pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Morton Filters for Superior Template Protection for Iris Recognition
Authors: Kiran B. Raja, R. Raghavendra, Sushma Venkatesh, Christoph Busch
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Iris Recognition

We address the fundamental performance issues of template protection (TP) for iris verification. We base our work on the popular Bloom-Filter templates protection & address the key challenges like sub-optimal performance and low unlinkability. Specifically, we focus on cases where Bloom-filter templates results in non-ideal performance due to presence of large degradations within iris images. Iris recognition is challenged with number of occluding factors such as presence of eye-lashes within captured image, occlusion due to eyelids, low quality iris images due to motion blur. All of such degrading factors result in obtaining non-reliable iris codes & thereby provide non-ideal biometric performance. These factors directly impact the protected templates derived from iris images when classical Bloom-filters are employed. To this end, we propose and extend our earlier ideas of Morton-filters for obtaining better and reliable templates for iris. Morton filter based TP for iris codes is based on leveraging the intra and inter-class distribution by exploiting low-rank iris codes to derive the stable bits across iris images for a particular subject and also analyzing the discriminable bits across various subjects. Such low-rank non-noisy iris codes enables realizing the template protection in a superior way which not only can be used in constrained setting, but also in relaxed iris imaging. We further extend the work to analyze the applicability to VIS iris images by employing a large scale public iris image database - UBIRIS(v1 & v2), captured in a unconstrained setting. Through a set of experiments, we demonstrate the applicability of proposed approach and vet the strengths and weakness. Yet another contribution of this work stems in assessing the security of the proposed approach where factors of Unlinkability is studied to indicate the antagonistic nature to relaxed iris imaging scenarios.
NEW: A Generic Learning Model for Tie Strength Prediction in Networks
Authors: Zhen Liu, Hu Li, Chao Wang
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00

Tie strength prediction, sometimes named weight prediction, is vital in exploring the diversity of connectivity pattern emerged in networks. Due to the fundamental significance, it has drawn much attention in the field of network analysis and mining. Some related works appeared in recent years have significantly advanced our understanding of how to predict the strong and weak ties in the social networks. However, most of the proposed approaches are scenario-aware methods heavily depending on some special contexts and even exclusively used in social networks. As a result, they are less applicable to various kinds of networks. In contrast to the prior studies, here we propose a new computational framework called Neighborhood Estimating Weight (NEW) which is purely driven by the basic structure information of the network and has the flexibility for adapting to diverse types of networks. In NEW, we design a novel index, i.e., connection inclination, to generate the representative features of the network, which is capable of capturing the actual distribution of the tie strength. In order to obtain the optimized prediction results, we also propose a parameterized regression model which approximately has a linear time complexity and thus is readily extended to the implementation in large-scale networks. The experimental results on six real-world networks demonstrate that our proposed predictive model outperforms the state of the art methods, which is powerful for predicting the missing tie strengths when only a part of the network's tie strength information is available.
Model-Driven Beamforming Neural Networks
Authors: Wenchao Xia, Gan Zheng, Kai-Kit Wong, Hongbo Zhu
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Transfer Learning

Beamforming is evidently a core technology in recent generations of mobile communication networks. Nevertheless, an iterative process is typically required to optimize the parameters, making it ill-placed for real-time implementation due to high complexity and computational delay. Heuristic solutions such as zero-forcing (ZF) are simpler but at the expense of performance loss. Alternatively, deep learning (DL) is well understood to be a generalizing technique that can deliver promising results for a wide range of applications at much lower complexity if it is sufficiently trained. As a consequence, DL may present itself as an attractive solution to beamforming. To exploit DL, this article introduces general data- and model-driven beamforming neural networks (BNNs), presents various possible learning strategies, and also discusses complexity reduction for the DL-based BNNs. We also offer enhancement methods such as training-set augmentation and transfer learning in order to improve the generality of BNNs, accompanied by computer simulation results and testbed results showing the performance of such BNN solutions.
FGN: Fusion Glyph Network for Chinese Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Zhenyu Xuan, Rui Bao, Shengyi Jiang
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Chinese Named Entity Recognition, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Representation Learning

