pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Joint, Partially-joint, and Individual Independent Component Analysis in Multi-Subject fMRI Data
Authors: Mansooreh Pakravan, Mohammad Bagher Shamsollahi
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: blind source separation, Clustering

Objective: Joint analysis of multi-subject brain imaging datasets has wide applications in biomedical engineering. In these datasets, some sources belong to all subjects (joint), a subset of subjects (partially-joint), or a single subject (individual). In this paper, this source model is referred to as joint/partially-joint/individual multiple datasets multidimensional (JpJI-MDM), and accordingly, a source extraction method is developed. Method: We present a deflation-based algorithm utilizing higher order cumulants to analyze the JpJI-MDM source model. The algorithm maximizes a cost function which leads to an eigenvalue problem solved with thin-SVD (singular value decomposition) factorization. Furthermore, we introduce the JpJI-feature which indicates the spatial shape of each source and the amount of its jointness with other subjects. We use this feature to determine the type of sources. Results: We evaluate our algorithm by analyzing simulated data and two real functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets. In our simulation study, we will show that the proposed algorithm determines the type of sources with the accuracy of 95% and 100% for 2-class and 3-class clustering scenarios, respectively. Furthermore, our algorithm extracts meaningful joint and partially-joint sources from the two real datasets, which are consistent with the existing neuroscience studies. Conclusion: Our results in analyzing the real datasets reveal that both datasets follow the JpJI-MDM source model. This source model improves the accuracy of source extraction methods developed for multi-subject datasets. Significance: The proposed joint blind source separation algorithm is robust and avoids parameters which are difficult to fine-tune.
Saliency based Semi-supervised Learning for Orbiting Satellite Tracking
Authors: Peizhuo Li, YunDa Sun, Xue Wan
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Visual Tracking

The trajectory and boundary of an orbiting satellite are fundamental information for on-orbit repairing and manipulation by space robots. This task, however, is challenging owing to the freely and rapidly motion of on-orbiting satellites, the quickly varying background and the sudden change in illumination conditions. Traditional tracking usually relies on a single bounding box of the target object, however, more detailed information should be provided by visual tracking such as binary mask. In this paper, we proposed a SSLT (Saliency-based Semi-supervised Learning for Tracking) algorithm that provides both the bounding box and segmentation binary mask of target satellites at 12 frame per second without requirement of annotated data. Our method, SSLT, improves the segmentation performance by generating a saliency map based semi-supervised on-line learning approach within the initial bounding box estimated by tracking. Once a customized segmentation model has been trained, the bounding box and satellite trajectory will be refined using the binary segmentation result. Experiment using real on-orbit rendezvous and docking video from NASA (Nation Aeronautics and Space Administration), simulated satellite animation sequence from ESA (European Space Agency) and image sequences of 3D printed satellite model took in our laboratory demonstrate the robustness, versatility and fast speed of our method compared to state-of-the-art tracking and segmentation methods. Our dataset will be released for academic use in future.
Open Data Chatbot
Authors: Sophia Keyner, Vadim Savenkov, Svitlana Vakulenko
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Recently, chatbots received an increased attention from industry and diverse research communities as a dialogue-based interface providing advanced human-computer interactions. On the other hand, Open Data continues to be an important trend and a potential enabler for government transparency and citizen participation. This paper shows how these two paradigms can be combined to help non-expert users find and discover open government datasets through dialogue.
A Comprehensive Benchmark for Single Image Compression Artifacts Reduction
Authors: Jiaying Liu, Dong Liu, Wenhan Yang, Sifeng Xia, Xiaoshuai Zhang, Yuanying Dai
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Image Compression, Quantization

