Christoph Lampert received the PhD degree in mathematics from the University of Bonn in 2003. In 2010 he joined the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) first as an Assistant Professor and since 2015 as a Professor. His research on computer vision and machine learning won several international and national awards, including the best paper prize of CVPR 2008. In 2012 he was awarded an ERC Starting Grant by the European Research Council. He is an Editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV), Action Editor of the Journal for Machine Learning Research (JMLR), and Associate Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI). His talk takes place on Tuesday, January 12, 2016, 1pm in room E104.
Classifier Adaptation at Prediction Time
Abstract: In the era of “big data” and a large commercial interest in computer vision, it is only a matter of time until we will buy commercial object recognition systems in pre-trained form instead of training them ourselves. This, however, poses a problem of domain adaptation: the data distribution in which a customer plans to use the system will almost certainly differ from the data distribution that the vendor used during training. Two relevant effects are a change of the class ratios and the fact that the image sequences that needs to be classified in real applications are typically not i.i.d. In my talk I will introduce simple probabilistic technique that can adapt the object recognition system to the test time distribution without having to change the underlying pre-trained classifiers. I will also introduce a framework for creating realistically distributed image sequences that offer a way to benchmark such adaptive recognition systems. Our results show that the above “problem” of domain adaptation can actually be a blessing in disguise: with proper adaptation the error rates on realistic image sequences are typically lower than on standard i.i.d. test sets.
Video recording of the talk is publicly available