Gabor Filters as Initializers for Convolutional Neural Networks: A Study on Inductive Bias and Performance on Image Classification

Rivas, Pablo, and Mehang Rai. 2023. “Enhancing CNNs Performance on Object Recognition Tasks with Gabor Initialization” Electronics 12, no. 19: 4072. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics12194072

Our latest journal article, authored by Baylor graduate and former Baylor.AI lab member Mehang Rai, MS, marks an advancement in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). The paper, titled “Enhancing CNNs Performance on Object Recognition Tasks with Gabor Initialization,” has not only garnered attention in academic circles but also achieved the prestigious Best Poster Award at the LXAI workshop at ICML 2023, a top-tier conference in the field.

Pablo Rivas and Mehang Rai, ” Gabor Filters as Initializers for Convolutional Neural Networks: A Study on Inductive Bias and Performance on Image Classification “, in The LXAI Workshop @ International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023), 7/2023.

A Journey from Concept to Recognition Our journey with this research began with early discussions and progress shared here. The idea was simple yet profound: exploring the potential of Gabor filters, known for their exceptional feature extraction capabilities, in enhancing the performance of CNNs for object recognition tasks. This exploration led to a comprehensive study comparing the performance of Gabor-initialized CNNs against traditional CNNs with random initialization across six object recognition datasets.

Key Findings and Contributions The results were fascinating to us. The Gabor-initialized CNNs consistently outperformed traditional models in accuracy, area under the curve, minimum loss, and convergence speed. These findings provide robust evidence in favor of using Gabor-based methods for initializing the receptive fields of CNN architectures, a technique that was explored before with little success because researchers had been constraining Gabor filters during training, precluding gradient descent to optimize the filters as needed for general purpose object recognition, until now.

Our research contributes significantly to the field by demonstrating:

  1. Improved performance in object classification tasks with Gabor-initialized CNNs.
  2. Superior performance of random configurations of Gabor filters in the receptive layer, especially with complex datasets.
  3. Enhanced performance of CNNs in a shorter time frame when incorporating Gabor filters.

Implications and Future Directions This study reaffirms the historical success of Gabor filters in image processing and opens new avenues for their application in modern CNN architectures. The impact of this research is vast, suggesting potential enhancements in various applications of CNNs, from medical imaging to autonomous vehicles.

As we celebrate this achievement, we also look forward to further research. Future studies could explore initializing other vision architectures, such as Vision Transformers (ViTs), with Gabor filters.

It’s a proud moment for us at the lab to see our research recognized on a global platform like ICML 2023 and published in a journal. This accomplishment is a testament to our commitment to pushing the boundaries of AI and ML research. We congratulate Mehang Rai for this remarkable achievement and thank the AI community for their continued support and recognition.

NSF Award: Using NLP to Identify Suspicious Transactions in Omnichannel Online C2C Marketplaces

Baylor University has been awarded funding under the SaTC program for Enabling Interdisciplinary Collaboration; a grant led by Principal Investigator Dr. Pablo Rivas and an amazing group of multidisciplinary researchers formed by:

  • Dr. Gissella Bichler from California State University San Bernardino, Center for Criminal Justice Research, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
  • Dr. Tomas Cerny is at Baylor University in the Computer Science Department, leading software engineering research.
  • Dr. Laurie Giddens from the University of North Texas, a faculty member at the G. Brint Ryan College of Business.
  • Dr. Stacy Petter is at Wake Forest University in the School of Business. She and Dr. Giddens have extensive research and funding in human trafficking research.
  • Dr. Javier Turek, a Research Scientist in Machine Learning at Intel Labs, is our collaborator in matters related to machine learning for natural language processing.

We also have two Ph.D. students working on this project: Alejandro Rodriguez and Korn Sooksatra.

This project was motivated by the increasing pattern of people buying and selling goods and services directly from other people via online marketplaces. While many online marketplaces enable transactions among reputable buyers and sellers, some platforms are vulnerable to suspicious transactions. This project investigates whether it is possible to automate the detection of illegal goods or services within online marketplaces. First, the project team will analyze the text of online advertisements and marketplace policies to identify indicators of suspicious activity. Then, the team will adapt the findings to a specific context to locate stolen motor vehicle parts advertised via online marketplaces. Together, the work will lead to general ways to identify signals of illegal online sales that can be used to help people choose trustworthy marketplaces and avoid illicit actors. This project will also provide law enforcement agencies and online marketplaces with insights to gather evidence on illicit goods or services on those marketplaces.

