pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Interactive Reinforcement Learning for Path Following of Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
Authors: Qilei Zhang, Jinying Lin, Qixin Sha, Bo He, Guangliang Li
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) plays an increasingly important role in ocean exploration. Existing AUVs are usually not fully autonomous and generally limited to pre-planning or pre-programming tasks. Reinforcement learning (RL) and deep reinforcement learning have been introduced into the AUV design and research to improve its autonomy. However, these methods are still difficult to apply directly to the actual AUV system because of the sparse rewards and low learning efficiency. In this paper, we proposed a deep interactive reinforcement learning method for path following of AUV by combining the advantages of deep reinforcement learning and interactive RL. In addition, since the human trainer cannot provide human rewards for AUV when it is running in the ocean and AUV needs to adapt to a changing environment, we further propose a deep reinforcement learning method that learns from both human rewards and environmental rewards at the same time. We test our methods in two path following tasks---straight line and sinusoids curve following of AUV by simulating in the Gazebo platform. Our experimental results show that with our proposed deep interactive RL method, AUV can converge faster than a DQN learner from only environmental reward. Moreover, AUV learning with our deep RL from both human and environmental rewards can also achieve a similar or even better performance than that with the deep interactive RL method and can adapt to the actual environment by further learning from environmental rewards.
Multi-Agent Interactions Modeling with Correlated Policies
Authors: Minghuan Liu, Ming Zhou, Wei-Nan Zhang, Yuzheng Zhuang, Jun Wang, Wulong Liu, Yong Yu
Date: 2020-01-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Imitation Learning

In multi-agent systems, complex interacting behaviors arise due to the high correlations among agents. However, previous work on modeling multi-agent interactions from demonstrations is primarily constrained by assuming the independence among policies and their reward structures. In this paper, we cast the multi-agent interactions modeling problem into a multi-agent imitation learning framework with explicit modeling of correlated policies by approximating opponents' policies, which can recover agents' policies that can regenerate similar interactions. Consequently, we develop a Decentralized Adversarial Imitation Learning algorithm with Correlated policies (CoDAIL), which allows for decentralized training and execution. Various experiments demonstrate that CoDAIL can better regenerate complex interactions close to the demonstrators and outperforms state-of-the-art multi-agent imitation learning methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/apexrl/CoDAIL}.
A machine learning based plasticity model using proper orthogonal decomposition
Authors: Dengpeng Huang, Jan Niklas Fuhg, Christian Weißenfels, Peter Wriggers
Date: 2020-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Data-driven material models have many advantages over classical numerical approaches, such as the direct utilization of experimental data and the possibility to improve performance of predictions when additional data is available. One approach to develop a data-driven material model is to use machine learning tools. These can be trained offline to fit an observed material behaviour and then be applied in online applications. However, learning and predicting history dependent material models, such as plasticity, is still challenging. In this work, a machine learning based material modelling framework is proposed for both elasticity and plasticity. The machine learning based hyperelasticity model is developed with the Feed forward Neural Network (FNN) directly whereas the machine learning based plasticity model is developed by using of a novel method called Proper Orthogonal Decomposition Feed forward Neural Network (PODFNN). In order to account for the loading history, the accumulated absolute strain is proposed to be the history variable of the plasticity model. Additionally, the strain-stress sequence data for plasticity is collected from different loading-unloading paths based on the concept of sequence for plasticity. By means of the POD, the multi-dimensional stress sequence is decoupled leading to independent one dimensional coefficient sequences. In this case, the neural network with multiple output is replaced by multiple independent neural networks each possessing a one-dimensional output, which leads to less training time and better training performance. To apply the machine learning based material model in finite element analysis, the tangent matrix is derived by the automatic symbolic differentiation tool AceGen. The effectiveness and generalization of the presented models are investigated by a series of numerical examples using both 2D and 3D finite element analysis.
Transferability of Adversarial Examples to Attack Cloud-based Image Classifier Service
Authors: Dou Goodman
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