We present a comprehensive study and evaluation of existing single image compression artifacts removal algorithms, using a new 4K resolution benchmark including diversified foreground objects and background scenes with rich structures, called Large-scale Ideal Ultra high definition 4K (LIU4K) benchmark. Compression artifacts removal, as a common post-processing technique, aims at alleviating undesirable artifacts such as blockiness, ringing, and banding caused by quantization and approximation in the compression process. In this work, a systematic listing of the reviewed methods is presented based on their basic models (handcrafted models and deep networks). The main contributions and novelties of these methods are highlighted, and the main development directions, including architectures, multi-domain sources, signal structures, and new targeted units, are summarized. Furthermore, based on a unified deep learning configuration (i.e. same training data, loss function, optimization algorithm, etc.), we evaluate recent deep learning-based methods based on diversified evaluation measures. The experimental results show the state-of-the-art performance comparison of existing methods based on both full-reference, non-reference and task-driven metrics. Our survey would give a comprehensive reference source for future research on single image compression artifacts removal and inspire new directions of the related fields.
Solving Continual Combinatorial Selection via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Hyungseok Song, Hyeryung Jang, Hai H. Tran, Se-eun Yoon, Kyunghwan Son, Donggyu Yun, Hyoju Chung, Yung Yi
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We consider the Markov Decision Process (MDP) of selecting a subset of items at each step, termed the Select-MDP (S-MDP). The large state and action spaces of S-MDPs make them intractable to solve with typical reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms especially when the number of items is huge. In this paper, we present a deep RL algorithm to solve this issue by adopting the following key ideas. First, we convert the original S-MDP into an Iterative Select-MDP (IS-MDP), which is equivalent to the S-MDP in terms of optimal actions. IS-MDP decomposes a joint action of selecting K items simultaneously into K iterative selections resulting in the decrease of actions at the expense of an exponential increase of states. Second, we overcome this state space explo-sion by exploiting a special symmetry in IS-MDPs with novel weight shared Q-networks, which prov-ably maintain sufficient expressive power. Various experiments demonstrate that our approach works well even when the item space is large and that it scales to environments with item spaces different from those used in training.
Theory of Optimal Bayesian Feature Filtering
Authors: Ali Foroughi pour, Lori A. Dalton
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Optimal Bayesian feature filtering (OBF) is a supervised screening method designed for biomarker discovery. In this article, we prove two major theoretical properties of OBF. First, optimal Bayesian feature selection under a general family of Bayesian models reduces to filtering if and only if the underlying Bayesian model assumes all features are mutually independent. Therefore, OBF is optimal if and only if one assumes all features are mutually independent, and OBF is the only filter method that is optimal under at least one model in the general Bayesian framework. Second, OBF under independent Gaussian models is consistent under very mild conditions, including cases where the data is non-Gaussian with correlated features. This result provides conditions where OBF is guaranteed to identify the correct feature set given enough data, and it justifies the use of OBF in non-design settings where its assumptions are invalid.
Krylov Subspace Method for Nonlinear Dynamical Systems with Random Noise
Authors: Yuka Hashimoto, Isao Ishikawa, Masahiro Ikeda, Yoichi Matsuo, Yoshinobu Kawahara
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Operator-theoretic analysis of nonlinear dynamical systems has attracted much attention in a variety of engineering and scientific fields, endowed with practical estimation methods using data such as dynamic mode decomposition. In this paper, we address a lifted representation of nonlinear dynamical systems with random noise based on transfer operators, and develop a novel Krylov subspace method for estimating the operators using finite data, with consideration of the unboundedness of operators. For this purpose, we first consider Perron-Frobenius operators with kernel-mean embeddings for such systems. We then extend the Arnoldi method, which is the most classical type of Kryov subspace method, so that it can be applied to the current case. Meanwhile, the Arnoldi method requires the assumption that the operator is bounded, which is not necessarily satisfied for transfer operators on nonlinear systems. We accordingly develop the shift-invert Arnoldi method for Perron-Frobenius operators to avoid this problem. Also, we describe an approach of evaluating predictive accuracy by estimated operators on the basis of the maximum mean discrepancy, which is applicable, for example, to anomaly detection in complex systems. The empirical performance of our methods is investigated using synthetic and real-world healthcare data.
Communication-Censored Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent
Authors: Weiyu Li, Tianyi Chen, Liping Li, Zhaoxian Wu, Qing Ling
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Stochastic Optimization

This paper develops a communication-efficient algorithm to solve the stochastic optimization problem defined over a distributed network, aiming at reducing the burdensome communication in applications such as distributed machine learning.Different from the existing works based on quantization and sparsification, we introduce a communication-censoring technique to reduce the transmissions of variables, which leads to our communication-Censored distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent (CSGD) algorithm. Specifically, in CSGD, the latest mini-batch stochastic gradient at a worker will be transmitted to the server if and only if it is sufficiently informative. When the latest gradient is not available, the stale one will be reused at the server. To implement this communication-censoring strategy, the batch-size is increasing in order to alleviate the effect of stochastic gradient noise. Theoretically, CSGD enjoys the same order of convergence rate as that of SGD, but effectively reduces communication. Numerical experiments demonstrate the sizable communication saving of CSGD.
CBNet: A Novel Composite Backbone Network Architecture for Object Detection
Authors: Yudong Liu, Yongtao Wang, Siwei Wang, Ting-Ting Liang, Qijie Zhao, Zhi Tang, Haibin Ling
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

