pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Multi-modal Style Transfer for Cardiac MR Segmentation
Authors: Chen Chen, Cheng Ouyang, Giacomo Tarroni, Jo Schlemper, Huaqi Qiu, Wenjia Bai, Daniel Rueckert
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Style Transfer, Translation

In this work, we present a fully automatic method to segment cardiac structures from late-gadolinium enhanced (LGE) images without using labelled LGE data for training, but instead by transferring the anatomical knowledge and features learned on annotated balanced steady-state free precession (bSSFP) images, which are easier to acquire. Our framework mainly consists of two neural networks: a multi-modal image translation network for style transfer and a cascaded segmentation network for image segmentation. The multi-modal image translation network generates realistic and diverse synthetic LGE images conditioned on a single annotated bSSFP image, forming a synthetic LGE training set. This set is then utilized to fine-tune the segmentation network pre-trained on labelled bSSFP images, achieving the goal of unsupervised LGE image segmentation. In particular, the proposed cascaded segmentation network is able to produce accurate segmentation by taking both shape prior and image appearance into account, achieving an average Dice score of 0.92 for the left ventricle, 0.83 for the myocardium, and 0.88 for the right ventricle on the test set.
Learning Semantic-Specific Graph Representation for Multi-Label Image Recognition
Authors: Tianshui Chen, Muxin Xu, Xiaolu Hui, Hefeng Wu, Liang Lin
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Multi-Label Classification, Multi-Label Image Recognition, Multi-label Image Recognition with Partial Labels, Representation Learning

Recognizing multiple labels of images is a practical and challenging task, and significant progress has been made by searching semantic-aware regions and modeling label dependency. However, current methods cannot locate the semantic regions accurately due to the lack of part-level supervision or semantic guidance. Moreover, they cannot fully explore the mutual interactions among the semantic regions and do not explicitly model the label co-occurrence. To address these issues, we propose a Semantic-Specific Graph Representation Learning (SSGRL) framework that consists of two crucial modules: 1) a semantic decoupling module that incorporates category semantics to guide learning semantic-specific representations and 2) a semantic interaction module that correlates these representations with a graph built on the statistical label co-occurrence and explores their interactions via a graph propagation mechanism. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that our SSGRL framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a sizable margin, e.g. with an mAP improvement of 2.5%, 2.6%, 6.7%, and 3.1% on the PASCAL VOC 2007 & 2012, Microsoft-COCO and Visual Genome benchmarks, respectively. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/HCPLab-SYSU/SSGRL.
Instance Scale Normalization for image understanding
Authors: Zewen He, He Huang, Yudong Wu, Guan Huang, Wensheng Zhang
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Recognition, Pose Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Scale variation remains a challenging problem for object detection. Common paradigms usually adopt multiscale training & testing (image pyramid) or FPN (feature pyramid network) to process objects in a wide scale range. However, multi-scale methods aggravate more variations of scale that even deep convolution neural networks with FPN cannot handle well. In this work, we propose an innovative paradigm called Instance Scale Normalization (ISN) to resolve the above problem. ISN compresses the scale space of objects into a consistent range (ISN range), in both training and testing phases. This reassures the problem of scale variation fundamentally and reduces the difficulty of network optimization. Experiments show that ISN surpasses multi-scale counterpart significantly for object detection, instance segmentation, and multi-task human pose estimation, on several architectures. On COCO test-dev, our single model based on ISN achieves 46.5 mAP with a ResNet-101 backbone, which is among the state-of-the-art (SOTA) candidates for object detection.
Accurate and interpretable evaluation of surgical skills from kinematic data using fully convolutional neural networks
Authors: Hassan Ismail Fawaz, Germain Forestier, Jonathan Weber, Lhassane Idoumghar, Pierre-Alain Muller
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, General Classification, Interpretable Machine Learning, Skills Evaluation, Surgical Skills Evaluation

