pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An unsupervised approach to Geographical Knowledge Discovery using street level and street network images
Authors: Stephen Law, Mateo Neira
Date: 2019-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Recent researches have shown the increasing use of machine learn-ing methods in geography and urban analytics, primarily to extract features and patterns from spatial and temporal data using a supervised approach. Researches integrating geographical processes in machine learning models and the use of unsupervised approacheson geographical data for knowledge discovery had been sparse. This research contributes to the ladder, where we show how latent variables learned from unsupervised learning methods on urbanimages can be used for geographic knowledge discovery. In particular, we propose a simple approach called Convolutional-PCA(ConvPCA) which are applied on both street level and street network images to find a set of uncorrelated and ordered visual latentcomponents. The approach allows for meaningful explanations using a combination of geographical and generative visualisations to explore the latent space, and to show how the learned representation can be used to predict urban characteristics such as streetquality and street network attributes. The research also finds that the visual components from the ConvPCA model achieves similaraccuracy when compared to less interpretable dimension reduction techniques.
Anomaly Detection with Joint Representation Learning of Content and Connection
Authors: Junhao Wang, Renhao Wang, Aayushi Kulshrestha, Reihaneh Rabbany
Date: 2019-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Representation Learning

Social media sites are becoming a key factor in politics. These platforms are easy to manipulate for the purpose of distorting information space to confuse and distract voters. Past works to identify disruptive patterns are mostly focused on analyzing the content of tweets. In this study, we jointly embed the information from both user posted content as well as a user's follower network, to detect groups of densely connected users in an unsupervised fashion. We then investigate these dense sub-blocks of users to flag anomalous behavior. In our experiments, we study the tweets related to the upcoming 2019 Canadian Elections, and observe a set of densely-connected users engaging in local politics in different provinces, and exhibiting troll-like behavior.
PredNet and Predictive Coding: A Critical Review
Authors: Roshan Rane, Edit Szügyi, Vageesh Saxena, André Ofner, Sebastian Stober
Date: 2019-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, General Classification, Representation Learning, Video Prediction

PredNet, a deep predictive coding network developed by Lotter et al., combines a biologically inspired architecture based on the propagation of prediction error with self-supervised representation learning in video. While the architecture has drawn a lot of attention and various extensions of the model exist, there is a lack of a critical analysis. We fill in the gap by evaluating PredNet both as an implementation of the predictive coding theory and as a self-supervised video prediction model using a challenging video action classification dataset. We design an extended model to test if conditioning future frame predictions on the action class of the video improves the model performance. We show that PredNet does not yet completely follow the principles of predictive coding. The proposed top-down conditioning leads to a performance gain on synthetic data, but does not scale up to the more complex real-world action classification dataset. Our analysis is aimed at guiding future research on similar architectures based on the predictive coding theory.
Identifying Emotions from Walking using Affective and Deep Features
Authors: Tanmay Randhavane, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Kyra Kapsaskis, Kurt Gray, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2019-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition

We present a new data-driven model and algorithm to identify the perceived emotions of individuals based on their walking styles. Given an RGB video of an individual walking, we extract his/her walking gait in the form of a series of 3D poses. Our goal is to exploit the gait features to classify the emotional state of the human into one of four emotions: happy, sad, angry, or neutral. Our perceived emotion recognition approach uses deep features learned via LSTM on labeled emotion datasets. Furthermore, we combine these features with affective features computed from gaits using posture and movement cues. These features are classified using a Random Forest Classifier. We show that our mapping between the combined feature space and the perceived emotional state provides 80.07% accuracy in identifying the perceived emotions. In addition to classifying discrete categories of emotions, our algorithm also predicts the values of perceived valence and arousal from gaits. We also present an EWalk (Emotion Walk) dataset that consists of videos of walking individuals with gaits and labeled emotions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first gait-based model to identify perceived emotions from videos of walking individuals.
Comparing Machine Learning Approaches for Table Recognition in Historical Register Books
Authors: Stéphane Clinchant, Hervé Déjean, Jean-Luc Meunier, Eva Lang, Florian Kleber
Date: 2019-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Table Recognition