Chinese NER is a challenging task. As pictographs, Chinese characters contain latent glyph information, which is often overlooked. In this paper, we propose the FGN, Fusion Glyph Network for Chinese NER. Except for adding glyph information, this method may also add extra interactive information with the fusion mechanism. The major innovations of FGN include: (1) a novel CNN structure called CGS-CNN is proposed to capture both glyph information and interactive information between glyphs from neighboring characters. (2) we provide a method with sliding window and Slice-Attention to fuse the BERT representation and glyph representation for a character, which may capture potential interactive knowledge between context and glyph. Experiments are conducted on four NER datasets, showing that FGN with LSTM-CRF as tagger achieves new state-of-the-arts performance for Chinese NER. Further, more experiments are conducted to investigate the influences of various components and settings in FGN.
Continuous-action Reinforcement Learning for Playing Racing Games: Comparing SPG to PPO
Authors: Mario S. Holubar, Marco A. Wiering
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: OpenAI Gym, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, a novel racing environment for OpenAI Gym is introduced. This environment operates with continuous action- and state-spaces and requires agents to learn to control the acceleration and steering of a car while navigating a randomly generated racetrack. Different versions of two actor-critic learning algorithms are tested on this environment: Sampled Policy Gradient (SPG) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). An extension of SPG is introduced that aims to improve learning performance by weighting action samples during the policy update step. The effect of using experience replay (ER) is also investigated. To this end, a modification to PPO is introduced that allows for training using old action samples by optimizing the actor in log space. Finally, a new technique for performing ER is tested that aims to improve learning speed without sacrificing performance by splitting the training into two parts, whereby networks are first trained using state transitions from the replay buffer, and then using only recent experiences. The results indicate that experience replay is not beneficial to PPO in continuous action spaces. The training of SPG seems to be more stable when actions are weighted. All versions of SPG outperform PPO when ER is used. The ER trick is effective at improving training speed on a computationally less intensive version of SPG.
Correcting Decalibration of Stereo Cameras in Self-Driving Vehicles
Authors: Jon Muhovič, Janez Perš
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Stereo Matching, valid

We address the problem of optical decalibration in mobile stereo camera setups, especially in context of autonomous vehicles. In real world conditions, an optical system is subject to various sources of anticipated and unanticipated mechanical stress (vibration, rough handling, collisions). Mechanical stress changes the geometry between the cameras that make up the stereo pair, and as a consequence, the pre-calculated epipolar geometry is no longer valid. Our method is based on optimization of camera geometry parameters and plugs directly into the output of the stereo matching algorithm. Therefore, it is able to recover calibration parameters on image pairs obtained from a decalibrated stereo system with minimal use of additional computing resources. The number of successfully recovered depth pixels is used as an objective function, which we aim to maximize. Our simulation confirms that the method can run constantly in parallel to stereo estimation and thus help keep the system calibrated in real time. Results confirm that the method is able to recalibrate all the parameters except for the baseline distance, which scales the absolute depth readings. However, that scaling factor could be uniquely determined using any kind of absolute range finding methods (e.g. a single beam time-of-flight sensor).
Deep Learning for MIR Tutorial
Authors: Alexander Schindler, Thomas Lidy, Sebastian Böck
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Event Detection, Information Retrieval, Music Information Retrieval, Onset Detection, Retrieval

Deep Learning has become state of the art in visual computing and continuously emerges into the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and audio retrieval domain. In order to bring attention to this topic we propose an introductory tutorial on deep learning for MIR. Besides a general introduction to neural networks, the proposed tutorial covers a wide range of MIR relevant deep learning approaches. \textbf{Convolutional Neural Networks} are currently a de-facto standard for deep learning based audio retrieval. \textbf{Recurrent Neural Networks} have proven to be effective in onset detection tasks such as beat or audio-event detection. \textbf{Siamese Networks} have been shown effective in learning audio representations and distance functions specific for music similarity retrieval. We will incorporate both academic and industrial points of view into the tutorial. Accompanying the tutorial, we will create a Github repository for the content presented at the tutorial as well as references to state of the art work and literature for further reading. This repository will remain public after the conference.
Towards Deep Unsupervised SAR Despeckling with Blind-Spot Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Andrea Bordone Molini, Diego Valsesia, Giulia Fracastoro, Enrico Magli
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

SAR despeckling is a problem of paramount importance in remote sensing, since it represents the first step of many scene analysis algorithms. Recently, deep learning techniques have outperformed classical model-based despeckling algorithms. However, such methods require clean ground truth images for training, thus resorting to synthetically speckled optical images since clean SAR images cannot be acquired. In this paper, inspired by recent works on blind-spot denoising networks, we propose a self-supervised Bayesian despeckling method. The proposed method is trained employing only noisy images and can therefore learn features of real SAR images rather than synthetic data. We show that the performance of the proposed network is very close to the supervised training approach on synthetic data and competitive on real data.
Approximate Weighted First-Order Model Counting: Exploiting Fast Approximate Model Counters and Symmetry
Authors: Timothy van Bremen, Ondrej Kuzelka
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Sentence

