pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Language-Independent Sentiment Analysis Using Subjectivity and Positional Information
Authors: Veselin Raychev, Preslav Nakov
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, General Classification, Position, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis

We describe a novel language-independent approach to the task of determining the polarity, positive or negative, of the author's opinion on a specific topic in natural language text. In particular, weights are assigned to attributes, individual words or word bi-grams, based on their position and on their likelihood of being subjective. The subjectivity of each attribute is estimated in a two-step process, where first the probability of being subjective is calculated for each sentence containing the attribute, and then these probabilities are used to alter the attribute's weights for polarity classification. The evaluation results on a standard dataset of movie reviews shows 89.85% classification accuracy, which rivals the best previously published results for this dataset for systems that use no additional linguistic information nor external resources.
How Can We Know What Language Models Know?
Authors: Zhengbao Jiang, Frank F. Xu, Jun Araki, Graham Neubig
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: TACL 2020 1

Recent work has presented intriguing results examining the knowledge contained in language models (LM) by having the LM fill in the blanks of prompts such as "Obama is a _ by profession". These prompts are usually manually created, and quite possibly sub-optimal; another prompt such as "Obama worked as a _" may result in more accurately predicting the correct profession. Because of this, given an inappropriate prompt, we might fail to retrieve facts that the LM does know, and thus any given prompt only provides a lower bound estimate of the knowledge contained in an LM. In this paper, we attempt to more accurately estimate the knowledge contained in LMs by automatically discovering better prompts to use in this querying process. Specifically, we propose mining-based and paraphrasing-based methods to automatically generate high-quality and diverse prompts, as well as ensemble methods to combine answers from different prompts. Extensive experiments on the LAMA benchmark for extracting relational knowledge from LMs demonstrate that our methods can improve accuracy from 31.1% to 39.6%, providing a tighter lower bound on what LMs know. We have released the code and the resulting LM Prompt And Query Archive (LPAQA) at https://github.com/jzbjyb/LPAQA.
U-CNNpred: A Universal CNN-based Predictor for Stock Markets
Authors: Ehsan Hoseinzade, Saman Haratizadeh, Arash Khoeini
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Stock Market Prediction

The performance of financial market prediction systems depends heavily on the quality of features it is using. While researchers have used various techniques for enhancing the stock specific features, less attention has been paid to extracting features that represent general mechanism of financial markets. In this paper, we investigate the importance of extracting such general features in stock market prediction domain and show how it can improve the performance of financial market prediction. We present a framework called U-CNNpred, that uses a CNN-based structure. A base model is trained in a specially designed layer-wise training procedure over a pool of historical data from many financial markets, in order to extract the common patterns from different markets. Our experiments, in which we have used hundreds of stocks in S\&P 500 as well as 14 famous indices around the world, show that this model can outperform baseline algorithms when predicting the directional movement of the markets for which it has been trained for. We also show that the base model can be fine-tuned for predicting new markets and achieve a better performance compared to the state of the art baseline algorithms that focus on constructing market-specific models from scratch.
One-Shot Object Detection with Co-Attention and Co-Excitation
Authors: Ting-I Hsieh, Yi-Chen Lo, Hwann-Tzong Chen, Tyng-Luh Liu
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, One-Shot Object Detection, Region Proposal

This paper aims to tackle the challenging problem of one-shot object detection. Given a query image patch whose class label is not included in the training data, the goal of the task is to detect all instances of the same class in a target image. To this end, we develop a novel {\em co-attention and co-excitation} (CoAE) framework that makes contributions in three key technical aspects. First, we propose to use the non-local operation to explore the co-attention embodied in each query-target pair and yield region proposals accounting for the one-shot situation. Second, we formulate a squeeze-and-co-excitation scheme that can adaptively emphasize correlated feature channels to help uncover relevant proposals and eventually the target objects. Third, we design a margin-based ranking loss for implicitly learning a metric to predict the similarity of a region proposal to the underlying query, no matter its class label is seen or unseen in training. The resulting model is therefore a two-stage detector that yields a strong baseline on both VOC and MS-COCO under one-shot setting of detecting objects from both seen and never-seen classes. Codes are available at https://github.com/timy90022/One-Shot-Object-Detection.
Unbiased Evaluation of Deep Metric Learning Algorithms
Authors: Istvan Fehervari, Avinash Ravichandran, Srikar Appalaraju
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Metric Learning, open-set classification, Retrieval, Triplet

