pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TANet: Robust 3D Object Detection from Point Clouds with Triple Attention
Authors: Zhe Liu, Xin Zhao, Tengteng Huang, Ruolan Hu, Yu Zhou, Xiang Bai
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Robust 3D Object Detection

In this paper, we focus on exploring the robustness of the 3D object detection in point clouds, which has been rarely discussed in existing approaches. We observe two crucial phenomena: 1) the detection accuracy of the hard objects, e.g., Pedestrians, is unsatisfactory, 2) when adding additional noise points, the performance of existing approaches decreases rapidly. To alleviate these problems, a novel TANet is introduced in this paper, which mainly contains a Triple Attention (TA) module, and a Coarse-to-Fine Regression (CFR) module. By considering the channel-wise, point-wise and voxel-wise attention jointly, the TA module enhances the crucial information of the target while suppresses the unstable cloud points. Besides, the novel stacked TA further exploits the multi-level feature attention. In addition, the CFR module boosts the accuracy of localization without excessive computation cost. Experimental results on the validation set of KITTI dataset demonstrate that, in the challenging noisy cases, i.e., adding additional random noisy points around each object,the presented approach goes far beyond state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, for the 3D object detection task of the KITTI benchmark, our approach ranks the first place on Pedestrian class, by using the point clouds as the only input. The running speed is around 29 frames per second.
Energy-aware Scheduling of Jobs in Heterogeneous Cluster Systems Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Amirhossein Esmaili, Massoud Pedram
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Management, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

Energy consumption is one of the most critical concerns in designing computing devices, ranging from portable embedded systems to computer cluster systems. Furthermore, in the past decade, cluster systems have increasingly risen as popular platforms to run computing-intensive real-time applications in which the performance is of great importance. However, due to different characteristics of real-time workloads, developing general job scheduling solutions that efficiently address both energy consumption and performance in real-time cluster systems is a challenging problem. In this paper, inspired by recent advances in applying deep reinforcement learning for resource management problems, we present the Deep-EAS scheduler that learns efficient energy-aware scheduling strategies for workloads with different characteristics without initially knowing anything about the scheduling task at hand. Results show that Deep-EAS converges quickly, and performs better compared to standard manually-tuned heuristics, especially in heavy load conditions.
Graph-based Multi-view Binary Learning for Image Clustering
Authors: Guangqi Jiang, Huibing Wang, Jinjia Peng, Dongyan Chen, Xianping Fu
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Embedding, Image Clustering

Hashing techniques, also known as binary code learning, have recently gained increasing attention in large-scale data analysis and storage. Generally, most existing hash clustering methods are single-view ones, which lack complete structure or complementary information from multiple views. For cluster tasks, abundant prior researches mainly focus on learning discrete hash code while few works take original data structure into consideration. To address these problems, we propose a novel binary code algorithm for clustering, which adopts graph embedding to preserve the original data structure, called (Graph-based Multi-view Binary Learning) GMBL in this paper. GMBL mainly focuses on encoding the information of multiple views into a compact binary code, which explores complementary information from multiple views. In particular, in order to maintain the graph-based structure of the original data, we adopt a Laplacian matrix to preserve the local linear relationship of the data and map it to the Hamming space. Considering different views have distinctive contributions to the final clustering results, GMBL adopts a strategy of automatically assign weights for each view to better guide the clustering. Finally, An alternating iterative optimization method is adopted to optimize discrete binary codes directly instead of relaxing the binary constraint in two steps. Experiments on five public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method compared with previous approaches in terms of clustering performance.
Low-Complexity LSTM-Assisted Bit-Flipping Algorithm for Successive Cancellation List Polar Decoder
Authors: Chun-Hsiang Chen, Chieh-Fang Teng, An-Yeu Wu
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Polar codes have attracted much attention in the past decade due to their capacity-achieving performance. The higher decoding capacity is required for 5G and beyond 5G (B5G). Although the cyclic redundancy check (CRC)- assisted successive cancellation list bit-flipping (CA-SCLF) decoders have been developed to obtain a better performance, the solution to error bit correction (bit-flipping) problem is still imperfect and hard to design. In this work, we leverage the expert knowledge in communication systems and adopt deep learning (DL) technique to obtain the better solution. A low-complexity long short-term memory network (LSTM)-assisted CA-SCLF decoder is proposed to further improve the performance of conventional CA-SCLF and avoid complexity and memory overhead. Our test results show that we can effectively improve the BLER performance by 0.11dB compared to prior work and reduce the complexity and memory overhead by over 30% of the network.
Lifelong learning for text retrieval and recognition in historical handwritten document collections
Authors: Lambert Schomaker
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Lifelong learning, Management, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

