For many real-world applications, labeled data can be costly to obtain. Semi-supervised learning methods make use of substantially available unlabeled data along with few labeled samples. Most of the latest work on semi-supervised learning for image classification show performance on standard machine learning datasets like MNIST, SVHN, etc. In this work, we propose a convolutional adversarial autoencoder architecture for real-world data. We demonstrate the application of this architecture for semi-supervised object recognition. We show that our approach can learn from limited labeled data and outperform fully-supervised CNN baseline method by about 4% on real-world datasets. We also achieve competitive performance on the MNIST dataset compared to state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning techniques. To spur research in this direction, we compiled two real-world datasets: Internet (WIS) dataset and Real-world (RW) dataset which consists of more than 20K labeled samples each, comprising of small household objects belonging to ten classes. We also show a possible application of this method for online learning in robotics. / I de flesta verklighetsbaserade tillämpningar kan det vara kostsamt att erhålla märkt data. Inlärningsmetoder som är semi-övervakade använder sig oftast i stor utsträckning av omärkt data med stöd av en liten mängd märkt data. Mycket av det senaste arbetet inom semiövervakade inlärningsmetoder för bildklassificering visar prestanda på standardiserad maskininlärning så som MNIST, SVHN, och så vidare. I det här arbetet föreslår vi en convolutional adversarial autoencoder arkitektur för verklighetsbaserad data. Vi demonstrerar tillämpningen av denna arkitektur för semi-övervakad objektidentifiering och visar att vårt tillvägagångssätt kan lära sig av ett begränsat antal märkt data. Därmed överträffar vi den fullt övervakade CNN-baslinjemetoden med ca. 4% på verklighetsbaserade datauppsättningar. Vi uppnår även konkurrenskraftig prestanda på MNIST datauppsättningen jämfört med moderna semi-övervakade inlärningsmetoder. För att stimulera forskningen i den här riktningen, samlade vi två verklighetsbaserade datauppsättningar: Internet (WIS) och Real-world (RW) datauppsättningar, som består av mer än 20 000 märkta prov vardera, som utgörs av små hushållsobjekt tillhörandes tio klasser. Vi visar också en möjlig tillämpning av den här metoden för online-inlärning i robotik.

This thesis addresses the crucial problem of knowledge transfer and retention in deep neural networks. The ability to transfer knowledge from previously learned tasks and retain it for future use is essential for machine learning models to continually adapt to new tasks and improve their overall performance. In principle, knowledge can be transferred between any type of task, but we believe it to be particularly challenging in the field of computer vision, where the size and diversity of visual data often result in high compute requirements and the need for large, complex models. Hence, we analyze transfer and retention learning between unsupervised and supervised visual tasks, which form the main focus of this thesis. We categorize our efforts into several knowledge transfer and retention paradigms, and we tackle them with several contributions for the scientific community. The thesis proposes settings and methods based on knowledge distillation and self-supervised learning techniques. In particular, we devise two novel continual learning settings and seven new methods for knowledge transfer and retention, setting new state-of-the-art in a wide range of tasks. In conclusion, this thesis provides a valuable contribution to the field of computer vision and machine learning and sets a foundation for future work in this area.

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In our work, we deploy semi-supervised learning methods to perform Sentiment Analysis on a corpus of sentences, meant to be labeled as either happy, neutral, sad, or angry. Sentence-BERT is used to obtain high-dimensional embeddings for the sentences in the training and testing sets, on which three classification methods are applied: the K-Nearest Neighbors classifier (KNN), Label Propagation, and Label Spreading. The latter two are graph-based classifying methods that are expected to provide better predictions compared to the supervised KNN, due to their ability to propagate labels of known data to similar (and spatially close) unknown data. In our study, we experiment with multiple combinations of labeled and unlabeled data, various hyperparameters, and 4 distinct classes of data, and we perform both binary and fine-grained classification tasks. A custom Radial Basis Function kernel is created for this study, in which Euclidean distance is replaced with Cosine Similarity, in order to correspond to the metric used in SentenceBERT. It is found that, for 2 out of 4 tasks, and more specifically 3-class and 2-class classification, the two graph-based algorithms outperform the chosen baseline, although the scores are not significantly higher. The supervised KNN classifier performs better for the second 3-class classification, as well as the 4-class classification, especially when using embeddings of lower dimensionality. The conclusions drawn from the results are, firstly, that the dataset used is most likely not quite suitable for graph creation, and, secondly, that larger volumes of labeled data should be used for further interpretation.