Deep metric learning (DML) is a popular approach for images retrieval, solving verification (same or not) problems and addressing open set classification. Arguably, the most common DML approach is with triplet loss, despite significant advances in the area of DML. Triplet loss suffers from several issues such as collapse of the embeddings, high sensitivity to sampling schemes and more importantly a lack of performance when compared to more modern methods. We attribute this adoption to a lack of fair comparisons between various methods and the difficulty in adopting them for novel problem statements. In this paper, we perform an unbiased comparison of the most popular DML baseline methods under same conditions and more importantly, not obfuscating any hyper parameter tuning or adjustment needed to favor a particular method. We find, that under equal conditions several older methods perform significantly better than previously believed. In fact, our unified implementation of 12 recently introduced DML algorithms achieve state-of-the art performance on CUB200, CAR196, and Stanford Online products datasets which establishes a new set of baselines for future DML research. The codebase and all tuned hyperparameters will be open-sourced for reproducibility and to serve as a source of benchmark.
Sparse-GAN: Sparsity-constrained Generative Adversarial Network for Anomaly Detection in Retinal OCT Image
Authors: Kang Zhou, Shenghua Gao, Jun Cheng, Zaiwang Gu, Huazhu Fu, Zhi Tu, Jianlong Yang, Yitian Zhao, Jiang Liu
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Deep Learning, Generative Adversarial Network

With the development of convolutional neural network, deep learning has shown its success for retinal disease detection from optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. However, deep learning often relies on large scale labelled data for training, which is oftentimes challenging especially for disease with low occurrence. Moreover, a deep learning system trained from data-set with one or a few diseases is unable to detect other unseen diseases, which limits the practical usage of the system in disease screening. To address the limitation, we propose a novel anomaly detection framework termed Sparsity-constrained Generative Adversarial Network (Sparse-GAN) for disease screening where only healthy data are available in the training set. The contributions of Sparse-GAN are two-folds: 1) The proposed Sparse-GAN predicts the anomalies in latent space rather than image-level; 2) Sparse-GAN is constrained by a novel Sparsity Regularization Net. Furthermore, in light of the role of lesions for disease screening, we present to leverage on an anomaly activation map to show the heatmap of lesions. We evaluate our proposed Sparse-GAN on a publicly available dataset, and the results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
A Discriminative Learned CNN Embedding for Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification
Authors: Wen Wang, Lijun Du, Yinxing Gao, Yanzhou Su, Feng Wang, Jian Cheng
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Metric Learning, Scene Classification

In this work, a discriminatively learned CNN embedding is proposed for remote sensing image scene classification. Our proposed siamese network simultaneously computes the classification loss function and the metric learning loss function of the two input images. Specifically, for the classification loss, we use the standard cross-entropy loss function to predict the classes of the images. For the metric learning loss, our siamese network learns to map the intra-class and inter-class input pairs to a feature space where intra-class inputs are close and inter-class inputs are separated by a margin. Concretely, for remote sensing image scene classification, we would like to map images from the same scene to feature vectors that are close, and map images from different scenes to feature vectors that are widely separated. Experiments are conducted on three different remote sensing image datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an excellent classification performance.
Palmprint Recognition in Uncontrolled and Uncooperative Environment
Authors: Wojciech Michal Matkowski, Tingting Chai, Adams Wai Kin Kong
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00

Online palmprint recognition and latent palmprint identification are two branches of palmprint studies. The former uses middle-resolution images collected by a digital camera in a well-controlled or contact-based environment with user cooperation for commercial applications and the latter uses high-resolution latent palmprints collected in crime scenes for forensic investigation. However, these two branches do not cover some palmprint images which have the potential for forensic investigation. Due to the prevalence of smartphone and consumer camera, more evidence is in the form of digital images taken in uncontrolled and uncooperative environment, e.g., child pornographic images and terrorist images, where the criminals commonly hide or cover their face. However, their palms can be observable. To study palmprint identification on images collected in uncontrolled and uncooperative environment, a new palmprint database is established and an end-to-end deep learning algorithm is proposed. The new database named NTU Palmprints from the Internet (NTU-PI-v1) contains 7881 images from 2035 palms collected from the Internet. The proposed algorithm consists of an alignment network and a feature extraction network and is end-to-end trainable. The proposed algorithm is compared with the state-of-the-art online palmprint recognition methods and evaluated on three public contactless palmprint databases, IITD, CASIA, and PolyU and two new databases, NTU-PI-v1 and NTU contactless palmprint database. The experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing palmprint recognition methods.
Rethinking Temporal Fusion for Video-based Person Re-identification on Semantic and Time Aspect
Authors: Xinyang Jiang, Yifei Gong, Xiaowei Guo, Qize Yang, Feiyue Huang, Wei-Shi Zheng, Feng Zheng, Xing Sun
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification, Video-Based Person Re-Identification

