OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A novel approach for Fair Principal Component Analysis based on eigendecomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Principal component analysis (PCA), a ubiquitous dimensionality reduction technique in signal processing, searches for a projection matrix that minimizes the mean squared error between the reduced dataset and the original one. Since classical PCA is not tailored to address concerns related to fairness, its application to actual problems may lead to disparity in the reconstruction errors of different groups (e.g., men and women, whites and blacks, etc.), with potentially harmful consequences such as the introduction of bias towards sensitive groups. Although several fair versions of PCA have been proposed recently, there still remains a fundamental gap in the search for algorithms that are simple enough to be deployed in real systems. To address this, we propose a novel PCA algorithm which tackles fairness issues by means of a simple strategy comprising a one-dimensional search which exploits the closed-form solution of PCA. As attested by numerical experiments, the proposal can significantly improve fairness with a very small loss in the overall reconstruction error and without resorting to complex optimization schemes. Moreover, our findings are consistent in several real situations as well as in scenarios with both unbalanced and balanced datasets.
Hierarchical Relative Lempel-Ziv Compression
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2022
Year: 2022

Relative Lempel-Ziv (RLZ) parsing is a dictionary compression method in which a string $S$ is compressed relative to a second string $R$ (called the reference) by parsing $S$ into a sequence of substrings that occur in $R$. RLZ is particularly effective at compressing sets of strings that have a high degree of similarity to the reference string, such as a set of genomes of individuals from the same species. With the now cheap cost of DNA sequencing, such data sets have become extremely abundant and are rapidly growing. In this paper, instead of using a single reference string for the entire collection, we investigate the use of different reference strings for subsets of the collection, with the aim of improving compression. In particular, we form a rooted tree (or hierarchy) on the strings and then compressed each string using RLZ with parent as reference, storing only the root of the tree in plain text. To decompress, we traverse the tree in BFS order starting at the root, decompressing children with respect to their parent. We show that this approach leads to a twofold improvement in compression on bacterial genome data sets, with negligible effect on decompression time compared to the standard single reference approach. We show that an effective hierarchy for a given set of strings can be constructed by computing the optimal arborescence of a completed weighted digraph of the strings, with weights as the number of phrases in the RLZ parsing of the source and destination vertices. We further show that instead of computing the complete graph, a sparse graph derived using locality sensitive hashing can significantly reduce the cost of computing a good hierarchy, without adversely effecting compression performance.
DCSF: Deep Convolutional Set Functions for Classification of Asynchronous Time Series
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Asynchronous Time Series is a multivariate time series where all the channels are observed asynchronously-independently, making the time series extremely sparse when aligning them. We often observe this effect in applications with complex observation processes, such as health care, climate science, and astronomy, to name a few. Because of the asynchronous nature, they pose a significant challenge to deep learning architectures, which presume that the time series presented to them are regularly sampled, fully observed, and aligned with respect to time. This paper proposes a novel framework, that we call Deep Convolutional Set Functions (DCSF), which is highly scalable and memory efficient, for the asynchronous time series classification task. With the recent advancements in deep set learning architectures, we introduce a model that is invariant to the order in which time series' channels are presented to it. We explore convolutional neural networks, which are well researched for the closely related problem-classification of regularly sampled and fully observed time series, for encoding the set elements. We evaluate DCSF for AsTS classification, and online (per time point) AsTS classification. Our extensive experiments on multiple real-world and synthetic datasets verify that the suggested model performs substantially better than a range of state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and run time.
WiCV 2022: The Tenth Women In Computer Vision Workshop
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we present the details of Women in Computer Vision Workshop - WiCV 2022, organized alongside the hybrid CVPR 2022 in New Orleans, Louisiana. It provides a voice to a minority (female) group in the computer vision community and focuses on increasing the visibility of these researchers, both in academia and industry. WiCV believes that such an event can play an important role in lowering the gender imbalance in the field of computer vision. WiCV is organized each year where it provides a) opportunity for collaboration between researchers from minority groups, b) mentorship to female junior researchers, c) financial support to presenters to overcome monetary burden and d) large and diverse choice of role models, who can serve as examples to younger researchers at the beginning of their careers. In this paper, we present a report on the workshop program, trends over the past years, a summary of statistics regarding presenters, attendees, and sponsorship for the WiCV 2022 workshop.