We present in this paper experiments on Table Recognition in hand-written registry books. We first explain how the problem of row and column detection is modeled, and then compare two Machine Learning approaches (Conditional Random Field and Graph Convolutional Network) for detecting these table elements. Evaluation was conducted on death records provided by the Archive of the Diocese of Passau. Both methods show similar results, a 89 F1 score, a quality which allows for Information Extraction. Software and dataset are open source/data.
VolMap: A Real-time Model for Semantic Segmentation of a LiDAR surrounding view
Authors: Hager Radi, Waleed Ali
Date: 2019-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Vehicles, CPU, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper introduces VolMap, a real-time approach for the semantic segmentation of a 3D LiDAR surrounding view system in autonomous vehicles. We designed an optimized deep convolution neural network that can accurately segment the point cloud produced by a 360\degree{} LiDAR setup, where the input consists of a volumetric bird-eye view with LiDAR height layers used as input channels. We further investigated the usage of multi-LiDAR setup and its effect on the performance of the semantic segmentation task. Our evaluations are carried out on a large scale 3D object detection benchmark containing a LiDAR cocoon setup, along with KITTI dataset, where the per-point segmentation labels are derived from 3D bounding boxes. We show that VolMap achieved an excellent balance between high accuracy and real-time running on CPU.
Implicitly Adaptive Importance Sampling
Authors: Topi Paananen, Juho Piironen, Paul-Christian Bürkner, Aki Vehtari
Date: 2019-06-20 00:00:00

Adaptive importance sampling is a class of techniques for finding good proposal distributions for importance sampling. Often the proposal distributions are standard probability distributions whose parameters are adapted based on the mismatch between the current proposal and a target distribution. In this work, we present an implicit adaptive importance sampling method that applies to complicated distributions which are not available in closed form. The method iteratively matches the moments of a set of Monte Carlo draws to weighted moments based on importance weights. We apply the method to Bayesian leave-one-out cross-validation and show that it performs better than many existing parametric adaptive importance sampling methods while being computationally inexpensive.
Explicit Disentanglement of Appearance and Perspective in Generative Models
Authors: Nicki Skafte Detlefsen, Søren Hauberg
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Disentanglement, Inductive Bias, Representation Learning

Disentangled representation learning finds compact, independent and easy-to-interpret factors of the data. Learning such has been shown to require an inductive bias, which we explicitly encode in a generative model of images. Specifically, we propose a model with two latent spaces: one that represents spatial transformations of the input data, and another that represents the transformed data. We find that the latter naturally captures the intrinsic appearance of the data. To realize the generative model, we propose a Variationally Inferred Transformational Autoencoder (VITAE) that incorporates a spatial transformer into a variational autoencoder. We show how to perform inference in the model efficiently by carefully designing the encoders and restricting the transformation class to be diffeomorphic. Empirically, our model separates the visual style from digit type on MNIST, separates shape and pose in images of human bodies and facial features from facial shape on CelebA.
From Data Quality to Model Quality: an Exploratory Study on Deep Learning
Authors: Tianxing He, Shengcheng Yu, Ziyuan Wang, Jieqiong Li, Zhenyu Chen
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00

Nowadays, people strive to improve the accuracy of deep learning models. However, very little work has focused on the quality of data sets. In fact, data quality determines model quality. Therefore, it is important for us to make research on how data quality affects on model quality. In this paper, we mainly consider four aspects of data quality, including Dataset Equilibrium, Dataset Size, Quality of Label, Dataset Contamination. We deign experiment on MNIST and Cifar-10 and try to find out the influence the four aspects make on model quality. Experimental results show that four aspects all have decisive impact on the quality of models. It means that decrease in data quality in these aspects will reduce the accuracy of model.
Uncertainty Based Detection and Relabeling of Noisy Image Labels
Authors: Jan M. Köhler, Maximilian Autenrieth, William H. Beluch
Date: 2019-05-29 00:00:00

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful tools in computer vision tasks. However, in many realistic scenarios label noise is prevalent in the training images, and overfitting to these noisy labels can significantly harm the generalization performance of DNNs. We propose a novel technique to identify data with noisy labels based on the different distributions of the predictive uncertainties from a DNN over the clean and noisy data. Additionally, the behavior of the uncertainty over the course of training helps to identify the network weights which best can be used to relabel the noisy labels. Data with noisy labels can therefore be cleaned in an iterative process. Our proposed method can be easily implemented, and shows promising performance on the task of noisy label detection on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.
Making CNNs for Video Parsing Accessible
Authors: Zijin Luo, Matthew Guzdial, Mark Riedl
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00