Recently, the research interest of person re-identification (ReID) has gradually turned to video-based methods, which acquire a person representation by aggregating frame features of an entire video. However, existing video-based ReID methods do not consider the semantic difference brought by the outputs of different network stages, which potentially compromises the information richness of the person features. Furthermore, traditional methods ignore important relationship among frames, which causes information redundancy in fusion along the time axis. To address these issues, we propose a novel general temporal fusion framework to aggregate frame features on both semantic aspect and time aspect. As for the semantic aspect, a multi-stage fusion network is explored to fuse richer frame features at multiple semantic levels, which can effectively reduce the information loss caused by the traditional single-stage fusion. While, for the time axis, the existing intra-frame attention method is improved by adding a novel inter-frame attention module, which effectively reduces the information redundancy in temporal fusion by taking the relationship among frames into consideration. The experimental results show that our approach can effectively improve the video-based re-identification accuracy, achieving the state-of-the-art performance.
Algorithmic Improvements for Deep Reinforcement Learning applied to Interactive Fiction
Authors: Vishal Jain, William Fedus, Hugo Larochelle, Doina Precup, Marc G. Bellemare
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), text-based games

Text-based games are a natural challenge domain for deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Their state and action spaces are combinatorially large, their reward function is sparse, and they are partially observable: the agent is informed of the consequences of its actions through textual feedback. In this paper we emphasize this latter point and consider the design of a deep reinforcement learning agent that can play from feedback alone. Our design recognizes and takes advantage of the structural characteristics of text-based games. We first propose a contextualisation mechanism, based on accumulated reward, which simplifies the learning problem and mitigates partial observability. We then study different methods that rely on the notion that most actions are ineffectual in any given situation, following Zahavy et al.'s idea of an admissible action. We evaluate these techniques in a series of text-based games of increasing difficulty based on the TextWorld framework, as well as the iconic game Zork. Empirically, we find that these techniques improve the performance of a baseline deep reinforcement learning agent applied to text-based games.
Action Recognition via Pose-Based Graph Convolutional Networks with Intermediate Dense Supervision
Authors: Lei Shi, Yifan Zhang, Jian Cheng, Hanqing Lu
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Pose-based action recognition has drawn considerable attention recently. Existing methods exploit the joint positions to extract the body-part features from the activation map of the convolutional networks to assist human action recognition. However, these features are simply concatenated or max-pooled in previous works. The structured correlations among the body parts, which are essential for understanding complex human actions, are not fully exploited. To address the problem, we propose a pose-based graph convolutional network (PGCN), which encodes the body-part features into a human-based spatiotemporal graph, and explicitly models their correlations with a novel light-weight adaptive graph convolutional module to produce a highly discriminative representation for human action recognition. Besides, we discover that the backbone network tends to identify patterns from the most discriminative areas of the input regardless of the others. Thus the features pooled by the joint positions from other areas are less informative, which consequently hampers the performance of the followed aggregation process for recognizing actions. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a simple intermediate dense supervision mechanism for the backbone network, which adequately addresses the problem with no extra computation cost during inference. We evaluate the proposed approach on three popular benchmarks for pose-based action recognition tasks, i.e., Sub-JHMDB, PennAction and NTU-RGBD, where our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-arts without the bells and whistles.
Error Resilient Deep Compressive Sensing
Authors: Thuong, Nguyen Canh, Chien, Trinh Van
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing

Compressive sensing (CS) is an emerging sampling technology that enables reconstructing signals from a subset of measurements and even corrupted measurements. Deep learning-based compressive sensing (DCS) has improved CS performance while maintaining a fast reconstruction but requires a training network for each measurement rate. Also, concerning the transmission scheme of measurement lost, DCS cannot recover the original signal. Thereby, it fails to maintain the error-resilient property. In this work, we proposed a robust deep reconstruction network to preserve the error-resilient property under the assumption of random measurement lost. Measurement lost layer is proposed to simulate the measurement lost in an end-to-end framework.
Augmentation Methods on Monophonic Audio for Instrument Classification in Polyphonic Music
Authors: Agelos Kratimenos, Kleanthis Avramidis, Christos Garoufis, Athanasia Zlatintsi, Petros Maragos
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, General Classification, Information Retrieval, Instrument Recognition, Music Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Instrument classification is one of the fields in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) that has attracted a lot of research interest. However, the majority of that is dealing with monophonic music, while efforts on polyphonic material mainly focus on predominant instrument recognition. In this paper, we propose an approach for instrument classification in polyphonic music from purely monophonic data, that involves performing data augmentation by mixing different audio segments. A variety of data augmentation techniques focusing on different sonic aspects, such as overlaying audio segments of the same genre, as well as pitch and tempo-based synchronization, are explored. We utilize Convolutional Neural Networks for the classification task, comparing shallow to deep network architectures. We further investigate the usage of a combination of the above classifiers, each trained on a single augmented dataset. An ensemble of VGG-like classifiers, trained on non-augmented, pitch-synchronized, tempo-synchronized and genre-similar excerpts, respectively, yields the best results, achieving slightly above 80% in terms of label ranking average precision (LRAP) in the IRMAS test set.ruments in over 2300 testing tracks.
Stigmergic Independent Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Collaboration
Authors: Xing Xu, Rongpeng Li, Zhifeng Zhao, Honggang Zhang
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