Purpose: Manual feedback from senior surgeons observing less experienced trainees is a laborious task that is very expensive, time-consuming and prone to subjectivity. With the number of surgical procedures increasing annually, there is an unprecedented need to provide an accurate, objective and automatic evaluation of trainees' surgical skills in order to improve surgical practice. Methods: In this paper, we designed a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify surgical skills by extracting latent patterns in the trainees' motions performed during robotic surgery. The method is validated on the JIGSAWS dataset for two surgical skills evaluation tasks: classification and regression. Results: Our results show that deep neural networks constitute robust machine learning models that are able to reach new competitive state-of-the-art performance on the JIGSAWS dataset. While we leveraged from CNNs' efficiency, we were able to minimize its black-box effect using the class activation map technique. Conclusions: This characteristic allowed our method to automatically pinpoint which parts of the surgery influenced the skill evaluation the most, thus allowing us to explain a surgical skill classification and provide surgeons with a novel personalized feedback technique. We believe this type of interpretable machine learning model could integrate within "Operation Room 2.0" and support novice surgeons in improving their skills to eventually become experts.
Investigation of wind pressures on tall building under interference effects using machine learning techniques
Authors: Gang Hu, Lingbo Liu, DaCheng Tao, Jie Song, K. C. S. Kwok
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Interference effects of tall buildings have attracted numerous studies due to the boom of clusters of tall buildings in megacities. To fully understand the interference effects of buildings, it often requires a substantial amount of wind tunnel tests. Limited wind tunnel tests that only cover part of interference scenarios are unable to fully reveal the interference effects. This study used machine learning techniques to resolve the conflicting requirement between limited wind tunnel tests that produce unreliable results and a completed investigation of the interference effects that is costly and time-consuming. Four machine learning models including decision tree, random forest, XGBoost, generative adversarial networks (GANs), were trained based on 30% of a dataset to predict both mean and fluctuating pressure coefficients on the principal building. The GANs model exhibited the best performance in predicting these pressure coefficients. A number of GANs models were then trained based on different portions of the dataset ranging from 10% to 90%. It was found that the GANs model based on 30% of the dataset is capable of predicting both mean and fluctuating pressure coefficients under unseen interference conditions accurately. By using this GANs model, 70% of the wind tunnel test cases can be saved, largely alleviating the cost of this kind of wind tunnel testing study.
Unsupervised Single Image Dehazing Using Dark Channel Prior Loss
Authors: Alona Golts, Daniel Freedman, Michael Elad
Date: 2018-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing

Single image dehazing is a critical stage in many modern-day autonomous vision applications. Early prior-based methods often involved a time-consuming minimization of a hand-crafted energy function. Recent learning-based approaches utilize the representational power of deep neural networks (DNNs) to learn the underlying transformation between hazy and clear images. Due to inherent limitations in collecting matching clear and hazy images, these methods resort to training on synthetic data; constructed from indoor images and corresponding depth information. This may result in a possible domain shift when treating outdoor scenes. We propose a completely unsupervised method of training via minimization of the well-known, Dark Channel Prior (DCP) energy function. Instead of feeding the network with synthetic data, we solely use real-world outdoor images and tune the network's parameters by directly minimizing the DCP. Although our "Deep DCP" technique can be regarded as a fast approximator of DCP, it actually improves its results significantly. This suggests an additional regularization obtained via the network and learning process. Experiments show that our method performs on par with large-scale supervised methods.
Unsupervised Hierarchical Grouping of Knowledge Graph Entities
Authors: Sameh K. Mohamed
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs have attracted lots of attention in academic and industrial environments. Despite their usefulness, popular knowledge graphs suffer from incompleteness of information, especially in their type assertions. This has encouraged research in the automatic discovery of entity types. In this context, multiple works were developed to utilize logical inference on ontologies and statistical machine learning methods to learn type assertion in knowledge graphs. However, these approaches suffer from limited performance on noisy data, limited scalability and the dependence on labeled training samples. In this work, we propose a new unsupervised approach that learns to categorize entities into a hierarchy of named groups. We show that our approach is able to effectively learn entity groups using a scalable procedure in noisy and sparse datasets. We experiment our approach on a set of popular knowledge graph benchmarking datasets, and we publish a collection of the outcome group hierarchies.
Towards High-Resolution Salient Object Detection
Authors: Yi Zeng, Pingping Zhang, Jianming Zhang, Zhe Lin, Huchuan Lu
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Saliency Detection, Salient Object Detection, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Deep neural network based methods have made a significant breakthrough in salient object detection. However, they are typically limited to input images with low resolutions ($400\times400$ pixels or less). Little effort has been made to train deep neural networks to directly handle salient object detection in very high-resolution images. This paper pushes forward high-resolution saliency detection, and contributes a new dataset, named High-Resolution Salient Object Detection (HRSOD). To our best knowledge, HRSOD is the first high-resolution saliency detection dataset to date. As another contribution, we also propose a novel approach, which incorporates both global semantic information and local high-resolution details, to address this challenging task. More specifically, our approach consists of a Global Semantic Network (GSN), a Local Refinement Network (LRN) and a Global-Local Fusion Network (GLFN). GSN extracts the global semantic information based on down-sampled entire image. Guided by the results of GSN, LRN focuses on some local regions and progressively produces high-resolution predictions. GLFN is further proposed to enforce spatial consistency and boost performance. Experiments illustrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on high-resolution saliency datasets by a large margin, and achieves comparable or even better performance than them on widely-used saliency benchmarks. The HRSOD dataset is available at https://github.com/yi94code/HRSOD.
RelGAN: Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation via Relative Attributes
Authors: Po-Wei Wu, Yu-Jing Lin, Che-Han Chang, Edward Y. Chang, Shih-wei Liao
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Attribute, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Multi-domain image-to-image translation has gained increasing attention recently. Previous methods take an image and some target attributes as inputs and generate an output image with the desired attributes. However, such methods have two limitations. First, these methods assume binary-valued attributes and thus cannot yield satisfactory results for fine-grained control. Second, these methods require specifying the entire set of target attributes, even if most of the attributes would not be changed. To address these limitations, we propose RelGAN, a new method for multi-domain image-to-image translation. The key idea is to use relative attributes, which describes the desired change on selected attributes. Our method is capable of modifying images by changing particular attributes of interest in a continuous manner while preserving the other attributes. Experimental results demonstrate both the quantitative and qualitative effectiveness of our method on the tasks of facial attribute transfer and interpolation.
Interactive Trajectory Adaptation through Force-guided Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Leonel Rozo
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