The ability to extract sequences of game events for high-resolution e-sport games has traditionally required access to the game's engine. This serves as a barrier to groups who don't possess this access. It is possible to apply deep learning to derive these logs from gameplay video, but it requires computational power that serves as an additional barrier. These groups would benefit from access to these logs, such as small e-sport tournament organizers who could better visualize gameplay to inform both audience and commentators. In this paper we present a combined solution to reduce the required computational resources and time to apply a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract events from e-sport gameplay videos. This solution consists of techniques to train a CNN faster and methods to execute predictions more quickly. This expands the types of machines capable of training and running these models, which in turn extends access to extracting game logs with this approach. We evaluate the approaches in the domain of DOTA2, one of the most popular e-sports. Our results demonstrate our approach outperforms standard backpropagation baselines.
Deep Learning-Based Classification Of the Defective Pistachios Via Deep Autoencoder Neural Networks
Authors: Mehdi Abbaszadeh, Aliakbar Rahimifard, Mohammadali Eftekhari, Hossein Ghayoumi zadeh, Ali Fayazi, Ali Dini, Mostafa Danaeian
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Pistachio nut is mainly consumed as raw, salted or roasted because of its high nutritional properties and favorable taste. Pistachio nuts with shell and kernel defects, besides not being acceptable for a consumer, are also prone to insects damage, mold decay, and aflatoxin contamination. In this research, a deep learning-based imaging algorithm was developed to improve the sorting of nuts with shell and kernel defects that indicate the risk of aflatoxin contamination, such as dark stains, oily stains, adhering hull, fungal decay and Aspergillus molds. This paper presents an unsupervised learning method to classify defective and unpleasant pistachios based on deep Auto-encoder neural networks. The testing of the designed neural network on a validation dataset showed that nuts having dark stain, oily stain or adhering hull with an accuracy of 80.3% can be distinguished from normal nuts. Due to the limited memory available in the HPC of university, the results are reasonable and justifiable.
Style Generator Inversion for Image Enhancement and Animation
Authors: Aviv Gabbay, Yedid Hoshen
Date: 2019-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Image Manipulation, valid

One of the main motivations for training high quality image generative models is their potential use as tools for image manipulation. Recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been able to generate images of remarkable quality. Unfortunately, adversarially-trained unconditional generator networks have not been successful as image priors. One of the main requirements for a network to act as a generative image prior, is being able to generate every possible image from the target distribution. Adversarial learning often experiences mode-collapse, which manifests in generators that cannot generate some modes of the target distribution. Another requirement often not satisfied is invertibility i.e. having an efficient way of finding a valid input latent code given a required output image. In this work, we show that differently from earlier GANs, the very recently proposed style-generators are quite easy to invert. We use this important observation to propose style generators as general purpose image priors. We show that style generators outperform other GANs as well as Deep Image Prior as priors for image enhancement tasks. The latent space spanned by style-generators satisfies linear identity-pose relations. The latent space linearity, combined with invertibility, allows us to animate still facial images without supervision. Extensive experiments are performed to support the main contributions of this paper.
Robust Classification with Sparse Representation Fusion on Diverse Data Subsets
Authors: Chun-Mei Feng, Yong Xu, Zuoyong Li, Jian Yang
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Robust classification