With the rapid evolution of wireless mobile devices, there emerges an increased need to design effective collaboration mechanisms between intelligent agents, so as to gradually approach the final collective objective through continuously learning from the environment based on their individual observations. In this regard, independent reinforcement learning (IRL) is often deployed in multi-agent collaboration to alleviate the problem of a non-stationary learning environment. However, behavioral strategies of intelligent agents in IRL can only be formulated upon their local individual observations of the global environment, and appropriate communication mechanisms must be introduced to reduce their behavioral localities. In this paper, we address the problem of communication between intelligent agents in IRL by jointly adopting mechanisms with two different scales. For the large scale, we introduce the stigmergy mechanism as an indirect communication bridge between independent learning agents, and carefully design a mathematical method to indicate the impact of digital pheromone. For the small scale, we propose a conflict-avoidance mechanism between adjacent agents by implementing an additionally embedded neural network to provide more opportunities for participants with higher action priorities. In addition, we present a federal training method to effectively optimize the neural network of each agent in a decentralized manner. Finally, we establish a simulation scenario in which a number of mobile agents in a certain area move automatically to form a specified target shape. Extensive simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
An End-to-end Framework for Unconstrained Monocular 3D Hand Pose Estimation
Authors: Sanjeev Sharma, Shaoli Huang, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Hand Pose Estimation, Hand Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

This work addresses the challenging problem of unconstrained 3D hand pose estimation using monocular RGB images. Most of the existing approaches assume some prior knowledge of hand (such as hand locations and side information) is available for 3D hand pose estimation. This restricts their use in unconstrained environments. We, therefore, present an end-to-end framework that robustly predicts hand prior information and accurately infers 3D hand pose by learning ConvNet models while only using keypoint annotations. To achieve robustness, the proposed framework uses a novel keypoint-based method to simultaneously predict hand regions and side labels, unlike existing methods that suffer from background color confusion caused by using segmentation or detection-based technology. Moreover, inspired by the biological structure of the human hand, we introduce two geometric constraints directly into the 3D coordinates prediction that further improves its performance in a weakly-supervised training. Experimental results show that our proposed framework not only performs robustly on unconstrained setting, but also outperforms the state-of-art methods on standard benchmark datasets.
QKD: Quantization-aware Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Jangho Kim, Yash Bhalgat, Jinwon Lee, Chirag Patel, Nojun Kwak
Date: 2019-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Quantization

Quantization and Knowledge distillation (KD) methods are widely used to reduce memory and power consumption of deep neural networks (DNNs), especially for resource-constrained edge devices. Although their combination is quite promising to meet these requirements, it may not work as desired. It is mainly because the regularization effect of KD further diminishes the already reduced representation power of a quantized model. To address this short-coming, we propose Quantization-aware Knowledge Distillation (QKD) wherein quantization and KD are care-fully coordinated in three phases. First, Self-studying (SS) phase fine-tunes a quantized low-precision student network without KD to obtain a good initialization. Second, Co-studying (CS) phase tries to train a teacher to make it more quantizaion-friendly and powerful than a fixed teacher. Finally, Tutoring (TU) phase transfers knowledge from the trained teacher to the student. We extensively evaluate our method on ImageNet and CIFAR-10/100 datasets and show an ablation study on networks with both standard and depthwise-separable convolutions. The proposed QKD outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods (e.g., 1.3% improvement on ResNet-18 with W4A4, 2.6% on MobileNetV2 with W4A4). Additionally, QKD could recover the full-precision accuracy at as low as W3A3 quantization on ResNet and W6A6 quantization on MobilenetV2.