This research assesses the feasibility of modeling illegal activity in online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platforms, using platform characteristics, seller profiles, and advertisements to prioritize investigations using actionable intelligence extracted from open-source information. The project is organized around three main steps. First, the research team will combine knowledge from computer science, criminology, and information systems to analyze online marketplace technology platform policies and identify platform features, policies, and terms of service that make platforms more vulnerable to criminal activity. Second, building on the understanding of platform vulnerabilities developed in the first step, the researchers will generate and train deep learning-based language models to detect illicit online commerce. Finally, to assess the generalizability of the identified markers, the investigators will apply the models to markets for motor vehicle parts, a licit marketplace that sometimes includes sellers offering stolen goods. This project establishes a cross-disciplinary partnership among a diverse group of researchers from different institutions and academic disciplines with collaborators from law enforcement and industry to develop practical, actionable insights.

Self-supervised modeling. After providing a corpus associated with a C2C domain of interest and ontologies, we will extract features followed by attention mechanisms for self-supervised and supervised tasks. The self-supervised models include the completion of missing information and domain-specific text encoding for learning representations. Then supervised tasks will leverage these representations to learn the relationships with targets.

Dr. Bejarano’s work is Recognized by Amazon

According to the World Federation of the Deaf, more than 70 million deaf people exist worldwide. More than 80% of them live in developing countries. Recent research by Dr. Gissella Bejarano, our very own postdoctoral research scientist, has been recognized for its impact on computer vision and speech recognition, providing opportunities to help individuals with disabilities. With support from AWS, Dr. Bejarano is finding better ways to translate Peruvian Sign Language using computer vision and natural language processing.

Read more about this in this release by AWS.

Evaluating Accuracy and Adversarial Robustness of Quanvolutional Neural Networks

A combination of a quantum circuit and a convolutional neural network (CNN) can have better results over a classic CNN in some cases. In our recent article, we show an example of such a case, using accuracy and adversarial examples as measures of performance and robustness. Check it out: [ bib | pdf ]

Enhancing Adversarial Examples on Deep QNetworks with Previous Information

This work finds strong adversarial examples for Deep Q Networks which are famous deep reinforcement learning models. We combine two subproblems of finding adversarial examples in deep reinforcement learning: finding states to perturb and determining how much to perturb. Therefore, the attack can jointly optimize this problem. Further, we trained Deep Q Networks to play Atari games: Breakout and Space Invader. Then, we used our attack to find adversarial examples on those games. As a result, we can achieve state-of-the-art results and showed that our attack is natural and stealthy. Paper: [ bib | pdf ]

On the Performance of Convolutional Neural Networks Initialized with Gabor Filters

When observing a fully trained CNN, researchers have found that the pattern on the kernel filters (convolution window) of the receptive convolutional layer closely resembles the Gabor filters. Gabor filters have existed for a long time, and researchers have been using them for texture analysis. Given the nature and purpose of the receptive layer of CNN, Gabor filters could act as a suitable replacement strategy for the randomly initialized kernels of the receptive layer in CNN, which could potentially boost the performance without any regard to the nature of the dataset. The findings in this thesis show that when low-level kernel filters are initialized with Gabor filters, there is a boost in accuracy, Area Under ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) Curve (AUC), minimum loss, and speed in some cases based on the complexity of the dataset. [pdf, bib]

Different Gabor filters with different values for \lambda, \theta, and \gamma. Different parameters will change filter properties.

A review of Earth Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, Earth system sciences are urgently calling for innovation on improving accuracy, enhancing model intelligence level, scaling up operation, and reducing costs in many subdomains amid the exponentially accumulated datasets and the promising artificial intelligence (AI) revolution in computer science. This paper presents work led by the NASA Earth Science Data Systems Working Groups and ESIP machine learning cluster to give a comprehensive overview of AI in Earth sciences. It holistically introduces the current status, technology, use cases, challenges, and opportunities, and provides all the levels of AI practitioners in geosciences with an overall big picture and to “blow away the fog to get a clearer vision” about the future development of Earth AI. The paper covers all the major spheres in the Earth system and investigates representative AI research in each domain. Widely used AI algorithms and computing cyberinfrastructure are briefly introduced. The mandatory steps in a typical workflow of specializing AI to solve Earth scientific problems are decomposed and analyzed. Eventually, it concludes with the grand challenges and reveals the opportunities to give some guidance and pre-warnings on allocating resources wisely to achieve the ambitious Earth AI goals in the future. [pdf, bib]

Challenges and opportunities.