Sparse Representation (SR) techniques encode the test samples into a sparse linear combination of all training samples and then classify the test samples into the class with the minimum residual. The classification of SR techniques depends on the representation capability on the test samples. However, most of these models view the representation problem of the test samples as a deterministic problem, ignoring the uncertainty of the representation. The uncertainty is caused by two factors, random noise in the samples and the intrinsic randomness of the sample set, which means that if we capture a group of samples, the obtained set of samples will be different in different conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel method based upon Collaborative Representation that is a special instance of SR and has closed-form solution. It performs Sparse Representation Fusion based on the Diverse Subset of training samples (SRFDS), which reduces the impact of randomness of the sample set and enhances the robustness of classification results. The proposed method is suitable for multiple types of data and has no requirement on the pattern type of the tasks. In addition, SRFDS not only preserves a closed-form solution but also greatly improves the classification performance. Promising results on various datasets serve as the evidence of better performance of SRFDS than other SR-based methods. The Matlab code of SRFDS will be accessible at http://www.yongxu.org/lunwen.html.
Traffic Light Recognition Using Deep Learning and Prior Maps for Autonomous Cars
Authors: Lucas C. Possatti, Rânik Guidolini, Vinicius B. Cardoso, Rodrigo F. Berriel, Thiago M. Paixão, Claudine Badue, Alberto F. de Souza, Thiago Oliveira-Santos
Date: 2019-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Autonomous terrestrial vehicles must be capable of perceiving traffic lights and recognizing their current states to share the streets with human drivers. Most of the time, human drivers can easily identify the relevant traffic lights. To deal with this issue, a common solution for autonomous cars is to integrate recognition with prior maps. However, additional solution is required for the detection and recognition of the traffic light. Deep learning techniques have showed great performance and power of generalization including traffic related problems. Motivated by the advances in deep learning, some recent works leveraged some state-of-the-art deep detectors to locate (and further recognize) traffic lights from 2D camera images. However, none of them combine the power of the deep learning-based detectors with prior maps to recognize the state of the relevant traffic lights. Based on that, this work proposes to integrate the power of deep learning-based detection with the prior maps used by our car platform IARA (acronym for Intelligent Autonomous Robotic Automobile) to recognize the relevant traffic lights of predefined routes. The process is divided in two phases: an offline phase for map construction and traffic lights annotation; and an online phase for traffic light recognition and identification of the relevant ones. The proposed system was evaluated on five test cases (routes) in the city of Vit\'oria, each case being composed of a video sequence and a prior map with the relevant traffic lights for the route. Results showed that the proposed technique is able to correctly identify the relevant traffic light along the trajectory.
A Preliminary Study on Data Augmentation of Deep Learning for Image Classification
Authors: Benlin Hu, Cheng Lei, Dong Wang, Shu Zhang, Zhenyu Chen
Date: 2019-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Deep learning models have a large number of freeparameters that need to be calculated by effective trainingof the models on a great deal of training data to improvetheir generalization performance. However, data obtaining andlabeling is expensive in practice. Data augmentation is one of themethods to alleviate this problem. In this paper, we conduct apreliminary study on how three variables (augmentation method,augmentation rate and size of basic dataset per label) can affectthe accuracy of deep learning for image classification. The studyprovides some guidelines: (1) it is better to use transformationsthat alter the geometry of the images rather than those justlighting and color. (2) 2-3 times augmentation rate is good enoughfor training. (3) the smaller amount of data, the more obviouscontributions could have.
CLAREL: Classification via retrieval loss for zero-shot learning
Authors: Boris N. Oreshkin, Negar Rostamzadeh, Pedro O. Pinheiro, Christopher Pal
Date: 2019-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Generalized Zero-Shot Learning, Metric Learning, Retrieval, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

We address the problem of learning fine-grained cross-modal representations. We propose an instance-based deep metric learning approach in joint visual and textual space. The key novelty of this paper is that it shows that using per-image semantic supervision leads to substantial improvement in zero-shot performance over using class-only supervision. On top of that, we provide a probabilistic justification for a metric rescaling approach that solves a very common problem in the generalized zero-shot learning setting, i.e., classifying test images from unseen classes as one of the classes seen during training. We evaluate our approach on two fine-grained zero-shot learning datasets: CUB and FLOWERS. We find that on the generalized zero-shot classification task CLAREL consistently outperforms the existing approaches on both datasets.
Classifying logistic vehicles in cities using Deep learning
Authors: Salma Benslimane, Simon Tamayo, Arnaud de La Fortelle
Date: 2019-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Rapid growth in delivery and freight transportation is increasing in urban areas; as a result the use of delivery trucks and light commercial vehicles is evolving. Major cities can use traffic counting as a tool to monitor the presence of delivery vehicles in order to implement intelligent city planning measures. Classical methods for counting vehicles use mechanical, electromagnetic or pneumatic sensors, but these devices are costly, difficult to implement and only detect the presence of vehicles without giving information about their category, model or trajectory. This paper proposes a Deep Learning tool for classifying vehicles in a given image while considering different categories of logistic vehicles, namely: light-duty, medium-duty and heavy-duty vehicles. The proposed approach yields two main contributions: first we developed an architecture to create an annotated and balanced database of logistic vehicles, reducing manual annotation efforts. Second, we built a classifier that accurately classifies the logistic vehicles passing through a given road. The results of this work are: first, a database of 72 000 images for 4 vehicles classes; and second two retrained convolutional neural networks (InceptionV3 and MobileNetV2) capable of classifying vehicles with accuracies over 90%.
InsectUp: Crowdsourcing Insect Observations to Assess Demographic Shifts and Improve Classification
Authors: Léonard Boussioux, Tomás Giro-Larraz, Charles Guille-Escuret, Mehdi Cherti, Balázs Kégl
Date: 2019-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Insects play such a crucial role in ecosystems that a shift in demography of just a few species can have devastating consequences at environmental, social and economic levels. Despite this, evaluation of insect demography is strongly limited by the difficulty of collecting census data at sufficient scale. We propose a method to gather and leverage observations from bystanders, hikers, and entomology enthusiasts in order to provide researchers with data that could significantly help anticipate and identify environmental threats. Finally, we show that there is indeed interest on both sides for such collaboration.