Maximum Entropy Exploration in Contextual Bandits with Neural Networks and Energy Based Models.

Contextual bandits can solve a huge range of real-world problems. However, current popular algorithms to solve them either rely on linear models or unreliable uncertainty estimation in non-linear models, which are required to deal with the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Inspired by theories of human cognition, we introduce novel techniques that use maximum entropy exploration, relying on neural networks to find optimal policies in settings with both continuous and discrete action spaces. We present two classes of models, one with neural networks as reward estimators, and the other with energy based models, which model the probability of obtaining an optimal reward given an action. We evaluate the performance of these models in static and dynamic contextual bandit simulation environments. We show that both techniques outperform standard baseline algorithms, such as NN HMC, NN Discrete, Upper Confidence Bound, and Thompson Sampling, where energy based models have the best overall performance. This provides practitioners with new techniques that perform well in static and dynamic settings, and are particularly well suited to non-linear scenarios with continuous action spaces.

Composition and Style Attributes Guided Image Aesthetic Assessment.

The aesthetic quality of an image is defined as the measure or appreciation of the beauty of an image. Aesthetics is inherently a subjective property but there are certain factors that influence it such as, the semantic content of the image, the attributes describing the artistic aspect, the photographic setup used for the shot, etc. In this paper we propose a method for the automatic prediction of the aesthetics of an image that is based on the analysis of the semantic content, the artistic style and the composition of the image. The proposed network includes: a pre-trained network for semantic features extraction (the Backbone); a Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) network that relies on the Backbone features for the prediction of image attributes (the AttributeNet); a self-adaptive Hypernetwork that exploits the attributes prior encoded into the embedding generated by the AttributeNet to predict the parameters of the target network dedicated to aesthetic estimation (the AestheticNet). Given an image, the proposed multi-network is able to predict: style and composition attributes, and aesthetic score distribution. Results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, while the ablation study gives a better understanding of the proposed network.

No Reference, Opinion Unaware Image Quality Assessment by Anomaly Detection.

We propose an anomaly detection based image quality assessment method which exploits the correlations between feature maps from a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The proposed method encodes the intra-layer correlation through the Gram matrix and then estimates the quality score combining the average of the correlation and the output from an anomaly detection method. The latter evaluates the degree of abnormality of an image by computing a correlation similarity with respect to a dictionary of pristine images. The effectiveness of the method is tested on different benchmarking datasets (LIVE-itW, KONIQ, and SPAQ).

A Robust Approach for the Background Subtraction Based on Multi-Layered Self-Organizing Maps.

Motion detection in video streams is a challenging task for several computer vision applications. Indeed, segmentation of moving and static elements in the scene allows to increase the efficiency of several challenging tasks, such as human-computer interface, robot visions, and intelligent surveillance systems. In this paper, we approach motion detection through a multi-layered artificial neural network, which is able to build for each background pixel a multi-modal color distribution evolving over time through self-organization. According to the winner-take-all rule, each layer of the network models an independent state of the background scene, in response to external disturbing conditions, such as illumination variations, moving backgrounds, and jittering. As a result, our background subtraction method exhibits high generalization capabilities that in combination with a post-processing filtering schema allow to produce accurate motion segmentation. Moreover, we propose an approach to detect anomalous events (such as camera motion) that require background model re-initialization. We describe our method in full details and we compare it against the most recent background subtraction approaches. Experimental results for video sequences from the 2012 and 2014 CVPR Change Detection data sets demonstrate how our methodology outperforms many state-of-the-art methods in terms of detection rate.