pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Training Progressively Binarizing Deep Networks Using FPGAs
Authors: Corey Lammie, Wei Xiang, Mostafa Rahimi Azghadi
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00

While hardware implementations of inference routines for Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs) are plentiful, current realizations of efficient BNN hardware training accelerators, suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices, leave much to be desired. Conventional BNN hardware training accelerators perform forward and backward propagations with parameters adopting binary representations, and optimization using parameters adopting floating or fixed-point real-valued representations--requiring two distinct sets of network parameters. In this paper, we propose a hardware-friendly training method that, contrary to conventional methods, progressively binarizes a singular set of fixed-point network parameters, yielding notable reductions in power and resource utilizations. We use the Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL development environment to train our progressively binarizing DNNs on an OpenVINO FPGA. We benchmark our training approach on both GPUs and FPGAs using CIFAR-10 and compare it to conventional BNNs.
A context based deep learning approach for unbalanced medical image segmentation
Authors: Balamurali Murugesan, Kaushik Sarveswaran, Vijaya Raghavan S, Sharath M. Shankaranarayana, Keerthi Ram, Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Automated medical image segmentation is an important step in many medical procedures. Recently, deep learning networks have been widely used for various medical image segmentation tasks, with U-Net and generative adversarial nets (GANs) being some of the commonly used ones. Foreground-background class imbalance is a common occurrence in medical images, and U-Net has difficulty in handling class imbalance because of its cross entropy (CE) objective function. Similarly, GAN also suffers from class imbalance because the discriminator looks at the entire image to classify it as real or fake. Since the discriminator is essentially a deep learning classifier, it is incapable of correctly identifying minor changes in small structures. To address these issues, we propose a novel context based CE loss function for U-Net, and a novel architecture Seg-GLGAN. The context based CE is a linear combination of CE obtained over the entire image and its region of interest (ROI). In Seg-GLGAN, we introduce a novel context discriminator to which the entire image and its ROI are fed as input, thus enforcing local context. We conduct extensive experiments using two challenging unbalanced datasets: PROMISE12 and ACDC. We observe that segmentation results obtained from our methods give better segmentation metrics as compared to various baseline methods.
Hypergraph Spectral Analysis and Processing in 3D Point Cloud
Authors: Songyang Zhang, Shuguang Cui, Zhi Ding
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Along with increasingly popular virtual reality applications, the three-dimensional (3D) point cloud has become a fundamental data structure to characterize 3D objects and surroundings. To process 3D point clouds efficiently, a suitable model for the underlying structure and outlier noises is always critical. In this work, we propose a hypergraph-based new point cloud model that is amenable to efficient analysis and processing. We introduce tensor-based methods to estimate hypergraph spectrum components and frequency coefficients of point clouds in both ideal and noisy settings. We establish an analytical connection between hypergraph frequencies and structural features. We further evaluate the efficacy of hypergraph spectrum estimation in two common point cloud applications of sampling and denoising for which also we elaborate specific hypergraph filter design and spectral properties. The empirical performance demonstrates the strength of hypergraph signal processing as a tool in 3D point clouds and the underlying properties.
Learning to Zoom-in via Learning to Zoom-out: Real-world Super-resolution by Generating and Adapting Degradation
Authors: Dong Gong, Wei Sun, Qinfeng Shi, Anton Van Den Hengel, Yanning Zhang
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Most learning-based super-resolution (SR) methods aim to recover high-resolution (HR) image from a given low-resolution (LR) image via learning on LR-HR image pairs. The SR methods learned on synthetic data do not perform well in real-world, due to the domain gap between the artificially synthesized and real LR images. Some efforts are thus taken to capture real-world image pairs. The captured LR-HR image pairs usually suffer from unavoidable misalignment, which hampers the performance of end-to-end learning, however. Here, focusing on the real-world SR, we ask a different question: since misalignment is unavoidable, can we propose a method that does not need LR-HR image pairing and alignment at all and utilize real images as they are? Hence we propose a framework to learn SR from an arbitrary set of unpaired LR and HR images and see how far a step can go in such a realistic and "unsupervised" setting. To do so, we firstly train a degradation generation network to generate realistic LR images and, more importantly, to capture their distribution (i.e., learning to zoom out). Instead of assuming the domain gap has been eliminated, we minimize the discrepancy between the generated data and real data while learning a degradation adaptive SR network (i.e., learning to zoom in). The proposed unpaired method achieves state-of-the-art SR results on real-world images, even in the datasets that favor the paired-learning methods more.
A Neural Approach to Discourse Relation Signal Detection
Authors: Amir Zeldes, Yang Liu
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Relation Classification

