Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Acquiring Dynamic Light Fields Through Coded Aperture Camera

We investigate the problem of compressive acquisition of a dynamic light field. A promising solution for compressive light field acquisition is to use a coded aperture camera, with which an entire light field can be computationally reconstructed from several images captured through differently-coded aperture patterns. With this method, it was assumed that the scene should not move throughout the complete acquisition process, which restricted real applications. In this study, however, we assume that the target scene may change over time, and propose a method for acquiring a dynamic light field (a moving scene) using a coded aperture camera and a convolutional neural network (CNN). To successfully handle scene motions, we develop a new configuration of image observation, called V-shape observation, and train the CNN using a dynamic-light-field dataset with pseudo motions. Our method is validated through experiments using both a computer-generated scene and a real camera.
Recent Advances in End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding

This work investigates spoken language understanding (SLU) systems in the scenario when the semantic information is extracted directly from the speech signal by means of a single end-to-end neural network model. Two SLU tasks are considered: named entity recognition (NER) and semantic slot filling (SF). For these tasks, in order to improve the model performance, we explore various techniques including speaker adaptation, a modification of the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) training criterion, and sequential pretraining.
IGT2P: From Interlinear Glossed Texts to Paradigms

An intermediate step in the linguistic analysis of an under-documented language is to find and organize inflected forms that are attested in natural speech.From this data, linguists generate unseen inflected word forms in order to test hypotheses about the language's inflectional patterns and to complete inflectional paradigm tables.To get the data linguists spend many hours manually creating interlinear glossed texts (IGTs).We introduce a new task that speeds this process and automatically generates new morphological resources for natural language processing systems: IGTto-paradigms (IGT2P).IGT2P generates entire morphological paradigms from IGT input.We show that existing morphological reinflection models can solve the task with 21% to 64% accuracy, depending on the language.We further find that (i) having a language expert spend only a few hours cleaning the noisy IGT data improves performance by as much as 21 percentage points, and (ii) POS tags, which are generally considered a necessary part of NLP morphological reinflection input, have no effect on the accuracy of the models considered here.
Building powerful and equivariant graph neural networks with structural message-passing

Message-passing has proved to be an effective way to design graph neural networks, as it is able to leverage both permutation equivariance and an inductive bias towards learning local structures in order to achieve good generalization. However, current message-passing architectures have a limited representation power and fail to learn basic topological properties of graphs. We address this problem and propose a powerful and equivariant message-passing framework based on two ideas: first, we propagate a one-hot encoding of the nodes, in addition to the features, in order to learn a local context matrix around each node. This matrix contains rich local information about both features and topology and can eventually be pooled to build node representations. Second, we propose methods for the parametrization of the message and update functions that ensure permutation equivariance. Having a representation that is independent of the specific choice of the one-hot encoding permits inductive reasoning and leads to better generalization properties. Experimentally, our model can predict various graph topological properties on synthetic data more accurately than previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art results on molecular graph regression on the ZINC dataset.
RepPoints v2: Verification Meets Regression for Object Detection

Verification and regression are two general methodologies for prediction in neural networks. Each has its own strengths: verification can be easier to infer accurately, and regression is more efficient and applicable to continuous target variables. Hence, it is often beneficial to carefully combine them to take advantage of their benefits. In this paper, we take this philosophy to improve state-of-the-art object detection, specifically by RepPoints. Though RepPoints provides high performance, we find that its heavy reliance on regression for object localization leaves room for improvement. We introduce verification tasks into the localization prediction of RepPoints, producing RepPoints v2, which provides consistent improvements of about 2.0 mAP over the original RepPoints on the COCO object detection benchmark using different backbones and training methods. RepPoints v2 also achieves 52.1 mAP on COCO test-dev by a single model. Moreover, we show that the proposed approach can more generally elevate other object detection frameworks as well as applications such as instance segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/Scalsol/RepPointsV2.
Labelling unlabelled videos from scratch with multi-modal self-supervision