This chapter provides an overview of the problems that need to be dealt with when constructing a lifelong-learning retrieval, recognition and indexing engine for large historical document collections in multiple scripts and languages, the Monk system. This application is highly variable over time, since the continuous labeling by end users changes the concept of what a 'ground truth' constitutes. Although current advances in deep learning provide a huge potential in this application domain, the scale of the problem, i.e., more than 520 hugely diverse books, documents and manuscripts precludes the current meticulous and painstaking human effort which is required in designing and developing successful deep-learning systems. The ball-park principle is introduced, which describes the evolution from the sparsely-labeled stage that can only be addressed by traditional methods or nearest-neighbor methods on embedded vectors of pre-trained neural networks, up to the other end of the spectrum where massive labeling allows reliable training of deep-learning methods. Contents: Introduction, Expectation management, Deep learning, The ball-park principle, Technical realization, Work flow, Quality and quantity of material, Industrialization and scalability, Human effort, Algorithms, Object of recognition, Processing pipeline, Performance,Compositionality, Conclusion.
Sampling for Bayesian Mixture Models: MCMC with Polynomial-Time Mixing
Authors: Wenlong Mou, Nhat Ho, Martin J. Wainwright, Peter L. Bartlett, Michael. I. Jordan
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00

We study the problem of sampling from the power posterior distribution in Bayesian Gaussian mixture models, a robust version of the classical posterior. This power posterior is known to be non-log-concave and multi-modal, which leads to exponential mixing times for some standard MCMC algorithms. We introduce and study the Reflected Metropolis-Hastings Random Walk (RMRW) algorithm for sampling. For symmetric two-component Gaussian mixtures, we prove that its mixing time is bounded as $d^{1.5}(d + \Vert \theta_{0} \Vert^2)^{4.5}$ as long as the sample size $n$ is of the order $d (d + \Vert \theta_{0} \Vert^2)$. Notably, this result requires no conditions on the separation of the two means. En route to proving this bound, we establish some new results of possible independent interest that allow for combining Poincar\'{e} inequalities for conditional and marginal densities.
Improving Neural Protein-Protein Interaction Extraction with Knowledge Selection
Authors: Huiwei Zhou, Xuefei Li, Weihong Yao, Zhuang Liu, Shixian Ning, Chengkun Lang, Lei Du
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation

Protein-protein interaction (PPI) extraction from published scientific literature provides additional support for precision medicine efforts. Meanwhile, knowledge bases (KBs) contain huge amounts of structured information of protein entities and their relations, which can be encoded in entity and relation embeddings to help PPI extraction. However, the prior knowledge of protein-protein pairs must be selectively used so that it is suitable for different contexts. This paper proposes a Knowledge Selection Model (KSM) to fuse the selected prior knowledge and context information for PPI extraction. Firstly, two Transformers encode the context sequence of a protein pair according to each protein embedding, respectively. Then, the two outputs are fed to a mutual attention to capture the important context features towards the protein pair. Next, the context features are used to distill the relation embedding by a knowledge selector. Finally, the selected relation embedding and the context features are concatenated for PPI extraction. Experiments on the BioCreative VI PPI dataset show that KSM achieves a new state-of-the-art performance (38.08% F1-score) by adding knowledge selection.
Concept and Experimental Demonstration of Optical IM/DD End-to-End System Optimization using a Generative Model
Authors: Boris Karanov, Mathieu Chagnon, Vahid Aref, Domaniç Lavery, Polina Bayvel, Laurent Schmalen
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Generative Adversarial Network

We perform an experimental end-to-end transceiver optimization via deep learning using a generative adversarial network to approximate the test-bed channel. Previously, optimization was only possible through a prior assumption of an explicit simplified channel model.
Beyond Node Embedding: A Direct Unsupervised Edge Representation Framework for Homogeneous Networks
Authors: Sambaran Bandyopadhyay, Anirban Biswas, M. N. Murty, Ramasuri Narayanam
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Network Embedding, Representation Learning