Improved Zero-Shot Audio Tagging & Classification with Patchout Spectrogram Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

Standard machine learning models for tagging and classifying acoustic signals cannot handle classes that were not seen during training. Zero-Shot (ZS) learning overcomes this restriction by predicting classes based on adaptable class descriptions. This study sets out to investigate the effectiveness of self-attention-based audio embedding architectures for ZS learning. To this end, we compare the very recent patchout spectrogram transformer with two classic convolutional architectures. We evaluate these three architectures on three tasks and on three different benchmark datasets: general-purpose tagging on AudioSet, environmental sound classification on ESC-50, and instrument tagging on OpenMIC. Our results show that the self-attention-based embedding methods outperform both compared convolutional architectures in all of these settings. By designing training and test data accordingly, we observe that prediction performance suffers significantly when the `semantic distance' between training and new test classes is large, an effect that will deserve more detailed investigations.
A Multi-Bennett 8R Mechanism Obtained From Factorization of Bivariate Motion Polynomials
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We present a closed-loop 8R mechanism with two degrees of freedom whose motion exhibits curious properties. In any point of a two-dimensional component of its configuration variety it is possible to fix every second joint while retaining one degree of freedom. This shows that the even and the odd axes, respectively, always form a Bennett mechanism. In this mechanism, opposite distances and angles are equal and all offsets are zero. The 8R mechanism has four "totally aligned" configurations in which the common normals of any pair of consecutive axes coincide.
Self-Supervised Endoscopic Image Key-Points Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Feature matching and finding correspondences between endoscopic images is a key step in many clinical applications such as patient follow-up and generation of panoramic image from clinical sequences for fast anomalies localization. Nonetheless, due to the high texture variability present in endoscopic images, the development of robust and accurate feature matching becomes a challenging task. Recently, deep learning techniques which deliver learned features extracted via convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained traction in a wide range of computer vision tasks. However, they all follow a supervised learning scheme where a large amount of annotated data is required to reach good performances, which is generally not always available for medical data databases. To overcome this limitation related to labeled data scarcity, the self-supervised learning paradigm has recently shown great success in a number of applications. This paper proposes a novel self-supervised approach for endoscopic image matching based on deep learning techniques. When compared to standard hand-crafted local feature descriptors, our method outperformed them in terms of precision and recall. Furthermore, our self-supervised descriptor provides a competitive performance in comparison to a selection of state-of-the-art deep learning based supervised methods in terms of precision and matching score.
Induced Natural Language Rationales and Interleaved Markup Tokens Enable Extrapolation in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

The ability to extrapolate, i.e., to make predictions on sequences that are longer than those presented as training examples, is a challenging problem for current deep learning models. Recent work shows that this limitation persists in state-of-the-art Transformer-based models. Most solutions to this problem use specific architectures or training methods that do not generalize to other tasks. We demonstrate that large language models can succeed in extrapolation without modifying their architecture or training procedure. Our experimental results show that generating step-by-step rationales and introducing marker tokens are both required for effective extrapolation. First, we induce a language model to produce step-by-step rationales before outputting the answer to effectively communicate the task to the model. However, as sequences become longer, we find that current models struggle to keep track of token positions. To address this issue, we interleave output tokens with markup tokens that act as explicit positional and counting symbols. Our findings show how these two complementary approaches enable remarkable sequence extrapolation and highlight a limitation of current architectures to effectively generalize without explicit surface form guidance. Code available at https://github.com/MirelleB/induced-rationales-markup-tokens
Improving Natural-Language-based Audio Retrieval with Transfer Learning and Audio & Text Augmentations
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2022
Year: 2022

The absence of large labeled datasets remains a significant challenge in many application areas of deep learning. Researchers and practitioners typically resort to transfer learning and data augmentation to alleviate this issue. We study these strategies in the context of audio retrieval with natural language queries (Task 6b of the DCASE 2022 Challenge). Our proposed system uses pre-trained embedding models to project recordings and textual descriptions into a shared audio-caption space in which related examples from different modalities are close. We employ various data augmentation techniques on audio and text inputs and systematically tune their corresponding hyperparameters with sequential model-based optimization. Our results show that the used augmentations strategies reduce overfitting and improve retrieval performance.
