pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning 3D Human Shape and Pose from Dense Body Parts
Authors: Hongwen Zhang, Jie Cao, Guo Lu, Wanli Ouyang, Zhenan Sun
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D human pose and shape estimation, 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Human Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction, Human Mesh Recovery, Position

Reconstructing 3D human shape and pose from monocular images is challenging despite the promising results achieved by the most recent learning-based methods. The commonly occurred misalignment comes from the facts that the mapping from images to the model space is highly non-linear and the rotation-based pose representation of body models is prone to result in the drift of joint positions. In this work, we investigate learning 3D human shape and pose from dense correspondences of body parts and propose a Decompose-and-aggregate Network (DaNet) to address these issues. DaNet adopts the dense correspondence maps, which densely build a bridge between 2D pixels and 3D vertices, as intermediate representations to facilitate the learning of 2D-to-3D mapping. The prediction modules of DaNet are decomposed into one global stream and multiple local streams to enable global and fine-grained perceptions for the shape and pose predictions, respectively. Messages from local streams are further aggregated to enhance the robust prediction of the rotation-based poses, where a position-aided rotation feature refinement strategy is proposed to exploit spatial relationships between body joints. Moreover, a Part-based Dropout (PartDrop) strategy is introduced to drop out dense information from intermediate representations during training, encouraging the network to focus on more complementary body parts as well as neighboring position features. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated on both indoor and real-world datasets including Human3.6M, UP3D, COCO, and 3DPW, showing that our method could significantly improve the reconstruction performance in comparison with previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://hongwenzhang.github.io/dense2mesh .
What Does My QA Model Know? Devising Controlled Probes using Expert Knowledge
Authors: Kyle Richardson, Ashish Sabharwal
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, Knowledge Graphs, Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering

Open-domain question answering (QA) is known to involve several underlying knowledge and reasoning challenges, but are models actually learning such knowledge when trained on benchmark tasks? To investigate this, we introduce several new challenge tasks that probe whether state-of-the-art QA models have general knowledge about word definitions and general taxonomic reasoning, both of which are fundamental to more complex forms of reasoning and are widespread in benchmark datasets. As an alternative to expensive crowd-sourcing, we introduce a methodology for automatically building datasets from various types of expert knowledge (e.g., knowledge graphs and lexical taxonomies), allowing for systematic control over the resulting probes and for a more comprehensive evaluation. We find automatically constructing probes to be vulnerable to annotation artifacts, which we carefully control for. Our evaluation confirms that transformer-based QA models are already predisposed to recognize certain types of structural lexical knowledge. However, it also reveals a more nuanced picture: their performance degrades substantially with even a slight increase in the number of hops in the underlying taxonomic hierarchy, or as more challenging distractor candidate answers are introduced. Further, even when these models succeed at the standard instance-level evaluation, they leave much room for improvement when assessed at the level of clusters of semantically connected probes (e.g., all Isa questions about a concept).
Volumetric Lung Nodule Segmentation using Adaptive ROI with Multi-View Residual Learning
Authors: Muhammad Usman, Byoung-Dai Lee, Shi Sub Byon, Sung Hyun Kim, Byung-ilLee
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Lung Nodule Segmentation, Segmentation

Accurate quantification of pulmonary nodules can greatly assist the early diagnosis of lung cancer, which can enhance patient survival possibilities. A number of nodule segmentation techniques have been proposed, however, all of the existing techniques rely on radiologist 3-D volume of interest (VOI) input or use the constant region of interest (ROI) and only investigate the presence of nodule voxels within the given VOI. Such approaches restrain the solutions to investigate the nodule presence outside the given VOI and also include the redundant structures into VOI, which may lead to inaccurate nodule segmentation. In this work, a novel semi-automated approach for 3-D segmentation of nodule in volumetric computerized tomography (CT) lung scans has been proposed. The proposed technique can be segregated into two stages, at the first stage, it takes a 2-D ROI containing the nodule as input and it performs patch-wise investigation along the axial axis with a novel adaptive ROI strategy. The adaptive ROI algorithm enables the solution to dynamically select the ROI for the surrounding slices to investigate the presence of nodule using deep residual U-Net architecture. The first stage provides the initial estimation of nodule which is further utilized to extract the VOI. At the second stage, the extracted VOI is further investigated along the coronal and sagittal axis with two different networks and finally, all the estimated masks are fed into the consensus module to produce the final volumetric segmentation of nodule. The proposed approach has been rigorously evaluated on the LIDC dataset, which is the largest publicly available dataset. The result suggests that the approach is significantly robust and accurate as compared to the previous state of the art techniques.
OTEANN: Estimating the Transparency of Orthographies with an Artificial Neural Network
Authors: Xavier Marjou
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL (SIGTYP) 2021 6
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

