pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TopoTag: A Robust and Scalable Topological Fiducial Marker System
Authors: Guoxing Yu, Yongtao Hu, Jingwen Dai
Date: 2019-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Robot Navigation, TAG

Fiducial markers have been playing an important role in augmented reality (AR), robot navigation, and general applications where the relative pose between a camera and an object is required. Here we introduce TopoTag, a robust and scalable topological fiducial marker system, which supports reliable and accurate pose estimation from a single image. TopoTag uses topological and geometrical information in marker detection to achieve higher robustness. Topological information is extensively used for 2D marker detection, and further corresponding geometrical information for ID decoding. Robust 3D pose estimation is achieved by taking advantage of all TopoTag vertices. Without sacrificing bits for higher recall and precision like previous systems, TopoTag can use full bits for ID encoding. TopoTag supports tens of thousands unique IDs and easily extends to millions of unique tags resulting in massive scalability. We collected a large test dataset including in total 169,713 images for evaluation, involving in-plane and out-of-plane rotation, image blur, different distances and various backgrounds, etc. Experiments on the dataset and real indoor and outdoor scene tests with a rolling shutter camera both show that TopoTag significantly outperforms previous fiducial marker systems in terms of various metrics, including detection accuracy, vertex jitter, pose jitter and accuracy, etc. In addition, TopoTag supports occlusion as long as the main tag topological structure is maintained and allows for flexible shape design where users can customize internal and external marker shapes. Code for our marker design/generation, marker detection, and dataset are available at http://herohuyongtao.github.io/research/publications/topo-tag/.
Image to Video Domain Adaptation Using Web Supervision
Authors: Andrew Kae, Yale Song
Date: 2019-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Training deep neural networks typically requires large amounts of labeled data which may be scarce or expensive to obtain for a particular target domain. As an alternative, we can leverage webly-supervised data (i.e. results from a public search engine) which are relatively plentiful but may contain noisy results. In this work, we propose a novel two-stage approach to learn a video classifier using webly-supervised data. We argue that learning appearance features and then temporal features sequentially, rather than simultaneously, is an easier optimization for this task. We show this by first learning an image model from web images, which is used to initialize and train a video model. Our model applies domain adaptation to account for potential domain shift present between the source domain (webly-supervised data) and target domain and also accounts for noise by adding a novel attention component. We report results competitive with state-of-the-art for webly-supervised approaches on UCF-101 (while simplifying the training process) and also evaluate on Kinetics for comparison.
Learning Compact Target-Oriented Feature Representations for Visual Tracking
Authors: Chenglong Li, Yan Huang, Liang Wang, Jin Tang, Liang Lin
Date: 2019-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Tracking

Many state-of-the-art trackers usually resort to the pretrained convolutional neural network (CNN) model for correlation filtering, in which deep features could usually be redundant, noisy and less discriminative for some certain instances, and the tracking performance might thus be affected. To handle this problem, we propose a novel approach, which takes both advantages of good generalization of generative models and excellent discrimination of discriminative models, for visual tracking. In particular, we learn compact, discriminative and target-oriented feature representations using the Laplacian coding algorithm that exploits the dependence among the input local features in a discriminative correlation filter framework. The feature representations and the correlation filter are jointly learnt to enhance to each other via a fast solver which only has very slight computational burden on the tracking speed. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that this proposed framework clearly outperforms baseline trackers with a modest impact on the frame rate, and performs comparably against the state-of-the-art methods.
Restricted Linearized Augmented Lagrangian Method for Euler's Elastica Model
Authors: Yinghui Zhang, Xiaojuan Deng, Jun Zhang, Hongwei Li
Date: 2019-08-05 00:00:00

Euler's elastica model has been extensively studied and applied to image processing tasks. However, due to the high nonlinearity and nonconvexity of the involved curvature term, conventional algorithms suffer from slow convergence and high computational cost. Various fast algorithms have been proposed, among which, the augmented Lagrangian based ones are very popular in the community. However, parameter tuning might be very challenging for these methods. In this paper, a simple cutting-off strategy is introduced into the augmented Lagrangian based algorithms for minimizing the Euler's elastica energy, which leads to easy parameter tuning and fast convergence. The cutting-off strategy is based on an observation of inconsistency inside the augmented Lagrangian based algorithms. When the weighting parameter of the curvature term goes to zero, the energy functional boils down to the ROF model. So, a natural requirement is that its augmented Lagrangian based algorithms should also approach the augmented Lagrangian based algorithms formulated directly for solving the ROF model from the very beginning. Unfortunately, this is not the case for certain existing augmented Lagrangian based algorithms. The proposed cutting-off strategy helps to decouple the tricky dependence between the auxiliary splitting variables, so as to remove the observed inconsistency. Numerical experiments suggest that the proposed algorithm enjoys easier parameter-tuning, faster convergence and even higher quality of image restorations.
Inference of visual field test performance from OCT volumes using deep learning
Authors: Stefan Maetschke, Bhavna Antony, Hiroshi Ishikawa, Gadi Wollstein, Joel Schuman, Rahil Garnavi
Date: 2019-08-05 00:00:00

