pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On the effectiveness of convolutional autoencoders on image-based personalized recommender systems
Authors: E. Blanco-Mallo, B. Remeseiro, V. Bolón-Canedo, A. Alonso-Betanzos
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems (RS) are increasingly present in our daily lives, especially since the advent of Big Data, which allows for storing all kinds of information about users' preferences. Personalized RS are successfully applied in platforms such as Netflix, Amazon or YouTube. However, they are missing in gastronomic platforms such as TripAdvisor, where moreover we can find millions of images tagged with users' tastes. This paper explores the potential of using those images as sources of information for modeling users' tastes and proposes an image-based classification system to obtain personalized recommendations, using a convolutional autoencoder as feature extractor. The proposed architecture will be applied to TripAdvisor data, using users' reviews that can be defined as a triad composed by a user, a restaurant, and an image of it taken by the user. Since the dataset is highly unbalanced, the use of data augmentation on the minority class is also considered in the experimentation. Results on data from three cities of different sizes (Santiago de Compostela, Barcelona and New York) demonstrate the effectiveness of using a convolutional autoencoder as feature extractor, instead of the standard deep features computed with convolutional neural networks.
Tracing patients' PLOD with mobile phones: Mitigation of epidemic risks through patients' locational open data
Authors: Ikki Ohmukai, Yasunori Yamamoto, Maori Ito, Takashi Okumura
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00

In the cases when public health authorities confirm a patient with highly contagious disease, they release the summaries about patient locations and travel information. However, due to privacy concerns, these releases do not include the detailed data and typically comprise the information only about commercial facilities and public transportation used by the patients. We addressed this problem and proposed to release the patient location data as open data represented in a structured form of the information described in press releases. Therefore, residents would be able to use these data for automated estimation of the potential risks of contacts combined with the location information stored in their mobile phones. This paper proposes the design of the open data based on Resource Description Framework (RDF), and performs a preliminary evaluation of the first draft of the specification followed by a discussion on possible future directions.
WAC: A Corpus of Wikipedia Conversations for Online Abuse Detection
Authors: Noé Cecillon, Vincent Labatut, Richard Dufour, Georges Linares
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Abuse Detection, Benchmarking

With the spread of online social networks, it is more and more difficult to monitor all the user-generated content. Automating the moderation process of the inappropriate exchange content on Internet has thus become a priority task. Methods have been proposed for this purpose, but it can be challenging to find a suitable dataset to train and develop them. This issue is especially true for approaches based on information derived from the structure and the dynamic of the conversation. In this work, we propose an original framework, based on the Wikipedia Comment corpus, with comment-level abuse annotations of different types. The major contribution concerns the reconstruction of conversations, by comparison to existing corpora, which focus only on isolated messages (i.e. taken out of their conversational context). This large corpus of more than 380k annotated messages opens perspectives for online abuse detection and especially for context-based approaches. We also propose, in addition to this corpus, a complete benchmarking platform to stimulate and fairly compare scientific works around the problem of content abuse detection, trying to avoid the recurring problem of result replication. Finally, we apply two classification methods to our dataset to demonstrate its potential.
Linear Latent Force Models using Gaussian Processes
Authors: Mauricio A. Álvarez, David Luengo, Neil D. Lawrence
Date: 2011-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes

Purely data driven approaches for machine learning present difficulties when data is scarce relative to the complexity of the model or when the model is forced to extrapolate. On the other hand, purely mechanistic approaches need to identify and specify all the interactions in the problem at hand (which may not be feasible) and still leave the issue of how to parameterize the system. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach using Gaussian processes and differential equations to combine data driven modelling with a physical model of the system. We show how different, physically-inspired, kernel functions can be developed through sensible, simple, mechanistic assumptions about the underlying system. The versatility of our approach is illustrated with three case studies from motion capture, computational biology and geostatistics.
Towards a Framework for Visual Intelligence in Service Robotics: Epistemic Requirements and Gap Analysis
Authors: Agnese Chiatti, Enrico Motta, Enrico Daga
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

A key capability required by service robots operating in real-world, dynamic environments is that of Visual Intelligence, i.e., the ability to use their vision system, reasoning components and background knowledge to make sense of their environment. In this paper, we analyze the epistemic requirements for Visual Intelligence, both in a top-down fashion, using existing frameworks for human-like Visual Intelligence in the literature, and from the bottom up, based on the errors emerging from object recognition trials in a real-world robotic scenario. Finally, we use these requirements to evaluate current knowledge bases for Service Robotics and to identify gaps in the support they provide for Visual Intelligence. These gaps provide the basis of a research agenda for developing more effective knowledge representations for Visual Intelligence.
Agile Earth observation satellite scheduling over 20 years: formulations, methods and future directions
Authors: Xinwei Wang, Guohua Wu, Lining Xing, Witold Pedrycz
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation, Scheduling

