pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Meta-neural-network for Realtime and Passive Deep-learning-based Object Recognition
Authors: Jingkai Weng, Yujiang Ding, Chengbo Hu, Xue-Feng Zhu, Bin Liang, Jing Yang, Jianchun Cheng
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Handwritten Digit Recognition, Object Recognition

Deep-learning recently show great success across disciplines yet conventionally require time-consuming computer processing or bulky-sized diffractive elements. Here we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a purely-passive "meta-neural-network" with compactness and high-resolution for real-time recognizing complicated objects by analyzing acoustic scattering. We prove our meta-neural-network mimics standard neural network despite its small footprint, thanks to unique capability of its metamaterial unit cells, dubbed "meta-neurons", to produce deep-subwavelength-distribution of discrete phase shift as learnable parameters during training. The resulting device exhibits the "intelligence" to perform desired tasks with potential to address the current trade-off between reducing device's size, cost and energy consumption and increasing recognition speed and accuracy, showcased by an example of handwritten digit recognition. Our mechanism opens the route to new metamaterial-based deep-learning paradigms and enable conceptual devices such as smart transducers automatically analyzing signals, with far-reaching implications for acoustics, optics and related fields.
Leveraging human Domain Knowledge to model an empirical Reward function for a Reinforcement Learning problem
Authors: Dattaraj Rao
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) problems depend on an exhaustive simulation environment that models real-world physics of the problem and trains the RL agent by observing this environment. In this paper, we present a novel approach to creating an environment by modeling the reward function based on empirical rules extracted from human domain knowledge of the system under study. Using this empirical rewards function, we will build an environment and train the agent. We will first create an environment that emulates the effect of setting cabin temperature through thermostat. This is typically done in RL problems by creating an exhaustive model of the system with detailed thermodynamic study. Instead, we propose an empirical approach to model the reward function based on human domain knowledge. We will document some rules of thumb that we usually exercise as humans while setting thermostat temperature and try and model these into our reward function. This modeling of empirical human domain rules into a reward function for RL is the unique aspect of this paper. This is a continuous action space problem and using deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) method, we will solve for maximizing the reward function. We will create a policy network that predicts optimal temperature setpoint given external temperature and humidity.
AdaBoost-assisted Extreme Learning Machine for Efficient Online Sequential Classification
Authors: Yi-Ta Chen, Yu-Chuan Chuang, An-Yeu, Wu
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

In this paper, we propose an AdaBoost-assisted extreme learning machine for efficient online sequential classification (AOS-ELM). In order to achieve better accuracy in online sequential learning scenarios, we utilize the cost-sensitive algorithm-AdaBoost, which diversifying the weak classifiers, and adding the forgetting mechanism, which stabilizing the performance during the training procedure. Hence, AOS-ELM adapts better to sequentially arrived data compared with other voting based methods. The experiment results show AOS-ELM can achieve 94.41% accuracy on MNIST dataset, which is the theoretical accuracy bound performed by an original batch learning algorithm, AdaBoost-ELM. Moreover, with the forgetting mechanism, the standard deviation of accuracy during the online sequential learning process is reduced to 8.26x.
TextSR: Content-Aware Text Super-Resolution Guided by Recognition
Authors: Wenjia Wang, Enze Xie, Peize Sun, Wenhai Wang, Lixun Tian, Chunhua Shen, Ping Luo
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Text Recognition, Super-Resolution