In existing CNN based detectors, the backbone network is a very important component for basic feature extraction, and the performance of the detectors highly depends on it. In this paper, we aim to achieve better detection performance by building a more powerful backbone from existing backbones like ResNet and ResNeXt. Specifically, we propose a novel strategy for assembling multiple identical backbones by composite connections between the adjacent backbones, to form a more powerful backbone named Composite Backbone Network (CBNet). In this way, CBNet iteratively feeds the output features of the previous backbone, namely high-level features, as part of input features to the succeeding backbone, in a stage-by-stage fashion, and finally the feature maps of the last backbone (named Lead Backbone) are used for object detection. We show that CBNet can be very easily integrated into most state-of-the-art detectors and significantly improve their performances. For example, it boosts the mAP of FPN, Mask R-CNN and Cascade R-CNN on the COCO dataset by about 1.5 to 3.0 percent. Meanwhile, experimental results show that the instance segmentation results can also be improved. Specially, by simply integrating the proposed CBNet into the baseline detector Cascade Mask R-CNN, we achieve a new state-of-the-art result on COCO dataset (mAP of 53.3) with single model, which demonstrates great effectiveness of the proposed CBNet architecture. Code will be made available on https://github.com/PKUbahuangliuhe/CBNet.
Transfer Reward Learning for Policy Gradient-Based Text Generation
Authors: James O' Neill, Danushka Bollegala
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Text Generation, Image Captioning, Policy Gradient Methods, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, Text Generation, Transfer Learning

Task-specific scores are often used to optimize for and evaluate the performance of conditional text generation systems. However, such scores are non-differentiable and cannot be used in the standard supervised learning paradigm. Hence, policy gradient methods are used since the gradient can be computed without requiring a differentiable objective. However, we argue that current n-gram overlap based measures that are used as rewards can be improved by using model-based rewards transferred from tasks that directly compare the similarity of sentence pairs. These reward models either output a score of sentence-level syntactic and semantic similarity between entire predicted and target sentences as the expected return, or for intermediate phrases as segmented accumulative rewards. We demonstrate that using a \textit{Transferable Reward Learner} leads to improved results on semantical evaluation measures in policy-gradient models for image captioning tasks. Our InferSent actor-critic model improves over a BLEU trained actor-critic model on MSCOCO when evaluated on a Word Mover's Distance similarity measure by 6.97 points, also improving on a Sliding Window Cosine Similarity measure by 10.48 points. Similar performance improvements are also obtained on the smaller Flickr-30k dataset, demonstrating the general applicability of the proposed transfer learning method.
A Stochastic Quasi-Newton Method with Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient
Authors: S. Indrapriyadarsini, Shahrzad Mahboubi, Hiroshi Ninomiya, Hideki Asai
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Incorporating second order curvature information in gradient based methods have shown to improve convergence drastically despite its computational intensity. In this paper, we propose a stochastic (online) quasi-Newton method with Nesterov's accelerated gradient in both its full and limited memory forms for solving large scale non-convex optimization problems in neural networks. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated in Tensorflow on benchmark classification and regression problems. The results show improved performance compared to the classical second order oBFGS and oLBFGS methods and popular first order stochastic methods such as SGD and Adam. The performance with different momentum rates and batch sizes have also been illustrated.
An Adaptive Stochastic Nesterov Accelerated Quasi Newton Method for Training RNNs
Authors: S. Indrapriyadarsini, Shahrzad Mahboubi, Hiroshi Ninomiya, Hideki Asai
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00

A common problem in training neural networks is the vanishing and/or exploding gradient problem which is more prominently seen in training of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Thus several algorithms have been proposed for training RNNs. This paper proposes a novel adaptive stochastic Nesterov accelerated quasiNewton (aSNAQ) method for training RNNs. The proposed method aSNAQ is an accelerated method that uses the Nesterov's gradient term along with second order curvature information. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated in Tensorflow on benchmark sequence modeling problems. The results show an improved performance while maintaining a low per-iteration cost and thus can be effectively used to train RNNs.
Weakly Supervised Localization Using Background Images
Authors: Ziyi Kou, Wentian Zhao, Guofeng Cui, Shaojie Wang
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Localization, Weakly-Supervised Object Localization