Adverse Childhood Experiences Identification from Clinical Notes with Ontologies and NLP
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are defined as a collection of highly stressful, and potentially traumatic, events or circumstances that occur throughout childhood and/or adolescence. They have been shown to be associated with increased risks of mental health diseases or other abnormal behaviours in later lives. However, the identification of ACEs from free-text Electronic Health Records (EHRs) with Natural Language Processing (NLP) is challenging because (a) there is no NLP ready ACE ontologies; (b) there are limited cases available for machine learning, necessitating the data annotation from clinical experts. We are currently developing a tool that would use NLP techniques to assist us in surfacing ACEs from clinical notes. This will enable us further research in identifying evidence of the relationship between ACEs and the subsequent developments of mental illness (e.g., addictions) in large-scale and longitudinal free-text EHRs, which has previously not been possible.
Weakly Supervised Airway Orifice Segmentation in Video Bronchoscopy
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Video bronchoscopy is routinely conducted for biopsies of lung tissue suspected for cancer, monitoring of COPD patients and clarification of acute respiratory problems at intensive care units. The navigation within complex bronchial trees is particularly challenging and physically demanding, requiring long-term experiences of physicians. This paper addresses the automatic segmentation of bronchial orifices in bronchoscopy videos. Deep learning-based approaches to this task are currently hampered due to the lack of readily-available ground truth segmentation data. Thus, we present a data-driven pipeline consisting of a k-means followed by a compact marker-based watershed algorithm which enables to generate airway instance segmentation maps from given depth images. In this way, these traditional algorithms serve as weak supervision for training a shallow CNN directly on RGB images solely based on a phantom dataset. We evaluate generalization capabilities of this model on two in-vivo datasets covering 250 frames on 21 different bronchoscopies. We demonstrate that its performance is comparable to those models being directly trained on in-vivo data, reaching an average error of 11 vs 5 pixels for the detected centers of the airway segmentation by an image resolution of 128x128. Our quantitative and qualitative results indicate that in the context of video bronchoscopy, phantom data and weak supervision using non-learning-based approaches enable to gain a semantic understanding of airway structures.
A novel method for data augmentation: Nine Dot Moving Least Square (ND-MLS)
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Data augmentation greatly increases the amount of data obtained based on labeled data to save on expenses and labor for data collection and labeling. We present a new approach for data augmentation called nine-dot MLS (ND-MLS). This approach is proposed based on the idea of image defor-mation. Images are deformed based on control points, which are calculated by ND-MLS. The method can generate over 2000 images for one exist-ing dataset in a short time. To verify this data augmentation method, extensive tests were performed covering 3 main tasks of computer vision, namely, classification, detection and segmentation. The results show that 1) in classification, 10 images per category were used for training, and VGGNet can obtain 92% top-1 acc on the MNIST dataset of handwritten digits by ND-MLS. In the Omniglot dataset, the few-shot accuracy usu-ally decreases with the increase in character categories. However, the ND-MLS method has stable performance and obtains 96.5 top-1 acc in Res-Net on 100 different handwritten character classification tasks; 2) in segmentation, under the premise of only ten original images, DeepLab obtains 93.5%, 85%, and 73.3% m_IOU(10) on the bottle, horse, and grass test datasets, respectively, while the cat test dataset obtains 86.7% m_IOU(10) with the SegNet model; 3) with only 10 original images from each category in object detection, YOLO v4 obtains 100% and 97.2% bottle and horse detection, respectively, while the cat dataset obtains 93.6% with YOLO v3. In summary, ND-MLS can perform well on classification, object detec-tion, and semantic segmentation tasks by using only a few data.
Visual Servoing in Orchard Settings
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We present a general framework for accurate positioning of sensors and end effectors in farm settings using a camera mounted on a robotic manipulator. Our main contribution is a visual servoing approach based on a new and robust feature tracking algorithm. Results from field experiments performed at an apple orchard demonstrate that our approach converges to a given termination criterion even under environmental influences such as strong winds, varying illumination conditions and partial occlusion of the target object. Further, we show experimentally that the system converges to the desired view for a wide range of initial conditions. This approach opens possibilities for new applications such as automated fruit inspection, fruit picking or precise pesticide application.
