Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) conduct image classification by activating dominant features that correlated with labels. When the training and testing data are under similar distributions, their dominant features are similar, leading to decent test performance. The performance is nonetheless unmet when tested with different distributions, leading to the challenges in cross-domain image classification. We introduce a simple training heuristic, Representation Self-Challenging (RSC), that significantly improves the generalization of CNN to the outof-domain data. RSC iteratively challenges (discards) the dominant features activated on the training data, and forces the network to activate remaining features that correlates with labels. This process appears to activate feature representations applicable to out-of-domain data without prior knowledge of new domain and without learning extra network parameters. We present theoretical properties and conditions of RSC for improving cross-domain generalization. The experiments endorse the simple, effective, and architecture-agnostic nature of our RSC method.

Abstract-Due to its ability to combine multiple base clusterings into a probably better and more robust clustering, the ensemble clustering technique has been attracting increasing attention in recent years. Despite the significant success, one limitation to most of the existing ensemble clustering methods is that they generally treat all base clusterings equally regardless of their reliability, which makes them vulnerable to low-quality base clusterings. Although some efforts have been made to (globally) evaluate and weight the base clusterings, yet these methods tend to view each base clustering as an individual and neglect the local diversity of clusters inside the same base clustering. It remains an open problem how to evaluate the reliability of clusters and exploit the local diversity in the ensemble to enhance the consensus performance, especially in the case when there is no access to data features or specific assumptions on data distribution. To address this, in this paper, we propose a novel ensemble clustering approach based on ensemble-driven cluster uncertainty estimation and local weighting strategy. In particular, the uncertainty of each cluster is estimated by considering the cluster labels in the entire ensemble via an entropic criterion. A novel ensemble-driven cluster validity measure is introduced, and a locally weighted co-association matrix is presented to serve as a summary for the ensemble of diverse clusters. With the local diversity in ensembles exploited, two novel consensus functions are further proposed. Extensive experiments on a variety of real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art.

The task of estimating complex non-rigid 3D motion through a monocular camera is of increasing interest to the wider scientific community. Assuming one has the 2D point tracks of the non-rigid object in question, the vision community refers to this problem as Non-Rigid Structure from Motion (NRSfM). In this paper we make two contributions. First, we demonstrate empirically that the current state of the art approach to NRSfM (i.e. Dai et al. [5]) exhibits poor reconstruction performance on complex motion (i.e motions involving a sequence of primitive actions such as walk, sit and stand involving a human object). Second, we propose that this limitation can be circumvented by modeling complex motion as a union of subspaces. This does not naturally occur in Dai et al.'s approach which instead makes a less compact summation of subspaces assumption. Experiments on both synthetic and real videos illustrate the benefits of our approach for the complex nonrigid motion analysis.

This paper focuses on scalability and robustness of spectral clustering for extremely large-scale datasets with limited resources. Two novel algorithms are proposed, namely, ultra-scalable spectral clustering (U-SPEC) and ultra-scalable ensemble clustering (U-SENC). In U-SPEC, a hybrid representative selection strategy and a fast approximation method for K-nearest representatives are proposed for the construction of a sparse affinity sub-matrix. By interpreting the sparse sub-matrix as a bipartite graph, the transfer cut is then utilized to efficiently partition the graph and obtain the clustering result. In U-SENC, multiple U-SPEC clusterers are further integrated into an ensemble clustering framework to enhance the robustness of U-SPEC while maintaining high efficiency. Based on the ensemble generation via multiple U-SEPC's, a new bipartite graph is constructed between objects and base clusters and then efficiently partitioned to achieve the consensus clustering result. It is noteworthy that both U-SPEC and U-SENC have nearly linear time and space complexity, and are capable of robustly and efficiently partitioning 10-million-level nonlinearly-separable datasets on a PC with 64 GB memory. Experiments on various large-scale datasets have demonstrated the scalability and robustness of our algorithms. The MATLAB code and experimental data are available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330760669.