Weakly Supervised Object Localization (WSOL) methodsusually rely on fully convolutional networks in order to ob-tain class activation maps(CAMs) of targeted labels. How-ever, these networks always highlight the most discriminativeparts to perform the task, the located areas are much smallerthan entire targeted objects. In this work, we propose a novelend-to-end model to enlarge CAMs generated from classifi-cation models, which can localize targeted objects more pre-cisely. In detail, we add an additional module in traditionalclassification networks to extract foreground object propos-als from images without classifying them into specific cate-gories. Then we set these normalized regions as unrestrictedpixel-level mask supervision for the following classificationtask. We collect a set of images defined as Background ImageSet from the Internet. The number of them is much smallerthan the targeted dataset but surprisingly well supports themethod to extract foreground regions from different pictures.The region extracted is independent from classification task,where the extracted region in each image covers almost en-tire object rather than just a significant part. Therefore, theseregions can serve as masks to supervise the response mapgenerated from classification models to become larger andmore precise. The method achieves state-of-the-art results onCUB-200-2011 in terms of Top-1 and Top-5 localization er-ror while has a competitive result on ILSVRC2016 comparedwith other approaches.
Formulating Manipulable Argumentation with Intra-/Inter-Agent Preferences
Authors: Ryuta Arisaka, Makoto Hagiwara, Takayuki Ito
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

From marketing to politics, exploitation of incomplete information through selective communication of arguments is ubiquitous. In this work, we focus on development of an argumentation-theoretic model for manipulable multi-agent argumentation, where each agent may transmit deceptive information to others for tactical motives. In particular, we study characterisation of epistemic states, and their roles in deception/honesty detection and (mis)trust-building. To this end, we propose the use of intra-agent preferences to handle deception/honesty detection and inter-agent preferences to determine which agent(s) to believe in more. We show how deception/honesty in an argumentation of an agent, if detected, would alter the agent's perceived trustworthiness, and how that may affect their judgement as to which arguments should be acceptable.
Neural Architecture Search in Embedding Space
Authors: Chun-Ting Liu
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, image-classification, Image Classification, Neural Architecture Search, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The neural architecture search (NAS) algorithm with reinforcement learning can be a powerful and novel framework for the automatic discovering process of neural architectures. However, its application is restricted by noncontinuous and high-dimensional search spaces, which result in difficulty in optimization. To resolve these problems, we proposed NAS in embedding space (NASES), which is a novel framework. Unlike other NAS with reinforcement learning approaches that search over a discrete and high-dimensional architecture space, this approach enables reinforcement learning to search in an embedding space by using architecture encoders and decoders. The current experiment demonstrated that the performance of the final architecture network using the NASES procedure is comparable with that of other popular NAS approaches for the image classification task on CIFAR-10. The results of the experiment were efficient and indicated that NASES was highly efficient to discover final architecture only in $<$3.5 GPU hours. The beneficial-performance and effectiveness of NASES was impressive when the architecture-embedding searching and weight initialization were applied.
An Acceleration Framework for High Resolution Image Synthesis
Authors: Jinlin Liu, Yuan YAO, Jianqiang Ren
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Decoder, Image Generation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Synthesis of high resolution images using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is challenging, which usually requires numbers of high-end graphic cards with large memory and long time of training. In this paper, we propose a two-stage framework to accelerate the training process of synthesizing high resolution images. High resolution images are first transformed to small codes via the trained encoder and decoder networks. The code in latent space is times smaller than the original high resolution images. Then, we train a code generation network to learn the distribution of the latent codes. In this way, the generator only learns to generate small latent codes instead of large images. Finally, we decode the generated latent codes to image space via the decoder networks so as to output the synthesized high resolution images. Experimental results show that the proposed method accelerates the training process significantly and increases the quality of the generated samples. The proposed acceleration framework makes it possible to generate high resolution images using less training time with limited hardware resource. After using the proposed acceleration method, it takes only 3 days to train a 1024 *1024 image generator on Celeba-HQ dataset using just one NVIDIA P100 graphic card.
DEAR: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Advertising Impression in Recommender Systems
Authors: Xiangyu Zhao, Changsheng Gu, Haoshenglun Zhang, Xiwang Yang, Xiaobing Liu, Jiliang Tang, Hui Liu
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Recommendation Systems, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in utilizing RL for online advertising in recommendation platforms (e.g., e-commerce and news feed sites). However, most RL-based advertising algorithms focus on optimizing ads' revenue while ignoring the possible negative influence of ads on user experience of recommended items (products, articles and videos). Developing an optimal advertising algorithm in recommendations faces immense challenges because interpolating ads improperly or too frequently may decrease user experience, while interpolating fewer ads will reduce the advertising revenue. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel advertising strategy for the rec/ads trade-off. To be specific, we develop an RL-based framework that can continuously update its advertising strategies and maximize reward in the long run. Given a recommendation list, we design a novel Deep Q-network architecture that can determine three internally related tasks jointly, i.e., (i) whether to interpolate an ad or not in the recommendation list, and if yes, (ii) the optimal ad and (iii) the optimal location to interpolate. The experimental results based on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.