PromptFL: Let Federated Participants Cooperatively Learn Prompts Instead of Models -- Federated Learning in Age of Foundation Model
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Quick global aggregation of effective distributed parameters is crucial to federated learning (FL), which requires adequate bandwidth for parameters communication and sufficient user data for local training. Otherwise, FL may cost excessive training time for convergence and produce inaccurate models. In this paper, we propose a brand-new FL framework, PromptFL, that replaces the federated model training with the federated prompt training, i.e., let federated participants train prompts instead of a shared model, to simultaneously achieve the efficient global aggregation and local training on insufficient data by exploiting the power of foundation models (FM) in a distributed way. PromptFL ships an off-the-shelf FM, i.e., CLIP, to distributed clients who would cooperatively train shared soft prompts based on very few local data. Since PromptFL only needs to update the prompts instead of the whole model, both the local training and the global aggregation can be significantly accelerated. And FM trained over large scale data can provide strong adaptation capability to distributed users tasks with the trained soft prompts. We empirically analyze the PromptFL via extensive experiments, and show its superiority in terms of system feasibility, user privacy, and performance.
Detecting the unknown in Object Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Object detection methods have witnessed impressive improvements in the last years thanks to the design of novel neural network architectures and the availability of large scale datasets. However, current methods have a significant limitation: they are able to detect only the classes observed during training time, that are only a subset of all the classes that a detector may encounter in the real world. Furthermore, the presence of unknown classes is often not considered at training time, resulting in methods not even able to detect that an unknown object is present in the image. In this work, we address the problem of detecting unknown objects, known as open-set object detection. We propose a novel training strategy, called UNKAD, able to predict unknown objects without requiring any annotation of them, exploiting non annotated objects that are already present in the background of training images. In particular, exploiting the four-steps training strategy of Faster R-CNN, UNKAD first identifies and pseudo-labels unknown objects and then uses the pseudo-annotations to train an additional unknown class. While UNKAD can directly detect unknown objects, we further combine it with previous unknown detection techniques, showing that it improves their performance at no costs.
Judging by the Look: The Impact of Robot Gaze Strategies on Human Cooperation
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Human eye gaze plays an important role in delivering information, communicating intent, and understanding others' mental states. Previous research shows that a robot's gaze can also affect humans' decision-making and strategy during an interaction. However, limited studies have trained humanoid robots on gaze-based data in human-robot interaction scenarios. Considering gaze impacts the naturalness of social exchanges and alters the decision process of an observer, it should be regarded as a crucial component in human-robot interaction. To investigate the impact of robot gaze on humans, we propose an embodied neural model for performing human-like gaze shifts. This is achieved by extending a social attention model and training it on eye-tracking data, collected by watching humans playing a game. We will compare human behavioral performances in the presence of a robot adopting different gaze strategies in a human-human cooperation game.
AGO-Net: Association-Guided 3D Point Cloud Object Detection Network
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

The human brain can effortlessly recognize and localize objects, whereas current 3D object detection methods based on LiDAR point clouds still report inferior performance for detecting occluded and distant objects: the point cloud appearance varies greatly due to occlusion, and has inherent variance in point densities along the distance to sensors. Therefore, designing feature representations robust to such point clouds is critical. Inspired by human associative recognition, we propose a novel 3D detection framework that associates intact features for objects via domain adaptation. We bridge the gap between the perceptual domain, where features are derived from real scenes with sub-optimal representations, and the conceptual domain, where features are extracted from augmented scenes that consist of non-occlusion objects with rich detailed information. A feasible method is investigated to construct conceptual scenes without external datasets. We further introduce an attention-based re-weighting module that adaptively strengthens the feature adaptation of more informative regions. The network's feature enhancement ability is exploited without introducing extra cost during inference, which is plug-and-play in various 3D detection frameworks. We achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI 3D detection benchmark in both accuracy and speed. Experiments on nuScenes and Waymo datasets also validate the versatility of our method.
Cross-Camera View-Overlap Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a decentralised view-overlap recognition framework that operates across freely moving cameras without the need of a reference 3D map. Each camera independently extracts, aggregates into a hierarchical structure, and shares feature-point descriptors over time. A view overlap is recognised by view-matching and geometric validation to discard wrongly matched views. The proposed framework is generic and can be used with different descriptors. We conduct the experiments on publicly available sequences as well as new sequences we collected with hand-held cameras. We show that Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) features with Bags of Binary Words within the proposed framework lead to higher precision and a higher or similar accuracy compared to NetVLAD, RootSIFT, and SuperGlue.