pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
movie2trailer: Unsupervised trailer generation using Anomaly detection
Authors: Orest Rehusevych, Taras Firman
Date: 2020-02-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: Computer Vision Winter Workshop 2020 2
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

In this work, we present movie2trailer - a novel unsupervised approach for automatic movie trailer generation. To our knowledge, it is the first-ever application of anomaly detection to such a creative and challenging part of the trailer creation process as a shot selection. One of the main advantages of our approach over the competitors is that it does not require any prior knowledge and extracts all needed information directly from the input movie. By leveraging the recent advancements in video and audio analysis, we produce high-quality movie trailers in equal or less time than professional movie editors. The proposed approach reaches state-of-the-art in terms of visual attractiveness and closeness to the “real” trailer. Moreover, it exposes new horizons for researching anomaly detection applications in the movie industry. The trailers, that were used in the evaluation stage are available at the following link -
https:// bit.ly/ 2GbOj4R.
The importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes
Authors: Max Tegmark
Date: 1999-07-05 00:00:00

Based on a calculation of neural decoherence rates, we argue that that the degrees of freedom of the human brain that relate to cognitive processes should be thought of as a classical rather than quantum system, i.e., that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the current classical approach to neural network simulations. We find that the decoherence timescales ~10^{-13}-10^{-20} seconds are typically much shorter than the relevant dynamical timescales (~0.001-0.1 seconds), both for regular neuron firing and for kink-like polarization excitations in microtubules. This conclusion disagrees with suggestions by Penrose and others that the brain acts as a quantum computer, and that quantum coherence is related to consciousness in a fundamental way.
Non-Computability of Consciousness
Authors: Daegene Song
Date: 2007-05-11 00:00:00

With the great success in simulating many intelligent behaviors using computing devices, there has been an ongoing debate whether all conscious activities are computational processes. In this paper, the answer to this question is shown to be no. A certain phenomenon of consciousness is demonstrated to be fully represented as a computational process using a quantum computer. Based on the computability criterion discussed with Turing machines, the model constructed is shown to necessarily involve a non-computable element. The concept that this is solely a quantum effect and does not work for a classical case is also discussed.
Robust Empirical Bayes Confidence Intervals
Authors: Timothy B. Armstrong, Michal Kolesár, Mikkel Plagborg-Møller
Date: 2020-04-07 00:00:00

We construct robust empirical Bayes confidence intervals (EBCIs) in a normal means problem. The intervals are centered at the usual linear empirical Bayes estimator, but use a critical value accounting for shrinkage. Parametric EBCIs that assume a normal distribution for the means (Morris, 1983b) may substantially undercover when this assumption is violated. In contrast, our EBCIs control coverage regardless of the means distribution, while remaining close in length to the parametric EBCIs when the means are indeed Gaussian. If the means are treated as fixed, our EBCIs have an average coverage guarantee: the coverage probability is at least $1 - \alpha$ on average across the $n$ EBCIs for each of the means. Our empirical application considers the effects of U.S. neighborhoods on intergenerational mobility.
Exploring the Combination of Contextual Word Embeddings and Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Authors: Lea Dieudonat, Kelvin Han, Phyllicia Leavitt, Esteban Marquer
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Typing, Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Representation Learning, Word Embeddings

``Classical'' word embeddings, such as Word2Vec, have been shown to capture the semantics of words based on their distributional properties. However, their ability to represent the different meanings that a word may have is limited. Such approaches also do not explicitly encode relations between entities, as denoted by words. Embeddings of knowledge bases (KB) capture the explicit relations between entities denoted by words, but are not able to directly capture the syntagmatic properties of these words. To our knowledge, recent research have focused on representation learning that augment the strengths of one with the other. In this work, we begin exploring another approach using contextual and KB embeddings jointly at the same level and propose two tasks -- an entity typing and a relation typing task -- that evaluate the performance of contextual and KB embeddings. We also evaluated a concatenated model of contextual and KB embeddings with these two tasks, and obtain conclusive results on the first task. We hope our work may contribute as a basis for models and datasets that develop in the direction of this approach.
Robotic Room Traversal using Optical Range Finding
Authors: Cole Smith, Eric Lin, Dennis Shasha
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00

