Complex classification scenarios, including long-tailed learning, domain adaptation, and transfer learning, present substantial challenges for traditional algorithms. Conditional class probability (CCP) predictions have recently become critical components of many state-of-the-art algorithms designed to address these challenging scenarios. Among kernel methods, kernel logistic regression (KLR) is distinguished by its effectiveness in predicting CCPs through the minimization of the cross-entropy (CE) loss. Despite the empirical success of CCP-based approaches, the theoretical understanding of their performance, particularly regarding the CE loss, remains limited. In this paper, we bridge this gap by demonstrating that KLR-based algorithms achieve minimax optimal convergence rates for the CE loss under mild assumptions in these complex tasks, thereby establishing their theoretical efficiency in such demanding contexts.

Self-supervised contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful tool in machine learning and computer vision to learn meaningful representations from unlabeled data. Meanwhile, its empirical success has encouraged many theoretical studies to reveal the learning mechanisms. However, in the existing theoretical research, the role of data augmentation is still under-exploited, especially the effects of specific augmentation types. To fill in the blank, we for the first time propose an augmentation-aware error bound for self-supervised contrastive learning, showing that the supervised risk is bounded not only by the unsupervised risk, but also explicitly by a trade-off induced by data augmentation. Then, under a novel semantic label assumption, we discuss how certain augmentation methods affect the error bound. Lastly, we conduct both pixel- and representation-level experiments to verify our proposed theoretical results.

We consider the domain adaptation problem in the context of label shift, where the label distributions between source and target domain differ, but the conditional distributions of features given the label are the same. To solve the label shift adaption problem, we develop a novel matching framework named \textit{class probability matching} (\textit{CPM}). It is inspired by a new understanding of the source domain's class probability, as well as a specific relationship between class probability ratios and feature probability ratios between the source and target domains. CPM is able to maintain the same theoretical guarantee with the existing feature probability matching framework, while significantly improving the computational efficiency due to directly matching the probabilities of the label variable. Within the CPM framework, we propose an algorithm named \textit{class probability matching with calibrated networks} (\textit{CPMCN}) for target domain classification. From the theoretical perspective, we establish the generalization bound of the CPMCN method in order to explain the benefits of introducing calibrated networks. From the experimental perspective, real data comparisons show that CPMCN outperforms existing matching-based and EM-based algorithms.

UAVs are widely used in various industries, and various visual tasks under the perspective of the UAV have been widely studied. In particular, the RGB-T detection method based on UAVs has shown significant advantages. However, existing RGB-T methods are designed based on registration image pairs rather than detecting images directly acquired by UAVs. This detection process is limited by the accuracy of image registration. And image registration wastes a lot of time. To solve the above problems, we construct an unregistered RGB-T image salient object detection (SOD) dataset under the UAV perspective, known as UAV RGB-T 2400. The dataset includes many challenging scenes, and the images are not manually registered. Further, we construct a modality registration and object search (MROS) framework for unregistered RGB-T SOD. Firstly, a modality registration scheme is proposed to solve the unregistration problem of modal features. We successively perform pixel-level registration from a local perspective and semantic-level registration from a global perspective for different modal features. And we carry out the channel and spatial interaction for the different modal features in modality registration. Aiming at the interference problem in the UAV detection environment, we propose an object search scheme. The two high-level features are used to search the object location, and the three low-level features are used to refine the object and produce prediction results. Experimental results on the UAV RGB-T 2400 dataset show that MROS is effective compared with state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at: https://github.com/VDT-2048/UAV-RGB-T-2400.

We propose a density estimation algorithm called random forest density estimation (RFDE) based on random trees where the split of cell is along the midpoint of the randomly chosen dimension. By combining the efficient random tree density estimation (RTDE) and the ensemble procedure, RFDE can alleviate the problems of boundary discontinuity suffered by partition-based density estimations. From the theoretical perspective, we first prove the fast convergence rates of RFDE if the density function lies in the Hölder space $C^{0,\alpha}$. Moreover, if the target function resides in the subspace $C^{1,\alpha}$, which contains smoother density functions, we for the first time manage to explain the benefits of the ensemble learning in density estimation. To be specific, we show that the upper bound of the ensemble estimator RFDE turns out to be strictly smaller than the lower bound of its base estimator RTDE in terms of convergence rates. In the experiments, we verify the theoretical results and show the promising performance of RFDE on both synthetic and real world datasets. Moreover, we evaluate our RFDE through the problem of anomaly detection as a possible application.

As an important branch of weakly supervised learning, partial label learning deals with data where each instance is assigned with a set of candidate labels, whereas only one of them is true. Despite many methodology studies on learning from partial labels, there still lacks theoretical understandings of their risk consistent properties under relatively weak assumptions, especially on the link between theoretical results and the empirical choice of parameters. In this paper, we propose a family of loss functions named \textit{Leveraged Weighted} (LW) loss, which for the first time introduces the leverage parameter $\beta$ to consider the trade-off between losses on partial labels and non-partial ones. From the theoretical side, we derive a generalized result of risk consistency for the LW loss in learning from partial labels, based on which we provide guidance to the choice of the leverage parameter $\beta$. In experiments, we verify the theoretical guidance, and show the high effectiveness of our proposed LW loss on both benchmark and real datasets compared with other state-of-the-art partial label learning algorithms.

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for large-scale regression problems named Histogram Transform Ensembles (HTE), composed of random rotations, stretchings, and translations. Our HTE method first implements a histogram transformed partition to the random affine mapped data, then adaptively leverages constant functions or SVMs to obtain the individual regression estimates, and eventually builds the ensemble predictor through an average strategy. First of all, in this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of HTE when the regression function lies in the Hölder space $C^{k,\alpha}$, $k \in \mathbb{N}_0$, $\alpha \in (0,1]$. In the case that $k=0, 1$, we adopt the constant regressors and develop the naïve histogram transforms (NHT). Within the space $C^{0,\alpha}$, although almost optimal convergence rates can be derived for both single and ensemble NHT, we fail to show the benefits of ensembles over single estimators theoretically. In contrast, in the subspace $C^{1,\alpha}$, we prove that if $d \geq 2(1+\alpha)/\alpha$, the lower bound of the convergence rates for single NHT turns out to be worse than the upper bound of the convergence rates for ensemble NHT. In the other case when $k \geq 2$, the NHT may no longer be appropriate in predicting smoother regression functions. Instead, we circumvent this issue by applying kernel histogram transforms (KHT) equipped with smoother regressors, such as support vector machines (SVMs). Accordingly, it turns out that both single and ensemble KHT enjoy almost optimal convergence rates. Then, we validate the above theoretical results with extensive numerical experiments. On the one hand, simulations are conducted to elucidate that ensemble NHT outperforms single NHT. On the other hand, the effects of bin sizes on the accuracy of both NHT and KHT are also in accord with the theoretical analysis. Last but not least, in the real-data experiments, comparisons between the ensemble KHT, equipped with adaptive histogram transforms, and other state-of-the-art large-scale regression estimators verify the effectiveness and precision of the proposed algorithm.