To transcribe spoken language to written medium, most alphabets enable an unambiguous sound-to-letter rule. However, some writing systems have distanced themselves from this simple concept and little work exists in Natural Language Processing (NLP) on measuring such distance. In this study, we use an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model to evaluate the transparency between written words and their pronunciation, hence its name Orthographic Transparency Estimation with an ANN (OTEANN). Based on datasets derived from Wikimedia dictionaries, we trained and tested this model to score the percentage of correct predictions in phoneme-to-grapheme and grapheme-to-phoneme translation tasks. The scores obtained on 17 orthographies were in line with the estimations of other studies. Interestingly, the model also provided insight into typical mistakes made by learners who only consider the phonemic rule in reading and writing.
LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding
Authors: Yiheng Xu, Minghao Li, Lei Cui, Shaohan Huang, Furu Wei, Ming Zhou
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Document AI, document-image-classification, Document Image Classification, Document Layout Analysis, image-classification, Image Classification, Key Information Extraction, Relation Extraction

Pre-training techniques have been verified successfully in a variety of NLP tasks in recent years. Despite the widespread use of pre-training models for NLP applications, they almost exclusively focus on text-level manipulation, while neglecting layout and style information that is vital for document image understanding. In this paper, we propose the \textbf{LayoutLM} to jointly model interactions between text and layout information across scanned document images, which is beneficial for a great number of real-world document image understanding tasks such as information extraction from scanned documents. Furthermore, we also leverage image features to incorporate words' visual information into LayoutLM. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that text and layout are jointly learned in a single framework for document-level pre-training. It achieves new state-of-the-art results in several downstream tasks, including form understanding (from 70.72 to 79.27), receipt understanding (from 94.02 to 95.24) and document image classification (from 93.07 to 94.42). The code and pre-trained LayoutLM models are publicly available at \url{https://aka.ms/layoutlm}.
Learning in Discounted-cost and Average-cost Mean-field Games
Authors: Berkay Anahtarci, Can Deha Kariksiz, Naci Saldi
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning

We consider learning approximate Nash equilibria for discrete-time mean-field games with nonlinear stochastic state dynamics subject to both average and discounted costs. To this end, we introduce a mean-field equilibrium (MFE) operator, whose fixed point is a mean-field equilibrium (i.e. equilibrium in the infinite population limit). We first prove that this operator is a contraction, and propose a learning algorithm to compute an approximate mean-field equilibrium by approximating the MFE operator with a random one. Moreover, using the contraction property of the MFE operator, we establish the error analysis of the proposed learning algorithm. We then show that the learned mean-field equilibrium constitutes an approximate Nash equilibrium for finite-agent games.
Stochastic gradient-free descents
Authors: Xiaopeng Luo, Xin Xu
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the convergence behavior of these methods under the mean-variance framework, and also provide a theoretical analysis about the inclusion of momentum in stochastic settings which reveals that the momentum term we used adds a deviation of order $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ but controls the variance at the order $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ for the $k$th iteration. So it is shown that, when employing a decaying stepsize $\alpha_k=\mathcal{O}(1/k)$, the stochastic gradient-free methods can still maintain the sublinear convergence rate $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ and the accelerated methods with momentum can achieve a convergence rate $\mathcal{O}(1/k^2)$ in probability for the strongly convex objectives with Lipschitz gradients; and all these methods converge to a solution with a zero expected gradient norm when the objective function is nonconvex, twice differentiable and bounded below.
Microlens array grid estimation, light field decoding, and calibration
Authors: Maximilian Schambach, Fernando Puente León
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00

We quantitatively investigate multiple algorithms for microlens array grid estimation for microlens array-based light field cameras. Explicitly taking into account natural and mechanical vignetting effects, we propose a new method for microlens array grid estimation that outperforms the ones previously discussed in the literature. To quantify the performance of the algorithms, we propose an evaluation pipeline utilizing application-specific ray-traced white images with known microlens positions. Using a large dataset of synthesized white images, we thoroughly compare the performance of the different estimation algorithms. As an example, we apply our results to the decoding and calibration of light fields taken with a Lytro Illum camera. We observe that decoding as well as calibration benefit from a more accurate, vignetting-aware grid estimation, especially in peripheral subapertures of the light field.
Automatic segmentation and determining radiodensity of the liver in a large-scale CT database
Authors: N. S. Kulberg, A. B. Elizarov, V. P. Novik, V. A. Gombolevsky, A. P. Gonchar, A. L. Alliua, V. Yu. Bosin, A. V. Vladzymyrsky, S. P. Morozov
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Liver Segmentation

