pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Visual Tactile Fusion Object Clustering
Authors: Tao Zhang, Yang Cong, Gan Sun, Qianqian Wang, Zhenming Ding
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Model Optimization, Object

Object clustering, aiming at grouping similar objects into one cluster with an unsupervised strategy, has been extensivelystudied among various data-driven applications. However, most existing state-of-the-art object clustering methods (e.g., single-view or multi-view clustering methods) only explore visual information, while ignoring one of most important sensing modalities, i.e., tactile information which can help capture different object properties and further boost the performance of object clustering task. To effectively benefit both visual and tactile modalities for object clustering, in this paper, we propose a deep Auto-Encoder-like Non-negative Matrix Factorization framework for visual-tactile fusion clustering. Specifically, deep matrix factorization constrained by an under-complete Auto-Encoder-like architecture is employed to jointly learn hierarchical expression of visual-tactile fusion data, and preserve the local structure of data generating distribution of visual and tactile modalities. Meanwhile, a graph regularizer is introduced to capture the intrinsic relations of data samples within each modality. Furthermore, we propose a modality-level consensus regularizer to effectively align thevisual and tactile data in a common subspace in which the gap between visual and tactile data is mitigated. For the model optimization, we present an efficient alternating minimization strategy to solve our proposed model. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on public datasets to verify the effectiveness of our framework.
Single Image Super Resolution based on a Modified U-net with Mixed Gradient Loss
Authors: Zhengyang Lu, Ying Chen
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Single image super-resolution (SISR) is the task of inferring a high-resolution image from a single low-resolution image. Recent research on super-resolution has achieved great progress due to the development of deep convolutional neural networks in the field of computer vision. Existing super-resolution reconstruction methods have high performances in the criterion of Mean Square Error (MSE) but most methods fail to reconstruct an image with shape edges. To solve this problem, the mixed gradient error, which is composed by MSE and a weighted mean gradient error, is proposed in this work and applied to a modified U-net network as the loss function. The modified U-net removes all batch normalization layers and one of the convolution layers in each block. The operation reduces the number of parameters, and therefore accelerates the reconstruction. Compared with the existing image super-resolution algorithms, the proposed reconstruction method has better performance and time consumption. The experiments demonstrate that modified U-net network architecture with mixed gradient loss yields high-level results on three image datasets: SET14, BSD300, ICDAR2003. Code is available online.
Accurate Hydrologic Modeling Using Less Information
Authors: Guy Shalev, Ran El-Yaniv, Daniel Klotz, Frederik Kratzert, Asher Metzger, Sella Nevo
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00

Joint models are a common and important tool in the intersection of machine learning and the physical sciences, particularly in contexts where real-world measurements are scarce. Recent developments in rainfall-runoff modeling, one of the prime challenges in hydrology, show the value of a joint model with shared representation in this important context. However, current state-of-the-art models depend on detailed and reliable attributes characterizing each site to help the model differentiate correctly between the behavior of different sites. This dependency can present a challenge in data-poor regions. In this paper, we show that we can replace the need for such location-specific attributes with a completely data-driven learned embedding, and match previous state-of-the-art results with less information.
Learning Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embeddings for Link Prediction
Authors: Zhanqiu Zhang, Jianyu Cai, Yongdong Zhang, Jie Wang
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction

Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to represent entities and relations as low dimensional vectors (or matrices, tensors, etc.), has been shown to be a powerful technique for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. Existing knowledge graph embedding models mainly focus on modeling relation patterns such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model -- namely, Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding (HAKE) -- which maps entities into the polar coordinate system. HAKE is inspired by the fact that concentric circles in the polar coordinate system can naturally reflect the hierarchy. Specifically, the radial coordinate aims to model entities at different levels of the hierarchy, and entities with smaller radii are expected to be at higher levels; the angular coordinate aims to distinguish entities at the same level of the hierarchy, and these entities are expected to have roughly the same radii but different angles. Experiments demonstrate that HAKE can effectively model the semantic hierarchies in knowledge graphs, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the link prediction task.
MSD: Multi-Self-Distillation Learning via Multi-classifiers within Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Yunteng Luan, Hanyu Zhao, Zhi Yang, Yafei Dai
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