Consider the goal of visiting every part of a room that is not blocked by obstacles. Doing so efficiently requires both sensors and planning. Our findings suggest a method of inexpensive optical range finding for robotic room traversal. Our room traversal algorithm relies upon the approximate distance from the robot to the nearest obstacle in 360 degrees. We then choose the path with the furthest approximate distance. Since millimeter-precision is not required for our problem, we have opted to develop our own laser range finding solution, in lieu of using more common, but also expensive solutions like light detection and ranging (LIDAR). Rather, our solution uses a laser that casts a visible dot on the target and a common camera (an iPhone, for example). Based upon where in the camera frame the laser dot is detected, we may calculate an angle between our target and the laser aperture. Using this angle and the known distance between the camera eye and the laser aperture, we may solve all sides of a trigonometric model which provides the distance between the robot and the target.
DynamicEmbedding: Extending TensorFlow for Colossal-Scale Applications
Authors: Yun Zeng, Siqi Zuo, Dongcai Shen
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00

One of the limitations of deep learning models with sparse features today stems from the predefined nature of their input, which requires a dictionary be defined prior to the training. With this paper we propose both a theory and a working system design which remove this limitation, and show that the resulting models are able to perform better and efficiently run at a much larger scale. Specifically, we achieve this by decoupling a model's content from its form to tackle architecture evolution and memory growth separately. To efficiently handle model growth, we propose a new neuron model, called DynamicCell, drawing inspiration from from the free energy principle [15] to introduce the concept of reaction to discharge non-digestive energy, which also subsumes gradient descent based approaches as its special cases. We implement DynamicCell by introducing a new server into TensorFlow to take over most of the work involving model growth. Consequently, it enables any existing deep learning models to efficiently handle arbitrary number of distinct sparse features (e.g., search queries), and grow incessantly without redefining the model. Most notably, one of our models, which has been reliably running in production for over a year, is capable of suggesting high quality keywords for advertisers of Google Smart Campaigns and achieved significant accuracy gains based on a challenging metric -- evidence that data-driven, self-evolving systems can potentially exceed the performance of traditional rule-based approaches.
Unsupervised Discovery of Implicit Gender Bias
Authors: Anjalie Field, Yulia Tsvetkov
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11

Despite their prevalence in society, social biases are difficult to identify, primarily because human judgements in this domain can be unreliable. We take an unsupervised approach to identifying gender bias against women at a comment level and present a model that can surface text likely to contain bias. Our main challenge is forcing the model to focus on signs of implicit bias, rather than other artifacts in the data. Thus, our methodology involves reducing the influence of confounds through propensity matching and adversarial learning. Our analysis shows how biased comments directed towards female politicians contain mixed criticisms, while comments directed towards other female public figures focus on appearance and sexualization. Ultimately, our work offers a way to capture subtle biases in various domains without relying on subjective human judgements.
Goal-conditioned Batch Reinforcement Learning for Rotation Invariant Locomotion
Authors: Aditi Mavalankar
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a novel approach to learn goal-conditioned policies for locomotion in a batch RL setting. The batch data is collected by a policy that is not goal-conditioned. For the locomotion task, this translates to data collection using a policy learnt by the agent for walking straight in one direction, and using that data to learn a goal-conditioned policy that enables the agent to walk in any direction. The data collection policy used should be invariant to the direction the agent is facing i.e. regardless of its initial orientation, the agent should take the same actions to walk forward. We exploit this property to learn a goal-conditioned policy using two key ideas: (1) augmenting data by generating trajectories with the same actions in different directions, and (2) learning an encoder that enforces invariance between these rotated trajectories with a Siamese framework. We show that our approach outperforms existing RL algorithms on 3-D locomotion agents like Ant, Humanoid and Minitaur.
Towards an Interoperable Ecosystem of AI and LT Platforms: A Roadmap for the Implementation of Different Levels of Interoperability
Authors: Georg Rehm, Dimitrios Galanis, Penny Labropoulou, Stelios Piperidis, Martin Welß, Ricardo Usbeck, Joachim köhler, Miltos Deligiannis, Katerina Gkirtzou, Johannes Fischer, Christian Chiarcos, Nils Feldhus, Julián Moreno-Schneider, Florian Kintzel, Elena Montiel, Víctor Rodríguez Doncel, John P. McCrae, David Laqua, Irina Patricia Theile, Christian Dittmar, Kalina Bontcheva, Ian Roberts, Andrejs Vasiljevs, Andis Lagzdiņš
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5

With regard to the wider area of AI/LT platform interoperability, we concentrate on two core aspects: (1) cross-platform search and discovery of resources and services; (2) composition of cross-platform service workflows. We devise five different levels (of increasing complexity) of platform interoperability that we suggest to implement in a wider federation of AI/LT platforms. We illustrate the approach using the five emerging AI/LT platforms AI4EU, ELG, Lynx, QURATOR and SPEAKER.
Motion and Region Aware Adversarial Learning for Fall Detection with Thermal Imaging
Authors: Vineet Mehta, Abhinav Dhall, Sujata Pal, Shehroz S. Khan
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Optical Flow Estimation