A large part of the current success of deep learning lies in the effectiveness of data -- more precisely: labelled data. Yet, labelling a dataset with human annotation continues to carry high costs, especially for videos. While in the image domain, recent methods have allowed to generate meaningful (pseudo-) labels for unlabelled datasets without supervision, this development is missing for the video domain where learning feature representations is the current focus. In this work, we a) show that unsupervised labelling of a video dataset does not come for free from strong feature encoders and b) propose a novel clustering method that allows pseudo-labelling of a video dataset without any human annotations, by leveraging the natural correspondence between the audio and visual modalities. An extensive analysis shows that the resulting clusters have high semantic overlap to ground truth human labels. We further introduce the first benchmarking results on unsupervised labelling of common video datasets Kinetics, Kinetics-Sound, VGG-Sound and AVE.
Unsupervised Adaptation of Question Answering Systems via Generative Self-training

BERT-era question answering systems have recently achieved impressive performance on several question-answering (QA) tasks. These systems are based on representations that have been pre-trained on self-supervised tasks such as word masking and sentence entailment, using massive amounts of data. Nevertheless, additional pre-training closer to the end-task, such as training on synthetic QA pairs, has been shown to improve performance. While recent work has considered augmenting labelled data and leveraging large unlabelled datasets to generate synthetic QA data, directly adapting to target data has received little attention. In this paper we investigate the iterative generation of synthetic QA pairs as a way to realize unsupervised self adaptation. Motivated by the success of the roundtrip consistency method for filtering generated QA pairs, we present iterative generalizations of the approach, which maximize an approximation of a lower bound on the probability of the adaptation data. By adapting on synthetic QA pairs generated on the target data, our method is able to improve QA systems significantly, using an order of magnitude less synthetic data and training computation than existing augmentation approaches.
Learning Diverse and Discriminative Representations via the Principle of Maximal Coding Rate Reduction

To learn intrinsic low-dimensional structures from high-dimensional data that most discriminate between classes, we propose the principle of Maximal Coding Rate Reduction ($\text{MCR}^2$), an information-theoretic measure that maximizes the coding rate difference between the whole dataset and the sum of each individual class. We clarify its relationships with most existing frameworks such as cross-entropy, information bottleneck, information gain, contractive and contrastive learning, and provide theoretical guarantees for learning diverse and discriminative features. The coding rate can be accurately computed from finite samples of degenerate subspace-like distributions and can learn intrinsic representations in supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised settings in a unified manner. Empirically, the representations learned using this principle alone are significantly more robust to label corruptions in classification than those using cross-entropy, and can lead to state-of-the-art results in clustering mixed data from self-learned invariant features.
A causal view of compositional zero-shot recognition

People easily recognize new visual categories that are new combinations of known components. This compositional generalization capacity is critical for learning in real-world domains like vision and language because the long tail of new combinations dominates the distribution. Unfortunately, learning systems struggle with compositional generalization because they often build on features that are correlated with class labels even if they are not essential for the class. This leads to consistent misclassification of samples from a new distribution, like new combinations of known components. Here we describe an approach for compositional generalization that builds on causal ideas. First, we describe compositional zero-shot learning from a causal perspective, and propose to view zero-shot inference as finding intervention caused the image?. Second, we present a causal-inspired embedding model that learns disentangled representations of elementary components of visual objects from correlated (confounded) training data. We evaluate this approach on two datasets for predicting new combinations of attribute-object pairs: A well-controlled synthesized images dataset and a real-world dataset which consists of fine-grained types of shoes. We show improvements compared to strong baselines.
Understanding the Role of Training Regimes in Continual Learning

Catastrophic forgetting affects the training of neural networks, limiting their ability to learn multiple tasks sequentially. From the perspective of the well established plasticity-stability dilemma, neural networks tend to be overly plastic, lacking the stability necessary to prevent the forgetting of previous knowledge, which means that as learning progresses, networks tend to forget previously seen tasks. This phenomenon coined in the continual learning literature, has attracted much attention lately, and several families of approaches have been proposed with different degrees of success. However, there has been limited prior work extensively analyzing the impact that different training regimes -- learning rate, batch size, regularization method-- can have on forgetting. In this work, we depart from the typical approach of altering the learning algorithm to improve stability. Instead, we hypothesize that the geometrical properties of the local minima found for each task play an important role in the overall degree of forgetting. In particular, we study the effect of dropout, learning rate decay, and batch size, on forming training regimes that widen the tasks' local minima and consequently, on helping it not to forget catastrophically. Our study provides practical insights to improve stability via simple yet effective techniques that outperform alternative baselines.
A Sentiment-Controllable Topic-to-Essay Generator with Topic Knowledge Graph

