Disciplined Convex Programming (DCP)
Convex programming is a subclass of nonlinear programming (NLP) that unifies and generalizes least squares (LS), linear programming (LP), and convex quadratic programming (QP). It has become quite popular recently for a number of reasons, including its attractive theoretical properties, efficient numerical algorithms, and practical applications. Nevertheless, there remains a significant impediment to the more widespread adoption of convex programming: the high level of expertise required to use it.
We introduce a new modeling methodology called disciplined convex programming. As the term ‘disciplined’ suggests, the methodology imposes a set of conventions that one must follow when constructing convex programs. The conventions are simple and teachable, taken from basic principles of convex analysis, and inspired by the practices of those who regularly study and apply convex optimization today. The conventions do not limit generality; but they do allow much of the manipulation and transformation required to analyze and solve convex programs to be automated.
➘ “Disciplined Convex Optimization” …

CNN-biLSTM-CRF
Vision algorithms capable of interpreting scenes from a real-time video stream are necessary for computer-assisted surgery systems to achieve context-aware behavior. In laparoscopic procedures one particular algorithm needed for such systems is the identification of surgical phases, for which the current state of the art is a model based on a CNN-LSTM. A number of previous works using models of this kind have trained them in a fully supervised manner, requiring a fully annotated dataset. Instead, our work confronts the problem of learning surgical phase recognition in scenarios presenting scarce amounts of annotated data (under 25% of all available video recordings). We propose a teacher/student type of approach, where a strong predictor called the teacher, trained beforehand on a small dataset of ground truth-annotated videos, generates synthetic annotations for a larger dataset, which another model – the student – learns from. In our case, the teacher features a novel CNN-biLSTM-CRF architecture, designed for offline inference only. The student, on the other hand, is a CNN-LSTM capable of making real-time predictions. Results for various amounts of manually annotated videos demonstrate the superiority of the new CNN-biLSTM-CRF predictor as well as improved performance from the CNN-LSTM trained using synthetic labels generated for unannotated videos. For both offline and online surgical phase recognition with very few annotated recordings available, this new teacher/student strategy provides a valuable performance improvement by efficiently leveraging the unannotated data. …

Meta Networks
Deep neural networks have been successfully applied in applications with a large amount of labeled data. However, there are major drawbacks of the neural networks that are related to rapid generalization with small data and continual learning of new concepts without forgetting. We present a novel meta learning method, Meta Networks (MetaNet), that acquires a meta-level knowledge across tasks and shifts its inductive bias via fast parameterization for the rapid generalization. When tested on the standard one-shot learning benchmarks, our MetaNet models achieved near human-level accuracy. We demonstrated several appealing properties of MetaNet relating to generalization and continual learning. …

Knowledge and-or Graph (AOG)
This paper focuses on semantic task planning, i.e., predicting a sequence of actions toward accomplishing a specific task under a certain scene, which is a new problem in computer vision research. The primary challenges are how to model task-specific knowledge and how to integrate this knowledge into the learning procedure. In this work, we propose training a recurrent long short-term memory (LSTM) network to address this problem, i.e., taking a scene image (including pre-located objects) and the specified task as input and recurrently predicting action sequences. However, training such a network generally requires large numbers of annotated samples to cover the semantic space (e.g., diverse action decomposition and ordering). To overcome this issue, we introduce a knowledge and-or graph (AOG) for task description, which hierarchically represents a task as atomic actions. With this AOG representation, we can produce many valid samples (i.e., action sequences according to common sense) by training another auxiliary LSTM network with a small set of annotated samples. Furthermore, these generated samples (i.e., task-oriented action sequences) effectively facilitate training of the model for semantic task planning. In our experiments, we create a new dataset that contains diverse daily tasks and extensively evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. …