pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Transfer Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation
Authors: Jonas Wacker, Marcelo Ladeira, José Eduardo Vaz Nascimento
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning, Tumor Segmentation

Gliomas are the most common malignant brain tumors that are treated with chemoradiotherapy and surgery. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is used by radiotherapists to manually segment brain lesions and to observe their development throughout the therapy. The manual image segmentation process is time-consuming and results tend to vary among different human raters. Therefore, there is a substantial demand for automatic image segmentation algorithms that produce a reliable and accurate segmentation of various brain tissue types. Recent advances in deep learning have led to convolutional neural network architectures that excel at various visual recognition tasks. They have been successfully applied to the medical context including medical image segmentation. In particular, fully convolutional networks (FCNs) such as the U-Net produce state-of-the-art results in the automatic segmentation of brain tumors. MRI brain scans are volumetric and exist in various co-registered modalities that serve as input channels for these FCN architectures. Training algorithms for brain tumor segmentation on this complex input requires large amounts of computational resources and is prone to overfitting. In this work, we construct FCNs with pretrained convolutional encoders. We show that we can stabilize the training process this way and achieve an improvement with respect to dice scores and Hausdorff distances. We also test our method on a privately obtained clinical dataset.
The Limits of Efficiency for Open- and Closed-World Query Evaluation Under Guarded TGDs
Authors: Pablo Barcelo, Victor Dalmau, Cristina Feier, Carsten Lutz, Andreas Pieris
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00

Ontology-mediated querying and querying in the presence of constraints are two key database problems where tuple-generating dependencies (TGDs) play a central role. In ontology-mediated querying, TGDs can formalize the ontology and thus derive additional facts from the given data, while in querying in the presence of constraints, they restrict the set of admissible databases. In this work, we study the limits of efficient query evaluation in the context of the above two problems, focussing on guarded and frontier-guarded TGDs and on UCQs as the actual queries. We show that a class of ontology-mediated queries (OMQs) based on guarded TGDs can be evaluated in FPT iff the OMQs in the class are equivalent to OMQs in which the actual query has bounded treewidth, up to some reasonable assumptions. For querying in the presence of constraints, we consider classes of constraint-query specifications (CQSs) that bundle a set of constraints with an actual query. We show a dichotomy result for CQSs based on guarded TGDs that parallels the one for OMQs except that, additionally, FPT coincides with PTime combined complexity. The proof is based on a novel connection between OMQ and CQS evaluation. Using a direct proof, we also show a similar dichotomy result, again up to some reasonable assumptions, for CQSs based on frontier-guarded TGDs with a bounded number of atoms in TGD heads. Our results on CQSs can be viewed as extensions of Grohe's well-known characterization of the tractable classes of CQs (without constraints). Like Grohe's characterization, all the above results assume that the arity of relation symbols is bounded by a constant. We also study the associated meta problems, i.e., whether a given OMQ or CQS is equivalent to one in which the actual query has bounded treewidth.
Silhouette-Net: 3D Hand Pose Estimation from Silhouettes
Authors: Kuo-Wei Lee, Shih-Hung Liu, Hwann-Tzong Chen, Koichi Ito
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Hand Pose Estimation, Hand Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

3D hand pose estimation has received a lot of attention for its wide range of applications and has made great progress owing to the development of deep learning. Existing approaches mainly consider different input modalities and settings, such as monocular RGB, multi-view RGB, depth, or point cloud, to provide sufficient cues for resolving variations caused by self occlusion and viewpoint change. In contrast, this work aims to address the less-explored idea of using minimal information to estimate 3D hand poses. We present a new architecture that automatically learns a guidance from implicit depth perception and solves the ambiguity of hand pose through end-to-end training. The experimental results show that 3D hand poses can be accurately estimated from solely {\em hand silhouettes} without using depth maps. Extensive evaluations on the {\em 2017 Hands In the Million Challenge} (HIM2017) benchmark dataset further demonstrate that our method achieves comparable or even better performance than recent depth-based approaches and serves as the state-of-the-art of its own kind on estimating 3D hand poses from silhouettes.
Hybrid Channel Based Pedestrian Detection
Authors: Fiseha B. Tesema, Hong Wu, Mingjian Chen, Junpeng Lin, William Zhu, Kai-Zhu Huang
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Pedestrian Detection

