pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Event detection in coarsely annotated sports videos via parallel multi receptive field 1D convolutions
Authors: Kanav Vats, Mehrnaz Fani, Pascale Walters, David A. Clausi, John Zelek
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Spotting, Event Detection

In problems such as sports video analytics, it is difficult to obtain accurate frame level annotations and exact event duration because of the lengthy videos and sheer volume of video data. This issue is even more pronounced in fast-paced sports such as ice hockey. Obtaining annotations on a coarse scale can be much more practical and time efficient. We propose the task of event detection in coarsely annotated videos. We introduce a multi-tower temporal convolutional network architecture for the proposed task. The network, with the help of multiple receptive fields, processes information at various temporal scales to account for the uncertainty with regard to the exact event location and duration. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the multi-receptive field architecture through appropriate ablation studies. The method is evaluated on two tasks - event detection in coarsely annotated hockey videos in the NHL dataset and event spotting in soccer on the SoccerNet dataset. The two datasets lack frame-level annotations and have very distinct event frequencies. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the network by obtaining a 55% average F1 score on the NHL dataset and by achieving competitive performance compared to the state of the art on the SoccerNet dataset. We believe our approach will help develop more practical pipelines for event detection in sports video.
Distributed Learning: Sequential Decision Making in Resource-Constrained Environments
Authors: Udari Madhushani, Naomi Ehrich Leonard
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

We study cost-effective communication strategies that can be used to improve the performance of distributed learning systems in resource-constrained environments. For distributed learning in sequential decision making, we propose a new cost-effective partial communication protocol. We illustrate that with this protocol the group obtains the same order of performance that it obtains with full communication. Moreover, we prove that under the proposed partial communication protocol the communication cost is $O(\log T)$, where $T$ is the time horizon of the decision-making process. This improves significantly on protocols with full communication, which incur a communication cost that is $O(T)$. We validate our theoretical results using numerical simulations.
Oscar: Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training for Vision-Language Tasks
Authors: Xiujun Li, Xi Yin, Chunyuan Li, Pengchuan Zhang, Xiao-Wei Hu, Lei Zhang, Lijuan Wang, Houdong Hu, Li Dong, Furu Wei, Yejin Choi, Jianfeng Gao
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Image Captioning, Image Retrieval, Image-text matching, Image-to-Text Retrieval, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Large-scale pre-training methods of learning cross-modal representations on image-text pairs are becoming popular for vision-language tasks. While existing methods simply concatenate image region features and text features as input to the model to be pre-trained and use self-attention to learn image-text semantic alignments in a brute force manner, in this paper, we propose a new learning method Oscar (Object-Semantics Aligned Pre-training), which uses object tags detected in images as anchor points to significantly ease the learning of alignments. Our method is motivated by the observation that the salient objects in an image can be accurately detected, and are often mentioned in the paired text. We pre-train an Oscar model on the public corpus of 6.5 million text-image pairs, and fine-tune it on downstream tasks, creating new state-of-the-arts on six well-established vision-language understanding and generation tasks.
Blind Quality Assessment for Image Superresolution Using Deep Two-Stream Convolutional Networks
Authors: Wei Zhou, Qiuping Jiang, Yuwang Wang, Zhibo Chen, Weiping Li
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment

Numerous image superresolution (SR) algorithms have been proposed for reconstructing high-resolution (HR) images from input images with lower spatial resolutions. However, effectively evaluating the perceptual quality of SR images remains a challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose a no-reference/blind deep neural network-based SR image quality assessor (DeepSRQ). To learn more discriminative feature representations of various distorted SR images, the proposed DeepSRQ is a two-stream convolutional network including two subcomponents for distorted structure and texture SR images. Different from traditional image distortions, the artifacts of SR images cause both image structure and texture quality degradation. Therefore, we choose the two-stream scheme that captures different properties of SR inputs instead of directly learning features from one image stream. Considering the human visual system (HVS) characteristics, the structure stream focuses on extracting features in structural degradations, while the texture stream focuses on the change in textural distributions. In addition, to augment the training data and ensure the category balance, we propose a stride-based adaptive cropping approach for further improvement. Experimental results on three publicly available SR image quality databases demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization ability of our proposed DeepSRQ method compared with state-of-the-art image quality assessment algorithms.
An Efficient UAV-based Artificial Intelligence Framework for Real-Time Visual Tasks
Authors: Enkhtogtokh Togootogtokh, Christian Micheloni, Gian Luca Foresti, Niki Martinel
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Modern Unmanned Aerial Vehicles equipped with state of the art artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are opening to a wide plethora of novel and interesting applications. While this field received a strong impact from the recent AI breakthroughs, most of the provided solutions either entirely rely on commercial software or provide a weak integration interface which denies the development of additional techniques. This leads us to propose a novel and efficient framework for the UAV-AI joint technology. Intelligent UAV systems encounter complex challenges to be tackled without human control. One of these complex challenges is to be able to carry out computer vision tasks in real-time use cases. In this paper we focus on this challenge and introduce a multi-layer AI (MLAI) framework to allow easy integration of ad-hoc visual-based AI applications. To show its features and its advantages, we implemented and evaluated different modern visual-based deep learning models for object detection, target tracking and target handover.
Improving Scholarly Knowledge Representation: Evaluating BERT-based Models for Scientific Relation Classification
Authors: Ming Jiang, Jennifer D'Souza, Sören Auer, J. Stephen Downie
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Relation, Relation Classification, Relation Extraction

