pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Colorectal Polyp Segmentation by U-Net with Dilation Convolution
Authors: Xinzi Sun, Pengfei Zhang, Dechun Wang, Yu Cao, Benyuan Liu
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers and a leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Colorectal polyps that grow on the intima of the colon or rectum is an important precursor for CRC. Currently, the most common way for colorectal polyp detection and precancerous pathology is the colonoscopy. Therefore, accurate colorectal polyp segmentation during the colonoscopy procedure has great clinical significance in CRC early detection and prevention. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end deep learning framework for the colorectal polyp segmentation. The model we design consists of an encoder to extract multi-scale semantic features and a decoder to expand the feature maps to a polyp segmentation map. We improve the feature representation ability of the encoder by introducing the dilated convolution to learn high-level semantic features without resolution reduction. We further design a simplified decoder which combines multi-scale semantic features with fewer parameters than the traditional architecture. Furthermore, we apply three post processing techniques on the output segmentation map to improve colorectal polyp detection performance. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on CVC-ClinicDB and ETIS-Larib Polyp DB.
On the Morality of Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Alexandra Luccioni, Yoshua Bengio
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00

Much of the existing research on the social and ethical impact of Artificial Intelligence has been focused on defining ethical principles and guidelines surrounding Machine Learning (ML) and other Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms [IEEE, 2017, Jobin et al., 2019]. While this is extremely useful for helping define the appropriate social norms of AI, we believe that it is equally important to discuss both the potential and risks of ML and to inspire the community to use ML for beneficial objectives. In the present article, which is specifically aimed at ML practitioners, we thus focus more on the latter, carrying out an overview of existing high-level ethical frameworks and guidelines, but above all proposing both conceptual and practical principles and guidelines for ML research and deployment, insisting on concrete actions that can be taken by practitioners to pursue a more ethical and moral practice of ML aimed at using AI for social good.
Towards Better Understanding of Adaptive Gradient Algorithms in Generative Adversarial Nets
Authors: Mingrui Liu, Youssef Mroueh, Jerret Ross, Wei zhang, Xiaodong Cui, Payel Das, Tianbao Yang
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1

Adaptive gradient algorithms perform gradient-based updates using the history of gradients and are ubiquitous in training deep neural networks. While adaptive gradient methods theory is well understood for minimization problems, the underlying factors driving their empirical success in min-max problems such as GANs remain unclear. In this paper, we aim at bridging this gap from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. First, we analyze a variant of Optimistic Stochastic Gradient (OSG) proposed in~\citep{daskalakis2017training} for solving a class of non-convex non-concave min-max problem and establish $O(\epsilon^{-4})$ complexity for finding $\epsilon$-first-order stationary point, in which the algorithm only requires invoking one stochastic first-order oracle while enjoying state-of-the-art iteration complexity achieved by stochastic extragradient method by~\citep{iusem2017extragradient}. Then we propose an adaptive variant of OSG named Optimistic Adagrad (OAdagrad) and reveal an \emph{improved} adaptive complexity $O\left(\epsilon^{-\frac{2}{1-\alpha}}\right)$, where $\alpha$ characterizes the growth rate of the cumulative stochastic gradient and $0\leq \alpha\leq 1/2$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work for establishing adaptive complexity in non-convex non-concave min-max optimization. Empirically, our experiments show that indeed adaptive gradient algorithms outperform their non-adaptive counterparts in GAN training. Moreover, this observation can be explained by the slow growth rate of the cumulative stochastic gradient, as observed empirically.
On the Principle of Least Symmetry Breaking in Shallow ReLU Models
Authors: Yossi Arjevani, Michael Field
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00

We consider the optimization problem associated with fitting two-layer ReLU networks with respect to the squared loss, where labels are assumed to be generated by a target network. Focusing first on standard Gaussian inputs, we show that the structure of spurious local minima detected by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is, in a well-defined sense, the \emph{least loss of symmetry} with respect to the target weights. A closer look at the analysis indicates that this principle of least symmetry breaking may apply to a broader range of settings. Motivated by this, we conduct a series of experiments which corroborate this hypothesis for different classes of non-isotropic non-product distributions, smooth activation functions and networks with a few layers.
Smell Pittsburgh: Engaging Community Citizen Science for Air Quality
Authors: Yen-Chia Hsu, Jennifer Cross, Paul Dille, Michael Tasota, Beatrice Dias, Randy Sargent, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang, Illah Nourbakhsh
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00

