pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Hough Transform-based method for Radial Lens Distortion Correction
Authors: R. Cucchiara, C. Grana, A. Prati, R. Vezzani
Date: 2003-09-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICIAP 2003 9
Tasks: distortion correction

The paper presents an approach for a robust (semi-)automatic correction of radial lens distortion in images and videos. This method, based on the Hough transform, has the characteristics to be applicable also on videos from unknown cameras that, consequently, can not be a priori calibrated. We approximated the lens distortion by considering only the lower-order term of the radial distortion. Thus, the method relies on the assumption that pure radial distortion transforms straight lines into curves. The computation of the best value of the distortion parameter is performed in a multi-resolution way. The method precision depends on the scale of the multi-resolution and on the Hough space's resolution. Experiments are provided for both outdoor, uncalibrated camera and an indoor, calibrated one. The stability of the value found in different frames of the same video demonstrates the reliability of the proposed method.
Learning Deep Analysis Dictionaries for Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Jun-Jie Huang, Pier Luigi Dragotti
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Image Super-Resolution, regression, Super-Resolution

Inspired by the recent success of deep neural networks and the recent efforts to develop multi-layer dictionary models, we propose a Deep Analysis dictionary Model (DeepAM) which is optimized to address a specific regression task known as single image super-resolution. Contrary to other multi-layer dictionary models, our architecture contains L layers of analysis dictionary and soft-thresholding operators to gradually extract high-level features and a layer of synthesis dictionary which is designed to optimize the regression task at hand. In our approach, each analysis dictionary is partitioned into two sub-dictionaries: an Information Preserving Analysis Dictionary (IPAD) and a Clustering Analysis Dictionary (CAD). The IPAD together with the corresponding soft-thresholds is designed to pass the key information from the previous layer to the next layer, while the CAD together with the corresponding soft-thresholding operator is designed to produce a sparse feature representation of its input data that facilitates discrimination of key features. DeepAM uses both supervised and unsupervised setup. Simulation results show that the proposed deep analysis dictionary model achieves better performance compared to a deep neural network that has the same structure and is optimized using back-propagation when training datasets are small.
Theory inspired deep network for instantaneous-frequency extraction and signal components recovery from discrete blind-source data
Authors: Charles K. Chui, Ningning Han, Hrushikesh N. Mhaskar
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00

This paper is concerned with the inverse problem of recovering the unknown signal components, along with extraction of their instantaneous frequencies (IFs), governed by the adaptive harmonic model (AHM), from discrete (and possibly non-uniform) samples of the blind-source composite signal. None of the existing decomposition methods and algorithms, including the most popular empirical mode decomposition (EMD) computational scheme and its current modifications, is capable of solving this inverse problem. In order to meet the AHM formulation and to extract the IFs of the decomposed components, called intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), each IMF of EMD is extended to an analytic function in the upper half of the complex plane via the Hilbert transform, followed by taking the real part of the polar form of the analytic extension. Unfortunately, this approach most often fails to resolve the inverse problem satisfactorily. More recently, to resolve the inverse problem, the notion of synchrosqueezed wavelet transform (SST) was proposed by Daubechies and Maes, and further developed in many other papers, while a more direct method, called signal separation operation (SSO), was proposed and developed in our previous work published in the journal, Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, vol. 30(2):243-261, 2016. In the present paper, we propose a synthesis of SSO using a deep neural network, based directly on a discrete sample set, that may be non-uniformly sampled, of the blind-source signal. Our method is localized, as illustrated by a number of numerical examples, including components with different signal arrival and departure times. It also yields short-term prediction of the signal components, along with their IFs. Our neural networks are inspired by theory, designed so that they do not require any training in the traditional sense.
Neural MMO v1.3: A Massively Multiagent Game Environment for Training and Evaluating Neural Networks
Authors: Joseph Suarez, Yilun Du, Igor Mordatch, Phillip Isola
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Policy Gradient Methods, Reinforcement Learning

Progress in multiagent intelligence research is fundamentally limited by the number and quality of environments available for study. In recent years, simulated games have become a dominant research platform within reinforcement learning, in part due to their accessibility and interpretability. Previous works have targeted and demonstrated success on arcade, first person shooter (FPS), real-time strategy (RTS), and massive online battle arena (MOBA) games. Our work considers massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs or MMOs), which capture several complexities of real-world learning that are not well modeled by any other game genre. We present Neural MMO, a massively multiagent game environment inspired by MMOs and discuss our progress on two more general challenges in multiagent systems engineering for AI research: distributed infrastructure and game IO. We further demonstrate that standard policy gradient methods and simple baseline models can learn interesting emergent exploration and specialization behaviors in this setting.
Consensus-Based Optimization on Hypersurfaces: Well-Posedness and Mean-Field Limit
Authors: Massimo Fornasier, Hui Huang, Lorenzo Pareschi, Philippe Sünnen
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization

We introduce a new stochastic differential model for global optimization of nonconvex functions on compact hypersurfaces. The model is inspired by the stochastic Kuramoto-Vicsek system and belongs to the class of Consensus-Based Optimization methods. In fact, particles move on the hypersurface driven by a drift towards an instantaneous consensus point, computed as a convex combination of the particle locations weighted by the cost function according to Laplace's principle. The consensus point represents an approximation to a global minimizer. The dynamics is further perturbed by a random vector field to favor exploration, whose variance is a function of the distance of the particles to the consensus point. In particular, as soon as the consensus is reached, then the stochastic component vanishes. In this paper, we study the well-posedness of the model and we derive rigorously its mean-field approximation for large particle limit.
Deontological Ethics By Monotonicity Shape Constraints
Authors: Serena Wang, Maya Gupta
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, Fairness

We demonstrate how easy it is for modern machine-learned systems to violate common deontological ethical principles and social norms such as "favor the less fortunate," and "do not penalize good attributes." We propose that in some cases such ethical principles can be incorporated into a machine-learned model by adding shape constraints that constrain the model to respond only positively to relevant inputs. We analyze the relationship between these deontological constraints that act on individuals and the consequentialist group-based fairness goals of one-sided statistical parity and equal opportunity. This strategy works with sensitive attributes that are Boolean or real-valued such as income and age, and can help produce more responsible and trustworthy AI.
Consensus-Based Optimization on the Sphere: Convergence to Global Minimizers and Machine Learning
Authors: Massimo Fornasier, Hui Huang, Lorenzo Pareschi, Philippe Sünnen
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, global-optimization, Retrieval

We investigate the implementation of a new stochastic Kuramoto-Vicsek-type model for global optimization of nonconvex functions on the sphere. This model belongs to the class of Consensus-Based Optimization. In fact, particles move on the sphere driven by a drift towards an instantaneous consensus point, which is computed as a convex combination of particle locations, weighted by the cost function according to Laplace's principle, and it represents an approximation to a global minimizer. The dynamics is further perturbed by a random vector field to favor exploration, whose variance is a function of the distance of the particles to the consensus point. In particular, as soon as the consensus is reached the stochastic component vanishes. The main results of this paper are about the proof of convergence of the numerical scheme to global minimizers provided conditions of well-preparation of the initial datum. The proof combines previous results of mean-field limit with a novel asymptotic analysis, and classical convergence results of numerical methods for SDE. We present several numerical experiments, which show that the algorithm proposed in the present paper scales well with the dimension and is extremely versatile. To quantify the performances of the new approach, we show that the algorithm is able to perform essentially as good as ad hoc state of the art methods in challenging problems in signal processing and machine learning, namely the phase retrieval problem and the robust subspace detection.
Pretrained Transformers for Simple Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs
Authors: D. Lukovnikov, A. Fischer, J. Lehmann
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering, Word Embeddings

Answering simple questions over knowledge graphs is a well-studied problem in question answering. Previous approaches for this task built on recurrent and convolutional neural network based architectures that use pretrained word embeddings. It was recently shown that finetuning pretrained transformer networks (e.g. BERT) can outperform previous approaches on various natural language processing tasks. In this work, we investigate how well BERT performs on SimpleQuestions and provide an evaluation of both BERT and BiLSTM-based models in datasparse scenarios.
Continuous Emotion Recognition via Deep Convolutional Autoencoder and Support Vector Regressor
Authors: Sevegni Odilon Clement Allognon, Alessandro L. Koerich, Alceu de S. Britto Jr
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER), Transfer Learning