With the rapid growth of research publications, there is a vast amount of scholarly knowledge that needs to be organized in digital libraries. To deal with this challenge, techniques relying on knowledge-graph structures are being advocated. Within such graph-based pipelines, inferring relation types between related scientific concepts is a crucial step. Recently, advanced techniques relying on language models pre-trained on the large corpus have been popularly explored for automatic relation classification. Despite remarkable contributions that have been made, many of these methods were evaluated under different scenarios, which limits their comparability. To this end, we present a thorough empirical evaluation on eight Bert-based classification models by focusing on two key factors: 1) Bert model variants, and 2) classification strategies. Experiments on three corpora show that domain-specific pre-training corpus benefits the Bert-based classification model to identify the type of scientific relations. Although the strategy of predicting a single relation each time achieves a higher classification accuracy than the strategy of identifying multiple relation types simultaneously in general, the latter strategy demonstrates a more consistent performance in the corpus with either a large or small size of annotations. Our study aims to offer recommendations to the stakeholders of digital libraries for selecting the appropriate technique to build knowledge-graph-based systems for enhanced scholarly information organization.
Sparse Regression at Scale: Branch-and-Bound rooted in First-Order Optimization
Authors: Hussein Hazimeh, Rahul Mazumder, Ali Saab
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Sparse Learning

We consider the least squares regression problem, penalized with a combination of the $\ell_{0}$ and squared $\ell_{2}$ penalty functions (a.k.a. $\ell_0 \ell_2$ regularization). Recent work shows that the resulting estimators are of key importance in many high-dimensional statistical settings. However, exact computation of these estimators remains a major challenge. Indeed, modern exact methods, based on mixed integer programming (MIP), face difficulties when the number of features $p \sim 10^4$. In this work, we present a new exact MIP framework for $\ell_0\ell_2$-regularized regression that can scale to $p \sim 10^7$, achieving speedups of at least $5000$x, compared to state-of-the-art exact methods. Unlike recent work, which relies on modern commercial MIP solvers, we design a specialized nonlinear branch-and-bound (BnB) framework, by critically exploiting the problem structure. A key distinguishing component in our framework lies in efficiently solving the node relaxations using a specialized first-order method, based on coordinate descent (CD). Our CD-based method effectively leverages information across the BnB nodes, through using warm starts, active sets, and gradient screening. In addition, we design a novel method for obtaining dual bounds from primal CD solutions, which certifiably works in high dimensions. Experiments on synthetic and real high-dimensional datasets demonstrate that our framework is not only significantly faster than the state of the art, but can also deliver certifiably optimal solutions to statistically challenging instances that cannot be handled with existing methods. We open source the implementation through our toolkit L0BnB.
Local Model Feature Transformations
Authors: CScott Brown
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Event Detection, Gaussian Processes, model, Point Cloud Segmentation, Surface Reconstruction