Network representation learning has traditionally been used to find lower dimensional vector representations of the nodes in a network. However, there are very important edge driven mining tasks of interest to the classical network analysis community, which have mostly been unexplored in the network embedding space. For applications such as link prediction in homogeneous networks, vector representation (i.e., embedding) of an edge is derived heuristically just by using simple aggregations of the embeddings of the end vertices of the edge. Clearly, this method of deriving edge embedding is suboptimal and there is a need for a dedicated unsupervised approach for embedding edges by leveraging edge properties of the network. Towards this end, we propose a novel concept of converting a network to its weighted line graph which is ideally suited to find the embedding of edges of the original network. We further derive a novel algorithm to embed the line graph, by introducing the concept of collective homophily. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first direct unsupervised approach for edge embedding in homogeneous information networks, without relying on the node embeddings. We validate the edge embeddings on three downstream edge mining tasks. Our proposed optimization framework for edge embedding also generates a set of node embeddings, which are not just the aggregation of edges. Further experimental analysis shows the connection of our framework to the concept of node centrality.
Is Feature Diversity Necessary in Neural Network Initialization?
Authors: Yaniv Blumenfeld, Dar Gilboa, Daniel Soudry
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, GPU

Standard practice in training neural networks involves initializing the weights in an independent fashion. The results of recent work suggest that feature "diversity" at initialization plays an important role in training the network. However, other initialization schemes with reduced feature diversity have also been shown to be viable. In this work, we conduct a series of experiments aimed at elucidating the importance of feature diversity at initialization. We show that a complete lack of diversity is harmful to training, but its effects can be counteracted by a relatively small addition of noise - even the noise in standard non-deterministic GPU computations is sufficient. Furthermore, we construct a deep convolutional network with identical features at initialization and almost all of the weights initialized at 0 that can be trained to reach accuracy matching its standard-initialized counterpart.
Vectorizing World Buildings: Planar Graph Reconstruction by Primitive Detection and Relationship Inference
Authors: Nelson Nauata, Yasutaka Furukawa
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Graph Reconstruction

This paper tackles a 2D architecture vectorization problem, whose task is to infer an outdoor building architecture as a 2D planar graph from a single RGB image. We provide a new benchmark with ground-truth annotations for 2,001 complex buildings across the cities of Atlanta, Paris, and Las Vegas. We also propose a novel algorithm utilizing 1) convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that detects geometric primitives and infers their relationships and 2) an integer programming (IP) that assembles the information into a 2D planar graph. While being a trivial task for human vision, the inference of a graph structure with an arbitrary topology is still an open problem for computer vision. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our algorithm makes significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art, towards an intelligent system at the level of human perception. We will share code and data.
Unsupervised Neural Dialect Translation with Commonality and Diversity Modeling
Authors: Yu Wan, Baosong Yang, Derek F. Wong, Lidia S. Chao, Haihua Du, Ben C. H. Ao
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Machine Translation, Translation

As a special machine translation task, dialect translation has two main characteristics: 1) lack of parallel training corpus; and 2) possessing similar grammar between two sides of the translation. In this paper, we investigate how to exploit the commonality and diversity between dialects thus to build unsupervised translation models merely accessing to monolingual data. Specifically, we leverage pivot-private embedding, layer coordination, as well as parameter sharing to sufficiently model commonality and diversity among source and target, ranging from lexical, through syntactic, to semantic levels. In order to examine the effectiveness of the proposed models, we collect 20 million monolingual corpus for each of Mandarin and Cantonese, which are official language and the most widely used dialect in China. Experimental results reveal that our methods outperform rule-based simplified and traditional Chinese conversion and conventional unsupervised translation models over 12 BLEU scores.
DeepMeshFlow: Content Adaptive Mesh Deformation for Robust Image Registration
Authors: Nianjin Ye, Chuan Wang, Shuaicheng Liu, Lanpeng Jia, Jue Wang, Yongqing Cui
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Homography Estimation, Image Registration, Video Stabilization

Image alignment by mesh warps, such as meshflow, is a fundamental task which has been widely applied in various vision applications(e.g., multi-frame HDR/denoising, video stabilization). Traditional mesh warp methods detect and match image features, where the quality of alignment highly depends on the quality of image features. However, the image features are not robust in occurrence of low-texture and low-light scenes. Deep homography methods, on the other hand, are free from such problem by learning deep features for robust performance. However, a homography is limited to plane motions. In this work, we present a deep meshflow motion model, which takes two images as input and output a sparse motion field with motions located at mesh vertexes. The deep meshflow enjoys the merics of meshflow that can describe nonlinear motions while also shares advantage of deep homography that is robust against challenging textureless scenarios. In particular, a new unsupervised network structure is presented with content-adaptive capability. On one hand, the image content that cannot be aligned under mesh representation are rejected by our learned mask, similar to the RANSAC procedure. On the other hand, we learn multiple mesh resolutions, combining to a non-uniform mesh division. Moreover, a comprehensive dataset is presented, covering various scenes for training and testing. The comparison between both traditional mesh warp methods and deep based methods show the effectiveness of our deep meshflow motion model.
Marginalized State Distribution Entropy Regularization in Policy Optimization
Authors: Riashat Islam, Zafarali Ahmed, Doina Precup
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Reinforcement Learning