Visual field tests (VFT) are pivotal for glaucoma diagnosis and conducted regularly to monitor disease progression. Here we address the question to what degree aggregate VFT measurements such as Visual Field Index (VFI) and Mean Deviation (MD) can be inferred from Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) scans of the Optic Nerve Head (ONH) or the macula. Accurate inference of VFT measurements from OCT could reduce examination time and cost. We propose a novel 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for this task and compare its accuracy with classical machine learning (ML) algorithms trained on common, segmentation-based OCT, features employed for glaucoma diagnostics. Peak accuracies were achieved on ONH scans when inferring VFI with a Pearson Correlation (PC) of 0.88$\pm$0.035 for the CNN and a significantly lower (p $<$ 0.01) PC of 0.74$\pm$0.090 for the best performing, classical ML algorithm - a Random Forest regressor. Estimation of MD was equally accurate with a PC of 0.88$\pm$0.023 on ONH scans for the CNN.
ChemBO: Bayesian Optimization of Small Organic Molecules with Synthesizable Recommendations
Authors: Ksenia Korovina, Sailun Xu, Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Willie Neiswanger, Barnabas Poczos, Jeff Schneider, Eric P. Xing
Date: 2019-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Drug Discovery

In applications such as molecule design or drug discovery, it is desirable to have an algorithm which recommends new candidate molecules based on the results of past tests. These molecules first need to be synthesized and then tested for objective properties. We describe ChemBO, a Bayesian optimization framework for generating and optimizing organic molecules for desired molecular properties. While most existing data-driven methods for this problem do not account for sample efficiency or fail to enforce realistic constraints on synthesizability, our approach explores the synthesis graph in a sample-efficient way and produces synthesizable candidates. We implement ChemBO as a Gaussian process model and explore existing molecular kernels for it. Moreover, we propose a novel optimal-transport based distance and kernel that accounts for graphical information explicitly. In our experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach on several molecular optimization problems.
Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Simulation-based Strategy Analysis
Authors: Alexander Zook, Brent Harrison, Mark O. Riedl
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Game Design

Games are often designed to shape player behavior in a desired way; however, it can be unclear how design decisions affect the space of behaviors in a game. Designers usually explore this space through human playtesting, which can be time-consuming and of limited effectiveness in exhausting the space of possible behaviors. In this paper, we propose the use of automated planning agents to simulate humans of varying skill levels to generate game playthroughs. Metrics can then be gathered from these playthroughs to evaluate the current game design and identify its potential flaws. We demonstrate this technique in two games: the popular word game Scrabble and a collectible card game of our own design named Cardonomicon. Using these case studies, we show how using simulated agents to model humans of varying skill levels allows us to extract metrics to describe game balance (in the case of Scrabble) and highlight potential design flaws (in the case of Cardonomicon).
Automatic Game Design via Mechanic Generation
Authors: Alexander Zook, Mark O. Riedl
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Game Design

Game designs often center on the game mechanics---rules governing the logical evolution of the game. We seek to develop an intelligent system that generates computer games. As first steps towards this goal we present a composable and cross-domain representation for game mechanics that draws from AI planning action representations. We use a constraint solver to generate mechanics subject to design requirements on the form of those mechanics---what they do in the game. A planner takes a set of generated mechanics and tests whether those mechanics meet playability requirements---controlling how mechanics function in a game to affect player behavior. We demonstrate our system by modeling and generating mechanics in a role-playing game, platformer game, and combined role-playing-platformer game.
Automatic Playtesting for Game Parameter Tuning via Active Learning
Authors: Alexander Zook, Eric Fruchter, Mark O. Riedl
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Game Design