Automatic facial expression recognition is an important research area in the emotion recognition and computer vision. Applications can be found in several domains such as medical treatment, driver fatigue surveillance, sociable robotics, and several other human-computer interaction systems. Therefore, it is crucial that the machine should be able to recognize the emotional state of the user with high accuracy. In recent years, deep neural networks have been used with great success in recognizing emotions. In this paper, we present a new model for continuous emotion recognition based on facial expression recognition by using an unsupervised learning approach based on transfer learning and autoencoders. The proposed approach also includes preprocessing and post-processing techniques which contribute favorably to improving the performance of predicting the concordance correlation coefficient for arousal and valence dimensions. Experimental results for predicting spontaneous and natural emotions on the RECOLA 2016 dataset have shown that the proposed approach based on visual information can achieve CCCs of 0.516 and 0.264 for valence and arousal, respectively.
Fast Monte Carlo Dropout and Error Correction for Radio Transmitter Classification
Authors: Liangping Ma, John Kaewell
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Monte Carlo dropout may effectively capture model uncertainty in deep learning, where a measure of uncertainty is obtained by using multiple instances of dropout at test time. However, Monte Carlo dropout is applied across the whole network and thus significantly increases the computational complexity, proportional to the number of instances. To reduce the computational complexity, at test time we enable dropout layers only near the output of the neural network and reuse the computation from prior layers while keeping, if any, other dropout layers disabled. Additionally, we leverage the side information about the ideal distributions for various input samples to do `error correction' on the predictions. We apply these techniques to the radio frequency (RF) transmitter classification problem and show that the proposed algorithm is able to provide better prediction uncertainty than the simple ensemble average algorithm and can be used to effectively identify transmitters that are not in the training data set while correctly classifying transmitters it has been trained on.
Non-reversibly updating a uniform [0,1] value for Metropolis accept/reject decisions
Authors: Radford M. Neal
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00

I show how it can be beneficial to express Metropolis accept/reject decisions in terms of comparison with a uniform [0,1] value, u, and to then update u non-reversibly, as part of the Markov chain state, rather than sampling it independently each iteration. This provides a small improvement for random walk Metropolis and Langevin updates in high dimensions. It produces a larger improvement when using Langevin updates with persistent momentum, giving performance comparable to that of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) with long trajectories. This is of significance when some variables are updated by other methods, since if HMC is used, these updates can be done only between trajectories, whereas they can be done more often with Langevin updates. I demonstrate that for a problem with some continuous variables, updated by HMC or Langevin updates, and also discrete variables, updated by Gibbs sampling between updates of the continuous variables, Langevin with persistent momentum and non-reversible updates to u samples nearly a factor of two more efficiently than HMC. Benefits are also seen for a Bayesian neural network model in which hyperparameters are updated by Gibbs sampling.
A Hybrid Quantum enabled RBM Advantage: Convolutional Autoencoders For Quantum Image Compression and Generative Learning
Authors: Jennifer Sleeman, John Dorband, Milton Halem
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Image Compression

Understanding how the D-Wave quantum computer could be used for machine learning problems is of growing interest. Our work evaluates the feasibility of using the D-Wave as a sampler for machine learning. We describe a hybrid system that combines a classical deep neural network autoencoder with a quantum annealing Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) using the D-Wave. We evaluate our hybrid autoencoder algorithm using two datasets, the MNIST dataset and MNIST Fashion dataset. We evaluate the quality of this method by using a downstream classification method where the training is based on quantum RBM-generated samples. Our method overcomes two key limitations in the current 2000-qubit D-Wave processor, namely the limited number of qubits available to accommodate typical problem sizes for fully connected quantum objective functions and samples that are binary pixel representations. As a consequence of these limitations we are able to show how we achieved nearly a 22-fold compression factor of grayscale 28 x 28 sized images to binary 6 x 6 sized images with a lossy recovery of the original 28 x 28 grayscale images. We further show how generating samples from the D-Wave after training the RBM, resulted in 28 x 28 images that were variations of the original input data distribution, as opposed to recreating the training samples. We formulated an MNIST classification problem using a deep convolutional neural network that used samples from a quantum RBM to train the MNIST classifier and compared the results with an MNIST classifier trained with the original MNIST training data set, as well as an MNIST classifier trained using classical RBM samples. Our hybrid autoencoder approach indicates advantage for RBM results relative to the use of a current RBM classical computer implementation for image-based machine learning and even more promising results for the next generation D-Wave quantum system.
Causal Structure Discovery from Distributions Arising from Mixtures of DAGs
Authors: Basil Saeed, Snigdha Panigrahi, Caroline Uhler
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Retrieval