Local learning methods are a popular class of machine learning algorithms. The basic idea for the entire cadre is to choose some non-local model family, to train many of them on small sections of neighboring data, and then to `stitch' the resulting models together in some way. Due to the limits of constraining a training dataset to a small neighborhood, research on locally-learned models has largely been restricted to simple model families. Also, since simple model families have no complex structure by design, this has limited use of the individual local models to predictive tasks. We hypothesize that, using a sufficiently complex local model family, various properties of the individual local models, such as their learned parameters, can be used as features for further learning. This dissertation improves upon the current state of research and works toward establishing this hypothesis by investigating algorithms for localization of more complex model families and by studying their applications beyond predictions as a feature extraction mechanism. We summarize this generic technique of using local models as a feature extraction step with the term ``local model feature transformations.'' In this document, we extend the local modeling paradigm to Gaussian processes, orthogonal quadric models and word embedding models, and extend the existing theory for localized linear classifiers. We then demonstrate applications of local model feature transformations to epileptic event classification from EEG readings, activity monitoring via chest accelerometry, 3D surface reconstruction, 3D point cloud segmentation, handwritten digit classification and event detection from Twitter feeds.
SpeedNet: Learning the Speediness in Videos
Authors: Sagie Benaim, Ariel Ephrat, Oran Lang, Inbar Mosseri, William T. Freeman, Michael Rubinstein, Michal Irani, Tali Dekel
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Action Recognition, Binary Classification, Retrieval, Self-Supervised Action Recognition, Video Retrieval

We wish to automatically predict the "speediness" of moving objects in videos---whether they move faster, at, or slower than their "natural" speed. The core component in our approach is SpeedNet---a novel deep network trained to detect if a video is playing at normal rate, or if it is sped up. SpeedNet is trained on a large corpus of natural videos in a self-supervised manner, without requiring any manual annotations. We show how this single, binary classification network can be used to detect arbitrary rates of speediness of objects. We demonstrate prediction results by SpeedNet on a wide range of videos containing complex natural motions, and examine the visual cues it utilizes for making those predictions. Importantly, we show that through predicting the speed of videos, the model learns a powerful and meaningful space-time representation that goes beyond simple motion cues. We demonstrate how those learned features can boost the performance of self-supervised action recognition, and can be used for video retrieval. Furthermore, we also apply SpeedNet for generating time-varying, adaptive video speedups, which can allow viewers to watch videos faster, but with less of the jittery, unnatural motions typical to videos that are sped up uniformly.
Transfer Learning for EEG-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Review of Progress Made Since 2016
Authors: Dongrui Wu, Yifan Xu, Bao-liang Lu
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Computer Interface, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Motor Imagery, Transfer Learning

A brain-computer interface (BCI) enables a user to communicate with a computer directly using brain signals. The most common non-invasive BCI modality, electroencephalogram (EEG), is sensitive to noise/artifact and suffers between-subject/within-subject non-stationarity. Therefore, it is difficult to build a generic pattern recognition model in an EEG-based BCI system that is optimal for different subjects, during different sessions, for different devices and tasks. Usually, a calibration session is needed to collect some training data for a new subject, which is time-consuming and user unfriendly. Transfer learning (TL), which utilizes data or knowledge from similar or relevant subjects/sessions/devices/tasks to facilitate learning for a new subject/session/device/task, is frequently used to reduce the amount of calibration effort. This paper reviews journal publications on TL approaches in EEG-based BCIs in the last few years, i.e., since 2016. Six paradigms and applications -- motor imagery, event-related potentials, steady-state visual evoked potentials, affective BCIs, regression problems, and adversarial attacks -- are considered. For each paradigm/application, we group the TL approaches into cross-subject/session, cross-device, and cross-task settings and review them separately. Observations and conclusions are made at the end of the paper, which may point to future research directions.
Learning a low dimensional manifold of real cancer tissue with PathologyGAN
Authors: Adalberto Claudio Quiros, Roderick Murray-Smith, Ke Yuan
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Application of deep learning in digital pathology shows promise on improving disease diagnosis and understanding. We present a deep generative model that learns to simulate high-fidelity cancer tissue images while mapping the real images onto an interpretable low dimensional latent space. The key to the model is an encoder trained by a previously developed generative adversarial network, PathologyGAN. We study the latent space using 249K images from two breast cancer cohorts. We find that the latent space encodes morphological characteristics of tissues (e.g. patterns of cancer, lymphocytes, and stromal cells). In addition, the latent space reveals distinctly enriched clusters of tissue architectures in the high-risk patient group.
Compass-aligned Distributional Embeddings for Studying Semantic Differences across Corpora
Authors: Federico Bianchi, Valerio Di Carlo, Paolo Nicoli, Matteo Palmonari
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Word Embeddings

