In this study, we systematically investigate the impact of class imbalance on classification performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and compare frequently used methods to address the issue. Class imbalance is a common problem that has been comprehensively studied in classical machine learning, yet very limited systematic research is available in the context of deep learning. In our study, we use three benchmark datasets of increasing complexity, MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, to investigate the effects of imbalance on classification and perform an extensive comparison of several methods to address the issue: oversampling, undersampling, two-phase training, and thresholding that compensates for prior class probabilities. Our main evaluation metric is area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC) adjusted to multi-class tasks since overall accuracy metric is associated with notable difficulties in the context of imbalanced data. Based on results from our experiments we conclude that (i) the effect of class imbalance on classification performance is detrimental; (ii) the method of addressing class imbalance that emerged as dominant in almost all analyzed scenarios was oversampling; (iii) oversampling should be applied to the level that completely eliminates the imbalance, whereas the optimal undersampling ratio depends on the extent of imbalance; (iv) as opposed to some classical machine learning models, oversampling does not cause overfitting of CNNs; (v) thresholding should be applied to compensate for prior class probabilities when overall number of properly classified cases is of interest. 

A power packet is a unit of electric power composed of a power pulse and an information tag. In Shannon’s information theory, messages are represented by symbol sequences in a digitized manner. Referring to this formulation, we define symbols in power packetization as a minimum unit of power transferred by a tagged pulse. Here, power is digitized and quantized. In this paper, we consider packetized power in networks for a finite duration, giving symbols and their energies to the networks. A network structure is defined using a graph whose nodes represent routers, sources and destinations. First, we introduce the concept of a symbol propagation matrix (SPM) in which symbols are transferred at links during unit times. Packetized power is described as a network flow in a spatio-temporal structure. Then, we study the problem of selecting an SPM in terms of transferability, that is, the possibility to represent given energies at sources and destinations during the finite duration. To select an SPM, we consider a network flow problem of packetized power. The problem is formulated as an M-convex submodular flow problem which is a solvable generalization of the minimum cost flow problem. Finally, through examples, we verify that this formulation provides reasonable packetized power.

Background and purpose - Recent advances in artificial intelligence (deep learning) have shown remarkable performance in classifying non-medical images, and the technology is believed to be the next technological revolution. So far it has never been applied in an orthopedic setting, and in this study we sought to determine the feasibility of using deep learning for skeletal radiographs. Methods - We extracted 256,000 wrist, hand, and ankle radiographs from Danderyd's Hospital and identified 4 classes: fracture, laterality, body part, and exam view. We then selected 5 openly available deep learning networks that were adapted for these images. The most accurate network was benchmarked against a gold standard for fractures. We furthermore compared the network's performance with 2 senior orthopedic surgeons who reviewed images at the same resolution as the network. Results - All networks exhibited an accuracy of at least 90% when identifying laterality, body part, and exam view. The final accuracy for fractures was estimated at 83% for the best performing network. The network performed similarly to senior orthopedic surgeons when presented with images at the same resolution as the network. The 2 reviewer Cohen's kappa under these conditions was 0.76. Interpretation - This study supports the use for orthopedic radiographs of artificial intelligence, which can perform at a human level. While current implementation lacks important features that surgeons require, e.g. risk of dislocation, classifications, measurements, and combining multiple exam views, these problems have technical solutions that are waiting to be implemented for orthopedics.

Skilled robot task learning is best implemented by predictive action policies due to the inherent latency of sensorimotor processes. However, training such predictive policies is challenging as it involves finding a trajectory of motor activations for the full duration of the action. We propose a data-efficient deep predictive policy training (DPPT) framework with a deep neural network policy architecture which maps an image observation to a sequence of motor activations. The architecture consists of three sub-networks referred to as the perception, policy and behavior super-layers. The perception and behavior super-layers force an abstraction of visual and motor data trained with synthetic and simulated training samples, respectively. The policy super-layer is a small subnetwork with fewer parameters that maps data in-between the abstracted manifolds. It is trained for each task using methods for policy search reinforcement learning. We demonstrate the suitability of the proposed architecture and learning framework by training predictive policies for skilled object grasping and ball throwing on a PR2 robot. The effectiveness of the method is illustrated by the fact that these tasks are trained using only about 180 real robot attempts with qualitative terminal rewards.

This paper presents a framework that enables a robot to discover various object categories through interaction. The categories are described using action-effect relations, i.e. sensorimotor contingencies rather than more static shape or appearance representation. The framework provides a functionality to classify objects and the resulting categories, associating a class with a specific module. We demonstrate the performance of the framework by studying a pushing behavior in robots, encoding the sensorimotor contingencies and their predictability with Gaussian Processes. We show how entropy-based action selection can improve object classification and how functional categories emerge from the similarities of effects observed among the objects. We also show how a multidimensional action space can be realized by parameterizing pushing using both position and velocity.

Modeling of physical human-robot collaborations is generally a challenging problem due to the unpredictive nature of human behavior. To address this issue, we present a data-efficient reinforcement learning framework which enables a robot to learn how to collaborate with a human partner. The robot learns the task from its own sensorimotor experiences in an unsupervised manner. The uncertainty in the interaction is modeled using Gaussian processes (GP) to implement a forward model and an actionvalue function. Optimal action selection given the uncertain GP model is ensured by Bayesian optimization. We apply the framework to a scenario in which a human and a PR2 robot jointly control the ball position on a plank based on vision and force/torque data. Our experimental results show the suitability of the proposed method in terms of fast and data-efficient model learning, optimal action selection under uncertainty and equal role sharing between the partners.

Evidence is mounting that Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) are the most effective representation learning method for visual recognition tasks. In the common scenario, a ConvNet is trained on a large labeled dataset (source) and the feed-forward units activation of the trained network, at a certain layer of the network, is used as a generic representation of an input image for a task with relatively smaller training set (target). Recent studies have shown this form of representation transfer to be suitable for a wide range of target visual recognition tasks. This paper introduces and investigates several factors affecting the transferability of such representations. It includes parameters for training of the source ConvNet such as its architecture, distribution of the training data, etc. and also the parameters of feature extraction such as layer of the trained ConvNet, dimensionality reduction, etc. Then, by optimizing these factors, we show that significant improvements can be achieved on various (17) visual recognition tasks. We further show that these visual recognition tasks can be categorically ordered based on their similarity to the source task such that a correlation between the performance of tasks and their similarity to the source task w.r.t. the proposed factors is observed.

This paper provides an extensive study on the availability of image representations based on convolutional networks (ConvNets) for the task of visual instance retrieval. Besides the choice of convolutional layers, we present an efficient pipeline exploiting multi-scale schemes to extract local features, in particular, by taking geometric invariance into explicit account, i.e. positions, scales and spatial consistency. In our experiments using five standard image retrieval datasets, we demonstrate that generic ConvNet image representations can outperform other state-of-the-art methods if they are extracted appropriately.