recurrent networks. AIM-2004-030 Author[s]: Percy Liang and Nathan Srebro Methods and Experiments With Bounded Tree-width Markov Networks December 30, 2004 Markov trees generalize naturally to bounded tree-width Markov networks, on which exact computations can still be done efficiently. However, learning the maximum likelihood Markov network with tree-width greater than 1 is NP-hard, so we discuss a few algorithms for approximating the optimal Markov network. We present a set of methods for training a density estimator. Each method is specified by three arguments: tree-width, model scoring metric (maximum likelihood or minimum description length), and model representation (using one joint distribution or several class-conditional distributions). On these methods, we give empirical results on density estimation and classification tasks and explore the implications of these arguments. AIM-2004-031 CBCL-245 Author[s]: Minjoon Kouh and Tomaso Poggio A general mechanism for tuning: Gain control circuits and synapses underlie tuning of cortical neurons December 31, 2004 Tuning to an optimal stimulus is a widespread property of neurons in cortex. We propose that such tuning is a consequence of normalization or gain control circuits. We also present a biologically plausible neural circuitry of tuning.

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