As the development of neural networks, more and more deep neural networks are adopted in various tasks, such as image classification. However, as the huge computational overhead, these networks could not be applied on mobile devices or other low latency scenes. To address this dilemma, multi-classifier convolutional network is proposed to allow faster inference via early classifiers with the corresponding classifiers. These networks utilize sophisticated designing to increase the early classifier accuracy. However, naively training the multi-classifier network could hurt the performance (accuracy) of deep neural networks as early classifiers throughout interfere with the feature generation process. In this paper, we propose a general training framework named multi-self-distillation learning (MSD), which mining knowledge of different classifiers within the same network and increase every classifier accuracy. Our approach can be applied not only to multi-classifier networks, but also modern CNNs (e.g., ResNet Series) augmented with additional side branch classifiers. We use sampling-based branch augmentation technique to transform a single-classifier network into a multi-classifier network. This reduces the gap of capacity between different classifiers, and improves the effectiveness of applying MSD. Our experiments show that MSD improves the accuracy of various networks: enhancing the accuracy of every classifier significantly for existing multi-classifier network (MSDNet), improving vanilla single-classifier networks with internal classifiers with high accuracy, while also improving the final accuracy.
Random Machines: A bagged-weighted support vector model with free kernel choice
Authors: Anderson Ara, Mateus Maia, Samuel Macêdo, Francisco Louzada
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, regression

Improvement of statistical learning models in order to increase efficiency in solving classification or regression problems is still a goal pursued by the scientific community. In this way, the support vector machine model is one of the most successful and powerful algorithms for those tasks. However, its performance depends directly from the choice of the kernel function and their hyperparameters. The traditional choice of them, actually, can be computationally expensive to do the kernel choice and the tuning processes. In this article, it is proposed a novel framework to deal with the kernel function selection called Random Machines. The results improved accuracy and reduced computational time. The data study was performed in simulated data and over 27 real benchmarking datasets.
Segmenting Medical MRI via Recurrent Decoding Cell
Authors: Ying Wen, Kai Xie, Lianghua He
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The encoder-decoder networks are commonly used in medical image segmentation due to their remarkable performance in hierarchical feature fusion. However, the expanding path for feature decoding and spatial recovery does not consider the long-term dependency when fusing feature maps from different layers, and the universal encoder-decoder network does not make full use of the multi-modality information to improve the network robustness especially for segmenting medical MRI. In this paper, we propose a novel feature fusion unit called Recurrent Decoding Cell (RDC) which leverages convolutional RNNs to memorize the long-term context information from the previous layers in the decoding phase. An encoder-decoder network, named Convolutional Recurrent Decoding Network (CRDN), is also proposed based on RDC for segmenting multi-modality medical MRI. CRDN adopts CNN backbone to encode image features and decode them hierarchically through a chain of RDCs to obtain the final high-resolution score map. The evaluation experiments on BrainWeb, MRBrainS and HVSMR datasets demonstrate that the introduction of RDC effectively improves the segmentation accuracy as well as reduces the model size, and the proposed CRDN owns its robustness to image noise and intensity non-uniformity in medical MRI.
Accelerating Reinforcement Learning with Suboptimal Guidance
Authors: Eivind Bøhn, Signe Moe, Tor Arne Johansen
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: OpenAI Gym, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement Learning in domains with sparse rewards is a difficult problem, and a large part of the training process is often spent searching the state space in a more or less random fashion for any learning signals. For control problems, we often have some controller readily available which might be suboptimal but nevertheless solves the problem to some degree. This controller can be used to guide the initial exploration phase of the learning controller towards reward yielding states, reducing the time before refinement of a viable policy can be initiated. In our work, the agent is guided through an auxiliary behaviour cloning loss which is made conditional on a Q-filter, i.e. it is only applied in situations where the critic deems the guiding controller to be better than the agent. The Q-filter provides a natural way to adjust the guidance throughout the training process, allowing the agent to exceed the guiding controller in a manner that is adaptive to the task at hand and the proficiency of the guiding controller. The contribution of this paper lies in identifying shortcomings in previously proposed implementations of the Q-filter concept, and in suggesting some ways these issues can be mitigated. These modifications are tested on the OpenAI Gym Fetch environments, showing clear improvements in adaptivity and yielding increased performance in all robotic environments tested.
Classification-driven Single Image Dehazing
Authors: Yanting Pei, Yaping Huang, Xingyuan Zhang
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing

Most existing dehazing algorithms often use hand-crafted features or Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)-based methods to generate clear images using pixel-level Mean Square Error (MSE) loss. The generated images generally have better visual appeal, but not always have better performance for high-level vision tasks, e.g. image classification. In this paper, we investigate a new point of view in addressing this problem. Instead of focusing only on achieving good quantitative performance on pixel-based metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), we also ensure that the dehazed image itself does not degrade the performance of the high-level vision tasks such as image classification. To this end, we present an unified CNN architecture that includes three parts: a dehazing sub-network (DNet), a classification-driven Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks sub-network (CCGAN) and a classification sub-network (CNet) related to image classification, which has better performance both on visual appeal and image classification. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two challenging benchmark datasets for fine-grained and object classification: CUB-200-2011 and Caltech-256. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms many recent state-of-the-art single image dehazing methods in terms of image dehazing metrics and classification accuracy.
ChartNet: Visual Reasoning over Statistical Charts using MAC-Networks
Authors: Monika Sharma, Shikha Gupta, Arindam Chowdhury, Lovekesh Vig
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Visual Reasoning

Despite the improvements in perception accuracies brought about via deep learning, developing systems combining accurate visual perception with the ability to reason over the visual percepts remains extremely challenging. A particular application area of interest from an accessibility perspective is that of reasoning over statistical charts such as bar and pie charts. To this end, we formulate the problem of reasoning over statistical charts as a classification task using MAC-Networks to give answers from a predefined vocabulary of generic answers. Additionally, we enhance the capabilities of MAC-Networks to give chart-specific answers to open-ended questions by replacing the classification layer by a regression layer to localize the textual answers present over the images. We call our network ChartNet, and demonstrate its efficacy on predicting both in vocabulary and out of vocabulary answers. To test our methods, we generated our own dataset of statistical chart images and corresponding question answer pairs. Results show that ChartNet consistently outperform other state-of-the-art methods on reasoning over these questions and may be a viable candidate for applications containing images of statistical charts.
Entity Extraction with Knowledge from Web Scale Corpora
Authors: Zeyi Wen, Zeyu Huang, Rui Zhang
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Extraction using GAN

Entity extraction is an important task in text mining and natural language processing. A popular method for entity extraction is by comparing substrings from free text against a dictionary of entities. In this paper, we present several techniques as a post-processing step for improving the effectiveness of the existing entity extraction technique. These techniques utilise models trained with the web-scale corpora which makes our techniques robust and versatile. Experiments show that our techniques bring a notable improvement on efficiency and effectiveness.
Generalized Planning with Positive and Negative Examples
Authors: Javier Segovia-Aguas, Sergio Jiménez, Anders Jonsson
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00

Generalized planning aims at computing an algorithm-like structure (generalized plan) that solves a set of multiple planning instances. In this paper we define negative examples for generalized planning as planning instances that must not be solved by a generalized plan. With this regard the paper extends the notion of validation of a generalized plan as the problem of verifying that a given generalized plan solves the set of input positives instances while it fails to solve a given input set of negative examples. This notion of plan validation allows us to define quantitative metrics to asses the generalization capacity of generalized plans. The paper also shows how to incorporate this new notion of plan validation into a compilation for plan synthesis that takes both positive and negative instances as input. Experiments show that incorporating negative examples can accelerate plan synthesis in several domains and leverage quantitative metrics to evaluate the generalization capacity of the synthesized plans.
On the separation of shape and temporal patterns in time series -Application to signature authentication-
Authors: Pierre-François Marteau
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In this article we address the problem of separation of shape and time components in time series. The concept ofshape that we tackle is termed temporally neutral to consider that it may possibly exist outside of any temporal specification, as it is the case for a geometric form. We propose to exploit and adapt a probabilistic temporal alignment algorithm, initially designed to estimate the centroid of a set of time series, to build some heuristicelements of solution to this separation problem. We show on some controlled synthetic data that this algorithm meets empirically our initial objectives. We finally evaluate it on real data, in the context of some on-line handwritten signature authentication benchmarks. On the three evaluated tasks, our approach based on the separation of signature shape and associated temporal patterns is positioned slightly above the current state of the art demonstrating the applicative benefit of this separating problem.
Multi-Scale RCNN Model for Financial Time-series Classification
Authors: Liu Guang, Wang Xiaojie, Li Ruifan
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Management, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

