pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Action Modifiers: Learning from Adverbs in Instructional Videos
Authors: Hazel Doughty, Ivan Laptev, Walterio Mayol-Cuevas, Dima Damen
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Video-Adverb Retrieval

We present a method to learn a representation for adverbs from instructional videos using weak supervision from the accompanying narrations. Key to our method is the fact that the visual representation of the adverb is highly dependant on the action to which it applies, although the same adverb will modify multiple actions in a similar way. For instance, while 'spread quickly' and 'mix quickly' will look dissimilar, we can learn a common representation that allows us to recognize both, among other actions. We formulate this as an embedding problem, and use scaled dot-product attention to learn from weakly-supervised video narrations. We jointly learn adverbs as invertible transformations operating on the embedding space, so as to add or remove the effect of the adverb. As there is no prior work on weakly supervised learning from adverbs, we gather paired action-adverb annotations from a subset of the HowTo100M dataset for 6 adverbs: quickly/slowly, finely/coarsely, and partially/completely. Our method outperforms all baselines for video-to-adverb retrieval with a performance of 0.719 mAP. We also demonstrate our model's ability to attend to the relevant video parts in order to determine the adverb for a given action.
Seeing Around Street Corners: Non-Line-of-Sight Detection and Tracking In-the-Wild Using Doppler Radar
Authors: Nicolas Scheiner, Florian Kraus, Fangyin Wei, Buu Phan, Fahim Mannan, Nils Appenrodt, Werner Ritter, Jürgen Dickmann, Klaus Dietmayer, Bernhard Sick, Felix Heide
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Temporal Sequences

Conventional sensor systems record information about directly visible objects, whereas occluded scene components are considered lost in the measurement process. Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) methods try to recover such hidden objects from their indirect reflections - faint signal components, traditionally treated as measurement noise. Existing NLOS approaches struggle to record these low-signal components outside the lab, and do not scale to large-scale outdoor scenes and high-speed motion, typical in automotive scenarios. In particular, optical NLOS capture is fundamentally limited by the quartic intensity falloff of diffuse indirect reflections. In this work, we depart from visible-wavelength approaches and demonstrate detection, classification, and tracking of hidden objects in large-scale dynamic environments using Doppler radars that can be manufactured at low-cost in series production. To untangle noisy indirect and direct reflections, we learn from temporal sequences of Doppler velocity and position measurements, which we fuse in a joint NLOS detection and tracking network over time. We validate the approach on in-the-wild automotive scenes, including sequences of parked cars or house facades as relay surfaces, and demonstrate low-cost, real-time NLOS in dynamic automotive environments.
From Shallow to Deep Interactions Between Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Machine Learning (Kay R. Amel group)
Authors: Zied Bouraoui, Antoine Cornuéjols, Thierry Denœux, Sébastien Destercke, Didier Dubois, Romain Guillaume, João Marques-Silva, Jérôme Mengin, Henri Prade, Steven Schockaert, Mathieu Serrurier, Christel Vrain
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Inductive logic programming, Knowledge Graph Completion

This paper proposes a tentative and original survey of meeting points between Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KRR) and Machine Learning (ML), two areas which have been developing quite separately in the last three decades. Some common concerns are identified and discussed such as the types of used representation, the roles of knowledge and data, the lack or the excess of information, or the need for explanations and causal understanding. Then some methodologies combining reasoning and learning are reviewed (such as inductive logic programming, neuro-symbolic reasoning, formal concept analysis, rule-based representations and ML, uncertainty in ML, or case-based reasoning and analogical reasoning), before discussing examples of synergies between KRR and ML (including topics such as belief functions on regression, EM algorithm versus revision, the semantic description of vector representations, the combination of deep learning with high level inference, knowledge graph completion, declarative frameworks for data mining, or preferences and recommendation). This paper is the first step of a work in progress aiming at a better mutual understanding of research in KRR and ML, and how they could cooperate.
Music-oriented Dance Video Synthesis with Pose Perceptual Loss
Authors: Xuanchi Ren, Haoran Li, Zijian Huang, Qifeng Chen
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

We present a learning-based approach with pose perceptual loss for automatic music video generation. Our method can produce a realistic dance video that conforms to the beats and rhymes of almost any given music. To achieve this, we firstly generate a human skeleton sequence from music and then apply the learned pose-to-appearance mapping to generate the final video. In the stage of generating skeleton sequences, we utilize two discriminators to capture different aspects of the sequence and propose a novel pose perceptual loss to produce natural dances. Besides, we also provide a new cross-modal evaluation to evaluate the dance quality, which is able to estimate the similarity between two modalities of music and dance. Finally, a user study is conducted to demonstrate that dance video synthesized by the presented approach produces surprisingly realistic results. The results are shown in the supplementary video at https://youtu.be/0rMuFMZa_K4
That and There: Judging the Intent of Pointing Actions with Robotic Arms
Authors: Malihe Alikhani, Baber Khalid, Rahul Shome, Chaitanya Mitash, Kostas Bekris, Matthew Stone
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning

Collaborative robotics requires effective communication between a robot and a human partner. This work proposes a set of interpretive principles for how a robotic arm can use pointing actions to communicate task information to people by extending existing models from the related literature. These principles are evaluated through studies where English-speaking human subjects view animations of simulated robots instructing pick-and-place tasks. The evaluation distinguishes two classes of pointing actions that arise in pick-and-place tasks: referential pointing (identifying objects) and locating pointing (identifying locations). The study indicates that human subjects show greater flexibility in interpreting the intent of referential pointing compared to locating pointing, which needs to be more deliberate. The results also demonstrate the effects of variation in the environment and task context on the interpretation of pointing. Our corpus, experiments and design principles advance models of context, common sense reasoning and communication in embodied communication.
Document Sub-structure in Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Radina Dobreva, Jie zhou, Rachel Bawden
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Articles, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Current approaches to machine translation (MT) either translate sentences in isolation, disregarding the context they appear in, or model context at the level of the full document, without a notion of any internal structure the document may have. In this work we consider the fact that documents are rarely homogeneous blocks of text, but rather consist of parts covering different topics. Some documents, such as biographies and encyclopedia entries, have highly predictable, regular structures in which sections are characterised by different topics. We draw inspiration from Louis and Webber (2014) who use this information to improve statistical MT and transfer their proposal into the framework of neural MT. We compare two different methods of including information about the topic of the section within which each sentence is found: one using side constraints and the other using a cache-based model. We create and release the data on which we run our experiments - parallel corpora for three language pairs (Chinese-English, French-English, Bulgarian-English) from Wikipedia biographies, which we extract automatically, preserving the boundaries of sections within the articles.
An Interval-Valued Utility Theory for Decision Making with Dempster-Shafer Belief Functions
Authors: Thierry Denoeux, Prakash P. Shenoy
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The main goal of this paper is to describe an axiomatic utility theory for Dempster-Shafer belief function lotteries. The axiomatic framework used is analogous to von Neumann-Morgenstern's utility theory for probabilistic lotteries as described by Luce and Raiffa. Unlike the probabilistic case, our axiomatic framework leads to interval-valued utilities, and therefore, to a partial (incomplete) preference order on the set of all belief function lotteries. If the belief function reference lotteries we use are Bayesian belief functions, then our representation theorem coincides with Jaffray's representation theorem for his linear utility theory for belief functions. We illustrate our representation theorem using some examples discussed in the literature, and we propose a simple model for assessing utilities based on an interval-valued pessimism index representing a decision-maker's attitude to ambiguity and indeterminacy. Finally, we compare our decision theory with those proposed by Jaffray, Smets, Dubois et al., Giang and Shenoy, and Shafer.
Active emulation of computer codes with Gaussian processes -- Application to remote sensing
Authors: Daniel Heestermans Svendsen, Luca Martino, Gustau Camps-Valls
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Gaussian Processes

Many fields of science and engineering rely on running simulations with complex and computationally expensive models to understand the involved processes in the system of interest. Nevertheless, the high cost involved hamper reliable and exhaustive simulations. Very often such codes incorporate heuristics that ironically make them less tractable and transparent. This paper introduces an active learning methodology for adaptively constructing surrogate models, i.e. emulators, of such costly computer codes in a multi-output setting. The proposed technique is sequential and adaptive, and is based on the optimization of a suitable acquisition function. It aims to achieve accurate approximations, model tractability, as well as compact and expressive simulated datasets. In order to achieve this, the proposed Active Multi-Output Gaussian Process Emulator (AMOGAPE) combines the predictive capacity of Gaussian Processes (GPs) with the design of an acquisition function that favors sampling in low density and fluctuating regions of the approximation functions. Comparing different acquisition functions, we illustrate the promising performance of the method for the construction of emulators with toy examples, as well as for a widely used remote sensing transfer code.
Fast Computation of Katz Index for Efficient Processing of Link Prediction Queries
Authors: Mustafa Coskun, Abdelkader Baggag, Mehmet Koyuturk
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Link Prediction, Prediction