Game designers use human playtesting to gather feedback about game design elements when iteratively improving a game. Playtesting, however, is expensive: human testers must be recruited, playtest results must be aggregated and interpreted, and changes to game designs must be extrapolated from these results. Can automated methods reduce this expense? We show how active learning techniques can formalize and automate a subset of playtesting goals. Specifically, we focus on the low-level parameter tuning required to balance a game once the mechanics have been chosen. Through a case study on a shoot-`em-up game we demonstrate the efficacy of active learning to reduce the amount of playtesting needed to choose the optimal set of game parameters for two classes of (formal) design objectives. This work opens the potential for additional methods to reduce the human burden of performing playtesting for a variety of relevant design concerns.
Deep Neural Network for Semantic-based Text Recognition in Images
Authors: Yi Zheng, Qitong Wang, Margrit Betke
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Spotting

State-of-the-art text spotting systems typically aim to detect isolated words or word-by-word text in images of natural scenes and ignore the semantic coherence within a region of text. However, when interpreted together, seemingly isolated words may be easier to recognize. On this basis, we propose a novel "semantic-based text recognition" (STR) deep learning model that reads text in images with the help of understanding context. STR consists of several modules. We introduce the Text Grouping and Arranging (TGA) algorithm to connect and order isolated text regions. A text-recognition network interprets isolated words. Benefiting from semantic information, a sequenceto-sequence network model efficiently corrects inaccurate and uncertain phrases produced earlier in the STR pipeline. We present experiments on two new distinct datasets that contain scanned catalog images of interior designs and photographs of protesters with hand-written signs, respectively. Our results show that our STR model outperforms a baseline method that uses state-of-the-art single-wordrecognition techniques on both datasets. STR yields a high accuracy rate of 90% on the catalog images and 71% on the more difficult protest images, suggesting its generality in recognizing text.
Sound Event Detection in Multichannel Audio using Convolutional Time-Frequency-Channel Squeeze and Excitation
Authors: Wei Xia, Kazuhito Koishida
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, Sound Event Detection

In this study, we introduce a convolutional time-frequency-channel "Squeeze and Excitation" (tfc-SE) module to explicitly model inter-dependencies between the time-frequency domain and multiple channels. The tfc-SE module consists of two parts: tf-SE block and c-SE block which are designed to provide attention on time-frequency and channel domain, respectively, for adaptively recalibrating the input feature map. The proposed tfc-SE module, together with a popular Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) model, are evaluated on a multi-channel sound event detection task with overlapping audio sources: the training and test data are synthesized TUT Sound Events 2018 datasets, recorded with microphone arrays. We show that the tfc-SE module can be incorporated into the CRNN model at a small additional computational cost and bring significant improvements on sound event detection accuracy. We also perform detailed ablation studies by analyzing various factors that may influence the performance of the SE blocks. We show that with the best tfc-SE block, error rate (ER) decreases from 0.2538 to 0.2026, relative 20.17\% reduction of ER, and 5.72\% improvement of F1 score. The results indicate that the learned acoustic embeddings with the tfc-SE module efficiently strengthen time-frequency and channel-wise feature representations to improve the discriminative performance.
Learning to Transport with Neural Networks
Authors: Andrea Schioppa
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00

We compare several approaches to learn an Optimal Map, represented as a neural network, between probability distributions. The approaches fall into two categories: ``Heuristics'' and approaches with a more sound mathematical justification, motivated by the dual of the Kantorovitch problem. Among the algorithms we consider a novel approach involving dynamic flows and reductions of Optimal Transport to supervised learning.
Simultaneous Clustering and Optimization for Evolving Datasets
Authors: Yawei Zhao, En Zhu, Xinwang Liu, Chang Tang, Deke Guo, Jianping Yin
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, regression

Simultaneous clustering and optimization (SCO) has recently drawn much attention due to its wide range of practical applications. Many methods have been previously proposed to solve this problem and obtain the optimal model. However, when a dataset evolves over time, those existing methods have to update the model frequently to guarantee accuracy; such updating is computationally infeasible. In this paper, we propose a new formulation of SCO to handle evolving datasets. Specifically, we propose a new variant of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve this problem efficiently. The guarantee of model accuracy is analyzed theoretically for two specific tasks: ridge regression and convex clustering. Extensive empirical studies confirm the effectiveness of our method.
Image-Guided Depth Sampling and Reconstruction
Authors: Adam Wolff, Shachar Praisler, Ilya Tcenov, Guy Gilboa
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Depth Completion

