pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Automatic Discovery of Families of Network Generative Processes
Authors: Telmo Menezes, Camille Roth
Date: 2019-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Symbolic Regression

Designing plausible network models typically requires scholars to form a priori intuitions on the key drivers of network formation. Oftentimes, these intuitions are supported by the statistical estimation of a selection of network evolution processes which will form the basis of the model to be developed. Machine learning techniques have lately been introduced to assist the automatic discovery of generative models. These approaches may more broadly be described as "symbolic regression", where fundamental network dynamic functions, rather than just parameters, are evolved through genetic programming. This chapter first aims at reviewing the principles, efforts and the emerging literature in this direction, which is very much aligned with the idea of creating artificial scientists. Our contribution then aims more specifically at building upon an approach recently developed by us [Menezes \& Roth, 2014] in order to demonstrate the existence of families of networks that may be described by similar generative processes. In other words, symbolic regression may be used to group networks according to their inferred genotype (in terms of generative processes) rather than their observed phenotype (in terms of statistical/topological features). Our empirical case is based on an original data set of 238 anonymized ego-centered networks of Facebook friends, further yielding insights on the formation of sociability networks.
Gray Level Image Threshold Using Neutrosophic Shannon Entropy
Authors: Vasile Patrascu
Date: 2019-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

This article presents a new method of segmenting grayscale images by minimizing Shannon's neutrosophic entropy. For the proposed segmentation method, the neutrosophic information components, i.e., the degree of truth, the degree of neutrality and the degree of falsity are defined taking into account the belonging to the segmented regions and at the same time to the separation threshold area. The principle of the method is simple and easy to understand and can lead to multiple thresholds. The efficacy of the method is illustrated using some test gray level images. The experimental results show that the proposed method has good performance for segmentation with optimal gray level thresholds.
Modeling Food Popularity Dependencies using Social Media data
Authors: Devashish Khulbe, Manu Pathak
Date: 2019-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

The rise in popularity of major social media platforms have enabled people to share photos and textual information about their daily life. One of the popular topics about which information is shared is food. Since a lot of media about food are attributed to particular locations and restaurants, information like spatio-temporal popularity of various cuisines can be analyzed. Tracking the popularity of food types and retail locations across space and time can also be useful for business owners and restaurant investors. In this work, we present an approach using off-the shelf machine learning techniques to identify trends and popularity of cuisine types in an area using geo-tagged data from social media, Google images and Yelp. After adjusting for time, we use the Kernel Density Estimation to get hot spots across the location and model the dependencies among food cuisines popularity using Bayesian Networks. We consider the Manhattan borough of New York City as the location for our analyses but the approach can be used for any area with social media data and information about retail businesses.
LipReading with 3D-2D-CNN BLSTM-HMM and word-CTC models
Authors: Dilip Kumar Margam, Rohith Aralikatti, Tanay Sharma, Abhinav Thanda, Pujitha A K, Sharad Roy, Shankar M Venkatesan
Date: 2019-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Lipreading

In recent years, deep learning based machine lipreading has gained prominence. To this end, several architectures such as LipNet, LCANet and others have been proposed which perform extremely well compared to traditional lipreading DNN-HMM hybrid systems trained on DCT features. In this work, we propose a simpler architecture of 3D-2D-CNN-BLSTM network with a bottleneck layer. We also present analysis of two different approaches for lipreading on this architecture. In the first approach, 3D-2D-CNN-BLSTM network is trained with CTC loss on characters (ch-CTC). Then BLSTM-HMM model is trained on bottleneck lip features (extracted from 3D-2D-CNN-BLSTM ch-CTC network) in a traditional ASR training pipeline. In the second approach, same 3D-2D-CNN-BLSTM network is trained with CTC loss on word labels (w-CTC). The first approach shows that bottleneck features perform better compared to DCT features. Using the second approach on Grid corpus' seen speaker test set, we report $1.3\%$ WER - a $55\%$ improvement relative to LCANet. On unseen speaker test set we report $8.6\%$ WER which is $24.5\%$ improvement relative to LipNet. We also verify the method on a second dataset of $81$ speakers which we collected. Finally, we also discuss the effect of feature duplication on BLSTM-HMM model performance.
Gesture Recognition in RGB Videos UsingHuman Body Keypoints and Dynamic Time Warping
Authors: Pascal Schneider, Raphael Memmesheimer, Ivanna Kramer, Dietrich Paulus
Date: 2019-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, General Classification, Gesture Recognition, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