Agile satellites with advanced attitude maneuvering capability are the new generation of Earth observation satellites (EOSs). The continuous improvement in satellite technology and decrease in launch cost have boosted the development of agile EOSs (AEOSs). To efficiently employ the increasing orbiting AEOSs, the AEOS scheduling problem (AEOSSP) aiming to maximize the entire observation profit while satisfying all complex operational constraints, has received much attention over the past 20 years. The objectives of this paper are thus to summarize current research on AEOSSP, identify main accomplishments and highlight potential future research directions. To this end, general definitions of AEOSSP with operational constraints are described initially, followed by its three typical variations including different definitions of observation profit, multi-objective function and autonomous model. A detailed literature review from 1997 up to 2019 is then presented in line with four different solution methods, i.e., exact method, heuristic, metaheuristic and machine learning. Finally, we discuss a number of topics worth pursuing in the future.
Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network with Attention Graph Clustering for Co-saliency Detection
Authors: Kaihua Zhang, Tengpeng Li, Shiwen Shen, Bo Liu, Jin Chen, Qingshan Liu
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Clustering, Co-Salient Object Detection, Decoder, Graph Clustering, Saliency Detection

Co-saliency detection aims to discover the common and salient foregrounds from a group of relevant images. For this task, we present a novel adaptive graph convolutional network with attention graph clustering (GCAGC). Three major contributions have been made, and are experimentally shown to have substantial practical merits. First, we propose a graph convolutional network design to extract information cues to characterize the intra- and interimage correspondence. Second, we develop an attention graph clustering algorithm to discriminate the common objects from all the salient foreground objects in an unsupervised fashion. Third, we present a unified framework with encoder-decoder structure to jointly train and optimize the graph convolutional network, attention graph cluster, and co-saliency detection decoder in an end-to-end manner. We evaluate our proposed GCAGC method on three cosaliency detection benchmark datasets (iCoseg, Cosal2015 and COCO-SEG). Our GCAGC method obtains significant improvements over the state-of-the-arts on most of them.
Random smooth gray value transformations for cross modality learning with gray value invariant networks
Authors: Nikolas Lessmann, Bram van Ginneken
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: MIDL 2019 7

Random transformations are commonly used for augmentation of the training data with the goal of reducing the uniformity of the training samples. These transformations normally aim at variations that can be expected in images from the same modality. Here, we propose a simple method for transforming the gray values of an image with the goal of reducing cross modality differences. This approach enables segmentation of the lumbar vertebral bodies in CT images using a network trained exclusively with MR images. The source code is made available at https://github.com/nlessmann/rsgt
Gimme Signals: Discriminative signal encoding for multimodal activity recognition
Authors: Raphael Memmesheimer, Nick Theisen, Dietrich Paulus
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Activity Recognition, Multimodal Activity Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

We present a simple, yet effective and flexible method for action recognition supporting multiple sensor modalities. Multivariate signal sequences are encoded in an image and are then classified using a recently proposed EfficientNet CNN architecture. Our focus was to find an approach that generalizes well across different sensor modalities without specific adaptions while still achieving good results. We apply our method to 4 action recognition datasets containing skeleton sequences, inertial and motion capturing measurements as well as \wifi fingerprints that range up to 120 action classes. Our method defines the current best CNN-based approach on the NTU RGB+D 120 dataset, lifts the state of the art on the ARIL Wi-Fi dataset by +6.78%, improves the UTD-MHAD inertial baseline by +14.4%, the UTD-MHAD skeleton baseline by 1.13% and achieves 96.11% on the Simitate motion capturing data (80/20 split). We further demonstrate experiments on both, modality fusion on a signal level and signal reduction to prevent the representation from overloading.
Can Implicit Bias Explain Generalization? Stochastic Convex Optimization as a Case Study
Authors: Assaf Dauber, Meir Feder, Tomer Koren, Roi Livni
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