Financial time-series classification (FTC) is extremely valuable for investment management. In past decades, it draws a lot of attention from a wide extent of research areas, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI). Existing researches majorly focused on exploring the effects of the Multi-Scale (MS) property or the Temporal Dependency (TD) within financial time-series. Unfortunately, most previous researches fail to combine these two properties effectively and often fall short of accuracy and profitability. To effectively combine and utilize both properties of financial time-series, we propose a Multi-Scale Temporal Dependent Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (MSTD-RCNN) for FTC. In the proposed method, the MS features are simultaneously extracted by convolutional units to precisely describe the state of the financial market. Moreover, the TD and complementary across different scales are captured through a Recurrent Neural Network. The proposed method is evaluated on three financial time-series datasets which source from the Chinese stock market. Extensive experimental results indicate that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance in trend classification and simulated trading, compared with classical and advanced baseline models.
Gliding vertex on the horizontal bounding box for multi-oriented object detection
Authors: Yongchao Xu, Mingtao Fu, Qimeng Wang, Yukang Wang, Kai Chen, Gui-Song Xia, Xiang Bai
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Detection In Aerial Images, Oriented Object Detection, Pedestrian Detection, Scene Text Detection, Text Detection

Object detection has recently experienced substantial progress. Yet, the widely adopted horizontal bounding box representation is not appropriate for ubiquitous oriented objects such as objects in aerial images and scene texts. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework to detect multi-oriented objects. Instead of directly regressing the four vertices, we glide the vertex of the horizontal bounding box on each corresponding side to accurately describe a multi-oriented object. Specifically, We regress four length ratios characterizing the relative gliding offset on each corresponding side. This may facilitate the offset learning and avoid the confusion issue of sequential label points for oriented objects. To further remedy the confusion issue for nearly horizontal objects, we also introduce an obliquity factor based on area ratio between the object and its horizontal bounding box, guiding the selection of horizontal or oriented detection for each object. We add these five extra target variables to the regression head of faster R-CNN, which requires ignorable extra computation time. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that without bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves superior performances on multiple multi-oriented object detection benchmarks including object detection in aerial images, scene text detection, pedestrian detection in fisheye images.
Schemaless Queries over Document Tables with Dependencies
Authors: Mustafa Canim, Cristina Cornelio, Arun Iyengar, Ryan Musa, Mariano Rodrigez Muro
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Table Detection

Unstructured enterprise data such as reports, manuals and guidelines often contain tables. The traditional way of integrating data from these tables is through a two-step process of table detection/extraction and mapping the table layouts to an appropriate schema. This can be an expensive process. In this paper we show that by using semantic technologies (RDF/SPARQL and database dependencies) paired with a simple but powerful way to transform tables with non-relational layouts, it is possible to offer query answering services over these tables with minimal manual work or domain-specific mappings. Our method enables users to exploit data in tables embedded in documents with little effort, not only for simple retrieval queries, but also for structured queries that require joining multiple interrelated tables.
A Probabilistic Approach for Discovering Daily Human Mobility Patterns with Mobile Data
Authors: Weizhu Qian, Fabrice Lauri, Franck Gechter
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Discovering human mobility patterns with geo-location data collected from smartphone users has been a hot research topic in recent years. In this paper, we attempt to discover daily mobile patterns based on GPS data. We view this problem from a probabilistic perspective in order to explore more information from the original GPS data compared to other conventional methods. A non-parameter Bayesian modeling method, Infinite Gaussian Mixture Model, is used to estimate the probability density for the daily mobility. Then, we use Kullback-Leibler divergence as the metrics to measure the similarity of different probability distributions. And combining Infinite Gaussian Mixture Model and Kullback-Leibler divergence, we derived an automatic clustering algorithm to discover mobility patterns for each individual user without setting the number of clusters in advance. In the experiments, the effectiveness of our method is validated on the real user data collected from different users. The results show that the IGMM-based algorithm outperforms the GMM-based algorithm. We also test our methods on the dataset with different lengths to discover the minimum data length for discovering mobility patterns.