pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Information in Emotion Communication
Authors: Alison Duncan Kerr, Kevin Scharp
Date: 2020-02-14 00:00:00

How much information is transmitted when animals use emotions to communicate? It is clear that emotions are used as communication systems in humans and other species. The quantitative theory of emotion information presented here is based on Shannon's mathematical theory of information in communication systems. The theory explains myriad aspects of emotion communication and offers dozens of new directions for research. It is superior to the "contagion" theory of emotion spreading, which is currently dominant. One important application of the information theory of emotion communication is that it permits the development of emotion security systems for social networks to guard against the widespread emotion manipulation we see online today.
SynFi: Automatic Synthetic Fingerprint Generation
Authors: M. Sadegh Riazi, Seyed M. Chavoshian, Farinaz Koushanfar
Date: 2020-02-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Authentication and identification methods based on human fingerprints are ubiquitous in several systems ranging from government organizations to consumer products. The performance and reliability of such systems directly rely on the volume of data on which they have been verified. Unfortunately, a large volume of fingerprint databases is not publicly available due to many privacy and security concerns. In this paper, we introduce a new approach to automatically generate high-fidelity synthetic fingerprints at scale. Our approach relies on (i) Generative Adversarial Networks to estimate the probability distribution of human fingerprints and (ii) Super-Resolution methods to synthesize fine-grained textures. We rigorously test our system and show that our methodology is the first to generate fingerprints that are computationally indistinguishable from real ones, a task that prior art could not accomplish.
Predicting Many Properties of a Quantum System from Very Few Measurements
Authors: Hsin-Yuan Huang, Richard Kueng, John Preskill
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00

Predicting properties of complex, large-scale quantum systems is essential for developing quantum technologies. We present an efficient method for constructing an approximate classical description of a quantum state using very few measurements of the state. This description, called a classical shadow, can be used to predict many different properties: order $\log M$ measurements suffice to accurately predict $M$ different functions of the state with high success probability. The number of measurements is independent of the system size, and saturates information-theoretic lower bounds. Moreover, target properties to predict can be selected after the measurements are completed. We support our theoretical findings with extensive numerical experiments. We apply classical shadows to predict quantum fidelities, entanglement entropies, two-point correlation functions, expectation values of local observables, and the energy variance of many-body local Hamiltonians. The numerical results highlight the advantages of classical shadows relative to previously known methods.
Effective Correlates of Motor Imagery Performance based on Default Mode Network in Resting-State
Authors: Jae-Geun Yoon, Minji Lee
Date: 2020-02-11 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Motor Imagery

Motor imagery based brain-computer interfaces (MI-BCIs) allow the control of devices and communication by imagining different muscle movements. However, most studies have reported a problem of "BCI-illiteracy" that does not have enough performance to use MI-BCI. Therefore, understanding subjects with poor performance and finding the cause of performance variation is still an important challenge. In this study, we proposed predictors of MI performance using effective connectivity in resting-state EEG. As a result, the high and low MI performance groups had a significant difference as 23% MI performance difference. We also found that connection from right lateral parietal to left lateral parietal in resting-state EEG was correlated significantly with MI performance (r = -0.37). These findings could help to understand BCI-illiteracy and to consider alternatives that are appropriate for the subject.
JRMOT: A Real-Time 3D Multi-Object Tracker and a New Large-Scale Dataset
Authors: Abhijeet Shenoi, Mihir Patel, JunYoung Gwak, Patrick Goebel, Amir Sadeghian, Hamid Rezatofighi, Roberto Martín-Martín, Silvio Savarese
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Motion Planning, Multi-Object Tracking, Multiple Object Tracking, Object Tracking

Robots navigating autonomously need to perceive and track the motion of objects and other agents in its surroundings. This information enables planning and executing robust and safe trajectories. To facilitate these processes, the motion should be perceived in 3D Cartesian space. However, most recent multi-object tracking (MOT) research has focused on tracking people and moving objects in 2D RGB video sequences. In this work we present JRMOT, a novel 3D MOT system that integrates information from RGB images and 3D point clouds to achieve real-time, state-of-the-art tracking performance. Our system is built with recent neural networks for re-identification, 2D and 3D detection and track description, combined into a joint probabilistic data-association framework within a multi-modal recursive Kalman architecture. As part of our work, we release the JRDB dataset, a novel large scale 2D+3D dataset and benchmark, annotated with over 2 million boxes and 3500 time consistent 2D+3D trajectories across 54 indoor and outdoor scenes. JRDB contains over 60 minutes of data including 360 degree cylindrical RGB video and 3D pointclouds in social settings that we use to develop, train and evaluate JRMOT. The presented 3D MOT system demonstrates state-of-the-art performance against competing methods on the popular 2D tracking KITTI benchmark and serves as first 3D tracking solution for our benchmark. Real-robot tests on our social robot JackRabbot indicate that the system is capable of tracking multiple pedestrians fast and reliably. We provide the ROS code of our tracker at https://sites.google.com/view/jrmot.
A Generalizable Knowledge Framework for Semantic Indoor Mapping Based on Markov Logic Networks and Data Driven MCMC
Authors: Ziyuan Liu, Georg von Wichert
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