We consider distributions arising from a mixture of causal models, where each model is represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG). We provide a graphical representation of such mixture distributions and prove that this representation encodes the conditional independence relations of the mixture distribution. We then consider the problem of structure learning based on samples from such distributions. Since the mixing variable is latent, we consider causal structure discovery algorithms such as FCI that can deal with latent variables. We show that such algorithms recover a "union" of the component DAGs and can identify variables whose conditional distribution across the component DAGs vary. We demonstrate our results on synthetic and real data showing that the inferred graph identifies nodes that vary between the different mixture components. As an immediate application, we demonstrate how retrieval of this causal information can be used to cluster samples according to each mixture component.
Centralized and distributed online learning for sparse time-varying optimization
Authors: Sophie M. Fosson
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing

The development of online algorithms to track time-varying systems has drawn a lot of attention in the last years, in particular in the framework of online convex optimization. Meanwhile, sparse time-varying optimization has emerged as a powerful tool to deal with widespread applications, ranging from dynamic compressed sensing to parsimonious system identification. In most of the literature on sparse time-varying problems, some prior information on the system's evolution is assumed to be available. In contrast, in this paper, we propose an online learning approach, which does not employ a given model and is suitable for adversarial frameworks. Specifically, we develop centralized and distributed algorithms, and we theoretically analyze them in terms of dynamic regret, in an online learning perspective. Further, we propose numerical experiments that illustrate their practical effectiveness.
An Autonomous Intrusion Detection System Using an Ensemble of Advanced Learners
Authors: Amir Andalib, Vahid Tabataba Vakili
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrusion Detection

An intrusion detection system (IDS) is a vital security component of modern computer networks. With the increasing amount of sensitive services that use computer network-based infrastructures, IDSs need to be more intelligent and autonomous. Aside from autonomy, another important feature for an IDS is its ability to detect zero-day attacks. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose an IDS which reduces the amount of manual interaction and needed expert knowledge and is able to yield acceptable performance under zero-day attacks. Our approach is to use three learning techniques in parallel: gated recurrent unit (GRU), convolutional neural network as deep techniques and random forest as an ensemble technique. These systems are trained in parallel and the results are combined under two logics: majority vote and "OR" logic. We use the NSL-KDD dataset to verify the proficiency of our proposed system. Simulation results show that the system has the potential to operate with a very low technician interaction under the zero-day attacks. We achieved 87:28% accuracy on the NSL-KDD's "KDDTest+" dataset and 76:61% accuracy on the challenging "KDDTest-21" with lower training time and lower needed computational resources.
A framework for large-scale mapping of human settlement extent from Sentinel-2 images via fully convolutional neural networks
Authors: C. Qiu, M. Schmitt, C. Geiss, T. K. Chen, X. X. Zhu
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Human settlement extent (HSE) information is a valuable indicator of world-wide urbanization as well as the resulting human pressure on the natural environment. Therefore, mapping HSE is critical for various environmental issues at local, regional, and even global scales. This paper presents a deep-learning-based framework to automatically map HSE from multi-spectral Sentinel-2 data using regionally available geo-products as training labels. A straightforward, simple, yet effective fully convolutional network-based architecture, Sen2HSE, is implemented as an example for semantic segmentation within the framework. The framework is validated against both manually labelled checking points distributed evenly over the test areas, and the OpenStreetMap building layer. The HSE mapping results were extensively compared to several baseline products in order to thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed HSE mapping framework. The HSE mapping power is consistently demonstrated over 10 representative areas across the world. We also present one regional-scale and one country-wide HSE mapping example from our framework to show the potential for upscaling. The results of this study contribute to the generalization of the applicability of CNN-based approaches for large-scale urban mapping to cases where no up-to-date and accurate ground truth is available, as well as the subsequent monitor of global urbanization.
Two-Sample Testing for Event Impacts in Time Series
Authors: Erik Scharwächter, Emmanuel Müller
Date: 2020-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Two-sample testing, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

In many application domains, time series are monitored to detect extreme events like technical faults, natural disasters, or disease outbreaks. Unfortunately, it is often non-trivial to select both a time series that is informative about events and a powerful detection algorithm: detection may fail because the detection algorithm is not suitable, or because there is no shared information between the time series and the events of interest. In this work, we thus propose a non-parametric statistical test for shared information between a time series and a series of observed events. Our test allows identifying time series that carry information on event occurrences without committing to a specific event detection methodology. In a nutshell, we test for divergences of the value distributions of the time series at increasing lags after event occurrences with a multiple two-sample testing approach. In contrast to related tests, our approach is applicable for time series over arbitrary domains, including multivariate numeric, strings or graphs. We perform a large-scale simulation study to show that it outperforms or is on par with related tests on our task for univariate time series. We also demonstrate the real-world applicability of our approach on datasets from social media and smart home environments.