Generating a vivid, novel, and diverse essay with only several given topic words is a promising task of natural language generation. Previous work in this task exists two challenging problems: neglect of sentiment beneath the text and insufficient utilization of topic-related knowledge. Therefore, we propose a novel Sentiment Controllable topic-to- essay generator with a Topic Knowledge Graph enhanced decoder, named SCTKG, which is based on the conditional variational auto-encoder (CVAE) framework. We firstly inject the sentiment information into the generator for controlling sentiment for each sentence, which leads to various generated essays. Then we design a Topic Knowledge Graph enhanced decoder. Unlike existing models that use knowledge entities separately, our model treats knowledge graph as a whole and encodes more structured, connected semantic information in the graph to generate a more relevant essay. Experimental results show that our SCTKG can generate sentiment controllable essays and outperform the state-of-the-art approach in terms of topic relevance, fluency, and diversity on both automatic and human evaluation.
Deep Reinforcement and InfoMax Learning

We begin with the hypothesis that a model-free agent whose representations are predictive of properties of future states (beyond expected rewards) will be more capable of solving and adapting to new RL problems. To test that hypothesis, we introduce an objective based on Deep InfoMax (DIM) which trains the agent to predict the future by maximizing the mutual information between its internal representation of successive timesteps. We test our approach in several synthetic settings, where it successfully learns representations that are predictive of the future. Finally, we augment C51, a strong RL baseline, with our temporal DIM objective and demonstrate improved performance on a continual learning task and on the recently introduced Procgen environment.
Improving model calibration with accuracy versus uncertainty optimization

Obtaining reliable and accurate quantification of uncertainty estimates from deep neural networks is important in safety-critical applications. A well-calibrated model should be accurate when it is certain about its prediction and indicate high uncertainty when it is likely to be inaccurate. Uncertainty calibration is a challenging problem as there is no ground truth available for uncertainty estimates. We propose an optimization method that leverages the relationship between accuracy and uncertainty as an anchor for uncertainty calibration. We introduce a differentiable accuracy versus uncertainty calibration (AvUC) loss function that allows a model to learn to provide well-calibrated uncertainties, in addition to improved accuracy. We also demonstrate the same methodology can be extended to post-hoc uncertainty calibration on pretrained models. We illustrate our approach with mean-field stochastic variational inference and compare with state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate our approach yields better model calibration than existing methods on large-scale image classification tasks under distributional shift.
Private Identity Testing for High-Dimensional Distributions

In this work we present novel differentially private identity (goodness-of-fit) testers for natural and widely studied classes of multivariate product distributions: Gaussians in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with known covariance and product distributions over $\{\pm 1\}^{d}$. Our testers have improved sample complexity compared to those derived from previous techniques, and are the first testers whose sample complexity matches the order-optimal minimax sample complexity of $O(d^{1/2}/\alpha^2)$ in many parameter regimes. We construct two types of testers, exhibiting tradeoffs between sample complexity and computational complexity. Finally, we provide a two-way reduction between testing a subclass of multivariate product distributions and testing univariate distributions, and thereby obtain upper and lower bounds for testing this subclass of product distributions.
Identifying Mislabeled Data using the Area Under the Margin Ranking

Not all data in a typical training set help with generalization; some samples can be overly ambiguous or outrightly mislabeled. This paper introduces a new method to identify such samples and mitigate their impact when training neural networks. At the heart of our algorithm is the Area Under the Margin (AUM) statistic, which exploits differences in the training dynamics of clean and mislabeled samples. A simple procedure - adding an extra class populated with purposefully mislabeled threshold samples - learns a AUM upper bound that isolates mislabeled data. This approach consistently improves upon prior work on synthetic and real-world datasets. On the WebVision50 classification task our method removes 17% of training data, yielding a 1.6% (absolute) improvement in test error. On CIFAR100 removing 13% of the data leads to a 1.2% drop in error.
AutoTrajectory: Label-Free Trajectory Extraction and Prediction from Videos Using Dynamic Points

Current methods for trajectory prediction operate in supervised manners, and therefore require vast quantities of corresponding ground truth data for training. In this paper, we present a novel, label-free algorithm, AutoTrajectory, for trajectory extraction and prediction to use raw videos directly. To better capture the moving objects in videos, we introduce dynamic points. We use them to model dynamic motions by using a forward-backward extractor to keep temporal consistency and using image reconstruction to keep spatial consistency in an unsupervised manner. Then we aggregate dynamic points to instance points, which stand for moving objects such as pedestrians in videos. Finally, we extract trajectories by matching instance points for prediction training. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to achieve unsupervised learning of trajectory extraction and prediction. We evaluate the performance on well-known trajectory datasets and show that our method is effective for real-world videos and can use raw videos to further improve the performance of existing models.
Blockchain in Smart Energy Grids: A Market Analysis

