pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
StereoNeuroBayesSLAM: A Neurobiologically Inspired Stereo Visual SLAM System Based on Direct Sparse Method
Authors: Taiping Zeng, Xiao-Li Li, Bailu Si
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Hippocampus, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

We propose a neurobiologically inspired visual simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system based on direction sparse method to real-time build cognitive maps of large-scale environments from a moving stereo camera. The core SLAM system mainly comprises a Bayesian attractor network, which utilizes neural responses of head direction (HD) cells in the hippocampus and grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) to represent the head direction and the position of the robot in the environment, respectively. Direct sparse method is employed to accurately and robustly estimate velocity information from a stereo camera. Input rotational and translational velocities are integrated by the HD cell and grid cell networks, respectively. We demonstrated our neurobiologically inspired stereo visual SLAM system on the KITTI odometry benchmark datasets. Our proposed SLAM system is robust to real-time build a coherent semi-metric topological map from a stereo camera. Qualitative evaluation on cognitive maps shows that our proposed neurobiologically inspired stereo visual SLAM system outperforms our previous brain-inspired algorithms and the neurobiologically inspired monocular visual SLAM system both in terms of tracking accuracy and robustness, which is closer to the traditional state-of-the-art one.
CNN-based Repetitive self-revised learning for photos' aesthetics imbalanced classification
Authors: Ying Dai
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, imbalanced classification

Aesthetic assessment is subjective, and the distribution of the aesthetic levels is imbalanced. In order to realize the auto-assessment of photo aesthetics, we focus on using repetitive self-revised learning (RSRL) to train the CNN-based aesthetics classification network by imbalanced data set. As RSRL, the network is trained repetitively by dropping out the low likelihood photo samples at the middle levels of aesthetics from the training data set based on the previously trained network. Further, the retained two networks are used in extracting highlight regions of the photos related with the aesthetic assessment. Experimental results show that the CNN-based repetitive self-revised learning is effective for improving the performances of the imbalanced classification.
Sparse Gaussian Processes Revisited: Bayesian Approaches to Inducing-Variable Approximations
Authors: Simone Rossi, Markus Heinonen, Edwin V. Bonilla, Zheyang Shen, Maurizio Filippone
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, Variational Inference

Variational inference techniques based on inducing variables provide an elegant framework for scalable posterior estimation in Gaussian process (GP) models. Besides enabling scalability, one of their main advantages over sparse approximations using direct marginal likelihood maximization is that they provide a robust alternative for point estimation of the inducing inputs, i.e. the location of the inducing variables. In this work we challenge the common wisdom that optimizing the inducing inputs in the variational framework yields optimal performance. We show that, by revisiting old model approximations such as the fully-independent training conditionals endowed with powerful sampling-based inference methods, treating both inducing locations and GP hyper-parameters in a Bayesian way can improve performance significantly. Based on stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, we develop a fully Bayesian approach to scalable GP and deep GP models, and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance through an extensive experimental campaign across several regression and classification problems.
Predicting Stock Returns with Batched AROW
Authors: Rachid Guennouni Hassani, Alexis Gilles, Emmanuel Lassalle, Arthur Dénouveaux
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We extend the AROW regression algorithm developed by Vaits and Crammer in [VC11] to handle synchronous mini-batch updates and apply it to stock return prediction. By design, the model should be more robust to noise and adapt better to non-stationarity compared to a simple rolling regression. We empirically show that the new model outperforms more classical approaches by backtesting a strategy on S\&P500 stocks.
Improving Neural Named Entity Recognition with Gazetteers
Authors: Chan Hee Song, Dawn Lawrie, Tim Finin, James Mayfield
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

The goal of this work is to improve the performance of a neural named entity recognition system by adding input features that indicate a word is part of a name included in a gazetteer. This article describes how to generate gazetteers from the Wikidata knowledge graph as well as how to integrate the information into a neural NER system. Experiments reveal that the approach yields performance gains in two distinct languages: a high-resource, word-based language, English and a high-resource, character-based language, Chinese. Experiments were also performed in a low-resource language, Russian on a newly annotated Russian NER corpus from Reddit tagged with four core types and twelve extended types. This article reports a baseline score. It is a longer version of a paper in the 33rd FLAIRS conference (Song et al. 2020).
Parsing Thai Social Data: A New Challenge for Thai NLP
Authors: Sattaya Singkul, Borirat Khampingyot, Nattasit Maharattamalai, Supawat Taerungruang, Tawunrat Chalothorn
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Dependency Parsing

