pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MLCVNet: Multi-Level Context VoteNet for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Qian Xie, Yu-Kun Lai, Jing Wu, Zhoutao Wang, Yiming Zhang, Kai Xu, Jun Wang
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In this paper, we address the 3D object detection task by capturing multi-level contextual information with the self-attention mechanism and multi-scale feature fusion. Most existing 3D object detection methods recognize objects individually, without giving any consideration on contextual information between these objects. Comparatively, we propose Multi-Level Context VoteNet (MLCVNet) to recognize 3D objects correlatively, building on the state-of-the-art VoteNet. We introduce three context modules into the voting and classifying stages of VoteNet to encode contextual information at different levels. Specifically, a Patch-to-Patch Context (PPC) module is employed to capture contextual information between the point patches, before voting for their corresponding object centroid points. Subsequently, an Object-to-Object Context (OOC) module is incorporated before the proposal and classification stage, to capture the contextual information between object candidates. Finally, a Global Scene Context (GSC) module is designed to learn the global scene context. We demonstrate these by capturing contextual information at patch, object and scene levels. Our method is an effective way to promote detection accuracy, achieving new state-of-the-art detection performance on challenging 3D object detection datasets, i.e., SUN RGBD and ScanNet. We also release our code at https://github.com/NUAAXQ/MLCVNet.
A Non-Parametric Test to Detect Data-Copying in Generative Models
Authors: Casey Meehan, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Sanjoy Dasgupta
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Detecting overfitting in generative models is an important challenge in machine learning. In this work, we formalize a form of overfitting that we call {\em{data-copying}} -- where the generative model memorizes and outputs training samples or small variations thereof. We provide a three sample non-parametric test for detecting data-copying that uses the training set, a separate sample from the target distribution, and a generated sample from the model, and study the performance of our test on several canonical models and datasets. For code \& examples, visit https://github.com/casey-meehan/data-copying
Direction of Arrival Estimation for a Vector Sensor Using Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Jianyuan Yu, William W. Howard, Daniel Tait, R. Michael Buehrer
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Direction of Arrival Estimation

A vector sensor, a type of sensor array with six collocated antennas to measure all electromagnetic field components of incident waves, has been shown to be advantageous in estimating the angle of arrival and polarization of the incident sources. While angle estimation with machine learning for linear arrays has been well studied, there has not been a similar solution for the vector sensor. In this paper, we propose neural networks to determine the number of the sources and estimate the angle of arrival of each source, based on the covariance matrix extracted from received data. Also, we provide a solution for matching output angles to corresponding sources and examine the error distributions with this method. The results show that neural networks can achieve reasonably accurate estimation with up to 5 sources, especially if the field-of-view is limited.
Minimizing FLOPs to Learn Efficient Sparse Representations
Authors: Biswajit Paria, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Ian E. H. Yen, Ning Xu, Pradeep Ravikumar, Barnabás Póczos
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Quantization, Representation Learning, Retrieval

Deep representation learning has become one of the most widely adopted approaches for visual search, recommendation, and identification. Retrieval of such representations from a large database is however computationally challenging. Approximate methods based on learning compact representations, have been widely explored for this problem, such as locality sensitive hashing, product quantization, and PCA. In this work, in contrast to learning compact representations, we propose to learn high dimensional and sparse representations that have similar representational capacity as dense embeddings while being more efficient due to sparse matrix multiplication operations which can be much faster than dense multiplication. Following the key insight that the number of operations decreases quadratically with the sparsity of embeddings provided the non-zero entries are distributed uniformly across dimensions, we propose a novel approach to learn such distributed sparse embeddings via the use of a carefully constructed regularization function that directly minimizes a continuous relaxation of the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) incurred during retrieval. Our experiments show that our approach is competitive to the other baselines and yields a similar or better speed-vs-accuracy tradeoff on practical datasets.
Workflow Automation for Cyber Physical System Development Processes
Authors: Charles Hartsell, Nagabhushan Mahadevan, Harmon Nine, Ted Bapty, Abhishek Dubey, Gabor Karsai
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00