<p dir="ltr">Traditional methods of behavior classification on videos of mice often rely on manually annotated datasets, which can be labor-intensive and resource-demanding to create. This research aims to address the challenges of behavior classification in mouse studies by leveraging an algorithmic framework employing self-supervised learning techniques capable of analyzing unlabeled datasets. This research seeks to develop a novel approach that eliminates the need for extensive manual annotation, making behavioral analysis more accessible and cost-effective for researchers, especially those in laboratories with limited access to annotated datasets.</p>

This thesis proposes a novel approach for efficiently estimating gaze points in dual camera transportation datasets. Traditional methods for gaze point estimation are dependent on large amounts of labeled data, which can be both expensive and time-consuming to collect. Additionally, alignment and calibration of the two camera views present significant challenges. To overcome these limitations, this thesis investigates the use of self-learning techniques such as semi-supervised learning and self-training, which can reduce the need for labeled data while maintaining high accuracy. The proposed method is evaluated on the DGAZE dataset and achieves a 57.2\% improvement in performance compared to the previous methods. This approach can prove to be a valuable tool for studying visual attention in transportation research, leading to more cost-effective and efficient research in this field. / Master of Science / This thesis presents a new method for efficiently estimating the gaze point of drivers while driving, which is crucial for understanding driver behavior and improving transportation safety. Traditional methods require a lot of labeled data, which can be time-consuming and expensive to obtain. This thesis proposes a self-learning approach that can learn from both labeled and unlabeled data, reducing the need for labeled data while maintaining high accuracy. By training the model on labeled data and using its own estimations on unlabeled data to improve its performance, the proposed approach can adapt to new scenarios and improve its accuracy over time. The proposed method is evaluated on the DGAZE dataset and achieves a 57.2\% improvement in performance compared to the previous methods. Overall, this approach offers a more efficient and cost-effective solution that can potentially help improve transportation safety by providing a better understanding of driver behavior. This approach can prove to be a valuable tool for studying visual attention in transportation research, leading to more cost-effective and efficient research in this field.

Recent adaptations of machine learning models in many businesses has underscored the need for quality training data. Typically, training supervised machine learning systems involves using large amounts of human-annotated data. Labeling data is expensive and can be a limiting factor in using machine learning models. To enable continued integration of machine learning systems in businesses and also easy access by users, researchers have proposed several alternatives to supervised learning. Weak supervision is one such alternative. Weak supervision or weakly supervised learning involves using noisy labels (weak signals of the data) from multiple sources to train machine learning systems. A weak supervision model aggregates multiple noisy label sources called weak signals in order to produce probabilistic labels for the data. The main allure of weak supervision is that it provides a cheap yet effective substitute for supervised learning without need for labeled data. The key challenge in training weakly supervised machine learning models is that the weak supervision leaves ambiguity about the possible true labelings of the data. In this dissertation, we aim to address the challenge associated with training weakly supervised learning models by developing new weak supervision methods. Our work focuses on learning with constraint-based weak supervision algorithms. Firstly, we will propose an adversarial labeling approach for weak supervision. In this method, the adversary chooses the labels for the data and a model learns by minimising the error made by the adversarial model. Secondly, we will propose a simple constrained based approach that minimises a quadratic objective function in order to solve for the labels of the data. Next we explain the notion of data consistency for weak supervision and propose a data consistent method for weakly supervised learning. This approach combines weak supervision labels with features of the training data to make the learned labels consistent with the data. Lastly, we use this data consistent approach to propose a general approach for improving the performance of weak supervision models. In this method, we combine weak supervision with active learning in order to generate a model that outperforms each individual approach using only a handful of labeled data. For each algorithm we propose, we report extensive empirical