This study proposes an automatic technique for liver segmentation in computed tomography (CT) images. Localization of the liver volume is based on the correlation with an optimized set of liver templates developed by the authors that allows clear geometric interpretation. Radiodensity values are calculated based on the boundaries of the segmented liver, which allows identifying liver abnormalities. The performance of the technique was evaluated on 700 CT images from dataset of the Unified Radiological Information System (URIS) of Moscow. Despite the decrease in accuracy, the technique is applicable to CT volumes with a partially visible region of the liver. The technique can be used to process CT images obtained in various patient positions in a wide range of exposition parameters. It is capable in dealing with low dose CT scans in real large-scale medical database with over 1 million of studies.
oLMpics -- On what Language Model Pre-training Captures
Authors: Alon Talmor, Yanai Elazar, Yoav Goldberg, Jonathan Berant
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model

Recent success of pre-trained language models (LMs) has spurred widespread interest in the language capabilities that they possess. However, efforts to understand whether LM representations are useful for symbolic reasoning tasks have been limited and scattered. In this work, we propose eight reasoning tasks, which conceptually require operations such as comparison, conjunction, and composition. A fundamental challenge is to understand whether the performance of a LM on a task should be attributed to the pre-trained representations or to the process of fine-tuning on the task data. To address this, we propose an evaluation protocol that includes both zero-shot evaluation (no fine-tuning), as well as comparing the learning curve of a fine-tuned LM to the learning curve of multiple controls, which paints a rich picture of the LM capabilities. Our main findings are that: (a) different LMs exhibit qualitatively different reasoning abilities, e.g., RoBERTa succeeds in reasoning tasks where BERT fails completely; (b) LMs do not reason in an abstract manner and are context-dependent, e.g., while RoBERTa can compare ages, it can do so only when the ages are in the typical range of human ages; (c) On half of our reasoning tasks all models fail completely. Our findings and infrastructure can help future work on designing new datasets, models and objective functions for pre-training.
Unseen Face Presentation Attack Detection Using Class-Specific Sparse One-Class Multiple Kernel Fusion Regression
Authors: Shervin Rahimzadeh Arashloo
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Presentation Attack Detection, regression

The paper addresses face presentation attack detection in the challenging conditions of an unseen attack scenario where the system is exposed to novel presentation attacks that were not present in the training step. For this purpose, a pure one-class face presentation attack detection approach based on kernel regression is developed which only utilises bona fide (genuine) samples for training. In the context of the proposed approach, a number of innovations, including multiple kernel fusion, client-specific modelling, sparse regularisation and probabilistic modelling of score distributions are introduced to improve the efficacy of the method. The results of experimental evaluations conducted on the OULU-NPU, Replay-Mobile, Replay-Attack and MSU-MFSD datasets illustrate that the proposed method compares very favourably with other methods operating in an unseen attack detection scenario while achieving very competitive performance to multi-class methods (benefiting from presentation attack data for training) despite using only bona fide samples for training.
Intrinsic motivations and open-ended learning
Authors: Gianluca Baldassarre
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