Automatic fall detection is a vital technology for ensuring the health and safety of people. Home-based camera systems for fall detection often put people's privacy at risk. Thermal cameras can partially or fully obfuscate facial features, thus preserving the privacy of a person. Another challenge is the less occurrence of falls in comparison to the normal activities of daily living. As fall occurs rarely, it is non-trivial to learn algorithms due to class imbalance. To handle these problems, we formulate fall detection as an anomaly detection within an adversarial framework using thermal imaging. We present a novel adversarial network that comprises of two-channel 3D convolutional autoencoders which reconstructs the thermal data and the optical flow input sequences respectively. We introduce a technique to track the region of interest, a region-based difference constraint, and a joint discriminator to compute the reconstruction error. A larger reconstruction error indicates the occurrence of a fall. The experiments on a publicly available thermal fall dataset show the superior results obtained compared to the standard baseline.
What do you Mean? The Role of the Mean Function in Bayesian Optimisation
Authors: George De Ath, Jonathan E. Fieldsend, Richard M. Everson
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimisation, Gaussian Processes

Bayesian optimisation is a popular approach for optimising expensive black-box functions. The next location to be evaluated is selected via maximising an acquisition function that balances exploitation and exploration. Gaussian processes, the surrogate models of choice in Bayesian optimisation, are often used with a constant prior mean function equal to the arithmetic mean of the observed function values. We show that the rate of convergence can depend sensitively on the choice of mean function. We empirically investigate 8 mean functions (constant functions equal to the arithmetic mean, minimum, median and maximum of the observed function evaluations, linear, quadratic polynomials, random forests and RBF networks), using 10 synthetic test problems and two real-world problems, and using the Expected Improvement and Upper Confidence Bound acquisition functions. We find that for design dimensions $\ge5$ using a constant mean function equal to the worst observed quality value is consistently the best choice on the synthetic problems considered. We argue that this worst-observed-quality function promotes exploitation leading to more rapid convergence. However, for the real-world tasks the more complex mean functions capable of modelling the fitness landscape may be effective, although there is no clearly optimum choice.
An integrated light management system with real-time light measurement and human perception
Authors: Theodore Tsesmelis, Irtiza Hasan, Marco Cristani, Alessio Del Bue, Fabio Galasso
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Illumination is important for well-being, productivity and safety across several environments, including offices, retail shops and industrial warehouses. Current techniques for setting up lighting require extensive and expert support and need to be repeated if the scene changes. Here we propose the first fully-automated light management system (LMS) which measures lighting in real-time, leveraging an RGBD sensor and a radiosity-based light propagation model. Thanks to the integration of light distribution and perception curves into the radiosity, we outperform a commercial software (Relux) on a newly introduced dataset. Furthermore, our proposed LMS is the first to estimate both the presence and the attention of the people in the environment, as well as their light perception. Our new LMS adapts therefore lighting to the scene and human activity and it is capable of saving up to 66%, as we experimentally quantify,without compromising the lighting quality.
Complexity Analysis of an Edge Preserving CNN SAR Despeckling Algorithm
Authors: Sergio Vitale, Giampaolo Ferraioli, Vito Pascazio
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

SAR images are affected by multiplicative noise that impairs their interpretations. In the last decades several methods for SAR denoising have been proposed and in the last years great attention has moved towards deep learning based solutions. Based on our last proposed convolutional neural network for SAR despeckling, here we exploit the effect of the complexity of the network. More precisely, once a dataset has been fixed, we carry out an analysis of the network performance with respect to the number of layers and numbers of features the network is composed of. Evaluation on simulated and real data are carried out. The results show that deeper networks better generalize on both simulated and real images.
Data-driven Flood Emulation: Speeding up Urban Flood Predictions by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Zifeng Guo, Joao P. Leitao, Nuno E. Simoes, Vahid Moosavi
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Computational complexity has been the bottleneck of applying physically-based simulations on large urban areas with high spatial resolution for efficient and systematic flooding analyses and risk assessments. To address this issue of long computational time, this paper proposes that the prediction of maximum water depth rasters can be considered as an image-to-image translation problem where the results are generated from input elevation rasters using the information learned from data rather than by conducting simulations, which can significantly accelerate the prediction process. The proposed approach was implemented by a deep convolutional neural network trained on flood simulation data of 18 designed hyetographs on three selected catchments. Multiple tests with both designed and real rainfall events were performed and the results show that the flood predictions by neural network uses only 0.5 % of time comparing with physically-based approaches, with promising accuracy and ability of generalizations. The proposed neural network can also potentially be applied to different but relevant problems including flood predictions for urban layout planning.
MAP segmentation in Bayesian hidden Markov models: a case study
Authors: Alexey Koloydenko, Kristi Kuljus, Jüri Lember
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00

