pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Parameterized Quantum Circuits: on the relation between classification accuracy, expressibility and entangling capability
Authors: Thomas Hubregtsen, Josef Pichlmeier, Patrick Stecher, Koen Bertels
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, General Classification, Quantum Machine Learning, Relation

An active area of investigation in the search for quantum advantage is Quantum Machine Learning. Quantum Machine Learning, and Parameterized Quantum Circuits in a hybrid quantum-classical setup in particular, could bring advancements in accuracy by utilizing the high dimensionality of the Hilbert space as feature space. But is the ability of a quantum circuit to uniformly address the Hilbert space a good indicator of classification accuracy? In our work, we use methods and quantifications from prior art to perform a numerical study in order to evaluate the level of correlation. We find a strong correlation between the ability of the circuit to uniformly address the Hilbert space and the achieved classification accuracy for circuits that entail a single embedding layer followed by 1 or 2 circuit designs. This is based on our study encompassing 19 circuits in both 1 and 2 layer configuration, evaluated on 9 datasets of increasing difficulty. Future work will evaluate if this holds for different circuit designs.
Pairwise Multi-Class Document Classification for Semantic Relations between Wikipedia Articles
Authors: Malte Ostendorff, Terry Ruas, Moritz Schubotz, Georg Rehm, Bela Gipp
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Document Classification, General Classification, Recommendation Systems

Many digital libraries recommend literature to their users considering the similarity between a query document and their repository. However, they often fail to distinguish what is the relationship that makes two documents alike. In this paper, we model the problem of finding the relationship between two documents as a pairwise document classification task. To find the semantic relation between documents, we apply a series of techniques, such as GloVe, Paragraph-Vectors, BERT, and XLNet under different configurations (e.g., sequence length, vector concatenation scheme), including a Siamese architecture for the Transformer-based systems. We perform our experiments on a newly proposed dataset of 32,168 Wikipedia article pairs and Wikidata properties that define the semantic document relations. Our results show vanilla BERT as the best performing system with an F1-score of 0.93, which we manually examine to better understand its applicability to other domains. Our findings suggest that classifying semantic relations between documents is a solvable task and motivates the development of recommender systems based on the evaluated techniques. The discussions in this paper serve as first steps in the exploration of documents through SPARQL-like queries such that one could find documents that are similar in one aspect but dissimilar in another.
HierTrain: Fast Hierarchical Edge AI Learning with Hybrid Parallelism in Mobile-Edge-Cloud Computing
Authors: Deyin Liu, Xu Chen, Zhi Zhou, Qing Ling
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Scheduling

Nowadays, deep neural networks (DNNs) are the core enablers for many emerging edge AI applications. Conventional approaches to training DNNs are generally implemented at central servers or cloud centers for centralized learning, which is typically time-consuming and resource-demanding due to the transmission of a large amount of data samples from the device to the remote cloud. To overcome these disadvantages, we consider accelerating the learning process of DNNs on the Mobile-Edge-Cloud Computing (MECC) paradigm. In this paper, we propose HierTrain, a hierarchical edge AI learning framework, which efficiently deploys the DNN training task over the hierarchical MECC architecture. We develop a novel \textit{hybrid parallelism} method, which is the key to HierTrain, to adaptively assign the DNN model layers and the data samples across the three levels of edge device, edge server and cloud center. We then formulate the problem of scheduling the DNN training tasks at both layer-granularity and sample-granularity. Solving this optimization problem enables us to achieve the minimum training time. We further implement a hardware prototype consisting of an edge device, an edge server and a cloud server, and conduct extensive experiments on it. Experimental results demonstrate that HierTrain can achieve up to 6.9x speedup compared to the cloud-based hierarchical training approach.
COVID-Net: A Tailored Deep Convolutional Neural Network Design for Detection of COVID-19 Cases from Chest X-Ray Images
Authors: Linda Wang, Alexander Wong
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: COVID-19 Diagnosis