Dependency parsing (DP) is a task that analyzes text for syntactic structure and relationship between words. DP is widely used to improve natural language processing (NLP) applications in many languages such as English. Previous works on DP are generally applicable to formally written languages. However, they do not apply to informal languages such as the ones used in social networks. Therefore, DP has to be researched and explored with such social network data. In this paper, we explore and identify a DP model that is suitable for Thai social network data. After that, we will identify the appropriate linguistic unit as an input. The result showed that, the transition based model called, improve Elkared dependency parser outperform the others at UAS of 81.42%.
Defense against adversarial attacks on spoofing countermeasures of ASV
Authors: Haibin Wu, Songxiang Liu, Helen Meng, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Verification

Various forefront countermeasure methods for automatic speaker verification (ASV) with considerable performance in anti-spoofing are proposed in the ASVspoof 2019 challenge. However, previous work has shown that countermeasure models are vulnerable to adversarial examples indistinguishable from natural data. A good countermeasure model should not only be robust against spoofing audio, including synthetic, converted, and replayed audios; but counteract deliberately generated examples by malicious adversaries. In this work, we introduce a passive defense method, spatial smoothing, and a proactive defense method, adversarial training, to mitigate the vulnerability of ASV spoofing countermeasure models against adversarial examples. This paper is among the first to use defense methods to improve the robustness of ASV spoofing countermeasure models under adversarial attacks. The experimental results show that these two defense methods positively help spoofing countermeasure models counter adversarial examples.
Transfer Learning for Information Extraction with Limited Data
Authors: Minh-Tien Nguyen, Viet-Anh Phan, Le Thai Linh, Nguyen Hong Son, Le Tien Dung, Miku Hirano, Hajime Hotta
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Transfer Learning

This paper presents a practical approach to fine-grained information extraction. Through plenty of experiences of authors in practically applying information extraction to business process automation, there can be found a couple of fundamental technical challenges: (i) the availability of labeled data is usually limited and (ii) highly detailed classification is required. The main idea of our proposal is to leverage the concept of transfer learning, which is to reuse the pre-trained model of deep neural networks, with a combination of common statistical classifiers to determine the class of each extracted term. To do that, we first exploit BERT to deal with the limitation of training data in real scenarios, then stack BERT with Convolutional Neural Networks to learn hidden representation for classification. To validate our approach, we applied our model to an actual case of document processing, which is a process of competitive bids for government projects in Japan. We used 100 documents for training and testing and confirmed that the model enables to extract fine-grained named entities with a detailed level of information preciseness specialized in the targeted business process, such as a department name of application receivers.
GeoConv: Geodesic Guided Convolution for Facial Action Unit Recognition
Authors: Yuedong Chen, Guoxian Song, Zhiwen Shao, Jianfei Cai, Tat-Jen Cham, Jianming Zheng
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Model, Facial Action Unit Detection

Automatic facial action unit (AU) recognition has attracted great attention but still remains a challenging task, as subtle changes of local facial muscles are difficult to thoroughly capture. Most existing AU recognition approaches leverage geometry information in a straightforward 2D or 3D manner, which either ignore 3D manifold information or suffer from high computational costs. In this paper, we propose a novel geodesic guided convolution (GeoConv) for AU recognition by embedding 3D manifold information into 2D convolutions. Specifically, the kernel of GeoConv is weighted by our introduced geodesic weights, which are negatively correlated to geodesic distances on a coarsely reconstructed 3D face model. Moreover, based on GeoConv, we further develop an end-to-end trainable framework named GeoCNN for AU recognition. Extensive experiments on BP4D and DISFA benchmarks show that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art AU recognition methods.
Cost-Sensitive Portfolio Selection via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Peilin Zhao, Qingyao Wu, Bin Li, Junzhou Huang, Mingkui Tan
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Portfolio Selection is an important real-world financial task and has attracted extensive attention in artificial intelligence communities. This task, however, has two main difficulties: (i) the non-stationary price series and complex asset correlations make the learning of feature representation very hard; (ii) the practicality principle in financial markets requires controlling both transaction and risk costs. Most existing methods adopt handcraft features and/or consider no constraints for the costs, which may make them perform unsatisfactorily and fail to control both costs in practice. In this paper, we propose a cost-sensitive portfolio selection method with deep reinforcement learning. Specifically, a novel two-stream portfolio policy network is devised to extract both price series patterns and asset correlations, while a new cost-sensitive reward function is developed to maximize the accumulated return and constrain both costs via reinforcement learning. We theoretically analyze the near-optimality of the proposed reward, which shows that the growth rate of the policy regarding this reward function can approach the theoretical optimum. We also empirically evaluate the proposed method on real-world datasets. Promising results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in terms of profitability, cost-sensitivity and representation abilities.
A Corpus for Detecting High-Context Medical Conditions in Intensive Care Patient Notes Focusing on Frequently Readmitted Patients
Authors: Edward T. Moseley, Joy T. Wu, Jonathan Welt, John Foote, Patrick D. Tyler, David W. Grant, Eric T. Carlson, Sebastian Gehrmann, Franck Dernoncourt, Leo Anthony Celi
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Patient Phenotyping