In this paper, we propose a generalizable knowledge framework for data abstraction, i.e. finding compact abstract model for input data using predefined abstract terms. Based on these abstract terms, intelligent autonomous systems, such as a robot, should be able to make inference according to specific knowledge base, so that they can better handle the complexity and uncertainty of the real world. We propose to realize this framework by combining Markov logic networks (MLNs) and data driven MCMC sampling, because the former are a powerful tool for modelling uncertain knowledge and the latter provides an efficient way to draw samples from unknown complex distributions. Furthermore, we show in detail how to adapt this framework to a certain task, in particular, semantic robot mapping. Based on MLNs, we formulate task-specific context knowledge as descriptive soft rules. Experiments on real world data and simulated data confirm the usefulness of our framework.
Table-Top Scene Analysis Using Knowledge-Supervised MCMC
Authors: Ziyuan Liu, Dong Chen, Kai M. Wurm, Georg von Wichert
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Object

In this paper, we propose a probabilistic method to generate abstract scene graphs for table-top scenes from 6D object pose estimates. We explicitly make use of task-specfic context knowledge by encoding this knowledge as descriptive rules in Markov logic networks. Our approach to generate scene graphs is probabilistic: Uncertainty in the object poses is addressed by a probabilistic sensor model that is embedded in a data driven MCMC process. We apply Markov logic inference to reason about hidden objects and to detect false estimates of object poses. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated and evaluated in real world experiments.
Residual-Sparse Fuzzy $C$-Means Clustering Incorporating Morphological Reconstruction and Wavelet frames
Authors: Cong Wang, Witold Pedrycz, Zhiwu Li, Mengchu Zhou, Jun Zhao
Date: 2020-02-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Instead of directly utilizing an observed image including some outliers, noise or intensity inhomogeneity, the use of its ideal value (e.g. noise-free image) has a favorable impact on clustering. Hence, the accurate estimation of the residual (e.g. unknown noise) between the observed image and its ideal value is an important task. To do so, we propose an $\ell_0$ regularization-based Fuzzy $C$-Means (FCM) algorithm incorporating a morphological reconstruction operation and a tight wavelet frame transform. To achieve a sound trade-off between detail preservation and noise suppression, morphological reconstruction is used to filter an observed image. By combining the observed and filtered images, a weighted sum image is generated. Since a tight wavelet frame system has sparse representations of an image, it is employed to decompose the weighted sum image, thus forming its corresponding feature set. Taking it as data for clustering, we present an improved FCM algorithm by imposing an $\ell_0$ regularization term on the residual between the feature set and its ideal value, which implies that the favorable estimation of the residual is obtained and the ideal value participates in clustering. Spatial information is also introduced into clustering since it is naturally encountered in image segmentation. Furthermore, it makes the estimation of the residual more reliable. To further enhance the segmentation effects of the improved FCM algorithm, we also employ the morphological reconstruction to smoothen the labels generated by clustering. Finally, based on the prototypes and smoothed labels, the segmented image is reconstructed by using a tight wavelet frame reconstruction operation. Experimental results reported for synthetic, medical, and color images show that the proposed algorithm is effective and efficient, and outperforms other algorithms.
Cooperative LIDAR Object Detection via Feature Sharing in Deep Networks
Authors: Ehsan Emad Marvasti, Arash Raftari, Amir Emad Marvasti, Yaser P. Fallah, Rui Guo, HongSheng Lu
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, object-detection, Object Detection