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a devastating effect on the health and well-being of the global population. A critical step in the fight against COVID-19 is effective screening of infected patients, with one of the key screening approaches being radiology examination using chest radiography. Motivated by this and inspired by the open source efforts of the research community, in this study we introduce COVID-Net, a deep convolutional neural network design tailored for the detection of COVID-19 cases from chest X-ray (CXR) images that is open source and available to the general public. To the best of the authors' knowledge, COVID-Net is one of the first open source network designs for COVID-19 detection from CXR images at the time of initial release. We also introduce COVIDx, an open access benchmark dataset that we generated comprising of 13,975 CXR images across 13,870 patient patient cases, with the largest number of publicly available COVID-19 positive cases to the best of the authors' knowledge. Furthermore, we investigate how COVID-Net makes predictions using an explainability method in an attempt to not only gain deeper insights into critical factors associated with COVID cases, which can aid clinicians in improved screening, but also audit COVID-Net in a responsible and transparent manner to validate that it is making decisions based on relevant information from the CXR images. By no means a production-ready solution, the hope is that the open access COVID-Net, along with the description on constructing the open source COVIDx dataset, will be leveraged and build upon by both researchers and citizen data scientists alike to accelerate the development of highly accurate yet practical deep learning solutions for detecting COVID-19 cases and accelerate treatment of those who need it the most.
Progressive Domain-Independent Feature Decomposition Network for Zero-Shot Sketch-Based Image Retrieval
Authors: Xinxun Xu, Muli Yang, Yanhua Yang, Hao Wang
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

Zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR) is a specific cross-modal retrieval task for searching natural images given free-hand sketches under the zero-shot scenario. Most existing methods solve this problem by simultaneously projecting visual features and semantic supervision into a low-dimensional common space for efficient retrieval. However, such low-dimensional projection destroys the completeness of semantic knowledge in original semantic space, so that it is unable to transfer useful knowledge well when learning semantic from different modalities. Moreover, the domain information and semantic information are entangled in visual features, which is not conducive for cross-modal matching since it will hinder the reduction of domain gap between sketch and image. In this paper, we propose a Progressive Domain-independent Feature Decomposition (PDFD) network for ZS-SBIR. Specifically, with the supervision of original semantic knowledge, PDFD decomposes visual features into domain features and semantic ones, and then the semantic features are projected into common space as retrieval features for ZS-SBIR. The progressive projection strategy maintains strong semantic supervision. Besides, to guarantee the retrieval features to capture clean and complete semantic information, the cross-reconstruction loss is introduced to encourage that any combinations of retrieval features and domain features can reconstruct the visual features. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our PDFD over state-of-the-art competitors.
Composite Monte Carlo Decision Making under High Uncertainty of Novel Coronavirus Epidemic Using Hybridized Deep Learning and Fuzzy Rule Induction
Authors: Simon James Fong, Gloria Li, Nilanjan Dey, Ruben Gonzalez Crespo, Enrique Herrera-Viedma
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In the advent of the novel coronavirus epidemic since December 2019, governments and authorities have been struggling to make critical decisions under high uncertainty at their best efforts. Composite Monte-Carlo (CMC) simulation is a forecasting method which extrapolates available data which are broken down from multiple correlated/casual micro-data sources into many possible future outcomes by drawing random samples from some probability distributions. For instance, the overall trend and propagation of the infested cases in China are influenced by the temporal-spatial data of the nearby cities around the Wuhan city (where the virus is originated from), in terms of the population density, travel mobility, medical resources such as hospital beds and the timeliness of quarantine control in each city etc. Hence a CMC is reliable only up to the closeness of the underlying statistical distribution of a CMC, that is supposed to represent the behaviour of the future events, and the correctness of the composite data relationships. In this paper, a case study of using CMC that is enhanced by deep learning network and fuzzy rule induction for gaining better stochastic insights about the epidemic development is experimented. Instead of applying simplistic and uniform assumptions for a MC which is a common practice, a deep learning-based CMC is used in conjunction of fuzzy rule induction techniques. As a result, decision makers are benefited from a better fitted MC outputs complemented by min-max rules that foretell about the extreme ranges of future possibilities with respect to the epidemic.
Large-Scale Screening of COVID-19 from Community Acquired Pneumonia using Infection Size-Aware Classification
Authors: Feng Shi, Liming Xia, Fei Shan, Dijia Wu, Ying WEI, Huan Yuan, Huiting Jiang, Yaozong Gao, He Sui, Dinggang Shen
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, General Classification, Specificity

