Sharif Digital Repository

In this dissertation, Data analysis and information retrieval from incomplete observations are investigated in different applications. Incomplete observations may be induced by lack of observations or part of data affected by specific noise (quantization noise). Data-driven algorithms are among important hot topics. Our goal is to process the lost information inducing certain assumption on big data structures. Then, the approach is to mathematically model the problem of interest as an optimization problem. Next, the designed algorithms for the optimization problems are proposed trying to cut down on the computational complexity of as well as enhancing recovery accuracy for big data... 

Distance Metric Learning algorithms have been widely used in Machine Learning methods recently. In these algorithms a distance function between objecs (data points) is learned based on their labels or similarity and dissimilarity constraints. Recent works have shown that a good precision is obtained in classification or clustering methods which use these functions. Since in the current systems many of data points do not exist at the beginning and are added to the training set as the algorithm is run, online methods are needed to update learned metric due to new data.
In this thesis, we proposed a new online distance metric learning method that has higher performance than existing... 

In this work, we aim to find a way to identify and forecast transients in nuclear power plants with the aid of semi-supervised machine learning algorithm. Forecasting and identifying transients in nuclear power plants at the early stages of formation are essential for safety considerations and precautionary measures. The use of machine learning algorithms provides an intelligent control mechanism that, along with the main operator of the power plant, raises the transient detection and identification rate. Our algorithm of choice is to change the way data is presented, which is a semi-supervised learning approach. The algorithm consists of two methods: quantum dynamics clustering... 

Semantic segmentation which is the classification of every pixel in an input image is a fundamental task in the fields of computer vision and scene understanding. Applications of semantic segmentation include usage in autonomous vehicles and robotics. Since in this task dense annotation of images in the dataset is needed, recent methods have been proposed to utilize weakly-supervised and semi-supervised learning using data with weak labels and unlabeled data respectively. Because the amount of fully labeled data might not be sufficient in such methods, some papers have proposed to employ depth input data due to its rich geometrical and local information when available. In this research, an... 

The existing continual learning methods are mainly focused on fully-supervised scenarios and are still not able to take advantage of unlabeled data available in the environment. Some recent works tried to investigate semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) settings in which the unlabeled data are available, but it is only from the same distribution as the labeled data. This assumption is still not general enough for real-world applications and restricts the utilization of unsupervised data. In this work, we introduce Open-Set Semi-Supervised Continual Learning (OSSCL), a more realistic semi-supervised continual learning setting in which out-of-distribution (OoD) unlabeled samples in the... 

Aautomatic image annotation that assigns some labels to input images and provides a textual description for the contents of images has become an active field in machine vision community. To design an annotation system, we need a dataset that contains images and labels for them. However, a large amount of manual efforts is required to annotate all images in a dataset. To reduce the demand of annotation systems on the labeled images, one solution is to exploit useful information embedded into the unlabeled images and incorporate them into learning process. In machine learning community, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been introduced with the aim of incorporating unlabeled samples into the... 

Image segmentation in medical imaging, as one of the most important branches of medical image analysis, often faces the challenge of limited labeled data for application in deep learning methods. The high cost of data collection and the need for expertise in image segmentation, particularly in three-dimensional images such as MRI and CT or sequence images like CMR, have all contributed to this problem, even for popular networks like U-Net, which struggle to achieve high accuracy. As a result, research efforts have focused on semi-supervised learning approaches, weakly supervised learning, as well as multi-instance learning in medical image segmentation. Unfortunately, each of these methods... 

In some of object recognition problems, labeled data may not be available for all categories. Zero-shot learning utilizes auxiliary information (also called signatures) describing each category in order to find a classifier that can recognize samples from categories with no labeled instance. On the other hand, with recent advances made by deep neural networks in computer vision, a rich representation can be obtained from images that discriminates different categorizes and therefore obtaining a unsupervised information from images is made possible. However, in the previous works, little attention has been paid to using such unsupervised information for the task of zero-shot learning. In this... 

Large data sources labeled by experts at cost are essential for deep learning success in various domains. But, when labeling is expensive and labeled data is scarce, deep learning generally does not perform well. The goal of semi-supervised learning is to leverage abundant unlabeled data that one can easily collect. New semi-supervised algorithms based on data augmentation techniques have reached new advances in this field. In this work, by studying different textual augmentation techniques, a new approach is proposed that can obtain effective information signals from unlabeled data. The method encourages the model to generate the same representation vectors for different augmented versions...