We consider the problem of estimating the maximum posterior probability (MAP) state sequence for a finite state and finite emission alphabet hidden Markov model (HMM) in the Bayesian setup, where both emission and transition matrices have Dirichlet priors. We study a training set consisting of thousands of protein alignment pairs. The training data is used to set the prior hyperparameters for Bayesian MAP segmentation. Since the Viterbi algorithm is not applicable any more, there is no simple procedure to find the MAP path, and several iterative algorithms are considered and compared. The main goal of the paper is to test the Bayesian setup against the frequentist one, where the parameters of HMM are estimated using the training data.
Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning for Medical Adverse Event Detection from Free-Text Medical Narratives: A Case Study of Detecting Total Hip Replacement Dislocation
Authors: Alireza Borjali, Martin Magneli, David Shin, Henrik Malchau, Orhun K. Muratoglu, Kartik M. Varadarajan
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection

Accurate and timely detection of medical adverse events (AEs) from free-text medical narratives is challenging. Natural language processing (NLP) with deep learning has already shown great potential for analyzing free-text data, but its application for medical AE detection has been limited. In this study we proposed deep learning based NLP (DL-NLP) models for efficient and accurate hip dislocation AE detection following total hip replacement from standard (radiology notes) and non-standard (follow-up telephone notes) free-text medical narratives. We benchmarked these proposed models with a wide variety of traditional machine learning based NLP (ML-NLP) models, and also assessed the accuracy of International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes in capturing these hip dislocation AEs in a multi-center orthopaedic registry. All DL-NLP models out-performed all of the ML-NLP models, with a convolutional neural network (CNN) model achieving the best overall performance (Kappa = 0.97 for radiology notes, and Kappa = 1.00 for follow-up telephone notes). On the other hand, the ICD/CPT codes of the patients who sustained a hip dislocation AE were only 75.24% accurate, showing the potential of the proposed model to be used in largescale orthopaedic registries for accurate and efficient hip dislocation AE detection to improve the quality of care and patient outcome.
SpEx: Multi-Scale Time Domain Speaker Extraction Network
Authors: Cheng-Lin Xu, Wei Rao, Eng Siong Chng, Haizhou Li
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Multi-Task Learning

Speaker extraction aims to mimic humans' selective auditory attention by extracting a target speaker's voice from a multi-talker environment. It is common to perform the extraction in frequency-domain, and reconstruct the time-domain signal from the extracted magnitude and estimated phase spectra. However, such an approach is adversely affected by the inherent difficulty of phase estimation. Inspired by Conv-TasNet, we propose a time-domain speaker extraction network (SpEx) that converts the mixture speech into multi-scale embedding coefficients instead of decomposing the speech signal into magnitude and phase spectra. In this way, we avoid phase estimation. The SpEx network consists of four network components, namely speaker encoder, speech encoder, speaker extractor, and speech decoder. Specifically, the speech encoder converts the mixture speech into multi-scale embedding coefficients, the speaker encoder learns to represent the target speaker with a speaker embedding. The speaker extractor takes the multi-scale embedding coefficients and target speaker embedding as input and estimates a receptive mask. Finally, the speech decoder reconstructs the target speaker's speech from the masked embedding coefficients. We also propose a multi-task learning framework and a multi-scale embedding implementation. Experimental results show that the proposed SpEx achieves 37.3%, 37.7% and 15.0% relative improvements over the best baseline in terms of signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR), scale-invariant SDR (SI-SDR), and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) under an open evaluation condition.
Causal Inference under Outcome-Based Sampling with Monotonicity Assumptions
Authors: Sung Jae Jun, Sokbae Lee
Date: 2020-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

We study causal inference under case-control and case-population sampling. Specifically, we focus on the binary-outcome and binary-treatment case, where the parameters of interest are causal relative and attributable risks defined via the potential outcome framework. It is shown that strong ignorability is not always as powerful as it is under random sampling and that certain monotonicity assumptions yield comparable results in terms of sharp identified intervals. Specifically, the usual odds ratio is shown to be a sharp identified upper bound on causal relative risk under the monotone treatment response and monotone treatment selection assumptions. We offer algorithms for inference on the causal parameters that are aggregated over the true population distribution of the covariates. We show the usefulness of our approach by studying three empirical examples: the benefit of attending private school for entering a prestigious university in Pakistan; the relationship between staying in school and getting involved with drug-trafficking gangs in Brazil; and the link between physicians' hours and size of the group practice in the United States.