Pedestrian detection has achieved great improvements with the help of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). CNN can learn high-level features from input images, but the insufficient spatial resolution of CNN feature channels (feature maps) may cause a loss of information, which is harmful especially to small instances. In this paper, we propose a new pedestrian detection framework, which extends the successful RPN+BF framework to combine handcrafted features and CNN features. RoI-pooling is used to extract features from both handcrafted channels (e.g. HOG+LUV, CheckerBoards or RotatedFilters) and CNN channels. Since handcrafted channels always have higher spatial resolution than CNN channels, we apply RoI-pooling with larger output resolution to handcrafted channels to keep more detailed information. Our ablation experiments show that the developed handcrafted features can reach better detection accuracy than the CNN features extracted from the VGG-16 net, and a performance gain can be achieved by combining them. Experimental results on Caltech pedestrian dataset with the original annotations and the improved annotations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. When using a more advanced RPN in our framework, our approach can be further improved and get competitive results on both benchmarks.
TextScanner: Reading Characters in Order for Robust Scene Text Recognition
Authors: Zhaoyi Wan, Minghang He, Haoran Chen, Xiang Bai, Cong Yao
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Scene Text Recognition, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Driven by deep learning and the large volume of data, scene text recognition has evolved rapidly in recent years. Formerly, RNN-attention based methods have dominated this field, but suffer from the problem of \textit{attention drift} in certain situations. Lately, semantic segmentation based algorithms have proven effective at recognizing text of different forms (horizontal, oriented and curved). However, these methods may produce spurious characters or miss genuine characters, as they rely heavily on a thresholding procedure operated on segmentation maps. To tackle these challenges, we propose in this paper an alternative approach, called TextScanner, for scene text recognition. TextScanner bears three characteristics: (1) Basically, it belongs to the semantic segmentation family, as it generates pixel-wise, multi-channel segmentation maps for character class, position and order; (2) Meanwhile, akin to RNN-attention based methods, it also adopts RNN for context modeling; (3) Moreover, it performs paralleled prediction for character position and class, and ensures that characters are transcripted in correct order. The experiments on standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that TextScanner outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, TextScanner shows its superiority in recognizing more difficult text such Chinese transcripts and aligning with target characters.
Transfer Learning in General Lensless Imaging through Scattering Media
Authors: Yukuan Yang, Lei Deng, Peng Jiao, Yansong Chua, Jing Pei, Cheng Ma, Guoqi Li
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Recently deep neural networks (DNNs) have been successfully introduced to the field of lensless imaging through scattering media. By solving an inverse problem in computational imaging, DNNs can overcome several shortcomings in the conventional lensless imaging through scattering media methods, namely, high cost, poor quality, complex control, and poor anti-interference. However, for training, a large number of training samples on various datasets have to be collected, with a DNN trained on one dataset generally performing poorly for recovering images from another dataset. The underlying reason is that lensless imaging through scattering media is a high dimensional regression problem and it is difficult to obtain an analytical solution. In this work, transfer learning is proposed to address this issue. Our main idea is to train a DNN on a relatively complex dataset using a large number of training samples and fine-tune the last few layers using very few samples from other datasets. Instead of the thousands of samples required to train from scratch, transfer learning alleviates the problem of costly data acquisition. Specifically, considering the difference in sample sizes and similarity among datasets, we propose two DNN architectures, namely LISMU-FCN and LISMU-OCN, and a balance loss function designed for balancing smoothness and sharpness. LISMU-FCN, with much fewer parameters, can achieve imaging across similar datasets while LISMU-OCN can achieve imaging across significantly different datasets. What's more, we establish a set of simulation algorithms which are close to the real experiment, and it is of great significance and practical value in the research on lensless scattering imaging. In summary, this work provides a new solution for lensless imaging through scattering media using transfer learning in DNNs.
Measuring group-separability in geometrical space for evaluation of pattern recognition and embedding algorithms
Authors: A. Acevedo, S. Ciucci, MJ. Kuo, C. Duran, CV. Cannistraci
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Evaluating data separation in a geometrical space is fundamental for pattern recognition. A plethora of dimensionality reduction (DR) algorithms have been developed in order to reveal the emergence of geometrical patterns in a low dimensional visible representation space, in which high-dimensional samples similarities are approximated by geometrical distances. However, statistical measures to evaluate directly in the low dimensional geometrical space the sample group separability attaiend by these DR algorithms are missing. Certainly, these separability measures could be used both to compare algorithms performance and to tune algorithms parameters. Here, we propose three statistical measures (named as PSI-ROC, PSI-PR, and PSI-P) that have origin from the Projection Separability (PS) rationale introduced in this study, which is expressly designed to assess group separability of data samples in a geometrical space. Traditional cluster validity indices (CVIs) might be applied in this context but they show limitations because they are not specifically tailored for DR. Our PS measures are compared to six baseline cluster validity indices, using five non-linear datasets and six different DR algorithms. The results provide clear evidence that statistical-based measures based on PS rationale are more accurate than CVIs and can be adopted to control the tuning of parameter-dependent DR algorithms.
Approval policies for modifications to Machine Learning-Based Software as a Medical Device: A study of bio-creep
Authors: Jean Feng, Scott Emerson, Noah Simon
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Marketing, Two-sample testing

