Infinite ShapeOdds: Nonparametric Bayesian Models for Shape Representations

Authors

  • Wei Xing University of Utah
  • Shireen Elhabian University of Utah
  • Robert Kirby University of Utah
  • Ross T. Whitaker University of Utah
  • Shandian Zhe University of Utah

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i04.6118

Abstract

Learning compact representations for shapes (binary images) is important for many applications. Although neural network models are very powerful, they usually involve many parameters, require substantial tuning efforts and easily overfit small datasets, which are common in shape-related applications. The state-of-the-art approach, ShapeOdds, as a latent Gaussian model, can effectively prevent overfitting and is more robust. Nonetheless, it relies on a linear projection assumption and is incapable of capturing intrinsic nonlinear shape variations, hence may leading to inferior representations and structure discovery. To address these issues, we propose Infinite ShapeOdds (InfShapeOdds), a Bayesian nonparametric shape model, which is flexible enough to capture complex shape variations and discover hidden cluster structures, while still avoiding overfitting. Specifically, we use matrix Gaussian priors, nonlinear feature mappings and the kernel trick to generalize ShapeOdds to a shape-variate Gaussian process model, which can grasp various nonlinear correlations among the pixels within and across (different) shapes. To further discover the hidden structures in data, we place a Dirichlet process mixture (DPM) prior over the representations to jointly infer the cluster number and memberships. Finally, we exploit the Kronecker-product structure in our model to develop an efficient, truncated variational expectation-maximization algorithm for model estimation. On synthetic and real-world data, we show the advantage of our method in both representation learning and latent structure discovery.

Downloads

Published

2020-04-03

How to Cite

Xing, W., Elhabian, S., Kirby, R., Whitaker, R. T., & Zhe, S. (2020). Infinite ShapeOdds: Nonparametric Bayesian Models for Shape Representations. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34(04), 6462-6469. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i04.6118

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track: Machine Learning