In recent years, Deep Learning(DL) techniques have been extensively deployed for computer vision tasks, particularly visual classification problems, where new algorithms reported to achieve or even surpass the human performance. While many recent works demonstrated that DL models are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Fortunately, generating adversarial examples usually requires white-box access to the victim model, and real-world cloud-based image classification services are more complex than white-box classifier,the architecture and parameters of DL models on cloud platforms cannot be obtained by the attacker. The attacker can only access the APIs opened by cloud platforms. Thus, keeping models in the cloud can usually give a (false) sense of security. In this paper, we mainly focus on studying the security of real-world cloud-based image classification services. Specifically, (1) We propose a novel attack method, Fast Featuremap Loss PGD (FFL-PGD) attack based on Substitution model, which achieves a high bypass rate with a very limited number of queries. Instead of millions of queries in previous studies, our method finds the adversarial examples using only two queries per image; and (2) we make the first attempt to conduct an extensive empirical study of black-box attacks against real-world cloud-based classification services. Through evaluations on four popular cloud platforms including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Clarifai, we demonstrate that FFL-PGD attack has a success rate over 90\% among different classification services. (3) We discuss the possible defenses to address these security challenges in cloud-based classification services. Our defense technology is mainly divided into model training stage and image preprocessing stage.
A Two-step-training Deep Learning Framework for Real-time Computational Imaging without Physics Priors
Authors: Ruibo Shang, Kevin Hoffer-Hawlik, Geoffrey P. Luke
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

Deep learning (DL) is a powerful tool in computational imaging for many applications. A common strategy is to reconstruct a preliminary image as the input of a neural network to achieve an optimized image. Usually, the preliminary image is acquired with the prior knowledge of the imaging model. One outstanding challenge, however, is the degree to which the actual imaging model deviates from the assumed model. Model mismatches degrade the quality of the preliminary image and therefore affect the DL predictions. Another main challenge is that since most imaging inverse problems are ill-posed and the networks are over-parameterized, DL networks have flexibility to extract features from the data that are not directly related to the imaging model. To solve these challenges, a two-step-training DL (TST-DL) framework is proposed for real-time computational imaging without physics priors. First, a single fully-connected layer (FCL) is trained to directly learn the model. Then, this FCL is fixed and concatenated with an un-trained U-Net architecture for a second-step training to improve the output image fidelity, resulting in four main advantages. First, it does not rely on an accurate representation of the imaging model since the model is directly learned. Second, real-time imaging can be achieved. Third, the TST-DL network is trained in the desired direction and the predictions are improved since the first step is constrained to learn the model and the second step improves the result by learning the optimal regularizer. Fourth, the approach accommodates any size and dimensionality of data. We demonstrate this framework using a linear single-pixel camera imaging model. The results are quantitatively compared with those from other DL frameworks and model-based iterative optimization approaches. We further extend this concept to nonlinear models in the application of image de-autocorrelation.
Multi-layer Optimizations for End-to-End Data Analytics
Authors: Amir Shaikhha, Maximilian Schleich, Alexandru Ghita, Dan Olteanu
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, C++ code, regression

We consider the problem of training machine learning models over multi-relational data. The mainstream approach is to first construct the training dataset using a feature extraction query over input database and then use a statistical software package of choice to train the model. In this paper we introduce Iterative Functional Aggregate Queries (IFAQ), a framework that realizes an alternative approach. IFAQ treats the feature extraction query and the learning task as one program given in the IFAQ's domain-specific language, which captures a subset of Python commonly used in Jupyter notebooks for rapid prototyping of machine learning applications. The program is subject to several layers of IFAQ optimizations, such as algebraic transformations, loop transformations, schema specialization, data layout optimizations, and finally compilation into efficient low-level C++ code specialized for the given workload and data. We show that a Scala implementation of IFAQ can outperform mlpack, Scikit, and TensorFlow by several orders of magnitude for linear regression and regression tree models over several relational datasets.
Solving inverse-PDE problems with physics-aware neural networks
Authors: Samira Pakravan, Pouria A. Mistani, Miguel Angel Aragon-Calvo, Frederic Gibou
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00