Urban air pollution has been linked to various human health concerns, including cardiopulmonary diseases. Communities who suffer from poor air quality often rely on experts to identify pollution sources due to the lack of accessible tools. Taking this into account, we developed Smell Pittsburgh, a system that enables community members to report odors and track where these odors are frequently concentrated. All smell report data are publicly accessible online. These reports are also sent to the local health department and visualized on a map along with air quality data from monitoring stations. This visualization provides a comprehensive overview of the local pollution landscape. Additionally, with these reports and air quality data, we developed a model to predict upcoming smell events and send push notifications to inform communities. We also applied regression analysis to identify statistically significant effects of push notifications on user engagement. Our evaluation of this system demonstrates that engaging residents in documenting their experiences with pollution odors can help identify local air pollution patterns, and can empower communities to advocate for better air quality. All citizen-contributed smell data are publicly accessible and can be downloaded from https://smellpgh.org.
Skeleton Extraction from 3D Point Clouds by Decomposing the Object into Parts
Authors: Vijai Jayadevan, Edward Delp, Zygmunt Pizlo
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00

Decomposing a point cloud into its components and extracting curve skeletons from point clouds are two related problems. Decomposition of a shape into its components is often obtained as a byproduct of skeleton extraction. In this work, we propose to extract curve skeletons, from unorganized point clouds, by decomposing the object into its parts, identifying part skeletons and then linking these part skeletons together to obtain the complete skeleton. We believe it is the most natural way to extract skeletons in the sense that this would be the way a human would approach the problem. Our parts are generalized cylinders (GCs). Since, the axis of a GC is an integral part of its definition, the parts have natural skeletal representations. We use translational symmetry, the fundamental property of GCs, to extract parts from point clouds. We demonstrate how this method can handle a large variety of shapes. We compare our method with state of the art methods and show how a part based approach can deal with some of the limitations of other methods. We present an improved version of an existing point set registration algorithm and demonstrate its utility in extracting parts from point clouds. We also show how this method can be used to extract skeletons from and identify parts of noisy point clouds. A part based approach also provides a natural and intuitive interface for user interaction. We demonstrate the ease with which mistakes, if any, can be fixed with minimal user interaction with the help of a graphical user interface.
Sparse Optimization on General Atomic Sets: Greedy and Forward-Backward Algorithms
Authors: Thomas Zhang
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00

We consider the problem of sparse atomic optimization, where the notion of "sparsity" is generalized to meaning some linear combination of few atoms. The definition of atomic set is very broad; popular examples include the standard basis, low-rank matrices, overcomplete dictionaries, permutation matrices, orthogonal matrices, etc. The model of sparse atomic optimization therefore includes problems coming from many fields, including statistics, signal processing, machine learning, computer vision and so on. Specifically, we consider the problem of maximizing a restricted strongly convex (or concave), smooth function restricted to a sparse linear combination of atoms. We extend recent work that establish linear convergence rates of greedy algorithms on restricted strongly concave, smooth functions on sparse vectors to the realm of general atomic sets, where the convergence rate involves a novel quantity: the "sparse atomic condition number". This leads to the strongest known multiplicative approximation guarantees for various flavors of greedy algorithms for sparse atomic optimization; in particular, we show that in many settings of interest the greedy algorithm can attain strong approximation guarantees while maintaining sparsity. Furthermore, we introduce a scheme for forward-backward algorithms that achieves the same approximation guarantees. Secondly, we define an alternate notion of weak submodularity, which we show is tightly related to the more familiar version that has been used to prove earlier linear convergence rates. We prove analogous multiplicative approximation guarantees using this alternate weak submodularity, and establish its distinct identity and applications.
Meta-analysis of heterogeneous data: integrative sparse regression in high-dimensions
Authors: Subha Maity, Yuekai Sun, Moulinath Banerjee
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We consider the task of meta-analysis in high-dimensional settings in which the data sources are similar but non-identical. To borrow strength across such heterogeneous datasets, we introduce a global parameter that emphasizes interpretability and statistical efficiency in the presence of heterogeneity. We also propose a one-shot estimator of the global parameter that preserves the anonymity of the data sources and converges at a rate that depends on the size of the combined dataset. For high-dimensional linear model settings, we demonstrate the superiority of our identification restrictions in adapting to a previously seen data distribution as well as predicting for a new/unseen data distribution. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of our approach on a large-scale drug treatment dataset involving several different cancer cell-lines.
Parameter Free Clustering with Cluster Catch Digraphs (Technical Report)
Authors: Artür Manukyan, Elvan Ceyhan
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