Previous data-driven work investigating the types and distributions of discourse relation signals, including discourse markers such as 'however' or phrases such as 'as a result' has focused on the relative frequencies of signal words within and outside text from each discourse relation. Such approaches do not allow us to quantify the signaling strength of individual instances of a signal on a scale (e.g. more or less discourse-relevant instances of 'and'), to assess the distribution of ambiguity for signals, or to identify words that hinder discourse relation identification in context ('anti-signals' or 'distractors'). In this paper we present a data-driven approach to signal detection using a distantly supervised neural network and develop a metric, Delta s (or 'delta-softmax'), to quantify signaling strength. Ranging between -1 and 1 and relying on recent advances in contextualized words embeddings, the metric represents each word's positive or negative contribution to the identifiability of a relation in specific instances in context. Based on an English corpus annotated for discourse relations using Rhetorical Structure Theory and signal type annotations anchored to specific tokens, our analysis examines the reliability of the metric, the places where it overlaps with and differs from human judgments, and the implications for identifying features that neural models may need in order to perform better on automatic discourse relation classification.
MACER: Attack-free and Scalable Robust Training via Maximizing Certified Radius
Authors: Runtian Zhai, Chen Dan, Di He, huan zhang, Boqing Gong, Pradeep Ravikumar, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Li-Wei Wang
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1

Adversarial training is one of the most popular ways to learn robust models but is usually attack-dependent and time costly. In this paper, we propose the MACER algorithm, which learns robust models without using adversarial training but performs better than all existing provable l2-defenses. Recent work shows that randomized smoothing can be used to provide a certified l2 radius to smoothed classifiers, and our algorithm trains provably robust smoothed classifiers via MAximizing the CErtified Radius (MACER). The attack-free characteristic makes MACER faster to train and easier to optimize. In our experiments, we show that our method can be applied to modern deep neural networks on a wide range of datasets, including Cifar-10, ImageNet, MNIST, and SVHN. For all tasks, MACER spends less training time than state-of-the-art adversarial training algorithms, and the learned models achieve larger average certified radius.
On Recoverability of Randomly Compressed Tensors with Low CP Rank
Authors: Shahana Ibrahim, Xiao Fu, Xingguo Li
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Video Compression

Our interest lies in the recoverability properties of compressed tensors under the \textit{canonical polyadic decomposition} (CPD) model. The considered problem is well-motivated in many applications, e.g., hyperspectral image and video compression. Prior work studied this problem under somewhat special assumptions---e.g., the latent factors of the tensor are sparse or drawn from absolutely continuous distributions. We offer an alternative result: We show that if the tensor is compressed by a subgaussian linear mapping, then the tensor is recoverable if the number of measurements is on the same order of magnitude as that of the model parameters---without strong assumptions on the latent factors. Our proof is based on deriving a \textit{restricted isometry property} (R.I.P.) under the CPD model via set covering techniques, and thus exhibits a flavor of classic compressive sensing. The new recoverability result enriches the understanding to the compressed CP tensor recovery problem; it offers theoretical guarantees for recovering tensors whose elements are not necessarily continuous or sparse.
What can robotics research learn from computer vision research?
Authors: Peter Corke, Feras Dayoub, David Hall, John Skinner, Niko Sünderhauf
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Reinforcement Learning

The computer vision and robotics research communities are each strong. However progress in computer vision has become turbo-charged in recent years due to big data, GPU computing, novel learning algorithms and a very effective research methodology. By comparison, progress in robotics seems slower. It is true that robotics came later to exploring the potential of learning -- the advantages over the well-established body of knowledge in dynamics, kinematics, planning and control is still being debated, although reinforcement learning seems to offer real potential. However, the rapid development of computer vision compared to robotics cannot be only attributed to the former's adoption of deep learning. In this paper, we argue that the gains in computer vision are due to research methodology -- evaluation under strict constraints versus experiments; bold numbers versus videos.
Learning to Move with Affordance Maps
Authors: William Qi, Ravi Teja Mullapudi, Saurabh Gupta, Deva Ramanan
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Autonomous Vehicles, Navigate, PointGoal Navigation