Gesture recognition opens up new ways for humans to intuitively interact with machines. Especially for service robots, gestures can be a valuable addition to the means of communication to, for example, draw the robot's attention to someone or something. Extracting a gesture from video data and classifying it is a challenging task and a variety of approaches have been proposed throughout the years. This paper presents a method for gesture recognition in RGB videos using OpenPose to extract the pose of a person and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) in conjunction with One-Nearest-Neighbor (1NN) for time-series classification. The main features of this approach are the independence of any specific hardware and high flexibility, because new gestures can be added to the classifier by adding only a few examples of it. We utilize the robustness of the Deep Learning-based OpenPose framework while avoiding the data-intensive task of training a neural network ourselves. We demonstrate the classification performance of our method using a public dataset.
New pointwise convolution in Deep Neural Networks through Extremely Fast and Non Parametric Transforms
Authors: Joonhyun Jeong, Sung-Ho Bae
Date: 2019-06-25 00:00:00

Some conventional transforms such as Discrete Walsh-Hadamard Transform (DWHT) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) have been widely used as feature extractors in image processing but rarely applied in neural networks. However, we found that these conventional transforms have the ability to capture the cross-channel correlations without any learnable parameters in DNNs. This paper firstly proposes to apply conventional transforms to pointwise convolution, showing that such transforms significantly reduce the computational complexity of neural networks without accuracy performance degradation. Especially for DWHT, it requires no floating point multiplications but only additions and subtractions, which can considerably reduce computation overheads. In addition, its fast algorithm further reduces complexity of floating point addition from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$. These nice properties construct extremely efficient networks in the number parameters and operations, enjoying accuracy gain. Our proposed DWHT-based model gained 1.49\% accuracy increase with 79.1\% reduced parameters and 48.4\% reduced FLOPs compared with its baseline model (MoblieNet-V1) on the CIFAR 100 dataset.
Road-network-based Rapid Geolocalization
Authors: Yongfei Li, Dongfang Yang, Shicheng Wang, Hao He
Date: 2019-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Point Cloud Registration

It has always been a research hotspot to use geographic information to assist the navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles. In this paper, a road-network-based localization method is proposed. We match roads in the measurement images to the reference road vector map, and realize successful localization on areas as large as a whole city. The road network matching problem is treated as a point cloud registration problem under two-dimensional projective transformation, and solved under a hypothesise-and-test framework. To deal with the projective point cloud registration problem, a global projective invariant feature is proposed, which consists of two road intersections augmented with the information of their tangents. We call it two road intersections tuple. We deduce the closed-form solution for determining the alignment transformation from a pair of matching two road intersections tuples. In addition, we propose the necessary conditions for the tuples to match. This can reduce the candidate matching tuples, thus accelerating the search to a great extent. We test all the candidate matching tuples under a hypothesise-and-test framework to search for the best match. The experiments show that our method can localize the target area over an area of 400 within 1 second on a single cpu.
Cross-Platform Modeling of Users' Behavior on Social Media
Authors: Haiqian Gu, Jie Wang, Ziwen Wang, Bojin Zhuang, Wenhao Bian, Fei Su
Date: 2019-06-23 00:00:00

With the booming development and popularity of mobile applications, different verticals accumulate abundant data of user information and social behavior, which are spontaneous, genuine and diversified. However, each platform describes user's portraits in only certain aspect, resulting in difficult combination of those internet footprints together. In our research, we proposed a modeling approach to analyze user's online behavior across different social media platforms. Structured and unstructured data of same users shared by NetEase Music and Sina Weibo have been collected for cross-platform analysis of correlations between music preference and other users' characteristics. Based on music tags of genre and mood, genre cluster of five groups and mood cluster of four groups have been formed by computing their collected song lists with K-means method. Moreover, with the help of user data of Weibo, correlations between music preference (i.e. genre, mood) and Big Five personalities (BFPs) and basic information (e.g. gender, resident region, tags) have been comprehensively studied, building up full-scale user portraits with finer grain. Our findings indicate that people's music preference could be linked with their real social activities. For instance, people living in mountainous areas generally prefer folk music, while those in urban areas like pop music more. Interestingly, dog lovers could love sad music more than cat lovers. Moreover, our proposed cross-platform modeling approach could be adapted to other verticals, providing an online automatic way for profiling users in a more precise and comprehensive way.
Accurate Robotic Pouring for Serving Drinks
Authors: Yongqiang Huang, Yu Sun
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00