There is a growing interest and literature on intrinsic motivations and open-ended learning in both cognitive robotics and machine learning on one side, and in psychology and neuroscience on the other. This paper aims to review some relevant contributions from the two literature threads and to draw links between them. To this purpose, the paper starts by defining intrinsic motivations and by presenting a computationally-driven theoretical taxonomy of their different types. Then it presents relevant contributions from the psychological and neuroscientific literature related to intrinsic motivations, interpreting them based on the grid, and elucidates the mechanisms and functions they play in animals and humans. Endowed with such concepts and their biological underpinnings, the paper next presents a selection of models from cognitive robotics and machine learning that computationally operationalise the concepts of intrinsic motivations and links them to biology concepts. The contribution finally presents some of the open challenges of the field from both the psychological/neuroscientific and computational perspectives.
Automated Testing for Deep Learning Systems with Differential Behavior Criteria
Authors: Yuan Gao, Yiqiang Han
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In this work, we conducted a study on building an automated testing system for deep learning systems based on differential behavior criteria. The automated testing goals were achieved by jointly optimizing two objective functions: maximizing differential behaviors from models under testing and maximizing neuron coverage. By observing differential behaviors from three pre-trained models during each testing iteration, the input image that triggered erroneous feedback was registered as a corner-case. The generated corner-cases can be used to examine the robustness of DNNs and consequently improve model accuracy. A project called DeepXplore was also used as a baseline model. After we fully implemented and optimized the baseline system, we explored its application as an augmenting training dataset with newly generated corner cases. With the GTRSB dataset, by retraining the model based on automated generated corner cases, the accuracy of three generic models increased by 259.2%, 53.6%, and 58.3%, respectively. Further, to extend the capability of automated testing, we explored other approaches based on differential behavior criteria to generate photo-realistic images for deep learning systems. One approach was to apply various transformations to the seed images for the deep learning framework. The other approach was to utilize the Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) technique, which was implemented on MNIST and Driving datasets. The style transferring capability has been observed very effective in adding additional visual effects, replacing image elements, and style-shifting (virtual image to real images). The GAN-based testing sample generation system was shown to be the next frontier for automated testing for deep learning systems.
Scalable NAS with Factorizable Architectural Parameters
Authors: Lanfei Wang, Lingxi Xie, Tianyi Zhang, Jun Guo, Qi Tian
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an emerging topic in machine learning and computer vision. The fundamental ideology of NAS is using an automatic mechanism to replace manual designs for exploring powerful network architectures. One of the key factors of NAS is to scale-up the search space, e.g., increasing the number of operators, so that more possibilities are covered, but existing search algorithms often get lost in a large number of operators. For avoiding huge computing and competition among similar operators in the same pool, this paper presents a scalable algorithm by factorizing a large set of candidate operators into smaller subspaces. As a practical example, this allows us to search for effective activation functions along with the regular operators including convolution, pooling, skip-connect, etc. With a small increase in search costs and no extra costs in re-training, we find interesting architectures that were not explored before, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR10 and ImageNet, two standard image classification benchmarks.
Learning to Infer User Interface Attributes from Images
Authors: Philippe Schlattner, Pavol Bielik, Martin Vechev
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Imitation Learning

We explore a new domain of learning to infer user interface attributes that helps developers automate the process of user interface implementation. Concretely, given an input image created by a designer, we learn to infer its implementation which when rendered, looks visually the same as the input image. To achieve this, we take a black box rendering engine and a set of attributes it supports (e.g., colors, border radius, shadow or text properties), use it to generate a suitable synthetic training dataset, and then train specialized neural models to predict each of the attribute values. To improve pixel-level accuracy, we additionally use imitation learning to train a neural policy that refines the predicted attribute values by learning to compute the similarity of the original and rendered images in their attribute space, rather than based on the difference of pixel values. We instantiate our approach to the task of inferring Android Button attribute values and achieve 92.5% accuracy on a dataset consisting of real-world Google Play Store applications.
Submodular Function Minimization and Polarity
Authors: Alper Atamturk, Vishnu Narayanan
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00

Using polarity, we give an outer polyhedral approximation for the epigraph of set functions. For a submodular function, we prove that the corresponding polar relaxation is exact; hence, it is equivalent to the Lov\'asz extension. The polar approach provides an alternative proof for the convex hull description of the epigraph of a submodular function. Computational experiments show that the inequalities from outer approximations can be effective as cutting planes for solving submodular as well as non-submodular set function minimization problems.
Leveraging Semi-Supervised Learning for Fairness using Neural Networks
Authors: Vahid Noroozi, Sara Bahaadini, Samira Sheikhi, Nooshin Mojab, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Fairness

There has been a growing concern about the fairness of decision-making systems based on machine learning. The shortage of labeled data has been always a challenging problem facing machine learning based systems. In such scenarios, semi-supervised learning has shown to be an effective way of exploiting unlabeled data to improve upon the performance of model. Notably, unlabeled data do not contain label information which itself can be a significant source of bias in training machine learning systems. This inspired us to tackle the challenge of fairness by formulating the problem in a semi-supervised framework. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised algorithm using neural networks benefiting from unlabeled data to not just improve the performance but also improve the fairness of the decision-making process. The proposed model, called SSFair, exploits the information in the unlabeled data to mitigate the bias in the training data.