Development of Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs) requires close interaction between developers with expertise in many domains to achieve ever-increasing demands for improved performance, reduced cost, and more system autonomy. Each engineering discipline commonly relies on domain-specific modeling languages, and analysis and execution of these models is often automated with appropriate tooling. However, integration between these heterogeneous models and tools is often lacking, and most of the burden for inter-operation of these tools is placed on system developers. To address this problem, we introduce a workflow modeling language for the automation of complex CPS development processes and implement a platform for execution of these models in the Assurance-based Learning-enabled CPS (ALC) Toolchain. Several illustrative examples are provided which show how these workflow models are able to automate many time-consuming integration tasks previously performed manually by system developers.
Residual Attention U-Net for Automated Multi-Class Segmentation of COVID-19 Chest CT Images
Authors: Xiaocong Chen, Lina Yao, Yu Zhang
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Diagnostic, Segmentation

The novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been spreading rapidly around the world and caused significant impact on the public health and economy. However, there is still lack of studies on effectively quantifying the lung infection caused by COVID-19. As a basic but challenging task of the diagnostic framework, segmentation plays a crucial role in accurate quantification of COVID-19 infection measured by computed tomography (CT) images. To this end, we proposed a novel deep learning algorithm for automated segmentation of multiple COVID-19 infection regions. Specifically, we use the Aggregated Residual Transformations to learn a robust and expressive feature representation and apply the soft attention mechanism to improve the capability of the model to distinguish a variety of symptoms of the COVID-19. With a public CT image dataset, we validate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm in comparison with other competing methods. Experimental results demonstrate the outstanding performance of our algorithm for automated segmentation of COVID-19 Chest CT images. Our study provides a promising deep leaning-based segmentation tool to lay a foundation to quantitative diagnosis of COVID-19 lung infection in CT images.
Relational Learning between Multiple Pulmonary Nodules via Deep Set Attention Transformers
Authors: Jiancheng Yang, Haoran Deng, Xiaoyang Huang, Bingbing Ni, Yi Xu
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple Instance Learning, Relational Reasoning

Diagnosis and treatment of multiple pulmonary nodules are clinically important but challenging. Prior studies on nodule characterization use solitary-nodule approaches on multiple nodular patients, which ignores the relations between nodules. In this study, we propose a multiple instance learning (MIL) approach and empirically prove the benefit to learn the relations between multiple nodules. By treating the multiple nodules from a same patient as a whole, critical relational information between solitary-nodule voxels is extracted. To our knowledge, it is the first study to learn the relations between multiple pulmonary nodules. Inspired by recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) domain, we introduce a self-attention transformer equipped with 3D CNN, named {NoduleSAT}, to replace typical pooling-based aggregation in multiple instance learning. Extensive experiments on lung nodule false positive reduction on LUNA16 database, and malignancy classification on LIDC-IDRI database, validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
At the Interface of Algebra and Statistics
Authors: Tai-Danae Bradley
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00

This thesis takes inspiration from quantum physics to investigate mathematical structure that lies at the interface of algebra and statistics. The starting point is a passage from classical probability theory to quantum probability theory. The quantum version of a probability distribution is a density operator, the quantum version of marginalizing is an operation called the partial trace, and the quantum version of a marginal probability distribution is a reduced density operator. Every joint probability distribution on a finite set can be modeled as a rank one density operator. By applying the partial trace, we obtain reduced density operators whose diagonals recover classical marginal probabilities. In general, these reduced densities will have rank higher than one, and their eigenvalues and eigenvectors will contain extra information that encodes subsystem interactions governed by statistics. We decode this information, and show it is akin to conditional probability, and then investigate the extent to which the eigenvectors capture "concepts" inherent in the original joint distribution. The theory is then illustrated with an experiment that exploits these ideas. Turning to a more theoretical application, we also discuss a preliminary framework for modeling entailment and concept hierarchy in natural language, namely, by representing expressions in the language as densities. Finally, initial inspiration for this thesis comes from formal concept analysis, which finds many striking parallels with the linear algebra. The parallels are not coincidental, and a common blueprint is found in category theory. We close with an exposition on free (co)completions and how the free-forgetful adjunctions in which they arise strongly suggest that in certain categorical contexts, the "fixed points" of a morphism with its adjoint encode interesting information.
A Machine Learning Approach for Flagging Incomplete Bid-rigging Cartels
Authors: Hannes Wallimann, David Imhof, Martin Huber
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We propose a new method for flagging bid rigging, which is particularly useful for detecting incomplete bid-rigging cartels. Our approach combines screens, i.e. statistics derived from the distribution of bids in a tender, with machine learning to predict the probability of collusion. As a methodological innovation, we calculate such screens for all possible subgroups of three or four bids within a tender and use summary statistics like the mean, median, maximum, and minimum of each screen as predictors in the machine learning algorithm. This approach tackles the issue that competitive bids in incomplete cartels distort the statistical signals produced by bid rigging. We demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms previously suggested methods in applications to incomplete cartels based on empirical data from Switzerland.
Variational Autoencoders with Normalizing Flow Decoders
Authors: Rogan Morrow, Wei-Chen Chiu
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00