The ability to autonomously explore and navigate a physical space is a fundamental requirement for virtually any mobile autonomous agent, from household robotic vacuums to autonomous vehicles. Traditional SLAM-based approaches for exploration and navigation largely focus on leveraging scene geometry, but fail to model dynamic objects (such as other agents) or semantic constraints (such as wet floors or doorways). Learning-based RL agents are an attractive alternative because they can incorporate both semantic and geometric information, but are notoriously sample inefficient, difficult to generalize to novel settings, and are difficult to interpret. In this paper, we combine the best of both worlds with a modular approach that learns a spatial representation of a scene that is trained to be effective when coupled with traditional geometric planners. Specifically, we design an agent that learns to predict a spatial affordance map that elucidates what parts of a scene are navigable through active self-supervised experience gathering. In contrast to most simulation environments that assume a static world, we evaluate our approach in the VizDoom simulator, using large-scale randomly-generated maps containing a variety of dynamic actors and hazards. We show that learned affordance maps can be used to augment traditional approaches for both exploration and navigation, providing significant improvements in performance.
Automatic Melody Harmonization with Triad Chords: A Comparative Study
Authors: Yin-Cheng Yeh, Wen-Yi Hsiao, Satoru Fukayama, Tetsuro Kitahara, Benjamin Genchel, Hao-Min Liu, Hao-Wen Dong, Yi-An Chen, Terence Leong, Yi-Hsuan Yang
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Template Matching

Several prior works have proposed various methods for the task of automatic melody harmonization, in which a model aims to generate a sequence of chords to serve as the harmonic accompaniment of a given multiple-bar melody sequence. In this paper, we present a comparative study evaluating and comparing the performance of a set of canonical approaches to this task, including a template matching based model, a hidden Markov based model, a genetic algorithm based model, and two deep learning based models. The evaluation is conducted on a dataset of 9,226 melody/chord pairs we newly collect for this study, considering up to 48 triad chords, using a standardized training/test split. We report the result of an objective evaluation using six different metrics and a subjective study with 202 participants.
Weakly Supervised Visual Semantic Parsing
Authors: Alireza Zareian, Svebor Karaman, Shih-Fu Chang
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Graph Generation, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Scene Graph Generation, Semantic Parsing, Visual Reasoning, Weakly-supervised Learning

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to extract entities, predicates and their semantic structure from images, enabling deep understanding of visual content, with many applications such as visual reasoning and image retrieval. Nevertheless, existing SGG methods require millions of manually annotated bounding boxes for training, and are computationally inefficient, as they exhaustively process all pairs of object proposals to detect predicates. In this paper, we address those two limitations by first proposing a generalized formulation of SGG, namely Visual Semantic Parsing, which disentangles entity and predicate recognition, and enables sub-quadratic performance. Then we propose the Visual Semantic Parsing Network, VSPNet, based on a dynamic, attention-based, bipartite message passing framework that jointly infers graph nodes and edges through an iterative process. Additionally, we propose the first graph-based weakly supervised learning framework, based on a novel graph alignment algorithm, which enables training without bounding box annotations. Through extensive experiments, we show that VSPNet outperforms weakly supervised baselines significantly and approaches fully supervised performance, while being several times faster. We publicly release the source code of our method.
VisionNet: A Drivable-space-based Interactive Motion Prediction Network for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Yanliang Zhu, Deheng Qian, Dongchun Ren, Huaxia Xia
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, motion prediction, Trajectory Prediction

The comprehension of environmental traffic situation largely ensures the driving safety of autonomous vehicles. Recently, the mission has been investigated by plenty of researches, while it is hard to be well addressed due to the limitation of collective influence in complex scenarios. These approaches model the interactions through the spatial relations between the target obstacle and its neighbors. However, they oversimplify the challenge since the training stage of the interactions lacks effective supervision. As a result, these models are far from promising. More intuitively, we transform the problem into calculating the interaction-aware drivable spaces and propose the CNN-based VisionNet for trajectory prediction. The VisionNet accepts a sequence of motion states, i.e., location, velocity, and acceleration, to estimate the future drivable spaces. The reified interactions significantly increase the interpretation ability of the VisionNet and refine the prediction. To further advance the performance, we propose an interactive loss to guide the generation of the drivable spaces. Experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed VisionNet.
Citation Recommendations Considering Content and Structural Context Embedding
Authors: Yang Zhang, Qiang Ma
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00