Successful deployment of machine learning algorithms in healthcare requires careful assessments of their performance and safety. To date, the FDA approves locked algorithms prior to marketing and requires future updates to undergo separate premarket reviews. However, this negates a key feature of machine learning--the ability to learn from a growing dataset and improve over time. This paper frames the design of an approval policy, which we refer to as an automatic algorithmic change protocol (aACP), as an online hypothesis testing problem. As this process has obvious analogy with noninferiority testing of new drugs, we investigate how repeated testing and adoption of modifications might lead to gradual deterioration in prediction accuracy, also known as ``biocreep'' in the drug development literature. We consider simple policies that one might consider but do not necessarily offer any error-rate guarantees, as well as policies that do provide error-rate control. For the latter, we define two online error-rates appropriate for this context: Bad Approval Count (BAC) and Bad Approval and Benchmark Ratios (BABR). We control these rates in the simple setting of a constant population and data source using policies aACP-BAC and aACP-BABR, which combine alpha-investing, group-sequential, and gate-keeping methods. In simulation studies, bio-creep regularly occurred when using policies with no error-rate guarantees, whereas aACP-BAC and -BABR controlled the rate of bio-creep without substantially impacting our ability to approve beneficial modifications.
Classifying topological sector via machine learning
Authors: Masakiyo Kitazawa, Takuya Matsumoto, Yasuhiro Kohno
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We employ a machine learning technique for an estimate of the topological charge $Q$ of gauge configurations in SU(3) Yang-Mills theory in vacuum. As a first trial, we feed the four-dimensional topological charge density with and without smoothing into the convolutional neural network and train it to estimate the value of $Q$. We find that the trained neural network can estimate the value of $Q$ from the topological charge density at small flow time with high accuracy. Next, we perform the dimensional reduction of the input data as a preprocessing and analyze lower dimensional data by the neural network. We find that the accuracy of the neural network does not have statistically-significant dependence on the dimension of the input data. From this result we argue that the neural network does not find characteristic features responsible for the determination of $Q$ in the higher dimensional space.
RoadTagger: Robust Road Attribute Inference with Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Songtao He, Favyen Bastani, Satvat Jagwani, Edward Park, Sofiane Abbar, Mohammad Alizadeh, Hari Balakrishnan, Sanjay Chawla, Samuel Madden, Mohammad Amin Sadeghi
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Inferring road attributes such as lane count and road type from satellite imagery is challenging. Often, due to the occlusion in satellite imagery and the spatial correlation of road attributes, a road attribute at one position on a road may only be apparent when considering far-away segments of the road. Thus, to robustly infer road attributes, the model must integrate scattered information and capture the spatial correlation of features along roads. Existing solutions that rely on image classifiers fail to capture this correlation, resulting in poor accuracy. We find this failure is caused by a fundamental limitation -- the limited effective receptive field of image classifiers. To overcome this limitation, we propose RoadTagger, an end-to-end architecture which combines both Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to infer road attributes. The usage of graph neural networks allows information propagation on the road network graph and eliminates the receptive field limitation of image classifiers. We evaluate RoadTagger on both a large real-world dataset covering 688 km^2 area in 20 U.S. cities and a synthesized micro-dataset. In the evaluation, RoadTagger improves inference accuracy over the CNN image classifier based approaches. RoadTagger also demonstrates strong robustness against different disruptions in the satellite imagery and the ability to learn complicated inductive rules for aggregating scattered information along the road network.
Beamforming Learning for mmWave Communication: Theory and Experimental Validation
Authors: ohaned Chraiti, Dmitry Chizhik, Jinfeng Du, Reinaldo A. Valenzuela, Ali Ghrayeb, Chadi Assi
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