Recently proposed normalizing flow models such as Glow have been shown to be able to generate high quality, high dimensional images with relatively fast sampling speed. Due to their inherently restrictive architecture, however, it is necessary that they are excessively deep in order to train effectively. In this paper we propose to combine Glow with an underlying variational autoencoder in order to counteract this issue. We demonstrate that our proposed model is competitive with Glow in terms of image quality and test likelihood while requiring far less time for training.
Minimal Filtering Algorithms for Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Aleksandr Cariow, Galina Cariowa
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00

In this paper, we present several resource-efficient algorithmic solutions regarding the fully parallel hardware implementation of the basic filtering operation performed in the convolutional layers of convolution neural networks. In fact, these basic operations calculate two inner products of neighboring vectors formed by a sliding time window from the current data stream with an impulse response of the M-tap finite impulse response filter. We used Winograd minimal filtering trick and applied it to develop fully parallel hardware-oriented algorithms for implementing the basic filtering operation for M=3,5,7,9, and 11. A fully parallel hardware implementation of the proposed algorithms in each case gives approximately 30 percent savings in the number of embedded multipliers compared to a fully parallel hardware implementation of the naive calculation methods.
Kernel-Based Reinforcement Learning: A Finite-Time Analysis
Authors: Omar Darwiche Domingues, Pierre Ménard, Matteo Pirotta, Emilie Kaufmann, Michal Valko
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We consider the exploration-exploitation dilemma in finite-horizon reinforcement learning problems whose state-action space is endowed with a metric. We introduce Kernel-UCBVI, a model-based optimistic algorithm that leverages the smoothness of the MDP and a non-parametric kernel estimator of the rewards and transitions to efficiently balance exploration and exploitation. For problems with $K$ episodes and horizon $H$, we provide a regret bound of $\widetilde{O}\left( H^3 K^{\frac{2d}{2d+1}}\right)$, where $d$ is the covering dimension of the joint state-action space. This is the first regret bound for kernel-based RL using smoothing kernels, which requires very weak assumptions on the MDP and has been previously applied to a wide range of tasks. We empirically validate our approach in continuous MDPs with sparse rewards.
An Entropy Clustering Approach for Assessing Visual Question Difficulty
Authors: Kento Terao, Toru Tamaki, Bisser Raytchev, Kazufumi Kaneda, Shun'ichi Satoh
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

We propose a novel approach to identify the difficulty of visual questions for Visual Question Answering (VQA) without direct supervision or annotations to the difficulty. Prior works have considered the diversity of ground-truth answers of human annotators. In contrast, we analyze the difficulty of visual questions based on the behavior of multiple different VQA models. We propose to cluster the entropy values of the predicted answer distributions obtained by three different models: a baseline method that takes as input images and questions, and two variants that take as input images only and questions only. We use a simple k-means to cluster the visual questions of the VQA v2 validation set. Then we use state-of-the-art methods to determine the accuracy and the entropy of the answer distributions for each cluster. A benefit of the proposed method is that no annotation of the difficulty is required, because the accuracy of each cluster reflects the difficulty of visual questions that belong to it. Our approach can identify clusters of difficult visual questions that are not answered correctly by state-of-the-art methods. Detailed analysis on the VQA v2 dataset reveals that 1) all methods show poor performances on the most difficult cluster (about 10\% accuracy), 2) as the cluster difficulty increases, the answers predicted by the different methods begin to differ, and 3) the values of cluster entropy are highly correlated with the cluster accuracy. We show that our approach has the advantage of being able to assess the difficulty of visual questions without ground-truth (\ie, the test set of VQA v2) by assigning them to one of the clusters. We expect that this can stimulate the development of novel directions of research and new algorithms.
Sharing Matters for Generalization in Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Timo Milbich, Karsten Roth, Biagio Brattoli, Björn Ommer
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Triplet