Flexible manufacturing processes demand robots to easily adapt to changes in the environment and interact with humans. In such dynamic scenarios, robotic tasks may be programmed through learning-from-demonstration approaches, where a nominal plan of the task is learned by the robot. However, the learned plan may need to be adapted in order to fulfill additional requirements or overcome unexpected environment changes. When the required adaptation occurs at the end-effector trajectory level, a human operator may want to intuitively show the robot the desired changes by physically interacting with it. In this scenario, the robot needs to understand the human intended changes from noisy haptic data, quickly adapt accordingly and execute the nominal task plan when no further adaptation is needed. This paper addresses the aforementioned challenges by leveraging LfD and Bayesian optimization to endow the robot with data-efficient adaptation capabilities. Our approach exploits the sensed interaction forces to guide the robot adaptation, and speeds up the optimization process by defining local search spaces extracted from the learned task model. We show how our framework quickly adapts the learned spatial-temporal patterns of the task, leading to deformed trajectory distributions that are consistent with the nominal plan and the changes introduced by the human.
A Neural Virtual Anchor Synthesizer based on Seq2Seq and GAN Models
Authors: Zipeng Wang, Zhaoxiang Liu, Zezhou Chen, Huan Hu, Shiguo Lian
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

This paper presents a novel framework to generate realistic face video of an anchor, who is reading certain news. This task is also known as Virtual Anchor. Given some paragraphs of words, we first utilize a pretrained Word2Vec model to embed each word into a vector; then we utilize a Seq2Seq-based model to translate these word embeddings into action units and head poses of the target anchor; these action units and head poses will be concatenated with facial landmarks as well as the former $n$ synthesized frames, and the concatenation serves as input of a Pix2PixHD-based model to synthesize realistic facial images for the virtual anchor. The experimental results demonstrate our framework is feasible for the synthesis of virtual anchor.
n-MeRCI: A new Metric to Evaluate the Correlation Between Predictive Uncertainty and True Error
Authors: Michel Moukari, Loïc Simon, Sylvaine Picard, Frédéric Jurie
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation

As deep learning applications are becoming more and more pervasive in robotics, the question of evaluating the reliability of inferences becomes a central question in the robotics community. This domain, known as predictive uncertainty, has come under the scrutiny of research groups developing Bayesian approaches adapted to deep learning such as Monte Carlo Dropout. Unfortunately, for the time being, the real goal of predictive uncertainty has been swept under the rug. Indeed, these approaches are solely evaluated in terms of raw performance of the network prediction, while the quality of their estimated uncertainty is not assessed. Evaluating such uncertainty prediction quality is especially important in robotics, as actions shall depend on the confidence in perceived information. In this context, the main contribution of this article is to propose a novel metric that is adapted to the evaluation of relative uncertainty assessment and directly applicable to regression with deep neural networks. To experimentally validate this metric, we evaluate it on a toy dataset and then apply it to the task of monocular depth estimation.
GlossBERT: BERT for Word Sense Disambiguation with Gloss Knowledge
Authors: Luyao Huang, Chi Sun, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Word Sense Disambiguation