Depth acquisition, based on active illumination, is essential for autonomous and robotic navigation. LiDARs (Light Detection And Ranging) with mechanical, fixed, sampling templates are commonly used in today's autonomous vehicles. An emerging technology, based on solid-state depth sensors, with no mechanical parts, allows fast, adaptive, programmable scans. In this paper, we investigate the topic of adaptive, image-driven, sampling and reconstruction strategies. First, we formulate a piece-wise linear depth model with several tolerance parameters and estimate its validity for indoor and outdoor scenes. Our model and experiments predict that, in the optimal case, about 20-60 piece-wise linear structures can approximate well a depth map. This translates to a depth-to-image sampling ratio of about 1/1200. We propose a simple, generic, sampling and reconstruction algorithm, based on super-pixels. We reach a sampling rate which is still far from the optimal case. However, our sampling improves grid and random sampling, consistently, for a wide variety of reconstruction methods. Moreover, our proposed reconstruction achieves state-of-the-art results, compared to image-guided depth completion algorithms, reducing the required sampling rate by a factor of 3-4. A single-pixel depth camera built in our lab illustrates the concept.
Unsupervised Microvascular Image Segmentation Using an Active Contours Mimicking Neural Network
Authors: Shir Gur, Lior Wolf, Lior Golgher, Pablo Blinder
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Diagnostic, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The task of blood vessel segmentation in microscopy images is crucial for many diagnostic and research applications. However, vessels can look vastly different, depending on the transient imaging conditions, and collecting data for supervised training is laborious. We present a novel deep learning method for unsupervised segmentation of blood vessels. The method is inspired by the field of active contours and we introduce a new loss term, which is based on the morphological Active Contours Without Edges (ACWE) optimization method. The role of the morphological operators is played by novel pooling layers that are incorporated to the network's architecture. We demonstrate the challenges that are faced by previous supervised learning solutions, when the imaging conditions shift. Our unsupervised method is able to outperform such previous methods in both the labeled dataset, and when applied to similar but different datasets. Our code, as well as efficient PyTorch reimplementations of the baseline methods VesselNN and DeepVess is available on GitHub - https://github.com/shirgur/UMIS.
Unsupervised Learning of Depth and Deep Representation for Visual Odometry from Monocular Videos in a Metric Space
Authors: Xiaochuan Yin, Chengju Liu
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Motion Estimation, Representation Learning, Text-to-Image Generation, Translation, Visual Odometry

For ego-motion estimation, the feature representation of the scenes is crucial. Previous methods indicate that both the low-level and semantic feature-based methods can achieve promising results. Therefore, the incorporation of hierarchical feature representation may benefit from both methods. From this perspective, we propose a novel direct feature odometry framework, named DFO, for depth estimation and hierarchical feature representation learning from monocular videos. By exploiting the metric distance, our framework is able to learn the hierarchical feature representation without supervision. The pose is obtained with a coarse-to-fine approach from high-level to low-level features in enlarged feature maps. The pixel-level attention mask can be self-learned to provide the prior information. In contrast to the previous methods, our proposed method calculates the camera motion with a direct method rather than regressing the ego-motion from the pose network. With this approach, the consistency of the scale factor of translation can be constrained. Additionally, the proposed method is thus compatible with the traditional SLAM pipeline. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
ASNets: Deep Learning for Generalised Planning
Authors: Sam Toyer, Felipe Trevizan, Sylvie Thiébaux, Lexing Xie
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Heuristic Search

In this paper, we discuss the learning of generalised policies for probabilistic and classical planning problems using Action Schema Networks (ASNets). The ASNet is a neural network architecture that exploits the relational structure of (P)PDDL planning problems to learn a common set of weights that can be applied to any problem in a domain. By mimicking the actions chosen by a traditional, non-learning planner on a handful of small problems in a domain, ASNets are able to learn a generalised reactive policy that can quickly solve much larger instances from the domain. This work extends the ASNet architecture to make it more expressive, while still remaining invariant to a range of symmetries that exist in PPDDL problems. We also present a thorough experimental evaluation of ASNets, including a comparison with heuristic search planners on seven probabilistic and deterministic domains, an extended evaluation on over 18,000 Blocksworld instances, and an ablation study. Finally, we show that sparsity-inducing regularisation can produce ASNets that are compact enough for humans to understand, yielding insights into how the structure of ASNets allows them to generalise across a domain.
Separating Argument Structure from Logical Structure in AMR
Authors: Johan Bos
Date: 2019-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: DMR (COLING) 2020 12
Tasks: Abstract Meaning Representation, Negation

The AMR (Abstract Meaning Representation) formalism for representing meaning of natural language sentences was not designed to deal with scope and quantifiers. By extending AMR with indices for contexts and formulating constraints on these contexts, a formalism is derived that makes correct prediction for inferences involving negation and bound variables. The attractive core predicate-argument structure of AMR is preserved. The resulting framework is similar to that of Discourse Representation Theory.