A crucial step within secondary analysis of electronic health records (EHRs) is to identify the patient cohort under investigation. While EHRs contain medical billing codes that aim to represent the conditions and treatments patients may have, much of the information is only present in the patient notes. Therefore, it is critical to develop robust algorithms to infer patients' conditions and treatments from their written notes. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for patient phenotyping, a task that is defined as the identification of whether a patient has a given medical condition (also referred to as clinical indication or phenotype) based on their patient note. Nursing Progress Notes and Discharge Summaries from the Intensive Care Unit of a large tertiary care hospital were manually annotated for the presence of several high-context phenotypes relevant to treatment and risk of re-hospitalization. This dataset contains 1102 Discharge Summaries and 1000 Nursing Progress Notes. Each Discharge Summary and Progress Note has been annotated by at least two expert human annotators (one clinical researcher and one resident physician). Annotated phenotypes include treatment non-adherence, chronic pain, advanced/metastatic cancer, as well as 10 other phenotypes. This dataset can be utilized for academic and industrial research in medicine and computer science, particularly within the field of medical natural language processing.
Causal Interaction Trees: Tree-Based Subgroup Identification for Observational Data
Authors: Jiabei Yang, Issa J. Dahabreh, Jon A. Steingrimsson
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, regression

We propose Causal Interaction Trees for identifying subgroups of participants that have enhanced treatment effects using observational data. We extend the Classification and Regression Tree algorithm by using splitting criteria that focus on maximizing between-group treatment effect heterogeneity based on subgroup-specific treatment effect estimators to dictate decision-making in the algorithm. We derive properties of three subgroup-specific treatment effect estimators that account for the observational nature of the data -- inverse probability weighting, g-formula and doubly robust estimators. We study the performance of the proposed algorithms using simulations and implement the algorithms in an observational study that evaluates the effectiveness of right heart catheterization on critically ill patients.
DeProCams: Simultaneous Relighting, Compensation and Shape Reconstruction for Projector-Camera Systems
Authors: Bingyao Huang, Haibin Ling
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Rendering

Image-based relighting, projector compensation and depth/normal reconstruction are three important tasks of projector-camera systems (ProCams) and spatial augmented reality (SAR). Although they share a similar pipeline of finding projector-camera image mappings, in tradition, they are addressed independently, sometimes with different prerequisites, devices and sampling images. In practice, this may be cumbersome for SAR applications to address them one-by-one. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable model named DeProCams to explicitly learn the photometric and geometric mappings of ProCams, and once trained, DeProCams can be applied simultaneously to the three tasks. DeProCams explicitly decomposes the projector-camera image mappings into three subprocesses: shading attributes estimation, rough direct light estimation and photorealistic neural rendering. A particular challenge addressed by DeProCams is occlusion, for which we exploit epipolar constraint and propose a novel differentiable projector direct light mask. Thus, it can be learned end-to-end along with the other modules. Afterwards, to improve convergence, we apply photometric and geometric constraints such that the intermediate results are plausible. In our experiments, DeProCams shows clear advantages over previous arts with promising quality and meanwhile being fully differentiable. Moreover, by solving the three tasks in a unified model, DeProCams waives the need for additional optical devices, radiometric calibrations and structured light.
What is the State of Neural Network Pruning?
Authors: Davis Blalock, Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz, Jonathan Frankle, John Guttag
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Pruning