Network proximity computations are among the most common operations in various data mining applications, including link prediction and collaborative filtering. A common measure of network proximity is Katz index, which has been shown to be among the best-performing path-based link prediction algorithms. With the emergence of very large network databases, such proximity computations become an important part of query processing in these databases. Consequently, significant effort has been devoted to developing algorithms for efficient computation of Katz index between a given pair of nodes or between a query node and every other node in the network. Here, we present LRC-Katz, an algorithm based on indexing and low-rank correction to accelerate Katz index-based network proximity queries. Using a variety of very large real-world networks, we show that LRC-Katz outperforms the fastest existing method, Conjugate Gradient, for a wide range of parameter values. We also show that this acceleration in the computation of Katz index can be used to drastically improve the efficiency of processing link prediction queries in very large networks. Motivated by this observation, we propose a new link prediction algorithm that exploits modularity of networks that are encountered in practical applications. Our experimental results on the link prediction problem show that our modularity based algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art link prediction Katz method.
Reducing selfish routing inefficiencies using traffic lights
Authors: Charlotte Roman, Paolo Turrini
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00

Traffic congestion games abstract away from the costs of junctions in transport networks, yet, in urban environments, these often impact journey times significantly. In this paper we equip congestion games with traffic lights, modelled as junction-based waiting cycles, therefore enabling more realistic route planning strategies. Using the SUMO simulator, we show that our modelling choices coincide with realistic routing behaviours, in particular, that drivers' decisions about route choices are based on the proportion of red light time for their direction of travel. Drawing upon the experimental results, we show that the effects of the notorious Braess' paradox can be avoided in theory and significantly reduced in practice, by allocating the appropriate traffic light cycles along a transport network.
Inferring Super-Resolution Depth from a Moving Light-Source Enhanced RGB-D Sensor: A Variational Approach
Authors: Lu Sang, Bjoern Haefner, Daniel Cremers
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Map Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

A novel approach towards depth map super-resolution using multi-view uncalibrated photometric stereo is presented. Practically, an LED light source is attached to a commodity RGB-D sensor and is used to capture objects from multiple viewpoints with unknown motion. This non-static camera-to-object setup is described with a nonconvex variational approach such that no calibration on lighting or camera motion is required due to the formulation of an end-to-end joint optimization problem. Solving the proposed variational model results in high resolution depth, reflectance and camera pose estimates, as we show on challenging synthetic and real-world datasets.
Latent-Space Laplacian Pyramids for Adversarial Representation Learning with 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Vage Egiazarian, Savva Ignatyev, Alexey Artemov, Oleg Voynov, Andrey Kravchenko, Youyi Zheng, Luiz Velho, Evgeny Burnaev
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Generating 3D Point Clouds, Representation Learning

Constructing high-quality generative models for 3D shapes is a fundamental task in computer vision with diverse applications in geometry processing, engineering, and design. Despite the recent progress in deep generative modelling, synthesis of finely detailed 3D surfaces, such as high-resolution point clouds, from scratch has not been achieved with existing approaches. In this work, we propose to employ the latent-space Laplacian pyramid representation within a hierarchical generative model for 3D point clouds. We combine the recently proposed latent-space GAN and Laplacian GAN architectures to form a multi-scale model capable of generating 3D point clouds at increasing levels of detail. Our evaluation demonstrates that our model outperforms the existing generative models for 3D point clouds.
Relative planar motion for vehicle-mounted cameras from a single affine correspondence
Authors: Levente Hajder, Daniel Barath
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00

Two solvers are proposed for estimating the extrinsic camera parameters from a single affine correspondence assuming general planar motion. In this case, the camera movement is constrained to a plane and the image plane is orthogonal to the ground. The algorithms do not assume other constraints, e.g.\ the non-holonomic one, to hold. A new minimal solver is proposed for the semi-calibrated case, i.e. the camera parameters are known except a common focal length. Another method is proposed for the fully calibrated case. Due to requiring a single correspondence, robust estimation, e.g. histogram voting, leads to a fast and accurate procedure. The proposed methods are tested in our synthetic environment and on publicly available real datasets consisting of videos through tens of kilometres. They are superior to the state-of-the-art both in terms of accuracy and processing time.
Least-squares Optimal Relative Planar Motion for Vehicle-mounted Cameras
Authors: Levente Hajder, Daniel Barath
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00