Pouring is the second most frequently executed motion in cooking scenarios. In this work, we present our system of accurate pouring that generates the angular velocities of the source container using recurrent neural networks. We collected demonstrations of human pouring water. We made a physical system on which the velocities of the source container were generated at each time step and executed by a motor. We tested our system on pouring water from containers that are not used for training and achieved an error of as low as 4 milliliters. We also used the system to pour oil and syrup. The accuracy achieved with oil is slightly lower than but comparable with that of water.
Are you really looking at me? A Feature-Extraction Framework for Estimating Interpersonal Eye Gaze from Conventional Video
Authors: Minh Tran, Taylan Sen, Kurtis Haut, Mohammad Rafayet Ali, Mohammed Ehsan Hoque
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deception Detection

Despite a revolution in the pervasiveness of video cameras in our daily lives, one of the most meaningful forms of nonverbal affective communication, interpersonal eye gaze, i.e. eye gaze relative to a conversation partner, is not available from common video. We introduce the Interpersonal-Calibrating Eye-gaze Encoder (ICE), which automatically extracts interpersonal gaze from video recordings without specialized hardware and without prior knowledge of participant locations. Leveraging the intuition that individuals spend a large portion of a conversation looking at each other enables the ICE dynamic clustering algorithm to extract interpersonal gaze. We validate ICE in both video chat using an objective metric with an infrared gaze tracker (F1=0.846, N=8), as well as in face-to-face communication with expert-rated evaluations of eye contact (r= 0.37, N=170). We then use ICE to analyze behavior in two different, yet important affective communication domains: interrogation-based deception detection, and communication skill assessment in speed dating. We find that honest witnesses break interpersonal gaze contact and look down more often than deceptive witnesses when answering questions (p=0.004, d=0.79). In predicting expert communication skill ratings in speed dating videos, we demonstrate that interpersonal gaze alone has more predictive power than facial expressions.
Filter Early, Match Late: Improving Network-Based Visual Place Recognition
Authors: Stephen Hausler, Adam Jacobson, Michael Milford
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Place Recognition

CNNs have excelled at performing place recognition over time, particularly when the neural network is optimized for localization in the current environmental conditions. In this paper we investigate the concept of feature map filtering, where, rather than using all the activations within a convolutional tensor, only the most useful activations are used. Since specific feature maps encode different visual features, the objective is to remove feature maps that are detract from the ability to recognize a location across appearance changes. Our key innovation is to filter the feature maps in an early convolutional layer, but then continue to run the network and extract a feature vector using a later layer in the same network. By filtering early visual features and extracting a feature vector from a higher, more viewpoint invariant later layer, we demonstrate improved condition and viewpoint invariance. Our approach requires image pairs for training from the deployment environment, but we show that state-of-the-art performance can regularly be achieved with as little as a single training image pair. An exhaustive experimental analysis is performed to determine the full scope of causality between early layer filtering and late layer extraction. For validity, we use three datasets: Oxford RobotCar, Nordland, and Gardens Point, achieving overall superior performance to NetVLAD. The work provides a number of new avenues for exploring CNN optimizations, without full re-training.
Graph Star Net for Generalized Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Lu Haonan, Seth H. Huang, Tian Ye, Guo Xiuyan
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Graph Classification, Link Prediction, Multi-Task Learning, Node Classification, Prediction, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

In this work, we present graph star net (GraphStar), a novel and unified graph neural net architecture which utilizes message-passing relay and attention mechanism for multiple prediction tasks - node classification, graph classification and link prediction. GraphStar addresses many earlier challenges facing graph neural nets and achieves non-local representation without increasing the model depth or bearing heavy computational costs. We also propose a new method to tackle topic-specific sentiment analysis based on node classification and text classification as graph classification. Our work shows that 'star nodes' can learn effective graph-data representation and improve on current methods for the three tasks. Specifically, for graph classification and link prediction, GraphStar outperforms the current state-of-the-art models by 2-5% on several key benchmarks.
Split Q Learning: Reinforcement Learning with Two-Stream Rewards
Authors: Baihan Lin, Djallel Bouneffouf, Guillermo Cecchi
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Q-Learning, Recommendation Systems, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Drawing an inspiration from behavioral studies of human decision making, we propose here a general parametric framework for a reinforcement learning problem, which extends the standard Q-learning approach to incorporate a two-stream framework of reward processing with biases biologically associated with several neurological and psychiatric conditions, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), addiction, and chronic pain. For AI community, the development of agents that react differently to different types of rewards can enable us to understand a wide spectrum of multi-agent interactions in complex real-world socioeconomic systems. Moreover, from the behavioral modeling perspective, our parametric framework can be viewed as a first step towards a unifying computational model capturing reward processing abnormalities across multiple mental conditions and user preferences in long-term recommendation systems.
Learning to segment microscopy images with lazy labels
Authors: Rihuan Ke, Aurélie Bugeau, Nicolas Papadakis, Peter Schuetz, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Date: 2019-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The need for labour intensive pixel-wise annotation is a major limitation of many fully supervised learning methods for segmenting bioimages that can contain numerous object instances with thin separations. In this paper, we introduce a deep convolutional neural network for microscopy image segmentation. Annotation issues are circumvented by letting the network being trainable on coarse labels combined with only a very small number of images with pixel-wise annotations. We call this new labelling strategy `lazy' labels. Image segmentation is stratified into three connected tasks: rough inner region detection, object separation and pixel-wise segmentation. These tasks are learned in an end-to-end multi-task learning framework. The method is demonstrated on two microscopy datasets, where we show that the model gives accurate segmentation results even if exact boundary labels are missing for a majority of annotated data. It brings more flexibility and efficiency for training deep neural networks that are data hungry and is applicable to biomedical images with poor contrast at the object boundaries or with diverse textures and repeated patterns.
Effective degrees of freedom for surface finish defect detection and classification
Authors: Natalya Pya Arnqvist, Blaise Ngendangenzwa, Eric Lindahl, Leif Nilsson, Jun Yu
Date: 2019-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection, General Classification