validation of it by testing it on standard text and image classification datasets. We compare each approach against baseline and state-of-the-art methods and show that in most cases we match or outperform the methods we compare against. We report significant gains of our method on both binary and multi-class classification tasks. / Doctor of Philosophy / Machine learning models learn to make predictions from data. In supervised learning, a machine learning model is fed data and corresponding labels for the data so that the model can learn to predict labels for new unseen test data. Curation of large fully supervised datasets is expensive and time consuming since it involves subject matter experts providing labels for each individual data example. The cost of collecting labels has become one of the major roadblocks for training machine learning models. An alternative to supervised training of machine learning models is weak supervision. Weak supervision or weakly supervised learning trains with cheap, and easy to define signals that noisily label the data. We refer to these signals as weak signals. A weak supervision model combines various weak signals to produce training labels for the data. The key challenge in weak supervision is how to combine the different weak signals while navigating misleading correlations in their errors. In this dissertation, we propose several algorithms for weakly supervised learning. We classify our methods as constraint-based weak supervision since weak supervision is provided as constraints to our algorithms. We use experiments on different text and image classification datasets to show that our methods are effective and outperform competing methods that we compare against. Lastly, we propose a general framework for improving the performance of weak supervision models by incorporating a few labeled data. With this method we are able to close the gap to supervised learning without the need for labeling all the data examples.

Learning from unlabeled data is a topic of critical significance in machine learning, as the large datasets required to train ever-growing models are costly and impractical to annotate. Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods aim to learn from a few labels and a large unlabeled dataset. In another approach, Domain Adaptation (DA) leverages data from a similar source domain to train a model for a target domain. This thesis focuses on Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA) for the dense task of semantic segmentation, where labels are particularly costly to obtain. SSDA has not received much attention yet, even though it has a great potential and represents a realistic scenario. The few existing SSDA methods for semantic segmentation reuse ideas from Unsupervised DA, despite the di↵erences between the two settings. This thesis proposes a new semantic segmentation framework designed particularly for the SSDA setting. The approach followed was to forego domain alignment and focus instead on enhancing clusterability of target domain features, an idea from SSL. The method is based on consistency regularization, combined with pixel contrastive learning and self-training. The proposed framework is found to be e↵ective not only in SSDA, but also in SSL. Ultimately, a unified solution for SSL and SSDA semantic segmentation is presented. Experiments were conducted on the target dataset of Cityscapes and source dataset of GTA5. The method proposed is competitive in both SSL and SSDA, and sets a new state-of-the-art for SSDA achieving a 65.6% mIoU (+4.4) on Cityscapes with 100 labeled samples. This thesis has an immediate impact on practical applications by proposing a new best-performing framework for the under-explored setting of SSDA. Furthermore, it also contributes towards the more ambitious goal of designing a unified solution for learning from unlabeled data. / Inlärning med hjälp av omärkt data är ett område av stor vikt inom maskininlärning. Detta på grund av att de stora datamängder som blivit nödvändiga för att träna konstant växande modeller både är kostsamma och opraktiska att implementera. Målet med Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) är att kombinera ett fåtal etiketter med en stor mängd omärkt data för inlärning. Som ett annat tillvägagångssätt använder Domain Adaptation (DA) data från en liknande domän för att träna en annan måldomän. I Denna avhandling används Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation (SSDA) för att utföra sådan semantisk segmentering, i vilken etiketter är särskilt kostsamma att erhålla. SSDA är ännu inte genererat mycket uppmärksamhet, även om det har en stor potential och representerar ett realistiskt scenario. De få metoder av SSDA som existerar för semantisk segmentering återanvänder idéer från Unsupervised DA, trots de olikheter som finns mellan de två modellerna. Denna avhandling föreslår ett nytt ramverk för semantisk segmentering, designat speciellt för SSDA modellen. Detta genom att försaka domänanpassning och i stället fokusera på att förbättra klusterbarheten av måldomänens egenskaper, en idé tagen