The number of academic papers being published is increasing exponentially in recent years, and recommending adequate citations to assist researchers in writing papers is a non-trivial task. Conventional approaches may not be optimal, as the recommended papers may already be known to the users, or be solely relevant to the surrounding context but not other ideas discussed in the manuscript. In this work, we propose a novel embedding algorithm DocCit2Vec, along with the new concept of ``structural context'', to tackle the aforementioned issues. The proposed approach demonstrates superior performances to baseline models in extensive experiments designed to simulate practical usage scenarios.
HyperSched: Dynamic Resource Reallocation for Model Development on a Deadline
Authors: Richard Liaw, Romil Bhardwaj, Lisa Dunlap, Yitian Zou, Joseph Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, Alexey Tumanov
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Prior research in resource scheduling for machine learning training workloads has largely focused on minimizing job completion times. Commonly, these model training workloads collectively search over a large number of parameter values that control the learning process in a hyperparameter search. It is preferable to identify and maximally provision the best-performing hyperparameter configuration (trial) to achieve the highest accuracy result as soon as possible. To optimally trade-off evaluating multiple configurations and training the most promising ones by a fixed deadline, we design and build HyperSched -- a dynamic application-level resource scheduler to track, identify, and preferentially allocate resources to the best performing trials to maximize accuracy by the deadline. HyperSched leverages three properties of a hyperparameter search workload over-looked in prior work - trial disposability, progressively identifiable rankings among different configurations, and space-time constraints - to outperform standard hyperparameter search algorithms across a variety of benchmarks.
Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Connected Vehicles
Authors: Dohyun Kwon, Joongheon Kim
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) base station can offer abundant high capacity channel resources toward connected vehicles so that quality-of-service (QoS) of them in terms of downlink throughput can be highly improved. The mmWave base station can operate among existing base stations (e.g., macro-cell base station) on non-overlapped channels among them and the vehicles can make decision what base station to associate, and what channel to utilize on heterogeneous networks. Furthermore, because of the non-omni property of mmWave communication, the vehicles decide how to align the beam direction toward mmWave base station to associate with it. However, such joint problem requires high computational cost, which is NP-hard and has combinatorial features. In this paper, we solve the problem in 3-tier heterogeneous vehicular network (HetVNet) with multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in a way that maximizes expected total reward (i.e., downlink throughput) of vehicles. The multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) approach is introduced to achieve optimal policy in continuous action domain.
$μ$VulDeePecker: A Deep Learning-Based System for Multiclass Vulnerability Detection
Authors: Deqing Zou, Sujuan Wang, Shouhuai Xu, Zhen Li, Hai Jin
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, General Classification, Vulnerability Detection

Fine-grained software vulnerability detection is an important and challenging problem. Ideally, a detection system (or detector) not only should be able to detect whether or not a program contains vulnerabilities, but also should be able to pinpoint the type of a vulnerability in question. Existing vulnerability detection methods based on deep learning can detect the presence of vulnerabilities (i.e., addressing the binary classification or detection problem), but cannot pinpoint types of vulnerabilities (i.e., incapable of addressing multiclass classification). In this paper, we propose the first deep learning-based system for multiclass vulnerability detection, dubbed $\mu$VulDeePecker. The key insight underlying $\mu$VulDeePecker is the concept of code attention, which can capture information that can help pinpoint types of vulnerabilities, even when the samples are small. For this purpose, we create a dataset from scratch and use it to evaluate the effectiveness of $\mu$VulDeePecker. Experimental results show that $\mu$VulDeePecker is effective for multiclass vulnerability detection and that accommodating control-dependence (other than data-dependence) can lead to higher detection capabilities.
Generative Adversarial Zero-Shot Relational Learning for Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Pengda Qin, Xin Wang, Wenhu Chen, Chunyun Zhang, Weiran Xu, William Yang Wang
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graphs, Relational Reasoning, Zero-Shot Learning

Large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) are shown to become more important in current information systems. To expand the coverage of KGs, previous studies on knowledge graph completion need to collect adequate training instances for newly-added relations. In this paper, we consider a novel formulation, zero-shot learning, to free this cumbersome curation. For newly-added relations, we attempt to learn their semantic features from their text descriptions and hence recognize the facts of unseen relations with no examples being seen. For this purpose, we leverage Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to establish the connection between text and knowledge graph domain: The generator learns to generate the reasonable relation embeddings merely with noisy text descriptions. Under this setting, zero-shot learning is naturally converted to a traditional supervised classification task. Empirically, our method is model-agnostic that could be potentially applied to any version of KG embeddings, and consistently yields performance improvements on NELL and Wiki dataset.
High-Level Plan for Behavioral Robot Navigation with Natural Language Directions and R-NET
Authors: Amar Shrestha, Krittaphat Pugdeethosapol, Haowen Fang, Qinru Qiu
Date: 2020-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Robot Navigation

When the navigational environment is known, it can be represented as a graph where landmarks are nodes, the robot behaviors that move from node to node are edges, and the route is a set of behavioral instructions. The route path from source to destination can be viewed as a class of combinatorial optimization problems where the path is a sequential subset from a set of discrete items. The pointer network is an attention-based recurrent network that is suitable for such a task. In this paper, we utilize a modified R-NET with gated attention and self-matching attention translating natural language instructions to a high-level plan for behavioral robot navigation by developing an understanding of the behavioral navigational graph to enable the pointer network to produce a sequence of behaviors representing the path. Tests on the navigation graph dataset show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach for both known and unknown environments.