No abstract

The dilemma between stability and plasticity is crucial in machine learning, especially when non-stationary input distributions are considered. This issue can be addressed by continual learning in order to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. This strategy has been previously proposed for supervised and reinforcement learning models. However, little attention has been devoted to unsupervised learning. This work presents a dynamic learning rate framework for unsupervised neural networks that can handle non-stationary distributions. In order for the model to adapt to the input as it changes its characteristics, a varying learning rate that does not merely depend on the training step but on the reconstruction error has been proposed. In the experiments, different configurations for classical competitive neural networks, self-organizing maps and growing neural gas with either per-neuron or per-network dynamic learning rate have been tested. Experimental results on document clustering tasks demonstrate the suitability of the proposal for real-world problems.

Video feeds from traffic cameras can be useful for many purposes, the most critical of which are related to monitoring road safety. Vehicle trajectory is a key element in dangerous behavior and traffic accidents. In this respect, it is crucial to detect those anomalous vehicle trajectories, that is, trajectories that depart from usual paths. In this work, a model is proposed to automatically address that by using video sequences from traffic cameras. The proposal detects vehicles frame by frame, tracks their trajectories across frames, estimates velocity vectors, and compares them to velocity vectors from other spatially adjacent trajectories. From the comparison of velocity vectors, trajectories that are very different (anomalous) from neighboring trajectories can be detected. In practical terms, this strategy can detect vehicles in wrong-way trajectories. Some components of the model are off-the-shelf, such as the detection provided by recent deep learning approaches; however, several different options are considered and analyzed for vehicle tracking. The performance of the system has been tested with a wide range of real and synthetic traffic videos.