Scene text recognition has witnessed rapid development with the advance of convolutional neural networks. Nonetheless, most of the previous methods may not work well in recognizing text with low resolution which is often seen in natural scene images. An intuitive solution is to introduce super-resolution techniques as pre-processing. However, conventional super-resolution methods in the literature mainly focus on reconstructing the detailed texture of natural images, which typically do not work well for text due to the unique characteristics of text. To tackle these problems, in this work, we propose a content-aware text super-resolution network to generate the information desired for text recognition. In particular, we design an end-to-end network that can perform super-resolution and text recognition simultaneously. Different from previous super-resolution methods, we use the loss of text recognition as the Text Perceptual Loss to guide the training of the super-resolution network, and thus it pays more attention to the text content, rather than the irrelevant background area. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in restoring a sharp high-resolution image from a small blurred one, and show that the recognition performance clearly boosts up the performance of text recognizer. To our knowledge, this is the first work focusing on text super-resolution. Code will be released in https://github.com/xieenze/TextSR.
Incorporating dynamicity of transportation network with multi-weight traffic graph convolutional network for traffic forecasting
Authors: Yuyol Shin, Yoonjin Yoon
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Traffic forecasting problem remains a challenging task in the intelligent transportation system due to its spatio-temporal complexity. Although temporal dependency has been well studied and discussed, spatial dependency is relatively less explored due to its large variations, especially in the urban environment. In this study, a novel graph convolutional network model, Multi-Weight Traffic Graph Convolutional (MW-TGC) network, is proposed and applied to two urban networks with contrasting geometric constraints. The model conducts graph convolution operations on speed data with multi-weighted adjacency matrices to combine the features, including speed limit, distance, and angle. The spatially isolated dimension reduction operation is conducted on the combined features to learn the dependencies among the features and reduce the size of the output to a computationally feasible level. The output of multi-weight graph convolution is applied to the sequence-to-sequence model with Long Short-Term Memory units to learn temporal dependencies. When applied to two urban sites, urban-core and urban-mix, MW-TGC network not only outperformed the comparative models in both sites but also reduced variance in the heterogeneous urban-mix network. We conclude that MW-TGC network can provide a robust traffic forecasting performance across the variations in spatial complexity, which can be a strong advantage in urban traffic forecasting.
Hybrid Neural Models For Sequence Modelling: The Best Of Three Worlds
Authors: Marco Dinarelli, Loïc Grobol
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

We propose a neural architecture with the main characteristics of the most successful neural models of the last years: bidirectional RNNs, encoder-decoder, and the Transformer model. Evaluation on three sequence labelling tasks yields results that are close to the state-of-the-art for all tasks and better than it for some of them, showing the pertinence of this hybrid architecture for this kind of tasks.
Domain Transfer in Dialogue Systems without Turn-Level Supervision
Authors: Joachim Bingel, Victor Petrén Bach Hansen, Ana Valeria Gonzalez, Paweł Budzianowski, Isabelle Augenstein, Anders Søgaard
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue State Tracking, Reinforcement Learning, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Task oriented dialogue systems rely heavily on specialized dialogue state tracking (DST) modules for dynamically predicting user intent throughout the conversation. State-of-the-art DST models are typically trained in a supervised manner from manual annotations at the turn level. However, these annotations are costly to obtain, which makes it difficult to create accurate dialogue systems for new domains. To address these limitations, we propose a method, based on reinforcement learning, for transferring DST models to new domains without turn-level supervision. Across several domains, our experiments show that this method quickly adapts off-the-shelf models to new domains and performs on par with models trained with turn-level supervision. We also show our method can improve models trained using turn-level supervision by subsequent fine-tuning optimization toward dialog-level rewards.
CELNet: Evidence Localization for Pathology Images using Weakly Supervised Learning
Authors: Yongxiang Huang, Albert C. S. Chung
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, image-classification, Image Classification, Object Localization, Weakly-supervised Learning

Despite deep convolutional neural networks boost the performance of image classification and segmentation in digital pathology analysis, they are usually weak in interpretability for clinical applications or require heavy annotations to achieve object localization. To overcome this problem, we propose a weakly supervised learning-based approach that can effectively learn to localize the discriminative evidence for a diagnostic label from weakly labeled training data. Experimental results show that our proposed method can reliably pinpoint the location of cancerous evidence supporting the decision of interest, while still achieving a competitive performance on glimpse-level and slide-level histopathologic cancer detection tasks.
RuDaS: Synthetic Datasets for Rule Learning and Evaluation Tools
Authors: Cristina Cornelio, Veronika Thost
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive knowledge graph completion, Inductive logic programming, Knowledge Graphs, Relational Reasoning

Logical rules are a popular knowledge representation language in many domains, representing background knowledge and encoding information that can be derived from given facts in a compact form. However, rule formulation is a complex process that requires deep domain expertise,and is further challenged by today's often large, heterogeneous, and incomplete knowledge graphs. Several approaches for learning rules automatically, given a set of input example facts,have been proposed over time, including, more recently, neural systems. Yet, the area is missing adequate datasets and evaluation approaches: existing datasets often resemble toy examples that neither cover the various kinds of dependencies between rules nor allow for testing scalability. We present a tool for generating different kinds of datasets and for evaluating rule learning systems, including new performance measures.
BasketballGAN: Generating Basketball Play Simulation Through Sketching
Authors: Hsin-Ying Hsieh, Chieh-Yu Chen, Yu-Shuen Wang, Jung-Hong Chuang
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00