One of the primary concerns of product quality control in the automotive industry is an automated detection of defects of small sizes on specular car body surfaces. A new statistical learning approach is presented for surface finish defect detection based on spline smoothing method for feature extraction and $k$-nearest neighbour probabilistic classifier. Since the surfaces are specular, structured lightning reflection technique is applied for image acquisition. Reduced rank cubic regression splines are used to smooth the pixel values while the effective degrees of freedom of the obtained smooths serve as components of the feature vector. A key advantage of the approach is that it allows reaching near zero misclassification error rate when applying standard learning classifiers. We also propose probability based performance evaluation metrics as alternatives to the conventional metrics. The usage of those provides the means for uncertainty estimation of the predictive performance of a classifier. Experimental classification results on the images obtained from the pilot system located at Volvo GTO Cab plant in Ume{\aa}, Sweden, show that the proposed approach is much more efficient than the compared methods.
On Physical Adversarial Patches for Object Detection
Authors: Mark Lee, Zico Kolter
Date: 2019-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In this paper, we demonstrate a physical adversarial patch attack against object detectors, notably the YOLOv3 detector. Unlike previous work on physical object detection attacks, which required the patch to overlap with the objects being misclassified or avoiding detection, we show that a properly designed patch can suppress virtually all the detected objects in the image. That is, we can place the patch anywhere in the image, causing all existing objects in the image to be missed entirely by the detector, even those far away from the patch itself. This in turn opens up new lines of physical attacks against object detection systems, which require no modification of the objects in a scene. A demo of the system can be found at https://youtu.be/WXnQjbZ1e7Y.
Deep Eyedentification: Biometric Identification using Micro-Movements of the Eye
Authors: Lena A. Jäger, Silvia Makowski, Paul Prasse, Sascha Liehr, Maximilian Seidler, Tobias Scheffer
Date: 2019-06-20 00:00:00

We study involuntary micro-movements of the eye for biometric identification. While prior studies extract lower-frequency macro-movements from the output of video-based eye-tracking systems and engineer explicit features of these macro-movements, we develop a deep convolutional architecture that processes the raw eye-tracking signal. Compared to prior work, the network attains a lower error rate by one order of magnitude and is faster by two orders of magnitude: it identifies users accurately within seconds.
Unsupervised Learning of Object Keypoints for Perception and Control
Authors: Tejas Kulkarni, Ankush Gupta, Catalin Ionescu, Sebastian Borgeaud, Malcolm Reynolds, Andrew Zisserman, Volodymyr Mnih
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: 3D Action Recognition, image-classification, Image Classification, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Semantic Segmentation

The study of object representations in computer vision has primarily focused on developing representations that are useful for image classification, object detection, or semantic segmentation as downstream tasks. In this work we aim to learn object representations that are useful for control and reinforcement learning (RL). To this end, we introduce Transporter, a neural network architecture for discovering concise geometric object representations in terms of keypoints or image-space coordinates. Our method learns from raw video frames in a fully unsupervised manner, by transporting learnt image features between video frames using a keypoint bottleneck. The discovered keypoints track objects and object parts across long time-horizons more accurately than recent similar methods. Furthermore, consistent long-term tracking enables two notable results in control domains -- (1) using the keypoint co-ordinates and corresponding image features as inputs enables highly sample-efficient reinforcement learning; (2) learning to explore by controlling keypoint locations drastically reduces the search space, enabling deep exploration (leading to states unreachable through random action exploration) without any extrinsic rewards.