The notion of implicit bias, or implicit regularization, has been suggested as a means to explain the surprising generalization ability of modern-days overparameterized learning algorithms. This notion refers to the tendency of the optimization algorithm towards a certain structured solution that often generalizes well. Recently, several papers have studied implicit regularization and were able to identify this phenomenon in various scenarios. We revisit this paradigm in arguably the simplest non-trivial setup, and study the implicit bias of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the context of Stochastic Convex Optimization. As a first step, we provide a simple construction that rules out the existence of a \emph{distribution-independent} implicit regularizer that governs the generalization ability of SGD. We then demonstrate a learning problem that rules out a very general class of \emph{distribution-dependent} implicit regularizers from explaining generalization, which includes strongly convex regularizers as well as non-degenerate norm-based regularizations. Certain aspects of our constructions point out to significant difficulties in providing a comprehensive explanation of an algorithm's generalization performance by solely arguing about its implicit regularization properties.
PointINS: Point-based Instance Segmentation
Authors: Lu Qi, Yi Wang, Yukang Chen, Yingcong Chen, Xiangyu Zhang, Jian Sun, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object Detection, Representation Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we explore the mask representation in instance segmentation with Point-of-Interest (PoI) features. Differentiating multiple potential instances within a single PoI feature is challenging because learning a high-dimensional mask feature for each instance using vanilla convolution demands a heavy computing burden. To address this challenge, we propose an instance-aware convolution. It decomposes this mask representation learning task into two tractable modules as instance-aware weights and instance-agnostic features. The former is to parametrize convolution for producing mask features corresponding to different instances, improving mask learning efficiency by avoiding employing several independent convolutions. Meanwhile, the latter serves as mask templates in a single point. Together, instance-aware mask features are computed by convolving the template with dynamic weights, used for the mask prediction. Along with instance-aware convolution, we propose PointINS, a simple and practical instance segmentation approach, building upon dense one-stage detectors. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated the effectiveness of our framework built upon RetinaNet and FCOS. PointINS in ResNet101 backbone achieves a 38.3 mask mean average precision (mAP) on COCO dataset, outperforming existing point-based methods by a large margin. It gives a comparable performance to the region-based Mask R-CNN with faster inference.
Is There Tradeoff between Spatial and Temporal in Video Super-Resolution?
Authors: Haochen Zhang, Dong Liu, Zhiwei Xiong
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution, Video Super-Resolution

Recent advances of deep learning lead to great success of image and video super-resolution (SR) methods that are based on convolutional neural networks (CNN). For video SR, advanced algorithms have been proposed to exploit the temporal correlation between low-resolution (LR) video frames, and/or to super-resolve a frame with multiple LR frames. These methods pursue higher quality of super-resolved frames, where the quality is usually measured frame by frame in e.g. PSNR. However, frame-wise quality may not reveal the consistency between frames. If an algorithm is applied to each frame independently (which is the case of most previous methods), the algorithm may cause temporal inconsistency, which can be observed as flickering. It is a natural requirement to improve both frame-wise fidelity and between-frame consistency, which are termed spatial quality and temporal quality, respectively. Then we may ask, is a method optimized for spatial quality also optimized for temporal quality? Can we optimize the two quality metrics jointly?
Mass Estimation of Galaxy Clusters with Deep Learning I: Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect
Authors: Nikhel Gupta, Christian L. Reichardt
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We present a new application of deep learning to infer the masses of galaxy clusters directly from images of the microwave sky. Effectively, this is a novel approach to determining the scaling relation between a cluster's Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect signal and mass. The deep learning algorithm used is mResUNet, which is a modified feed-forward deep learning algorithm that broadly combines residual learning, convolution layers with different dilation rates, image regression activation and a U-Net framework. We train and test the deep learning model using simulated images of the microwave sky that include signals from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), dusty and radio galaxies, instrumental noise as well as the cluster's own SZ signal. The simulated cluster sample covers the mass range 1$\times 10^{14}~\rm M_{\odot}$ $<M_{200\rm c}<$ 8$\times 10^{14}~\rm M_{\odot}$ at $z=0.7$. The trained model estimates the cluster masses with a 1 $\sigma$ uncertainty $\Delta M/M \leq 0.2$, consistent with the input scatter on the SZ signal of 20%. We verify that the model works for realistic SZ profiles even when trained on azimuthally symmetric SZ profiles by using the Magneticum hydrodynamical simulations.
Partial Weight Adaptation for Robust DNN Inference
Authors: Xiufeng Xie, Kyu-Han Kim
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