We study the symmetric weighted first-order model counting task and present ApproxWFOMC, a novel anytime method for efficiently bounding the weighted first-order model count in the presence of an unweighted first-order model counting oracle. The algorithm has applications to inference in a variety of first-order probabilistic representations, such as Markov logic networks and probabilistic logic programs. Crucially for many applications, we make no assumptions on the form of the input sentence. Instead, our algorithm makes use of the symmetry inherent in the problem by imposing cardinality constraints on the number of possible true groundings of a sentence's literals. Realising the first-order model counting oracle in practice using the approximate hashing-based model counter ApproxMC3, we show how our algorithm outperforms existing approximate and exact techniques for inference in first-order probabilistic models. We additionally provide PAC guarantees on the generated bounds.
Autoencoders as Weight Initialization of Deep Classification Networks for Cancer versus Cancer Studies
Authors: Mafalda Falcao Ferreira, Rui Camacho, Luis F. Teixeira
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Denoising, General Classification

Cancer is still one of the most devastating diseases of our time. One way of automatically classifying tumor samples is by analyzing its derived molecular information (i.e., its genes expression signatures). In this work, we aim to distinguish three different types of cancer: thyroid, skin, and stomach. For that, we compare the performance of a Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) used as weight initialization of a deep neural network. Although we address a different domain problem in this work, we have adopted the same methodology of Ferreira et al.. In our experiments, we assess two different approaches when training the classification model: (a) fixing the weights, after pre-training the DAE, and (b) allowing fine-tuning of the entire classification network. Additionally, we apply two different strategies for embedding the DAE into the classification network: (1) by only importing the encoding layers, and (2) by inserting the complete autoencoder. Our best result was the combination of unsupervised feature learning through a DAE, followed by its full import into the classification network, and subsequent fine-tuning through supervised training, achieving an F1 score of 98.04% +/- 1.09 when identifying cancerous thyroid samples.
Single Image Dehazing Using Ranking Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Yafei Song, Jia Li, Xiaogang Wang, Xiaowu Chen
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing

Single image dehazing, which aims to recover the clear image solely from an input hazy or foggy image, is a challenging ill-posed problem. Analysing existing approaches, the common key step is to estimate the haze density of each pixel. To this end, various approaches often heuristically designed haze-relevant features. Several recent works also automatically learn the features via directly exploiting Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). However, it may be insufficient to fully capture the intrinsic attributes of hazy images. To obtain effective features for single image dehazing, this paper presents a novel Ranking Convolutional Neural Network (Ranking-CNN). In Ranking-CNN, a novel ranking layer is proposed to extend the structure of CNN so that the statistical and structural attributes of hazy images can be simultaneously captured. By training Ranking-CNN in a well-designed manner, powerful haze-relevant features can be automatically learned from massive hazy image patches. Based on these features, haze can be effectively removed by using a haze density prediction model trained through the random forest regression. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms several previous dehazing approaches on synthetic and real-world benchmark images. Comprehensive analyses are also conducted to interpret the proposed Ranking-CNN from both the theoretical and experimental aspects.
Moving Objects Detection with a Moving Camera: A Comprehensive Review
Authors: Marie-Neige Chapel, Thierry Bouwmans
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Compensation, Motion Segmentation, Segmentation

During about 30 years, a lot of research teams have worked on the big challenge of detection of moving objects in various challenging environments. First applications concern static cameras but with the rise of the mobile sensors studies on moving cameras have emerged over time. In this survey, we propose to identify and categorize the different existing methods found in the literature. For this purpose, we propose to classify these methods according to the choose of the scene representation: one plane or several parts. Inside these two categories, the methods are grouped according to eight different approaches: panoramic background subtraction, dual cameras, motion compensation, subspace segmentation, motion segmentation, plane+parallax, multi planes and split image in blocks. A reminder of methods for static cameras is provided as well as the challenges with both static and moving cameras. Publicly available datasets and evaluation metrics are also surveyed in this paper.
Extreme Regression for Dynamic Search Advertising
Authors: Yashoteja Prabhu, Aditya Kusupati, Nilesh Gupta, Manik Varma
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