The worldwide spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a threatening risk for global public health. It is of great importance to rapidly and accurately screen patients with COVID-19 from community acquired pneumonia (CAP). In this study, a total of 1658 patients with COVID-19 and 1027 patients of CAP underwent thin-section CT. All images were preprocessed to obtain the segmentations of both infections and lung fields, which were used to extract location-specific features. An infection Size Aware Random Forest method (iSARF) was proposed, in which subjects were automated categorized into groups with different ranges of infected lesion sizes, followed by random forests in each group for classification. Experimental results show that the proposed method yielded sensitivity of 0.907, specificity of 0.833, and accuracy of 0.879 under five-fold cross-validation. Large performance margins against comparison methods were achieved especially for the cases with infection size in the medium range, from 0.01% to 10%. The further inclusion of Radiomics features show slightly improvement. It is anticipated that our proposed framework could assist clinical decision making.
TanhExp: A Smooth Activation Function with High Convergence Speed for Lightweight Neural Networks
Authors: Xinyu Liu, Xiaoguang Di
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Lightweight or mobile neural networks used for real-time computer vision tasks contain fewer parameters than normal networks, which lead to a constrained performance. In this work, we proposed a novel activation function named Tanh Exponential Activation Function (TanhExp) which can improve the performance for these networks on image classification task significantly. The definition of TanhExp is f(x) = xtanh(e^x). We demonstrate the simplicity, efficiency, and robustness of TanhExp on various datasets and network models and TanhExp outperforms its counterparts in both convergence speed and accuracy. Its behaviour also remains stable even with noise added and dataset altered. We show that without increasing the size of the network, the capacity of lightweight neural networks can be enhanced by TanhExp with only a few training epochs and no extra parameters added.
Visual Question Answering for Cultural Heritage
Authors: Pietro Bongini, Federico Becattini, Andrew D. Bagdanov, Alberto del Bimbo
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Technology and the fruition of cultural heritage are becoming increasingly more entwined, especially with the advent of smart audio guides, virtual and augmented reality, and interactive installations. Machine learning and computer vision are important components of this ongoing integration, enabling new interaction modalities between user and museum. Nonetheless, the most frequent way of interacting with paintings and statues still remains taking pictures. Yet images alone can only convey the aesthetics of the artwork, lacking is information which is often required to fully understand and appreciate it. Usually this additional knowledge comes both from the artwork itself (and therefore the image depicting it) and from an external source of knowledge, such as an information sheet. While the former can be inferred by computer vision algorithms, the latter needs more structured data to pair visual content with relevant information. Regardless of its source, this information still must be be effectively transmitted to the user. A popular emerging trend in computer vision is Visual Question Answering (VQA), in which users can interact with a neural network by posing questions in natural language and receiving answers about the visual content. We believe that this will be the evolution of smart audio guides for museum visits and simple image browsing on personal smartphones. This will turn the classic audio guide into a smart personal instructor with which the visitor can interact by asking for explanations focused on specific interests. The advantages are twofold: on the one hand the cognitive burden of the visitor will decrease, limiting the flow of information to what the user actually wants to hear; and on the other hand it proposes the most natural way of interacting with a guide, favoring engagement.
Multiview Neural Surface Reconstruction by Disentangling Geometry and Appearance
Authors: Lior Yariv, Yoni Kasten, Dror Moran, Meirav Galun, Matan Atzmon, Ronen Basri, Yaron Lipman
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, 3D Shape Representation, Surface Reconstruction

In this work we address the challenging problem of multiview 3D surface reconstruction. We introduce a neural network architecture that simultaneously learns the unknown geometry, camera parameters, and a neural renderer that approximates the light reflected from the surface towards the camera. The geometry is represented as a zero level-set of a neural network, while the neural renderer, derived from the rendering equation, is capable of (implicitly) modeling a wide set of lighting conditions and materials. We trained our network on real world 2D images of objects with different material properties, lighting conditions, and noisy camera initializations from the DTU MVS dataset. We found our model to produce state of the art 3D surface reconstructions with high fidelity, resolution and detail.
An Efficient Software-Hardware Design Framework for Spiking Neural Network Systems
Authors: Khanh N. Dang, Abderazek Ben Abdallah
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00

Spiking Neural Network (SNN) is the third generation of Neural Network (NN) mimicking the natural behavior of the brain. By processing based on binary input/output, SNNs offer lower complexity, higher density and lower power consumption. This work presents an efficient software-hardware design framework for developing SNN systems in hardware. In addition, a design of low-cost neurosynaptic core is presented based on packet-switching communication approach. The evaluation results show that the ANN to SNN conversion method with the size 784:1200:1200:10 performs 99% accuracy for MNIST while the unsupervised STDP archives 89% with the size 784:400 with recurrent connections. The design of 256-neurons and 65k synapses is also implemented in ASIC 45nm technology with an area cost of 0.205 $m m^2$.
Tune smarter not harder: A principled approach to tuning learning rates for shallow nets
Authors: Thulasi Tholeti, Sheetal Kalyani
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00