Mainstream video analytics uses a pre-trained DNN model with an assumption that inference input and training data follow the same probability distribution. However, this assumption does not always hold in the wild: autonomous vehicles may capture video with varying brightness; unstable wireless bandwidth calls for adaptive bitrate streaming of video; and, inference servers may serve inputs from heterogeneous IoT devices/cameras. In such situations, the level of input distortion changes rapidly, thus reshaping the probability distribution of the input. We present GearNN, an adaptive inference architecture that accommodates heterogeneous DNN inputs. GearNN employs an optimization algorithm to identify a small set of "distortion-sensitive" DNN parameters, given a memory budget. Based on the distortion level of the input, GearNN then adapts only the distortion-sensitive parameters, while reusing the rest of constant parameters across all input qualities. In our evaluation of DNN inference with dynamic input distortions, GearNN improves the accuracy (mIoU) by an average of 18.12% over a DNN trained with the undistorted dataset and 4.84% over stability training from Google, with only 1.8% extra memory overhead.
LIBRE: The Multiple 3D LiDAR Dataset
Authors: Alexander Carballo, Jacob Lambert, Abraham Monrroy-Cano, David Robert Wong, Patiphon Narksri, Yuki Kitsukawa, Eijiro Takeuchi, Shinpei Kato, Kazuya Takeda
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

In this work, we present LIBRE: LiDAR Benchmarking and Reference, a first-of-its-kind dataset featuring 10 different LiDAR sensors, covering a range of manufacturers, models, and laser configurations. Data captured independently from each sensor includes three different environments and configurations: static targets, where objects were placed at known distances and measured from a fixed position within a controlled environment; adverse weather, where static obstacles were measured from a moving vehicle, captured in a weather chamber where LiDARs were exposed to different conditions (fog, rain, strong light); and finally, dynamic traffic, where dynamic objects were captured from a vehicle driven on public urban roads, multiple times at different times of the day, and including supporting sensors such as cameras, infrared imaging, and odometry devices. LIBRE will contribute to the research community to (1) provide a means for a fair comparison of currently available LiDARs, and (2) facilitate the improvement of existing self-driving vehicles and robotics-related software, in terms of development and tuning of LiDAR-based perception algorithms.
Dual Temporal Memory Network for Efficient Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Kaihua Zhang, Long Wang, Dong Liu, Bo Liu, Qingshan Liu, Zhu Li
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, One-shot visual object segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is typically formulated in a semi-supervised setting. Given the ground-truth segmentation mask on the first frame, the task of VOS is to track and segment the single or multiple objects of interests in the rest frames of the video at the pixel level. One of the fundamental challenges in VOS is how to make the most use of the temporal information to boost the performance. We present an end-to-end network which stores short- and long-term video sequence information preceding the current frame as the temporal memories to address the temporal modeling in VOS. Our network consists of two temporal sub-networks including a short-term memory sub-network and a long-term memory sub-network. The short-term memory sub-network models the fine-grained spatial-temporal interactions between local regions across neighboring frames in video via a graph-based learning framework, which can well preserve the visual consistency of local regions over time. The long-term memory sub-network models the long-range evolution of object via a Simplified-Gated Recurrent Unit (S-GRU), making the segmentation be robust against occlusions and drift errors. In our experiments, we show that our proposed method achieves a favorable and competitive performance on three frequently-used VOS datasets, including DAVIS 2016, DAVIS 2017 and Youtube-VOS in terms of both speed and accuracy.
A High-Performance Object Proposals based on Horizontal High Frequency Signal
Authors: Jiang Chao, Liang Huawei, Wang Zhiling
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In recent years, the use of object proposal as a preprocessing step for target detection to improve computational efficiency has become an effective method. Good object proposal methods should have high object detection recall rate and low computational cost, as well as good localization quality and repeatability. However, it is difficult for current advanced algorithms to achieve a good balance in the above performance. For this problem, we propose a class-independent object proposal algorithm BIHL. It combines the advantages of window scoring and superpixel merging, which not only improves the localization quality but also speeds up the computational efficiency. The experimental results on the VOC2007 data set show that when the IOU is 0.5 and 10,000 budget proposals, our method can achieve the highest detection recall and an mean average best overlap of 79.5%, and the computational efficiency is nearly three times faster than the current fastest method. Moreover, our method is the method with the highest average repeatability among the methods that achieve good repeatability to various disturbances.
Dynamic transformation of prior knowledge into Bayesian models for data streams
Authors: Tran Xuan Bach, Nguyen Duc Anh, Ngo Van Linh, Khoat Than
Date: 2020-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We consider how to effectively use prior knowledge when learning a Bayesian model from streaming environments where the data come infinitely and sequentially. This problem is highly important in the era of data explosion and rich sources of precious external knowledge such as pre-trained models, ontologies, Wikipedia, etc. We show that some existing approaches can forget any knowledge very fast. We then propose a novel framework that enables to incorporate the prior knowledge of different forms into a base Bayesian model for data streams. Our framework subsumes some existing popular models for time-series/dynamic data. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms existing methods with a large margin. In particular, our framework can help Bayesian models generalize well on extremely short text while other methods overfit. The implementation of our framework is available at https://github.com/bachtranxuan/TPS.git.