A new closed-form solver is proposed minimizing the algebraic error optimally, in the least-squares sense, to estimate the relative planar motion of two calibrated cameras. The main objective is to solve the over-determined case, i.e., when a larger-than-minimal sample of point correspondences is given - thus, estimating the motion from at least three correspondences. The algorithm requires the camera movement to be constrained to a plane, e.g. mounted to a vehicle, and the image plane to be orthogonal to the ground. The solver obtains the motion parameters as the roots of a 6-th degree polynomial. It is validated both in synthetic experiments and on publicly available real-world datasets that using the proposed solver leads to results superior to the state-of-the-art in terms of geometric accuracy with no noticeable deterioration in the processing time.
Multilayer Collaborative Low-Rank Coding Network for Robust Deep Subspace Discovery
Authors: Xianzhen Li, Zhao Zhang, Yang Wang, Guangcan Liu, Shuicheng Yan, Meng Wang
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Representation Learning

For subspace recovery, most existing low-rank representation (LRR) models performs in the original space in single-layer mode. As such, the deep hierarchical information cannot be learned, which may result in inaccurate recoveries for complex real data. In this paper, we explore the deep multi-subspace recovery problem by designing a multilayer architecture for latent LRR. Technically, we propose a new Multilayer Collabora-tive Low-Rank Representation Network model termed DeepLRR to discover deep features and deep subspaces. In each layer (>2), DeepLRR bilinearly reconstructs the data matrix by the collabo-rative representation with low-rank coefficients and projection matrices in the previous layer. The bilinear low-rank reconstruc-tion of previous layer is directly fed into the next layer as the input and low-rank dictionary for representation learning, and is further decomposed into a deep principal feature part, a deep salient feature part and a deep sparse error. As such, the coher-ence issue can be also resolved due to the low-rank dictionary, and the robustness against noise can also be enhanced in the feature subspace. To recover the sparse errors in layers accurately, a dynamic growing strategy is used, as the noise level will be-come smaller for the increase of layers. Besides, a neighborhood reconstruction error is also included to encode the locality of deep salient features by deep coefficients adaptively in each layer. Extensive results on public databases show that our DeepLRR outperforms other related models for subspace discovery and clustering.
Solving Visual Object Ambiguities when Pointing: An Unsupervised Learning Approach
Authors: Doreen Jirak, David Biertimpel, Matthias Kerzel, Stefan Wermter
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Whenever we are addressing a specific object or refer to a certain spatial location, we are using referential or deictic gestures usually accompanied by some verbal description. Especially pointing gestures are necessary to dissolve ambiguities in a scene and they are of crucial importance when verbal communication may fail due to environmental conditions or when two persons simply do not speak the same language. With the currently increasing advances of humanoid robots and their future integration in domestic domains, the development of gesture interfaces complementing human-robot interaction scenarios is of substantial interest. The implementation of an intuitive gesture scenario is still challenging because both the pointing intention and the corresponding object have to be correctly recognized in real-time. The demand increases when considering pointing gestures in a cluttered environment, as is the case in households. Also, humans perform pointing in many different ways and those variations have to be captured. Research in this field often proposes a set of geometrical computations which do not scale well with the number of gestures and objects, use specific markers or a predefined set of pointing directions. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised learning approach to model the distribution of pointing gestures using a growing-when-required (GWR) network. We introduce an interaction scenario with a humanoid robot and define so-called ambiguity classes. Our implementation for the hand and object detection is independent of any markers or skeleton models, thus it can be easily reproduced. Our evaluation comparing a baseline computer vision approach with our GWR model shows that the pointing-object association is well learned even in cases of ambiguities resulting from close object proximity.
Towards Partial Supervision for Generic Object Counting in Natural Scenes
Authors: Hisham Cholakkal, Guolei Sun, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ling Shao, Luc van Gool
Date: 2019-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image-level Supervised Instance Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Object, Object Counting, Semantic Segmentation

Generic object counting in natural scenes is a challenging computer vision problem. Existing approaches either rely on instance-level supervision or absolute count information to train a generic object counter. We introduce a partially supervised setting that significantly reduces the supervision level required for generic object counting. We propose two novel frameworks, named lower-count (LC) and reduced lower-count (RLC), to enable object counting under this setting. Our frameworks are built on a novel dual-branch architecture that has an image classification and a density branch. Our LC framework reduces the annotation cost due to multiple instances in an image by using only lower-count supervision for all object categories. Our RLC framework further reduces the annotation cost arising from large numbers of object categories in a dataset by only using lower-count supervision for a subset of categories and class-labels for the remaining ones. The RLC framework extends our dual-branch LC framework with a novel weight modulation layer and a category-independent density map prediction. Experiments are performed on COCO, Visual Genome and PASCAL 2007 datasets. Our frameworks perform on par with state-of-the-art approaches using higher levels of supervision. Additionally, we demonstrate the applicability of our LC supervised density map for image-level supervised instance segmentation.