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to find the exact sense of an ambiguous word in a particular context. Traditional supervised methods rarely take into consideration the lexical resources like WordNet, which are widely utilized in knowledge-based methods. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of incorporating gloss (sense definition) into neural networks for WSD. However, compared with traditional word expert supervised methods, they have not achieved much improvement. In this paper, we focus on how to better leverage gloss knowledge in a supervised neural WSD system. We construct context-gloss pairs and propose three BERT-based models for WSD. We fine-tune the pre-trained BERT model on SemCor3.0 training corpus and the experimental results on several English all-words WSD benchmark datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art systems.
Proposal-free Temporal Moment Localization of a Natural-Language Query in Video using Guided Attention
Authors: Cristian Rodriguez-Opazo, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Fatemeh Sadat Saleh, Hongdong Li, Stephen Gould
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

This paper studies the problem of temporal moment localization in a long untrimmed video using natural language as the query. Given an untrimmed video and a sentence as the query, the goal is to determine the starting, and the ending, of the relevant visual moment in the video, that corresponds to the query sentence. While previous works have tackled this task by a propose-and-rank approach, we introduce a more efficient, end-to-end trainable, and {\em proposal-free approach} that relies on three key components: a dynamic filter to transfer language information to the visual domain, a new loss function to guide our model to attend the most relevant parts of the video, and soft labels to model annotation uncertainty. We evaluate our method on two benchmark datasets, Charades-STA and ActivityNet-Captions. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both datasets.
Density estimation in representation space to predict model uncertainty
Authors: Tiago Ramalho, Miguel Miranda
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, image-classification, Image Classification, Out-of-Distribution Detection

Deep learning models frequently make incorrect predictions with high confidence when presented with test examples that are not well represented in their training dataset. We propose a novel and straightforward approach to estimate prediction uncertainty in a pre-trained neural network model. Our method estimates the training data density in representation space for a novel input. A neural network model then uses this information to determine whether we expect the pre-trained model to make a correct prediction. This uncertainty model is trained by predicting in-distribution errors, but can detect out-of-distribution data without having seen any such example. We test our method for a state-of-the art image classification model in the settings of both in-distribution uncertainty estimation as well as out-of-distribution detection.
Prosodic Phrase Alignment for Machine Dubbing
Authors: Alp Öktem, Mireia Farrús, Antonio Bonafonte
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Dubbing is a type of audiovisual translation where dialogues are translated and enacted so that they give the impression that the media is in the target language. It requires a careful alignment of dubbed recordings with the lip movements of performers in order to achieve visual coherence. In this paper, we deal with the specific problem of prosodic phrase synchronization within the framework of machine dubbing. Our methodology exploits the attention mechanism output in neural machine translation to find plausible phrasing for the translated dialogue lines and then uses them to condition their synthesis. Our initial work in this field records comparable speech rate ratio to professional dubbing translation, and improvement in terms of lip-syncing of long dialogue lines.
SROBB: Targeted Perceptual Loss for Single Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Mohammad Saeed Rad, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Urs-Viktor Marti, Max Basler, Hazim Kemal Ekenel, Jean-Philippe Thiran
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Decoder, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

By benefiting from perceptual losses, recent studies have improved significantly the performance of the super-resolution task, where a high-resolution image is resolved from its low-resolution counterpart. Although such objective functions generate near-photorealistic results, their capability is limited, since they estimate the reconstruction error for an entire image in the same way, without considering any semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel method to benefit from perceptual loss in a more objective way. We optimize a deep network-based decoder with a targeted objective function that penalizes images at different semantic levels using the corresponding terms. In particular, the proposed method leverages our proposed OBB (Object, Background and Boundary) labels, generated from segmentation labels, to estimate a suitable perceptual loss for boundaries, while considering texture similarity for backgrounds. We show that our proposed approach results in more realistic textures and sharper edges, and outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of both qualitative results on standard benchmarks and results of extensive user studies.
A Bayesian Lasso based Sparse Learning Model
Authors: Ingvild M. Helgøy, Yushu Li
Date: 2019-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, model, regression, Sparse Learning

The Bayesian Lasso is constructed in the linear regression framework and applies the Gibbs sampling to estimate the regression parameters. This paper develops a new sparse learning model, named the Bayesian Lasso Sparse (BLS) model, that takes the hierarchical model formulation of the Bayesian Lasso. The main difference from the original Bayesian Lasso lies in the estimation procedure; the BLS method uses a learning algorithm based on the type-II maximum likelihood procedure. Opposed to the Bayesian Lasso, the BLS provides sparse estimates of the regression parameters. The BLS method is also derived for nonlinear supervised learning problems by introducing kernel functions. We compare the BLS model to the well known Relevance Vector Machine, the Fast Laplace method, the Byesian Lasso, and the Lasso, on both simulated and real data. The numerical results show that the BLS is sparse and precise, especially when dealing with noisy and irregular dataset.