This paper introduces a new learning paradigm called eXtreme Regression (XR) whose objective is to accurately predict the numerical degrees of relevance of an extremely large number of labels to a data point. XR can provide elegant solutions to many large-scale ranking and recommendation applications including Dynamic Search Advertising (DSA). XR can learn more accurate models than the recently popular extreme classifiers which incorrectly assume strictly binary-valued label relevances. Traditional regression metrics which sum the errors over all the labels are unsuitable for XR problems since they could give extremely loose bounds for the label ranking quality. Also, the existing regression algorithms won't efficiently scale to millions of labels. This paper addresses these limitations through: (1) new evaluation metrics for XR which sum only the k largest regression errors; (2) a new algorithm called XReg which decomposes XR task into a hierarchy of much smaller regression problems thus leading to highly efficient training and prediction. This paper also introduces a (3) new labelwise prediction algorithm in XReg useful for DSA and other recommendation tasks. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrated that XReg can outperform the state-of-the-art extreme classifiers as well as large-scale regressors and rankers by up to 50% reduction in the new XR error metric, and up to 2% and 2.4% improvements in terms of the propensity-scored precision metric used in extreme classification and the click-through rate metric used in DSA respectively. Deployment of XReg on DSA in Bing resulted in a relative gain of 27% in query coverage. XReg's source code can be downloaded from http://manikvarma.org/code/XReg/download.html.
Improved propagation models for lte path loss prediction in urban & suburban Ghana
Authors: James D. Gadze, Kwame A. Agyekum, Stephen J. Nuagah, E. A. Affum
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00

To maximize the benefits of LTE cellular networks, careful and proper planning is needed. This requires the use of accurate propagation models to quantify the path loss required for base station deployment. Deployed LTE networks in Ghana can barely meet the desired 100Mbps throughput leading to customer dissatisfaction. Network operators rely on transmission planning tools designed for generalized environments that come with already embedded propagation models suited to other environments. A challenge therefore to Ghanaian transmission Network planners will be choosing an accurate and precise propagation model that best suits the Ghanaian environment. Given this, extensive LTE path loss measurements at 800MHz and 2600MHz were taken in selected urban and suburban environments in Ghana and compared with 6 commonly used propagation models. Improved versions of the Ericson, SUI, and ECC-33 developed in this study predict more precisely the path loss in Ghanaian environments compared with commonly used propagation models.
Structured GANs
Authors: Irad Peleg, Lior Wolf
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

We present Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), in which the symmetric property of the generated images is controlled. This is obtained through the generator network's architecture, while the training procedure and the loss remain the same. The symmetric GANs are applied to face image synthesis in order to generate novel faces with a varying amount of symmetry. We also present an unsupervised face rotation capability, which is based on the novel notion of one-shot fine tuning.
Proceedings of the AAAI-20 Workshop on Intelligent Process Automation (IPA-20)
Authors: Dell Zhang, Andre Freitas, DaCheng Tao, Dawn Song
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00

This is the Proceedings of the AAAI-20 Workshop on Intelligent Process Automation (IPA-20) which took place in New York, NY, USA on February 7th 2020.
SEERL: Sample Efficient Ensemble Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Rohan Saphal, Balaraman Ravindran, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Sasikanth Avancha, Bharat Kaul
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Diversity, Ensemble Learning, Model Selection, MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Ensemble learning is a very prevalent method employed in machine learning. The relative success of ensemble methods is attributed to their ability to tackle a wide range of instances and complex problems that require different low-level approaches. However, ensemble methods are relatively less popular in reinforcement learning owing to the high sample complexity and computational expense involved in obtaining a diverse ensemble. We present a novel training and model selection framework for model-free reinforcement algorithms that use ensembles of policies obtained from a single training run. These policies are diverse in nature and are learned through directed perturbation of the model parameters at regular intervals. We show that learning and selecting an adequately diverse set of policies is required for a good ensemble while extreme diversity can prove detrimental to overall performance. Selection of an adequately diverse set of policies is done through our novel policy selection framework. We evaluate our approach on challenging discrete and continuous control tasks and also discuss various ensembling strategies. Our framework is substantially sample efficient, computationally inexpensive and is seen to outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) scores in Atari 2600 and Mujoco.
SMT + ILP
Authors: Vaishak Belle
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive logic programming, Position

Inductive logic programming (ILP) has been a deeply influential paradigm in AI, enjoying decades of research on its theory and implementations. As a natural descendent of the fields of logic programming and machine learning, it admits the incorporation of background knowledge, which can be very useful in domains where prior knowledge from experts is available and can lead to a more data-efficient learning regime. Be that as it may, the limitation to Horn clauses composed over Boolean variables is a very serious one. Many phenomena occurring in the real-world are best characterized using continuous entities, and more generally, mixtures of discrete and continuous entities. In this position paper, we motivate a reconsideration of inductive declarative programming by leveraging satisfiability modulo theory technology.