Word2vec is one of the most used algorithms to generate word embeddings because of a good mix of efficiency, quality of the generated representations and cognitive grounding. However, word meaning is not static and depends on the context in which words are used. Differences in word meaning that depends on time, location, topic, and other factors, can be studied by analyzing embeddings generated from different corpora in collections that are representative of these factors. For example, language evolution can be studied using a collection of news articles published in different time periods. In this paper, we present a general framework to support cross-corpora language studies with word embeddings, where embeddings generated from different corpora can be compared to find correspondences and differences in meaning across the corpora. CADE is the core component of our framework and solves the key problem of aligning the embeddings generated from different corpora. In particular, we focus on providing solid evidence about the effectiveness, generality, and robustness of CADE. To this end, we conduct quantitative and qualitative experiments in different domains, from temporal word embeddings to language localization and topical analysis. The results of our experiments suggest that CADE achieves state-of-the-art or superior performance on tasks where several competing approaches are available, yet providing a general method that can be used in a variety of domains. Finally, our experiments shed light on the conditions under which the alignment is reliable, which substantially depends on the degree of cross-corpora vocabulary overlap.
Gender Detection on Social Networks using Ensemble Deep Learning
Authors: Kamran Kowsari, Mojtaba Heidarysafa, Tolu Odukoya, Philip Potter, Laura E. Barnes, Donald E. Brown
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Deep Learning, Document Classification, General Classification

Analyzing the ever-increasing volume of posts on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter requires improved information processing methods for profiling authorship. Document classification is central to this task, but the performance of traditional supervised classifiers has degraded as the volume of social media has increased. This paper addresses this problem in the context of gender detection through ensemble classification that employs multi-model deep learning architectures to generate specialized understanding from different feature spaces.
Open Data Resources for Fighting COVID-19
Authors: Teodoro Alamo, Daniel G. Reina, Martina Mammarella, Alberto Abella
Date: 2020-04-13 00:00:00

We provide an insight into the open data resources pertinent to the study of the spread of Covid-19 pandemic and its control. We identify the variables required to analyze fundamental aspects like seasonal behaviour, regional mortality rates, and effectiveness of government measures. Open data resources, along with data-driven methodologies, provide many opportunities to improve the response of the different administrations to the virus. We describe the present limitations and difficulties encountered in most of the open-data resources. To facilitate the access to the main open-data portals and resources, we identify the most relevant institutions, at a world scale, providing Covid-19 information and/or auxiliary variables (demographics, mobility, etc.). We also describe several open resources to access Covid-19 data-sets at a country-wide level (i.e. China, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, U.S., etc.). In an attempt to facilitate the rapid response to the study of the seasonal behaviour of Covid-19, we enumerate the main open resources in terms of weather and climate variables. CONCO-Team: The authors of this paper belong to the CONtrol COvid-19 Team, which is composed of different researches from universities of Spain, Italy, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Argentina. The main goal of CONCO-Team is to develop data-driven methods for the better understanding and control of the pandemic.
Improving Calibration and Out-of-Distribution Detection in Medical Image Segmentation with Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Davood Karimi, Ali Gholipour
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have shown to be powerful medical image segmentation models. In this study, we address some of the main unresolved issues regarding these models. Specifically, training of these models on small medical image datasets is still challenging, with many studies promoting techniques such as transfer learning. Moreover, these models are infamous for producing over-confident predictions and for failing silently when presented with out-of-distribution (OOD) data at test time. In this paper, we advocate for multi-task learning, i.e., training a single model on several different datasets, spanning several different organs of interest and different imaging modalities. We show that not only a single CNN learns to automatically recognize the context and accurately segment the organ of interest in each context, but also that such a joint model often has more accurate and better-calibrated predictions than dedicated models trained separately on each dataset. Our experiments show that multi-task learning can outperform transfer learning in medical image segmentation tasks. For detecting OOD data, we propose a method based on spectral analysis of CNN feature maps. We show that different datasets, representing different imaging modalities and/or different organs of interest, have distinct spectral signatures, which can be used to identify whether or not a test image is similar to the images used to train a model. We show that this approach is far more accurate than OOD detection based on prediction uncertainty. The methods proposed in this paper contribute significantly to improving the accuracy and reliability of CNN-based medical image segmentation models.
Solving Newton's Equations of Motion with Large Timesteps using Recurrent Neural Networks based Operators
Authors: JCS Kadupitiya, Geoffrey C. Fox, Vikram Jadhao
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00

Classical molecular dynamics simulations are based on solving Newton's equations of motion. Using a small timestep, numerical integrators such as Verlet generate trajectories of particles as solutions to Newton's equations. We introduce operators derived using recurrent neural networks that accurately solve Newton's equations utilizing sequences of past trajectory data, and produce energy-conserving dynamics of particles using timesteps up to 4000 times larger compared to the Verlet timestep. We demonstrate significant speedup in many example problems including 3D systems of up to 16 particles.