We propose clustering algorithms based on a recently developed geometric digraph family called cluster catch digraphs (CCDs). These digraphs are used to devise clustering methods that are hybrids of density-based and graph-based clustering methods. CCDs are appealing digraphs for clustering, since they estimate the number of clusters; however, CCDs (and density-based methods in general) require some information on a parameter representing the \emph{intensity} of assumed clusters in the data set. We propose algorithms that are parameter free versions of the CCD algorithm and does not require a specification of the intensity parameter whose choice is often critical in finding an optimal partitioning of the data set. We estimate the number of convex clusters by borrowing a tool from spatial data analysis, namely Ripley's $K$ function. We call our new digraphs utilizing the $K$ function as RK-CCDs. We show that the minimum dominating sets of RK-CCDs estimate and distinguish the clusters from noise clusters in a data set, and hence allow the estimation of the correct number of clusters. Our robust clustering algorithms are comprised of methods that estimate both the number of clusters and the intensity parameter, making them completely parameter free. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations and use real life data sets to compare RK-CCDs with some commonly used density-based and prototype-based clustering methods.
Inverses of Matern Covariances on Grids
Authors: Joseph Guinness
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

We conduct a study of the aliased spectral densities of Mat\'ern covariance functions on a regular grid of points, providing clarity on the properties of a popular approximation based on stochastic partial differential equations; while others have shown that it can approximate the covariance function well, we find that it assigns too much power at high frequencies and does not provide increasingly accurate approximations to the inverse as the grid spacing goes to zero, except in the one-dimensional exponential covariance case. We provide numerical results to support our theory, and in a simulation study, we investigate the implications for parameter estimation, finding that the SPDE approximation tends to overestimate spatial range parameters.
Category-Level Articulated Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Xiaolong Li, He Wang, Li Yi, Leonidas Guibas, A. Lynn Abbott, Shuran Song
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Object, parameter estimation, Pose Estimation

This project addresses the task of category-level pose estimation for articulated objects from a single depth image. We present a novel category-level approach that correctly accommodates object instances previously unseen during training. We introduce Articulation-aware Normalized Coordinate Space Hierarchy (ANCSH) - a canonical representation for different articulated objects in a given category. As the key to achieve intra-category generalization, the representation constructs a canonical object space as well as a set of canonical part spaces. The canonical object space normalizes the object orientation,scales and articulations (e.g. joint parameters and states) while each canonical part space further normalizes its part pose and scale. We develop a deep network based on PointNet++ that predicts ANCSH from a single depth point cloud, including part segmentation, normalized coordinates, and joint parameters in the canonical object space. By leveraging the canonicalized joints, we demonstrate: 1) improved performance in part pose and scale estimations using the induced kinematic constraints from joints; 2) high accuracy for joint parameter estimation in camera space.
Quasi-Newton Trust Region Policy Optimization
Authors: Devesh Jha, Arvind Raghunathan, Diego Romeres
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a trust region method for policy optimization that employs Quasi-Newton approximation for the Hessian, called Quasi-Newton Trust Region Policy Optimization QNTRPO. Gradient descent is the de facto algorithm for reinforcement learning tasks with continuous controls. The algorithm has achieved state-of-the-art performance when used in reinforcement learning across a wide range of tasks. However, the algorithm suffers from a number of drawbacks including: lack of stepsize selection criterion, and slow convergence. We investigate the use of a trust region method using dogleg step and a Quasi-Newton approximation for the Hessian for policy optimization. We demonstrate through numerical experiments over a wide range of challenging continuous control tasks that our particular choice is efficient in terms of number of samples and improves performance
A simple baseline for domain adaptation using rotation prediction
Authors: Ajinkya Tejankar, Hamed Pirsiavash
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation

Recently, domain adaptation has become a hot research area with lots of applications. The goal is to adapt a model trained in one domain to another domain with scarce annotated data. We propose a simple yet effective method based on self-supervised learning that outperforms or is on par with most state-of-the-art algorithms, e.g. adversarial domain adaptation. Our method involves two phases: predicting random rotations (self-supervised) on the target domain along with correct labels for the source domain (supervised), and then using self-distillation on the target domain. Our simple method achieves state-of-the-art results on semi-supervised domain adaptation on DomainNet dataset. Further, we observe that the unlabeled target datasets of popular domain adaptation benchmarks do not contain any categories apart from testing categories. We believe this introduces a bias that does not exist in many real applications. We show that removing this bias from the unlabeled data results in a large drop in performance of state-of-the-art methods, while our simple method is relatively robust.
Convergence and sample complexity of gradient methods for the model-free linear quadratic regulator problem
Authors: Hesameddin Mohammadi, Armin Zare, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Mihailo R. Jovanović
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning

Model-free reinforcement learning attempts to find an optimal control action for an unknown dynamical system by directly searching over the parameter space of controllers. The convergence behavior and statistical properties of these approaches are often poorly understood because of the nonconvex nature of the underlying optimization problems and the lack of exact gradient computation. In this paper, we take a step towards demystifying the performance and efficiency of such methods by focusing on the standard infinite-horizon linear quadratic regulator problem for continuous-time systems with unknown state-space parameters. We establish exponential stability for the ordinary differential equation (ODE) that governs the gradient-flow dynamics over the set of stabilizing feedback gains and show that a similar result holds for the gradient descent method that arises from the forward Euler discretization of the corresponding ODE. We also provide theoretical bounds on the convergence rate and sample complexity of the random search method with two-point gradient estimates. We prove that the required simulation time for achieving $\epsilon$-accuracy in the model-free setup and the total number of function evaluations both scale as $\log \, (1/\epsilon)$.
Efficient Training of Deep Classifiers for Wireless Source Identification using Test SNR Estimates
Authors: Xingchen Wang, Shengtai Ju, Xiwen Zhang, Sharan Ramjee, Aly El Gamal
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

We study efficient deep learning training algorithms that process received wireless signals, if a test Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) estimate is available. We focus on two tasks that facilitate source identification: 1- Identifying the modulation type, 2- Identifying the wireless technology and channel in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. For benchmarking, we rely on recent literature on testing deep learning algorithms against two well-known datasets. We first demonstrate that using training data corresponding only to the test SNR value leads to dramatic reductions in training time while incurring a small loss in average test accuracy, as it improves the accuracy for low SNR values. Further, we show that an erroneous test SNR estimate with a small positive offset is better for training than another having the same error magnitude with a negative offset. Secondly, we introduce a greedy training SNR Boosting algorithm that leads to uniform improvement in accuracy across all tested SNR values, while using a small subset of training SNR values at each test SNR. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of bootstrap aggregating (Bagging) based on training SNR values to improve generalization at low test SNR values with scarcity of training data.
3DFR: A Swift 3D Feature Reductionist Framework for Scene Independent Change Detection
Authors: Murari Mandal, Vansh Dhar, Abhishek Mishra, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Decoder

In this paper we propose an end-to-end swift 3D feature reductionist framework (3DFR) for scene independent change detection. The 3DFR framework consists of three feature streams: a swift 3D feature reductionist stream (AvFeat), a contemporary feature stream (ConFeat) and a temporal median feature map. These multilateral foreground/background features are further refined through an encoder-decoder network. As a result, the proposed framework not only detects temporal changes but also learns high-level appearance features. Thus, it incorporates the object semantics for effective change detection. Furthermore, the proposed framework is validated through a scene independent evaluation scheme in order to demonstrate the robustness and generalization capability of the network. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on the benchmark CDnet 2014 dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed 3DFR network outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.
W-PoseNet: Dense Correspondence Regularized Pixel Pair Pose Regression
Authors: Zelin Xu, Ke Chen, Kui Jia
Date: 2019-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, 6D Pose Estimation using RGBD, Pose Estimation, regression

Solving 6D pose estimation is non-trivial to cope with intrinsic appearance and shape variation and severe inter-object occlusion, and is made more challenging in light of extrinsic large illumination changes and low quality of the acquired data under an uncontrolled environment. This paper introduces a novel pose estimation algorithm W-PoseNet, which densely regresses from input data to 6D pose and also 3D coordinates in model space. In other words, local features learned for pose regression in our deep network are regularized by explicitly learning pixel-wise correspondence mapping onto 3D pose-sensitive coordinates as an auxiliary task. Moreover, a sparse pair combination of pixel-wise features and soft voting on pixel-pair pose predictions are designed to improve robustness to inconsistent and sparse local features. Experiment results on the popular YCB-Video and LineMOD benchmarks show that the proposed W-PoseNet consistently achieves superior performance to the state-of-the-art algorithms.