Adaptive Feeding (AF)
Object detection aims at high speed and accuracy simultaneously. However, fast models are usually less accurate, while accurate models cannot satisfy our need for speed. A fast model can be 10 times faster but 50\% less accurate than an accurate model. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Feeding (AF) to combine a fast (but less accurate) detector and an accurate (but slow) detector, by adaptively determining whether an image is easy or hard and choosing an appropriate detector for it. In practice, we build a cascade of detectors, including the AF classifier which make the easy vs. hard decision and the two detectors. The AF classifier can be tuned to obtain different tradeoff between speed and accuracy, which has negligible training time and requires no additional training data. Experimental results on the PASCAL VOC, MS COCO and Caltech Pedestrian datasets confirm that AF has the ability to achieve comparable speed as the fast detector and comparable accuracy as the accurate one at the same time. As an example, by combining the fast SSD300 with the accurate SSD500 detector, AF leads to 50\% speedup over SSD500 with the same precision on the VOC2007 test set. …

Deep Convolutional Gaussian Process
We propose deep convolutional Gaussian processes, a deep Gaussian process architecture with convolutional structure. The model is a principled Bayesian framework for detecting hierarchical combinations of local features for image classification. We demonstrate greatly improved image classification performance compared to current Gaussian process approaches on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. In particular, we improve CIFAR-10 accuracy by over 10 percentage points. …

Deep Belief Networks (DBN)
In machine learning, a deep belief network (DBN) is a generative graphical model, or alternatively a type of deep neural network, composed of multiple layers of latent variables (“hidden units”), with connections between the layers but not between units within each layer. When trained on a set of examples in an unsupervised way, a DBN can learn to probabilistically reconstruct its inputs. The layers then act as feature detectors on inputs. After this learning step, a DBN can be further trained in a supervised way to perform classification. DBNs can be viewed as a composition of simple, unsupervised networks such as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) or autoencoders, where each sub-network’s hidden layer serves as the visible layer for the next. This also leads to a fast, layer-by-layer unsupervised training procedure, where contrastive divergence is applied to each sub-network in turn, starting from the “lowest” pair of layers (the lowest visible layer being a training set). The observation, due to Hinton’s student Teh, that DBNs can be trained greedily, one layer at a time, has been called a breakthrough in deep learning. …

Invariance Induction Framework
Data representations that contain all the information about target variables but are invariant to nuisance factors benefit supervised learning algorithms by preventing them from learning associations between these factors and the targets, thus reducing overfitting. We present a novel unsupervised invariance induction framework for neural networks that learns a split representation of data through competitive training between the prediction task and a reconstruction task coupled with disentanglement, without needing any labeled information about nuisance factors or domain knowledge. We describe an adversarial instantiation of this framework and provide analysis of its working. Our unsupervised model outperforms state-of-the-art methods, which are supervised, at inducing invariance to inherent nuisance factors, effectively using synthetic data augmentation to learn invariance, and domain adaptation. Our method can be applied to any prediction task, eg., binary/multi-class classification or regression, without loss of generality. …