To establish reliable and long-range millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication, beamforming is deemed to be a promising solution. Although beamforming can be done in the digital and analog domains, both approaches are hindered by several constraints when it comes to mmWave communications. For example, performing fully digital beamforming in mmWave systems involves using many radio frequency (RF) chains, which are expensive and consume high power. This necessitates finding more efficient ways for using fewer RF chains while taking advantage of the large antenna arrays. One way to overcome this challenge is to employ (partially or fully) analog beamforming through proper configuration of phase-shifters. Existing works on mmWave analog beam design either rely on the knowledge of the channel state information (CSI) per antenna within the array, require a large search time (e.g., exhaustive search) or do not guarantee a minimum beamforming gain (e.g., codebook based beamforming). In this paper, we propose a beam design technique that reduces the search time and does not require CSI while guaranteeing a minimum beamforming gain. The key idea derives from observations drawn from real-life measurements. It was observed that for a given propagation environment (e.g., coverage area of a mmWave BS) the azimuthal angles of dominant signals could be more probable from certain angles than others. Thus, pre-collected measurements could used to build a beamforming codebook that regroups the most probable beam designs. We invoke Bayesian learning for measurements clustering. We evaluate the efficacy of the proposed scheme in terms of building the codebook and assessing its performance through real-life measurements. We demonstrate that the training time required by the proposed scheme is only 5% of that of exhaustive search. This crucial gain is obtained while achieving a minimum targeted beamforming gain.
A Genetic Algorithm based Kernel-size Selection Approach for a Multi-column Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Animesh Singh, Sandip Saha, Ritesh Sarkhel, Mahantapas Kundu, Mita Nasipuri, Nibaran Das
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00

Deep neural network-based architectures give promising results in various domains including pattern recognition. Finding the optimal combination of the hyper-parameters of such a large-sized architecture is tedious and requires a large number of laboratory experiments. But, identifying the optimal combination of a hyper-parameter or appropriate kernel size for a given architecture of deep learning is always a challenging and tedious task. Here, we introduced a genetic algorithm-based technique to reduce the efforts of finding the optimal combination of a hyper-parameter (kernel size) of a convolutional neural network-based architecture. The method is evaluated on three popular datasets of different handwritten Bangla characters and digits. The implementation of the proposed methodology can be found in the following link: https://github.com/DeepQn/GA-Based-Kernel-Size.
Solving Cold Start Problem in Recommendation with Attribute Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Tieyun Qian, Yile Liang, Qing Li
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Graph Neural Network, Matrix Completion, Recommendation Systems

Matrix completion is a classic problem underlying recommender systems. It is traditionally tackled with matrix factorization. Recently, deep learning based methods, especially graph neural networks, have made impressive progress on this problem. Despite their effectiveness, existing methods focus on modeling the user-item interaction graph. The inherent drawback of such methods is that their performance is bound to the density of the interactions, which is however usually of high sparsity. More importantly, for a cold start user/item that does not have any interactions, such methods are unable to learn the preference embedding of the user/item since there is no link to this user/item in the graph. In this work, we develop a novel framework Attribute Graph Neural Networks (AGNN) by exploiting the attribute graph rather than the commonly used interaction graph. This leads to the capability of learning embeddings for cold start users/items. Our AGNN can produce the preference embedding for a cold user/item by learning on the distribution of attributes with an extended variational auto-encoder structure. Moreover, we propose a new graph neural network variant, i.e., gated-GNN, to effectively aggregate various attributes of different modalities in a neighborhood. Empirical results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model yields significant improvements for cold start recommendations and outperforms or matches state-of-the-arts performance in the warm start scenario.
Natural language processing of MIMIC-III clinical notes for identifying diagnosis and procedures with neural networks
Authors: Siddhartha Nuthakki, Sunil Neela, Judy W. Gichoya, Saptarshi Purkayastha
Date: 2019-12-28 00:00:00

Coding diagnosis and procedures in medical records is a crucial process in the healthcare industry, which includes the creation of accurate billings, receiving reimbursements from payers, and creating standardized patient care records. In the United States, Billing and Insurance related activities cost around $471 billion in 2012 which constitutes about 25% of all the U.S hospital spending. In this paper, we report the performance of a natural language processing model that can map clinical notes to medical codes, and predict final diagnosis from unstructured entries of history of present illness, symptoms at the time of admission, etc. Previous studies have demonstrated that deep learning models perform better at such mapping when compared to conventional machine learning models. Therefore, we employed state-of-the-art deep learning method, ULMFiT on the largest emergency department clinical notes dataset MIMIC III which has 1.2M clinical notes to select for the top-10 and top-50 diagnosis and procedure codes. Our models were able to predict the top-10 diagnoses and procedures with 80.3% and 80.5% accuracy, whereas the top-50 ICD-9 codes of diagnosis and procedures are predicted with 70.7% and 63.9% accuracy. Prediction of diagnosis and procedures from unstructured clinical notes benefit human coders to save time, eliminate errors and minimize costs. With promising scores from our present model, the next step would be to deploy this on a small-scale real-world scenario and compare it with human coders as the gold standard. We believe that further research of this approach can create highly accurate predictions that can ease the workflow in a clinical setting.