We present a data-driven basketball set play simulation. Given an offensive set play sketch, our method simulates potential scenarios that may occur in the game. The simulation provides coaches and players with insights on how a given set play can be executed. To achieve the goal, we train a conditional adversarial network on NBA movement data to imitate the behaviors of how players move around the court through two major components: a generator that learns to generate natural player movements based on a latent noise and a user sketched set play; and a discriminator that is used to evaluate the realism of the basketball play. To improve the quality of simulation, we minimize 1.) a dribbler loss to prevent the ball from drifting away from the dribbler; 2.) a defender loss to prevent the dribbler from not being defended; 3.) a ball passing loss to ensure the straightness of passing trajectories; and 4) an acceleration loss to minimize unnecessary players' movements. To evaluate our system, we objectively compared real and simulated basketball set plays. Besides, a subjective test was conducted to judge whether a set play was real or generated by our network. On average, the mean correct rates to the binary tests were 56.17 \%. Experiment results and the evaluations demonstrated the effectiveness of our system.
Controllable Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Bowen Li, Xiaojuan Qi, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Philip H. S. Torr
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

In this paper, we propose a novel controllable text-to-image generative adversarial network (ControlGAN), which can effectively synthesise high-quality images and also control parts of the image generation according to natural language descriptions. To achieve this, we introduce a word-level spatial and channel-wise attention-driven generator that can disentangle different visual attributes, and allow the model to focus on generating and manipulating subregions corresponding to the most relevant words. Also, a word-level discriminator is proposed to provide fine-grained supervisory feedback by correlating words with image regions, facilitating training an effective generator which is able to manipulate specific visual attributes without affecting the generation of other content. Furthermore, perceptual loss is adopted to reduce the randomness involved in the image generation, and to encourage the generator to manipulate specific attributes required in the modified text. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state of the art, and is able to effectively manipulate synthetic images using natural language descriptions. Code is available at https://github.com/mrlibw/ControlGAN.
Towards a Rigorous Evaluation of XAI Methods on Time Series
Authors: Udo Schlegel, Hiba Arnout, Mennatallah El-Assady, Daniela Oelke, Daniel A. Keim
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods are typically deployed to explain and debug black-box machine learning models. However, most proposed XAI methods are black-boxes themselves and designed for images. Thus, they rely on visual interpretability to evaluate and prove explanations. In this work, we apply XAI methods previously used in the image and text-domain on time series. We present a methodology to test and evaluate various XAI methods on time series by introducing new verification techniques to incorporate the temporal dimension. We further conduct preliminary experiments to assess the quality of selected XAI method explanations with various verification methods on a range of datasets and inspecting quality metrics on it. We demonstrate that in our initial experiments, SHAP works robust for all models, but others like DeepLIFT, LRP, and Saliency Maps work better with specific architectures.
Classification-Specific Parts for Improving Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
Authors: Dimitri Korsch, Paul Bodesheim, Joachim Denzler
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Feature Importance, Fine-Grained Image Classification, Fine-Grained Visual Categorization, General Classification, Image Classification

Fine-grained visual categorization is a classification task for distinguishing categories with high intra-class and small inter-class variance. While global approaches aim at using the whole image for performing the classification, part-based solutions gather additional local information in terms of attentions or parts. We propose a novel classification-specific part estimation that uses an initial prediction as well as back-propagation of feature importance via gradient computations in order to estimate relevant image regions. The subsequently detected parts are then not only selected by a-posteriori classification knowledge, but also have an intrinsic spatial extent that is determined automatically. This is in contrast to most part-based approaches and even to available ground-truth part annotations, which only provide point coordinates and no additional scale information. We show in our experiments on various widely-used fine-grained datasets the effectiveness of the mentioned part selection method in conjunction with the extracted part features.
Temporally Consistent Depth Prediction with Flow-Guided Memory Units
Authors: Chanho Eom, Hyunjong Park, Bumsub Ham
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Optical Flow Estimation, Prediction