We propose a novel composite framework to find unknown fields in the context of inverse problems for partial differential equations (PDEs). We blend the high expressibility of deep neural networks as universal function estimators with the accuracy and reliability of existing numerical algorithms for partial differential equations as custom layers in semantic autoencoders. Our design brings together techniques of computational mathematics, machine learning and pattern recognition under one umbrella to incorporate domain-specific knowledge and physical constraints to discover the underlying hidden fields. The network is explicitly aware of the governing physics through a hard-coded PDE solver layer in contrast to most existing methods that incorporate the governing equations in the loss function or rely on trainable convolutional layers to discover proper discretizations from data. This subsequently focuses the computational load to only the discovery of the hidden fields and therefore is more data efficient. We call this architecture Blended inverse-PDE networks (hereby dubbed BiPDE networks) and demonstrate its applicability for recovering the variable diffusion coefficient in Poisson problems in one and two spatial dimensions, as well as the diffusion coefficient in the time-dependent and nonlinear Burgers' equation in one dimension. We also show that this approach is robust to noise.
CrDoCo: Pixel-level Domain Transfer with Cross-Domain Consistency
Authors: Yun-Chun Chen, Yen-Yu Lin, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jia-Bin Huang
Date: 2020-01-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2019 6
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Image-to-Image Translation, Semantic Segmentation, Translation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation algorithms aim to transfer the knowledge learned from one domain to another (e.g., synthetic to real images). The adapted representations often do not capture pixel-level domain shifts that are crucial for dense prediction tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation). In this paper, we present a novel pixel-wise adversarial domain adaptation algorithm. By leveraging image-to-image translation methods for data augmentation, our key insight is that while the translated images between domains may differ in styles, their predictions for the task should be consistent. We exploit this property and introduce a cross-domain consistency loss that enforces our adapted model to produce consistent predictions. Through extensive experimental results, we show that our method compares favorably against the state-of-the-art on a wide variety of unsupervised domain adaptation tasks.
MatrixNets: A New Scale and Aspect Ratio Aware Architecture for Object Detection
Authors: Abdullah Rashwan, Rishav Agarwal, Agastya Kalra, Pascal Poupart
Date: 2020-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

We present MatrixNets (xNets), a new deep architecture for object detection. xNets map objects with similar sizes and aspect ratios into many specialized layers, allowing xNets to provide a scale and aspect ratio aware architecture. We leverage xNets to enhance single-stage object detection frameworks. First, we apply xNets on anchor-based object detection, for which we predict object centers and regress the top-left and bottom-right corners. Second, we use MatrixNets for corner-based object detection by predicting top-left and bottom-right corners. Each corner predicts the center location of the object. We also enhance corner-based detection by replacing the embedding layer with center regression. Our final architecture achieves mAP of 47.8 on MS COCO, which is higher than its CornerNet counterpart by +5.6 mAP while also closing the gap between single-stage and two-stage detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/arashwan/matrixnet.
RSL-Net: Localising in Satellite Images From a Radar on the Ground
Authors: Tim Y. Tang, Daniele De Martini, Dan Barnes, Paul Newman
Date: 2020-01-09 00:00:00

This paper is about localising a vehicle in an overhead image using FMCW radar mounted on a ground vehicle. FMCW radar offers extraordinary promise and efficacy for vehicle localisation. It is impervious to all weather types and lighting conditions. However the complexity of the interactions between millimetre radar wave and the physical environment makes it a challenging domain. Infrastructure-free large-scale radar-based localisation is in its infancy. Typically here a map is built and suitable techniques, compatible with the nature of sensor, are brought to bear. In this work we eschew the need for a radar-based map; instead we simply use an overhead image -- a resource readily available everywhere. This paper introduces a method that not only naturally deals with the complexity of the signal type but does so in the context of cross modal processing.
A Deep Neural Networks Approach for Pixel-Level Runway Pavement Crack Segmentation Using Drone-Captured Images
Authors: Liming Jiang, Yuanchang Xie, Tianzhu Ren
Date: 2020-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Asset Management, Crack Segmentation, Management, Segmentation

Pavement conditions are a critical aspect of asset management and directly affect safety. This study introduces a deep neural network method called U-Net for pavement crack segmentation based on drone-captured images to reduce the cost and time needed for airport runway inspection. The proposed approach can also be used for highway pavement conditions assessment during off-peak periods when there are few vehicles on the road. In this study, runway pavement images are collected using drone at various heights from the Fitchburg Municipal Airport (FMA) in Massachusetts to evaluate their quality and applicability for crack segmentation, from which an optimal height is determined. Drone images captured at the optimal height are then used to evaluate the crack segmentation performance of the U-Net model. Deep learning methods typically require a huge set of annotated training datasets for model development, which can be a major obstacle for their applications. An online annotated pavement image dataset is used together with the FMA data to train the U-Net model. The results show that U-Net performs well on the FMA testing data even with limited FMA training images, suggesting that it has good generalization ability and great potential to be used for both airport runways and highway pavements.
Image Inpainting by Multiscale Spline Interpolation
Authors: Ghazale Ghorbanzade, Zahra Nabizadeh, Nader Karimi, Shadrokh Samavi
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting

Recovering the missing regions of an image is a task that is called image inpainting. Depending on the shape of missing areas, different methods are presented in the literature. One of the challenges of this problem is extracting features that lead to better results. Experimental results show that both global and local features are useful for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a multi-scale image inpainting method that utilizes both local and global features. The first step of this method is to determine how many scales we need to use, which depends on the width of the lines in the map of the missing region. Then we apply adaptive image inpainting to the damaged areas of the image, and the lost pixels are predicted. Each scale is inpainted and the result is resized to the original size. Then a voting process produces the final result. The proposed method is tested on damaged images with scratches and creases. The metric that we use to evaluate our approach is PSNR. On average, we achieved 1.2 dB improvement over some existing inpainting approaches.
Visual Question Answering on 360° Images
Authors: Shih-Han Chou, Wei-Lun Chao, Wei-Sheng Lai, Min Sun, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

In this work, we introduce VQA 360, a novel task of visual question answering on 360 images. Unlike a normal field-of-view image, a 360 image captures the entire visual content around the optical center of a camera, demanding more sophisticated spatial understanding and reasoning. To address this problem, we collect the first VQA 360 dataset, containing around 17,000 real-world image-question-answer triplets for a variety of question types. We then study two different VQA models on VQA 360, including one conventional model that takes an equirectangular image (with intrinsic distortion) as input and one dedicated model that first projects a 360 image onto cubemaps and subsequently aggregates the information from multiple spatial resolutions. We demonstrate that the cubemap-based model with multi-level fusion and attention diffusion performs favorably against other variants and the equirectangular-based models. Nevertheless, the gap between the humans' and machines' performance reveals the need for more advanced VQA 360 algorithms. We, therefore, expect our dataset and studies to serve as the benchmark for future development in this challenging task. Dataset, code, and pre-trained models are available online.
RTM3D: Real-time Monocular 3D Detection from Object Keypoints for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Peixuan Li, Huaici Zhao, PengFei Liu, Feidao Cao
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Vehicle Pose Estimation

In this work, we propose an efficient and accurate monocular 3D detection framework in single shot. Most successful 3D detectors take the projection constraint from the 3D bounding box to the 2D box as an important component. Four edges of a 2D box provide only four constraints and the performance deteriorates dramatically with the small error of the 2D detector. Different from these approaches, our method predicts the nine perspective keypoints of a 3D bounding box in image space, and then utilize the geometric relationship of 3D and 2D perspectives to recover the dimension, location, and orientation in 3D space. In this method, the properties of the object can be predicted stably even when the estimation of keypoints is very noisy, which enables us to obtain fast detection speed with a small architecture. Training our method only uses the 3D properties of the object without the need for external networks or supervision data. Our method is the first real-time system for monocular image 3D detection while achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI benchmark. Code will be released at https://github.com/Banconxuan/RTM3D.
NWPU-Crowd: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Crowd Counting and Localization
Authors: Qi. Wang, Junyu. Gao, Wei. Lin, Xuelong. Li
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

In the last decade, crowd counting and localization attract much attention of researchers due to its wide-spread applications, including crowd monitoring, public safety, space design, etc. Many Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are designed for tackling this task. However, currently released datasets are so small-scale that they can not meet the needs of the supervised CNN-based algorithms. To remedy this problem, we construct a large-scale congested crowd counting and localization dataset, NWPU-Crowd, consisting of 5,109 images, in a total of 2,133,375 annotated heads with points and boxes. Compared with other real-world datasets, it contains various illumination scenes and has the largest density range (0~20,033). Besides, a benchmark website is developed for impartially evaluating the different methods, which allows researchers to submit the results of the test set. Based on the proposed dataset, we further describe the data characteristics, evaluate the performance of some mainstream state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, and analyze the new problems that arise on the new data. What's more, the benchmark is deployed at \url{https://www.crowdbenchmark.com/}, and the dataset/code/models/results are available at \url{https://gjy3035.github.io/NWPU-Crowd-Sample-Code/}.
Seismic horizon detection with neural networks
Authors: Alexander Koryagin, Darima Mylzenova, Roman Khudorozhkov, Sergey Tsimfer
Date: 2020-01-10 00:00:00

Over the last few years, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) were successfully adopted in numerous domains to solve various image-related tasks, ranging from simple classification to fine borders annotation. Tracking seismic horizons is no different, and there are a lot of papers proposing the usage of such models to avoid time-consuming hand-picking. Unfortunately, most of them are (i) either trained on synthetic data, which can't fully represent the complexity of subterranean structures, (ii) trained and tested on the same cube, or (iii) lack reproducibility and precise descriptions of the model-building process. With all that in mind, the main contribution of this paper is an open-sourced research of applying binary segmentation approach to the task of horizon detection on multiple real seismic cubes with a focus on inter-cube generalization of the predictive model.