The recent advancements in communication and computational systems has led to significant improvement of situational awareness in connected and autonomous vehicles. Computationally efficient neural networks and high speed wireless vehicular networks have been some of the main contributors to this improvement. However, scalability and reliability issues caused by inherent limitations of sensory and communication systems are still challenging problems. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the effects of these limitations by introducing the concept of feature sharing for cooperative object detection (FS-COD). In our proposed approach, a better understanding of the environment is achieved by sharing partially processed data between cooperative vehicles while maintaining a balance between computation and communication load. This approach is different from current methods of map sharing, or sharing of raw data which are not scalable. The performance of the proposed approach is verified through experiments on Volony dataset. It is shown that the proposed approach has significant performance superiority over the conventional single-vehicle object detection approaches.
Revisiting Training Strategies and Generalization Performance in Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Karsten Roth, Timo Milbich, Samarth Sinha, Prateek Gupta, Björn Ommer, Joseph Paul Cohen
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Metric Learning

Deep Metric Learning (DML) is arguably one of the most influential lines of research for learning visual similarities with many proposed approaches every year. Although the field benefits from the rapid progress, the divergence in training protocols, architectures, and parameter choices make an unbiased comparison difficult. To provide a consistent reference point, we revisit the most widely used DML objective functions and conduct a study of the crucial parameter choices as well as the commonly neglected mini-batch sampling process. Under consistent comparison, DML objectives show much higher saturation than indicated by literature. Further based on our analysis, we uncover a correlation between the embedding space density and compression to the generalization performance of DML models. Exploiting these insights, we propose a simple, yet effective, training regularization to reliably boost the performance of ranking-based DML models on various standard benchmark datasets. Code and a publicly accessible WandB-repo are available at https://github.com/Confusezius/Revisiting_Deep_Metric_Learning_PyTorch.
Modelling response to trypophobia trigger using intermediate layers of ImageNet networks
Authors: Piotr Woźnicki, Michał Kuźba, Piotr Migdał
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00

In this paper, we approach the problem of detecting trypophobia triggers using Convolutional neural networks. We show that standard architectures such as VGG or ResNet are capable of recognizing trypophobia patterns. We also conduct experiments to analyze the nature of this phenomenon. To do that, we dissect the network decreasing the number of its layers and parameters. We prove, that even significantly reduced networks have accuracy above 91% and focus their attention on the trypophobia patterns as presented on the visual explanations.
Algorithm-hardware Co-design for Deformable Convolution
Authors: Qijing Huang, Dequan Wang, Yizhao Gao, Yaohui Cai, Zhen Dong, Bichen Wu, Kurt Keutzer, John Wawrzynek
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Quantization, Semantic Segmentation

FPGAs provide a flexible and efficient platform to accelerate rapidly-changing algorithms for computer vision. The majority of existing work focuses on accelerating image classification, while other fundamental vision problems, including object detection and instance segmentation, have not been adequately addressed. Compared with image classification, detection problems are more sensitive to the spatial variance of objects, and therefore, require specialized convolutions to aggregate spatial information. To address this, recent work proposes dynamic deformable convolution to augment regular convolutions. Regular convolutions process a fixed grid of pixels across all the spatial locations in an image, while dynamic deformable convolutions may access arbitrary pixels in the image and the access pattern is input-dependent and varies per spatial location. These properties lead to inefficient memory accesses of inputs with existing hardware. In this work, we first investigate the overhead of the deformable convolution on embedded FPGA SoCs, and then show the accuracy-latency tradeoffs for a set of algorithm modifications including full versus depthwise, fixed-shape, and limited-range. These modifications benefit the energy efficiency for embedded devices in general as they reduce the compute complexity. We then build an efficient object detection network with modified deformable convolutions and quantize the network using state-of-the-art quantization methods. We implement a unified hardware engine on FPGA to support all the operations in the network. Preliminary experiments show that little accuracy is compromised and speedup can be achieved with our co-design optimization for the deformable convolution.
T-Net: Learning Feature Representation with Task-specific Supervision for Biomedical Image Analysis
Authors: Weinan Song, Yuan Liang, Jiawei Yang, Kun Wang, Lei He
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Region Proposal, Representation Learning