Effective hyper-parameter tuning is essential to guarantee the performance that neural networks have come to be known for. In this work, a principled approach to choosing the learning rate is proposed for shallow feedforward neural networks. We associate the learning rate with the gradient Lipschitz constant of the objective to be minimized while training. An upper bound on the mentioned constant is derived and a search algorithm, which always results in non-divergent traces, is proposed to exploit the derived bound. It is shown through simulations that the proposed search method significantly outperforms the existing tuning methods such as Tree Parzen Estimators (TPE). The proposed method is applied to three different existing applications: a) channel estimation in OFDM systems, b) prediction of the exchange currency rates and c) offset estimation in OFDM receivers, and it is shown to pick better learning rates than the existing methods using the same or lesser compute power.
SAC: Accelerating and Structuring Self-Attention via Sparse Adaptive Connection
Authors: Xiaoya Li, Yuxian Meng, Mingxin Zhou, Qinghong Han, Fei Wu, Jiwei Li
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Representation Learning, Translation

While the self-attention mechanism has been widely used in a wide variety of tasks, it has the unfortunate property of a quadratic cost with respect to the input length, which makes it difficult to deal with long inputs. In this paper, we present a method for accelerating and structuring self-attentions: Sparse Adaptive Connection (SAC). In SAC, we regard the input sequence as a graph and attention operations are performed between linked nodes. In contrast with previous self-attention models with pre-defined structures (edges), the model learns to construct attention edges to improve task-specific performances. In this way, the model is able to select the most salient nodes and reduce the quadratic complexity regardless of the sequence length. Based on SAC, we show that previous variants of self-attention models are its special cases. Through extensive experiments on neural machine translation, language modeling, graph representation learning and image classification, we demonstrate SAC is competitive with state-of-the-art models while significantly reducing memory cost.
Prior Knowledge Driven Label Embedding for Slot Filling in Natural Language Understanding
Authors: Su Zhu, Zijian Zhao, Rao Ma, Kai Yu
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Natural Language Understanding, slot-filling, Slot Filling

Traditional slot filling in natural language understanding (NLU) predicts a one-hot vector for each word. This form of label representation lacks semantic correlation modelling, which leads to severe data sparsity problem, especially when adapting an NLU model to a new domain. To address this issue, a novel label embedding based slot filling framework is proposed in this paper. Here, distributed label embedding is constructed for each slot using prior knowledge. Three encoding methods are investigated to incorporate different kinds of prior knowledge about slots: atomic concepts, slot descriptions, and slot exemplars. The proposed label embeddings tend to share text patterns and reuses data with different slot labels. This makes it useful for adaptive NLU with limited data. Also, since label embedding is independent of NLU model, it is compatible with almost all deep learning based slot filling models. The proposed approaches are evaluated on three datasets. Experiments on single domain and domain adaptation tasks show that label embedding achieves significant performance improvement over traditional one-hot label representation as well as advanced zero-shot approaches.
BS-NAS: Broadening-and-Shrinking One-Shot NAS with Searchable Numbers of Channels
Authors: Zan Shen, Jiang Qian, Bojin Zhuang, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

One-Shot methods have evolved into one of the most popular methods in Neural Architecture Search (NAS) due to weight sharing and single training of a supernet. However, existing methods generally suffer from two issues: predetermined number of channels in each layer which is suboptimal; and model averaging effects and poor ranking correlation caused by weight coupling and continuously expanding search space. To explicitly address these issues, in this paper, a Broadening-and-Shrinking One-Shot NAS (BS-NAS) framework is proposed, in which `broadening' refers to broadening the search space with a spring block enabling search for numbers of channels during training of the supernet; while `shrinking' refers to a novel shrinking strategy gradually turning off those underperforming operations. The above innovations broaden the search space for wider representation and then shrink it by gradually removing underperforming operations, followed by an evolutionary algorithm to efficiently search for the optimal architecture. Extensive experiments on ImageNet illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed BS-NAS as well as the state-of-the-art performance.
Review of data analysis in vision inspection of power lines with an in-depth discussion of deep learning technology
Authors: Xinyu Liu, Xiren Miao, Hao Jiang, Jing Chen
Date: 2020-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Diagnosis, object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection

The widespread popularity of unmanned aerial vehicles enables an immense amount of power lines inspection data to be collected. How to employ massive inspection data especially the visible images to maintain the reliability, safety, and sustainability of power transmission is a pressing issue. To date, substantial works have been conducted on the analysis of power lines inspection data. With the aim of providing a comprehensive overview for researchers who are interested in developing a deep-learning-based analysis system for power lines inspection data, this paper conducts a thorough review of the current literature and identifies the challenges for future research. Following the typical procedure of inspection data analysis, we categorize current works in this area into component detection and fault diagnosis. For each aspect, the techniques and methodologies adopted in the literature are summarized. Some valuable information is also included such as data description and method performance. Further, an in-depth discussion of existing deep-learning-related analysis methods in power lines inspection is proposed. Finally, we conclude the paper with several research trends for the future of this area, such as data quality problems, small object detection, embedded application, and evaluation baseline.