från SSL. Metoden är baserad på konsistensregularisering, i kombination med pixelkontrastinlärning och självinlärning. Det föreslagna ramverket visar sig vara effektivt, inte bara för SSDA, men även för SSL. Till slut presenteras en enad lösning för semantisk segmentering med SLL och SSDA. Experiment utfördes på måldata från Cityscapes samt källdata från GTA5. Den föreslagna metoden är konkurrenskraftig både för SSL och SSDA, och blir världsledande för SSDA genom att uppnå 65,6% mIoU (+4,4) för Cityscapes med 100 märkta testdata. Denna avhandling har en omedelbar effekt gällande praktiska applikationer genom att föreslå ett nytt ”bäst resulterande” ramverk för dåligt utforskade inställningar av SSDA. Till yttermera visso bidrar avhandlingen även till det mer ambitiösa målet att designa en enad lösning för maskininlärning från omärkta data.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / As genomes are sequenced, a major challenge is their annotation -- the identification of genes and regulatory elements, their locations and their functions. For years, it was believed that one gene corresponds to one protein, but the discovery of alternative splicing provided a mechanism for generating different gene transcripts (isoforms) from the same genomic sequence. In the recent years, it has become obvious that a large fraction of genes undergoes alternative splicing. Thus, understanding alternative splicing is a problem of great interest to biologists. Supervised machine learning approaches can be used to predict alternative splicing events at genome level. However, supervised approaches require large amounts of labeled data to produce accurate classifiers. While large amounts of genomic data are produced by the new sequencing technologies, labeling these data can be costly and time consuming. Therefore, semi-supervised learning approaches that can make use of large amounts of unlabeled data, in addition to small amounts of labeled data are highly desirable. In this work, we study the usefulness of a semi-supervised learning approach, co-training, for classifying exons as alternatively spliced or constitutive. The co-training algorithm makes use of two views of the data to iteratively learn two classifiers that can inform each other, at each step, with their best predictions on the unlabeled data. We consider three sets of features for constructing views for the problem of predicting alternatively spliced exons: lengths of the exon of interest and its flanking introns, exonic splicing enhancers (a.k.a., ESE motifs) and intronic regulatory sequences (a.k.a., IRS motifs). Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms are used as based classifiers in our study. Experimental results show that the usage of the unlabeled data can result in better classifiers as compared to those obtained from the small amount of labeled data alone. In addition to semi-supervised approaches, we also also study the usefulness of graph based transductive learning approaches for predicting alternatively spliced exons. Similar to the semi-supervised learning algorithms, transductive learning algorithms can make use of unlabeled data, together with labeled data, to produce labels for the unlabeled data. However, a classification model that could be used to classify new unlabeled data is not learned in this case. Experimental results show that graph based transductive approaches can make effective use of the unlabeled data.

La reconnaissance automatique des émotions dans la parole est un sujet de recherche relativement récent dans le domaine du traitement de la parole, puisqu’il est abordé depuis une dizaine d’années environs. Ce sujet fait de nos jours l’objet d’une grande attention, non seulement dans le monde académique mais aussi dans l’industrie, grâce à l’augmentation des performances et de la fiabilité des systèmes. Les premiers travaux étaient fondés sur des donnés jouées par des acteurs, et donc non spontanées. Même aujourd’hui, la plupart des études exploitent des séquences pré-segmentées d’un locuteur unique et non une communication spontanée entre plusieurs locuteurs. Cette méthodologie rend les travaux effectués difficilement généralisables pour des informations collectées de manière naturelle.Les travaux entrepris dans cette thèse se basent sur des conversations de centre d’appels, enregistrés en grande quantité et mettant en jeu au minimum 2 locuteurs humains (un client et un agent commercial) lors de chaque dialogue. Notre but est la détection, via l’expression émotionnelle, de la satisfaction client. Dans une première partie nous présentons les scores pouvant être obtenus sur nos données à partir de modèles se basant uniquement sur des indices acoustiques ou lexicaux. Nous montrons que pour obtenir des résultats satisfaisants une approche ne prenant en compte qu’un seul de ces types d’indices ne suffit pas. Nous proposons pour palier ce problème une étude sur la fusion d’indices de types acoustiques, lexicaux et syntaxico-sémantiques. Nous montrons que l’emploi de cette combinaison d’indices nous permet d’obtenir des gains par rapport aux modèles