Predicting depth from a monocular video sequence is an important task for autonomous driving. Although it has advanced considerably in the past few years, recent methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) discard temporal coherence in the video sequence and estimate depth independently for each frame, which often leads to undesired inconsistent results over time. To address this problem, we propose to memorize temporal consistency in the video sequence, and leverage it for the task of depth prediction. To this end, we introduce a two-stream CNN with a flow-guided memory module, where each stream encodes visual and temporal features, respectively. The memory module, implemented using convolutional gated recurrent units (ConvGRUs), inputs visual and temporal features sequentially together with optical flow tailored to our task. It memorizes trajectories of individual features selectively and propagates spatial information over time, enforcing a long-term temporal consistency to prediction results. We evaluate our method on the KITTI benchmark dataset in terms of depth prediction accuracy, temporal consistency and runtime, and achieve a new state of the art. We also provide an extensive experimental analysis, clearly demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach to memorizing temporal consistency for depth prediction.
A Real-Time Cross-modality Correlation Filtering Method for Referring Expression Comprehension
Authors: Yue Liao, Si Liu, Guanbin Li, Fei Wang, Yanjie Chen, Chen Qian, Bo Li
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Referring Expression, Referring Expression Comprehension

Referring expression comprehension aims to localize the object instance described by a natural language expression. Current referring expression methods have achieved good performance. However, none of them is able to achieve real-time inference without accuracy drop. The reason for the relatively slow inference speed is that these methods artificially split the referring expression comprehension into two sequential stages including proposal generation and proposal ranking. It does not exactly conform to the habit of human cognition. To this end, we propose a novel Realtime Cross-modality Correlation Filtering method (RCCF). RCCF reformulates the referring expression comprehension as a correlation filtering process. The expression is first mapped from the language domain to the visual domain and then treated as a template (kernel) to perform correlation filtering on the image feature map. The peak value in the correlation heatmap indicates the center points of the target box. In addition, RCCF also regresses a 2-D object size and 2-D offset. The center point coordinates, object size and center point offset together to form the target bounding box. Our method runs at 40 FPS while achieving leading performance in RefClef, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg benchmarks. In the challenging RefClef dataset, our methods almost double the state-of-the-art performance (34.70% increased to 63.79%). We hope this work can arouse more attention and studies to the new cross-modality correlation filtering framework as well as the one-stage framework for referring expression comprehension.
Pose Neural Fabrics Search
Authors: Sen Yang, Wankou Yang, Zhen Cui
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Keypoint Detection, Multi-Task Learning, Neural Architecture Search, Pose Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technologies have emerged in many domains to jointly learn the architectures and weights of the neural network. However, most existing NAS works claim they are task-specific and focus only on optimizing a single architecture to replace a human-designed neural network, in fact, their search processes are almost independent of domain knowledge of the tasks. In this paper, we propose Pose Neural Fabrics Search (PoseNFS). We explore a new solution for NAS and human pose estimation task: part-specific neural architecture search, which can be seen as a variant of multi-task learning. Firstly, we design a new neural architecture search space, Cell-based Neural Fabric (CNF), to learn micro as well as macro neural architecture using a differentiable search strategy. Then, we view locating human keypoints as multiple disentangled prediction sub-tasks, and then use prior knowledge of body structure as guidance to search for multiple part-specific neural architectures for different human parts. After search, all these part-specific CNFs have distinct micro and macro architecture parameters. The results show that such knowledge-guided NAS-based architectures have obvious performance improvements to a hand-designed part-based baseline model. The experiments on MPII and MS-COCO datasets demonstrate that PoseNFS\footnote{Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yangsenius/PoseNFS}} can achieve comparable performance to some efficient and state-of-the-art methods.
Global Autoregressive Models for Data-Efficient Sequence Learning
Authors: Tetiana Parshakova, Jean-Marc Andreoli, Marc Dymetman
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CONLL 2019 11
Tasks: Language Modelling, Small Data Image Classification

Standard autoregressive seq2seq models are easily trained by max-likelihood, but tend to show poor results under small-data conditions. We introduce a class of seq2seq models, GAMs (Global Autoregressive Models), which combine an autoregressive component with a log-linear component, allowing the use of global \textit{a priori} features to compensate for lack of data. We train these models in two steps. In the first step, we obtain an \emph{unnormalized} GAM that maximizes the likelihood of the data, but is improper for fast inference or evaluation. In the second step, we use this GAM to train (by distillation) a second autoregressive model that approximates the \emph{normalized} distribution associated with the GAM, and can be used for fast inference and evaluation. Our experiments focus on language modelling under synthetic conditions and show a strong perplexity reduction of using the second autoregressive model over the standard one.