Neural network pruning---the task of reducing the size of a network by removing parameters---has been the subject of a great deal of work in recent years. We provide a meta-analysis of the literature, including an overview of approaches to pruning and consistent findings in the literature. After aggregating results across 81 papers and pruning hundreds of models in controlled conditions, our clearest finding is that the community suffers from a lack of standardized benchmarks and metrics. This deficiency is substantial enough that it is hard to compare pruning techniques to one another or determine how much progress the field has made over the past three decades. To address this situation, we identify issues with current practices, suggest concrete remedies, and introduce ShrinkBench, an open-source framework to facilitate standardized evaluations of pruning methods. We use ShrinkBench to compare various pruning techniques and show that its comprehensive evaluation can prevent common pitfalls when comparing pruning methods.
Clean-Label Backdoor Attacks on Video Recognition Models
Authors: Shihao Zhao, Xingjun Ma, Xiang Zheng, James Bailey, Jingjing Chen, Yu-Gang Jiang
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, backdoor defense, image-classification, Image Classification, Video Recognition

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks which can hide backdoor triggers in DNNs by poisoning training data. A backdoored model behaves normally on clean test images, yet consistently predicts a particular target class for any test examples that contain the trigger pattern. As such, backdoor attacks are hard to detect, and have raised severe security concerns in real-world applications. Thus far, backdoor research has mostly been conducted in the image domain with image classification models. In this paper, we show that existing image backdoor attacks are far less effective on videos, and outline 4 strict conditions where existing attacks are likely to fail: 1) scenarios with more input dimensions (eg. videos), 2) scenarios with high resolution, 3) scenarios with a large number of classes and few examples per class (a "sparse dataset"), and 4) attacks with access to correct labels (eg. clean-label attacks). We propose the use of a universal adversarial trigger as the backdoor trigger to attack video recognition models, a situation where backdoor attacks are likely to be challenged by the above 4 strict conditions. We show on benchmark video datasets that our proposed backdoor attack can manipulate state-of-the-art video models with high success rates by poisoning only a small proportion of training data (without changing the labels). We also show that our proposed backdoor attack is resistant to state-of-the-art backdoor defense/detection methods, and can even be applied to improve image backdoor attacks. Our proposed video backdoor attack not only serves as a strong baseline for improving the robustness of video models, but also provides a new perspective for more understanding more powerful backdoor attacks.
Recovering compressed images for automatic crack segmentation using generative models
Authors: Yong Huang, Haoyu Zhang, Hui Li, Stephen Wu
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Crack Segmentation, Data Compression, Structural Health Monitoring

In a structural health monitoring (SHM) system that uses digital cameras to monitor cracks of structural surfaces, techniques for reliable and effective data compression are essential to ensure a stable and energy efficient crack images transmission in wireless devices, e.g., drones and robots with high definition cameras installed. Compressive sensing (CS) is a signal processing technique that allows accurate recovery of a signal from a sampling rate much smaller than the limitation of the Nyquist sampling theorem. The conventional CS method is based on the principle that, through a regularized optimization, the sparsity property of the original signals in some domain can be exploited to get the exact reconstruction with a high probability. However, the strong assumption of the signals being highly sparse in an invertible space is relatively hard for real crack images. In this paper, we present a new approach of CS that replaces the sparsity regularization with a generative model that is able to effectively capture a low dimension representation of targeted images. We develop a recovery framework for automatic crack segmentation of compressed crack images based on this new CS method and demonstrate the remarkable performance of the method taking advantage of the strong capability of generative models to capture the necessary features required in the crack segmentation task even the backgrounds of the generated images are not well reconstructed. The superior performance of our recovery framework is illustrated by comparing with three existing CS algorithms. Furthermore, we show that our framework is extensible to other common problems in automatic crack segmentation, such as defect recovery from motion blurring and occlusion.
DA4AD: End-to-End Deep Attention-based Visual Localization for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Yao Zhou, Guowei Wan, Shenhua Hou, Li Yu, Gang Wang, Xiaofei Rui, Shiyu Song
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Attention, Visual Localization

We present a visual localization framework based on novel deep attention aware features for autonomous driving that achieves centimeter level localization accuracy. Conventional approaches to the visual localization problem rely on handcrafted features or human-made objects on the road. They are known to be either prone to unstable matching caused by severe appearance or lighting changes, or too scarce to deliver constant and robust localization results in challenging scenarios. In this work, we seek to exploit the deep attention mechanism to search for salient, distinctive and stable features that are good for long-term matching in the scene through a novel end-to-end deep neural network. Furthermore, our learned feature descriptors are demonstrated to be competent to establish robust matches and therefore successfully estimate the optimal camera poses with high precision. We comprehensively validate the effectiveness of our method using a freshly collected dataset with high-quality ground truth trajectories and hardware synchronization between sensors. Results demonstrate that our method achieves a competitive localization accuracy when compared to the LiDAR-based localization solutions under various challenging circumstances, leading to a potential low-cost localization solution for autonomous driving.