acoustiques même dans les cas ou nous nous basons sur une approche sans pré-traitements manuels (segmentation automatique des conversations, utilisation de transcriptions fournies par un système de reconnaissance de la parole). Dans une seconde partie nous remarquons que même si les modèles hybrides acoustiques/linguistiques nous permettent d’obtenir des gains intéressants la quantité de données utilisées dans nos modèles de détection est un problème lorsque nous testons nos méthodes sur des données nouvelles et très variées (49h issus de la base de données de conversations). Pour remédier à ce problème nous proposons une méthode d’enrichissement de notre corpus d’apprentissage. Nous sélectionnons ainsi, de manière automatique, de nouvelles données qui seront intégrées dans notre corpus d’apprentissage. Ces ajouts nous permettent de doubler la taille de notre ensemble d’apprentissage et d’obtenir des gains par rapport aux modèles de départ. Enfin, dans une dernière partie nous choisissons d’évaluées nos méthodes non plus sur des portions de dialogues comme cela est le cas dans la plupart des études, mais sur des conversations complètes. Nous utilisons pour cela les modèles issus des études précédentes (modèles issus de la fusion d’indices, des méthodes d’enrichissement automatique) et ajoutons 2 groupes d’indices supplémentaires : i) Des indices « structurels » prenant en compte des informations comme la durée de la conversation, le temps de parole de chaque type de locuteurs. ii) des indices « dialogiques » comprenant des informations comme le thème de la conversation ainsi qu’un nouveau concept que nous nommons « implication affective ». Celui-ci a pour but de modéliser l’impact de la production émotionnelle du locuteur courant sur le ou les autres participants de la conversation. Nous montrons que lorsque nous combinons l’ensemble de ces informations nous arrivons à obtenir des résultats proches de ceux d’un humain lorsqu’il s’agit de déterminer le caractère positif ou négatif d’une conversation / Automatic emotion recognition in speech is a relatively recent research subject in the field of natural language processing considering that the subject has been proposed for the first time about ten years ago. This subject is nowadays the object of much attention, not only in academia but also in industry, thank to the increased models performance and system reliability. The first studies were based on acted data and non spontaneous speech. Up until now, most experiments carried out by the research community on emotions were realized pre-segmented sequences and with a unique speaker and not on spontaneous speech with several speaker. With this methodology the models built on acted data are hardly usable on data collected in natural context The studies we present in this thesis are based on call center’s conversation with about 1620 hours of dialogs and with at least two human speakers (a commercial agent and a client) for each conversation. Our aim is the detection, via emotional expression, of the client satisfaction.In the first part of this work we present the results we obtained from models using only acoustic or linguistic features for emotion detection. We show that to obtain correct results an approach taking into account only one of these features type is not enough. To overcome this problem we propose the combination of three type of features (acoustic, lexical and semantic). We show that the use of models with features fusion allows higher score for the recognition step in all case compared to the model using only acoustic features. This gain is also obtained if we use an approach without manual pre-processing (automatic segmentation of conversation, transcriptions based on automatic speech recognition).In the second part of our study we notice that even if models based on features combination are relevant for emotion detection the amount of data we use in our training set is too small if we used it on large amount of data test. To overcome this problem we propose a new method to automatically complete training set with new data. We base this selection on linguistic and acoustic criterion. These new information are issued from 100 hours of data. These additions allow us to double the amount of data in our training set and increase emotion recognition rate compare to the non-enrich models. Finally, in the last part we choose to evaluate our method on entire conversation and not only on conversations turns as in most studies. To define the classification of a dialog we use models built on the previous steps of this works and we add two new features group:i) structural features including information like the length of the conversation, the proportion of speech for each speaker in the dialogii) dialogic features including informations like the topic of a conversation and a new concept we call “affective implication”. The aim of the affective implication is to represent the impact of the current speaker’s emotional production on the other speakers. We show that if we combined all information we can obtain results close to those of humans