Entropy regularization is used to get improved optimization performance in reinforcement learning tasks. A common form of regularization is to maximize policy entropy to avoid premature convergence and lead to more stochastic policies for exploration through action space. However, this does not ensure exploration in the state space. In this work, we instead consider the distribution of discounted weighting of states, and propose to maximize the entropy of a lower bound approximation to the weighting of a state, based on latent space state representation. We propose entropy regularization based on the marginal state distribution, to encourage the policy to have a more uniform distribution over the state space for exploration. Our approach based on marginal state distribution achieves superior state space coverage on complex gridworld domains, that translate into empirical gains in sparse reward 3D maze navigation and continuous control domains compared to entropy regularization with stochastic policies.
A Closer Look at Disentangling in $β$-VAE
Authors: Harshvardhan Sikka, Weishun Zhong, Jun Yin, Cengiz Pehlevan
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Variational Inference

In many data analysis tasks, it is beneficial to learn representations where each dimension is statistically independent and thus disentangled from the others. If data generating factors are also statistically independent, disentangled representations can be formed by Bayesian inference of latent variables. We examine a generalization of the Variational Autoencoder (VAE), $\beta$-VAE, for learning such representations using variational inference. $\beta$-VAE enforces conditional independence of its bottleneck neurons controlled by its hyperparameter $\beta$. This condition is in general not compatible with the statistical independence of latents. By providing analytical and numerical arguments, we show that this incompatibility leads to a non-monotonic inference performance in $\beta$-VAE with a finite optimal $\beta$.
Small-footprint Keyword Spotting with Graph Convolutional Network
Authors: Xi Chen, Shouyi Yin, Dandan song, Peng Ouyang, Leibo Liu, Shaojun Wei
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Spotting, Small-Footprint Keyword Spotting

Despite the recent successes of deep neural networks, it remains challenging to achieve high precision keyword spotting task (KWS) on resource-constrained devices. In this study, we propose a novel context-aware and compact architecture for keyword spotting task. Based on residual connection and bottleneck structure, we design a compact and efficient network for KWS task. To leverage the long range dependencies and global context of the convolutional feature maps, the graph convolutional network is introduced to encode the non-local relations. By evaluated on the Google Speech Command Dataset, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms the prior works by a large margin with lower computational cost.
Towards Better Forecasting by Fusing Near and Distant Future Visions
Authors: Jiezhu Cheng, Kai-Zhu Huang, Zibin Zheng
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Multivariate Time Series Forecasting, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series forecasting is an important yet challenging problem in machine learning. Most existing approaches only forecast the series value of one future moment, ignoring the interactions between predictions of future moments with different temporal distance. Such a deficiency probably prevents the model from getting enough information about the future, thus limiting the forecasting accuracy. To address this problem, we propose Multi-Level Construal Neural Network (MLCNN), a novel multi-task deep learning framework. Inspired by the Construal Level Theory of psychology, this model aims to improve the predictive performance by fusing forecasting information (i.e., future visions) of different future time. We first use the Convolution Neural Network to extract multi-level abstract representations of the raw data for near and distant future predictions. We then model the interplay between multiple predictive tasks and fuse their future visions through a modified Encoder-Decoder architecture. Finally, we combine traditional Autoregression model with the neural network to solve the scale insensitive problem. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our method achieves statistically significant improvements compared to the most state-of-the-art baseline methods, with average 4.59% reduction on RMSE metric and average 6.87% reduction on MAE metric.
Doubly Robust Off-Policy Actor-Critic Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Riashat Islam, Raihan Seraj, Samin Yeasar Arnob, Doina Precup
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Safe Reinforcement Learning

We study the problem of off-policy critic evaluation in several variants of value-based off-policy actor-critic algorithms. Off-policy actor-critic algorithms require an off-policy critic evaluation step, to estimate the value of the new policy after every policy gradient update. Despite enormous success of off-policy policy gradients on control tasks, existing general methods suffer from high variance and instability, partly because the policy improvement depends on gradient of the estimated value function. In this work, we present a new way of off-policy policy evaluation in actor-critic, based on the doubly robust estimators. We extend the doubly robust estimator from off-policy policy evaluation (OPE) to actor-critic algorithms that consist of a reward estimator performance model. We find that doubly robust estimation of the critic can significantly improve performance in continuous control tasks. Furthermore, in cases where the reward function is stochastic that can lead to high variance, doubly robust critic estimation can improve performance under corrupted, stochastic reward signals, indicating its usefulness for robust and safe reinforcement learning.