The encoder-decoder network is widely used to learn deep feature representations from pixel-wise annotations in biomedical image analysis. Under this structure, the performance profoundly relies on the effectiveness of feature extraction achieved by the encoding network. However, few models have considered adapting the attention of the feature extractor even in different kinds of tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel training strategy by adapting the attention of the feature extractor according to different tasks for effective representation learning. Specifically, the framework, named T-Net, consists of an encoding network supervised by task-specific attention maps and a posterior network that takes in the learned features to predict the corresponding results. The attention map is obtained by the transformation from pixel-wise annotations according to the specific task, which is used as the supervision to regularize the feature extractor to focus on different locations of the recognition object. To show the effectiveness of our method, we evaluate T-Net on two different tasks, i.e. , segmentation and localization. Extensive results on three public datasets (BraTS-17, MoNuSeg and IDRiD) have indicated the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed supervision method, especially over the conventional encoding-decoding network.
Unsupervised Deep Feature Learning for Deformable Registration of MR Brain Images
Authors: Guorong WuMinjeong KimQian WangYaozong GaoShu LiaoDinggang Shen
Date: 2013-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: MICCAI 2013 3
Tasks: Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Establishing accurate anatomical correspondences is critical for medical image registration. Although many hand-engineered features have been proposed for correspondence detection in various registration applications, no features are general enough to work well for all image data. Although many learning-based methods have been developed to help selection of best features for guiding correspondence detection across subjects with large anatomical variations, they are often limited by requiring the known correspondences (often presumably estimated by certain registration methods) as the ground truth for training. To address this limitation, we propose using an unsupervised deep learning approach to directly learn the basis filters that can effectively represent all observed image patches. Then, the coefficients by these learnt basis filters in representing the particular image patch can be regarded as the morphological signature for correspondence detection during image registration. Specifically, a stacked two-layer convolutional network is constructed to seek for the hierarchical representations for each image patch, where the high-level features are inferred from the responses of the low-level network. By replacing the hand-engineered features with our learnt data-adaptive features for image registration, we achieve promising registration results, which demonstrates that a general approach can be built to improve image registration by using data-adaptive features through unsupervised deep learning.
Higher-Order Label Homogeneity and Spreading in Graphs
Authors: Dhivya Eswaran, Srijan Kumar, Christos Faloutsos
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, Recommendation Systems

Do higher-order network structures aid graph semi-supervised learning? Given a graph and a few labeled vertices, labeling the remaining vertices is a high-impact problem with applications in several tasks, such as recommender systems, fraud detection and protein identification. However, traditional methods rely on edges for spreading labels, which is limited as all edges are not equal. Vertices with stronger connections participate in higher-order structures in graphs, which calls for methods that can leverage these structures in the semi-supervised learning tasks. To this end, we propose Higher-Order Label Spreading (HOLS) to spread labels using higher-order structures. HOLS has strong theoretical guarantees and reduces to standard label spreading in the base case. Via extensive experiments, we show that higher-order label spreading using triangles in addition to edges is up to 4.7% better than label spreading using edges alone. Compared to prior traditional and state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method leads to statistically significant accuracy gains in all-but-one cases, while remaining fast and scalable to large graphs.
iSEGAN: Improved Speech Enhancement Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Deepak Baby
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Popular neural network-based speech enhancement systems operate on the magnitude spectrogram and ignore the phase mismatch between the noisy and clean speech signals. Conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) show promise in addressing the phase mismatch problem by directly mapping the raw noisy speech waveform to the underlying clean speech signal. However, stabilizing and training cGAN systems is difficult and they still fall short of the performance achieved by the spectral enhancement approaches. This paper investigates whether different normalization strategies and one-sided label smoothing can further stabilize the cGAN-based speech enhancement model. In addition, we propose incorporating a Gammatone-based auditory filtering layer and a trainable pre-emphasis layer to further improve the performance of the cGAN framework. Simulation results show that the proposed approaches improve the speech enhancement performance of cGAN systems in addition to yielding improved stability and reduced computational effort.
Bias in word embeddings
Authors: Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, Simon Hegelich, Juan Carlos Medina Serrano, Fabienne Marco
Date: 2020-01-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency 2020 1
Tasks: Bias Detection, Word Embeddings

Word embeddings are a widely used set of natural language processing techniques that map words to vectors of real numbers. These vectors are used to improve the quality of generative and predictive models. Recent studies demonstrate that word embeddings contain and amplify biases present in data, such as stereotypes and prejudice. In this study, we provide a complete overview of bias in word embeddings. We develop a new technique for bias detection for gendered languages and use it to compare bias in embeddings trained on Wikipedia and on political social media data. We investigate bias diffusion and prove that existing biases are transferred to further machine learning models. We test two techniques for bias mitigation and show that the generally proposed methodology for debiasing models at the embeddings level is insufficient. Finally, we employ biased word embeddings and illustrate that they can be used for the detection of similar biases in new data. Given that word embeddings are widely used by commercial companies, we discuss the challenges and required actions towards fair algorithmic implementations and applications.