Modern society consumes a huge amount of energy, making the energy industry highly important across the globe. Customers are supplied with the electricity via the energy grid, as part of the utility value chain and pay on per-unit consumed basis. Thus, grid operations and energy prices have little effects on actual energy demand because grid imbalances frequently arise rapidly over very short periods of time, due to imprecise forecasts or unexpected events. Non-predictable renewable energy sources variable generation raises crucial challenges in grid management, making grid defection a rapidly increasing challenge to traditional energy markets. Blockchain technology has been studied to overcome these problems for application in the smart energy grid, and experts agree that it has the potential to change the electricity market. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies can promote a transparent, secure and decentralized transactions network that will allow new innovative business solutions. Although, the integration of blockchain into the smart energy grid poses some challenges and prohibits the widespread use of blockchain technology in the energy sector. Therefore, in this paper a market analysis was conducted, to investigate the parameters that affect the large-scale adoption of blockchain in smart energy grids. The first part of the paper is setting up the scene, introducing the blockchain and smart grid fundamentals, as well as presenting blockchain’s potential impact on different energy use cases. On the second part of the paper the market analysis is presented, providing blockchain technology’s market opportunities within the energy grid. The paper ends with a description of threats and market challenges that the technology has to address in order to get through the hype, prove its economic, social and technological potential and eventually be accepted in the mainstream.
Real-World ADS-B signal recognition based on Radio Frequency Fingerprinting

To meet the future needs of increasingly crowded airspace, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO ) proposed to use the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B ) to provide navigation and surveillance technology to solve the problems of security and capacity in the airspace. But ADS-B does not offer any authentication and encryption. So it is vulnerable to attacks by various illegal devices. A novel radiofrequency fingerprint (RFF ) recognition method of aircraft identity verification based on deep learning is proposed. The ADS-B signal captured by RTL-SDR is used for confirmation. The experimental results show that the fingerprint is called the Contour Stellar Images with a better recognition effect under different networks and different SNR.
DanbooRegion: An Illustration Region Dataset

Region is a fundamental element of various cartoon animation techniques and artistic painting applications. Achieving satisfactory region is essential to the success of these techniques. Motivated to assist diversiform region-based cartoon applications, we invite artists to annotate regions for in-the-wild cartoon images with several application-oriented goals: (1) To assist image-based cartoon rendering, relighting, and cartoon intrinsic decomposition literature, artists identify object outlines and eliminate lighting-and-shadow boundaries. (2) To assist cartoon inking tools, cartoon structure extraction applications, and cartoon texture processing techniques, artists clean-up texture or deformation patterns and emphasize cartoon structural boundary lines. (3) To assist region-based cartoon digitalization, clip-art vectorization, and animation tracking applications, artists inpaint and reconstruct broken or blurred regions in cartoon images. Given the typicality of these involved applications, this dataset is also likely to be used in other cartoon techniques. We detail the challenges in achieving this dataset and present a human-in-the-loop workflow namely Feasibility-based Assignment Recommendation (FAR) to enable large-scale annotating. The FAR tends to reduce artist trails-and-errors and encourage their enthusiasm during annotating. Finally, we present a dataset that contains a large number of artistic region compositions paired with corresponding cartoon illustrations. We also invite multiple professional artists to assure the quality of each annotation.
Channel Pruning via Optimal Thresholding

Structured pruning, especially channel pruning is widely used for the reduced computational cost and compatibility with off-the-shelf hardware devices. Among existing works, weights are typically removed using a predefined global threshold, or a threshold computed from a predefined metric. These designs ignore the variation among different layers and weights distribution, therefore, they may often result in sub-optimal performance caused by over-pruning or under-pruning. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method, termed Optimal Thresholding (OT), to prune channels with layer dependent thresholds that optimally separate important from negligible channels. By using OT, negligible channels are pruned to achieve high sparsity while minimizing performance degradation. Since most important weights are preserved, the pruned model can be further fine-tuned and quickly converge with very few iterations. Our method demonstrates superior performance, especially when compared to the state-of-the-art designs at high levels of sparsity.