Learning the similarity between images constitutes the foundation for numerous vision tasks. The common paradigm is discriminative metric learning, which seeks an embedding that separates different training classes. However, the main challenge is to learn a metric that not only generalizes from training to novel, but related, test samples. It should also transfer to different object classes. So what complementary information is missed by the discriminative paradigm? Besides finding characteristics that separate between classes, we also need them to likely occur in novel categories, which is indicated if they are shared across training classes. This work investigates how to learn such characteristics without the need for extra annotations or training data. By formulating our approach as a novel triplet sampling strategy, it can be easily applied on top of recent ranking loss frameworks. Experiments show that, independent of the underlying network architecture and the specific ranking loss, our approach significantly improves performance in deep metric learning, leading to new the state-of-the-art results on various standard benchmark datasets. Preliminary early access page can be found here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9141449
When Weak Becomes Strong: Robust Quantification of White Matter Hyperintensities in Brain MRI scans
Authors: Oliver Werner, Kimberlin M. H. van Wijnen, Wiro J. Niessen, Marius de Groot, Meike W. Vernooij, Florian Dubost, Marleen de Bruijne
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00

To measure the volume of specific image structures, a typical approach is to first segment those structures using a neural network trained on voxel-wise (strong) labels and subsequently compute the volume from the segmentation. A more straightforward approach would be to predict the volume directly using a neural network based regression approach, trained on image-level (weak) labels indicating volume. In this article, we compared networks optimized with weak and strong labels, and study their ability to generalize to other datasets. We experimented with white matter hyperintensity (WMH) volume prediction in brain MRI scans. Neural networks were trained on a large local dataset and their performance was evaluated on four independent public datasets. We showed that networks optimized using only weak labels reflecting WMH volume generalized better for WMH volume prediction than networks optimized with voxel-wise segmentations of WMH. The attention maps of networks trained with weak labels did not seem to delineate WMHs, but highlighted instead areas with smooth contours around or near WMHs. By correcting for possible confounders we showed that networks trained on weak labels may have learnt other meaningful features that are more suited to generalization to unseen data. Our results suggest that for imaging biomarkers that can be derived from segmentations, training networks to predict the biomarker directly may provide more robust results than solving an intermediate segmentation step.
Image Co-skeletonization via Co-segmentation
Authors: Koteswar Rao Jerripothula, Jianfei Cai, Jiangbo Lu, Junsong Yuan
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation

Recent advances in the joint processing of images have certainly shown its advantages over individual processing. Different from the existing works geared towards co-segmentation or co-localization, in this paper, we explore a new joint processing topic: image co-skeletonization, which is defined as joint skeleton extraction of objects in an image collection. Object skeletonization in a single natural image is a challenging problem because there is hardly any prior knowledge about the object. Therefore, we resort to the idea of object co-skeletonization, hoping that the commonness prior that exists across the images may help, just as it does for other joint processing problems such as co-segmentation. We observe that the skeleton can provide good scribbles for segmentation, and skeletonization, in turn, needs good segmentation. Therefore, we propose a coupled framework for co-skeletonization and co-segmentation tasks so that they are well informed by each other, and benefit each other synergistically. Since it is a new problem, we also construct a benchmark dataset by annotating nearly 1.8k images spread across 38 categories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves promising results in all the three possible scenarios of joint-processing: weakly-supervised, supervised, and unsupervised.
PrivEdge: From Local to Distributed Private Training and Prediction
Authors: Ali Shahin Shamsabadi, Adria Gascon, Hamed Haddadi, Andrea Cavallaro
Date: 2020-04-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Privacy Preserving

Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) operators provide model training and prediction on the cloud. MLaaS applications often rely on centralised collection and aggregation of user data, which could lead to significant privacy concerns when dealing with sensitive personal data. To address this problem, we propose PrivEdge, a technique for privacy-preserving MLaaS that safeguards the privacy of users who provide their data for training, as well as users who use the prediction service. With PrivEdge, each user independently uses their private data to locally train a one-class reconstructive adversarial network that succinctly represents their training data. As sending the model parameters to the service provider in the clear would reveal private information, PrivEdge secret-shares the parameters among two non-colluding MLaaS providers, to then provide cryptographically private prediction services through secure multi-party computation techniques. We quantify the benefits of PrivEdge and compare its performance with state-of-the-art centralised architectures on three privacy-sensitive image-based tasks: individual identification, writer identification, and handwritten letter recognition. Experimental results show that PrivEdge has high precision and recall in preserving privacy, as well as in distinguishing between private and non-private images. Moreover, we show the robustness of PrivEdge to image compression and biased training data. The source code is available at https://github.com/smartcameras/PrivEdge.