pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation using Adversarial Consistency Loss
Authors: Yihao Zhao, Ruihai Wu, Hao Dong
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Unpaired image-to-image translation is a class of vision problems whose goal is to find the mapping between different image domains using unpaired training data. Cycle-consistency loss is a widely used constraint for such problems. However, due to the strict pixel-level constraint, it cannot perform geometric changes, remove large objects, or ignore irrelevant texture. In this paper, we propose a novel adversarial-consistency loss for image-to-image translation. This loss does not require the translated image to be translated back to be a specific source image but can encourage the translated images to retain important features of the source images and overcome the drawbacks of cycle-consistency loss noted above. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on three challenging tasks: glasses removal, male-to-female translation, and selfie-to-anime translation.
Image Restoration for Under-Display Camera
Authors: Yuqian Zhou, David Ren, Neil Emerton, Sehoon Lim, Timothy Large
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: 4k, Image Restoration

The new trend of full-screen devices encourages us to position a camera behind a screen. Removing the bezel and centralizing the camera under the screen brings larger display-to-body ratio and enhances eye contact in video chat, but also causes image degradation. In this paper, we focus on a newly-defined Under-Display Camera (UDC), as a novel real-world single image restoration problem. First, we take a 4k Transparent OLED (T-OLED) and a phone Pentile OLED (P-OLED) and analyze their optical systems to understand the degradation. Second, we design a Monitor-Camera Imaging System (MCIS) for easier real pair data acquisition, and a model-based data synthesizing pipeline to generate Point Spread Function (PSF) and UDC data only from display pattern and camera measurements. Finally, we resolve the complicated degradation using deconvolution-based pipeline and learning-based methods. Our model demonstrates a real-time high-quality restoration. The presented methods and results reveal the promising research values and directions of UDC.
PANDA: A Gigapixel-level Human-centric Video Dataset
Authors: Xueyang Wang, Xiya Zhang, Yinheng Zhu, Yuchen Guo, Xiaoyun Yuan, Liuyu Xiang, Zerun Wang, Guiguang Ding, David J. Brady, Qionghai Dai, Lu Fang
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 4k, Attribute, Human Detection

We present PANDA, the first gigaPixel-level humAN-centric viDeo dAtaset, for large-scale, long-term, and multi-object visual analysis. The videos in PANDA were captured by a gigapixel camera and cover real-world scenes with both wide field-of-view (~1 square kilometer area) and high-resolution details (~gigapixel-level/frame). The scenes may contain 4k head counts with over 100x scale variation. PANDA provides enriched and hierarchical ground-truth annotations, including 15,974.6k bounding boxes, 111.8k fine-grained attribute labels, 12.7k trajectories, 2.2k groups and 2.9k interactions. We benchmark the human detection and tracking tasks. Due to the vast variance of pedestrian pose, scale, occlusion and trajectory, existing approaches are challenged by both accuracy and efficiency. Given the uniqueness of PANDA with both wide FoV and high resolution, a new task of interaction-aware group detection is introduced. We design a 'global-to-local zoom-in' framework, where global trajectories and local interactions are simultaneously encoded, yielding promising results. We believe PANDA will contribute to the community of artificial intelligence and praxeology by understanding human behaviors and interactions in large-scale real-world scenes. PANDA Website: http://www.panda-dataset.com.
Hierarchical Human Parsing with Typed Part-Relation Reasoning
Authors: Wenguan Wang, Hailong Zhu, Jifeng Dai, Yanwei Pang, Jianbing Shen, Ling Shao
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Human Parsing, Relation

Human parsing is for pixel-wise human semantic understanding. As human bodies are underlying hierarchically structured, how to model human structures is the central theme in this task. Focusing on this, we seek to simultaneously exploit the representational capacity of deep graph networks and the hierarchical human structures. In particular, we provide following two contributions. First, three kinds of part relations, i.e., decomposition, composition, and dependency, are, for the first time, completely and precisely described by three distinct relation networks. This is in stark contrast to previous parsers, which only focus on a portion of the relations and adopt a type-agnostic relation modeling strategy. More expressive relation information can be captured by explicitly imposing the parameters in the relation networks to satisfy the specific characteristics of different relations. Second, previous parsers largely ignore the need for an approximation algorithm over the loopy human hierarchy, while we instead address an iterative reasoning process, by assimilating generic message-passing networks with their edge-typed, convolutional counterparts. With these efforts, our parser lays the foundation for more sophisticated and flexible human relation patterns of reasoning. Comprehensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that our parser sets a new state-of-the-art on each.
Reinforcement Learning for Mitigating Intermittent Interference in Terahertz Communication Networks
Authors: Reza Barazideh, Omid Semiari, Solmaz Niknam, Balasubramaniam Natarajan
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Emerging wireless services with extremely high data rate requirements, such as real-time extended reality applications, mandate novel solutions to further increase the capacity of future wireless networks. In this regard, leveraging large available bandwidth at terahertz frequency bands is seen as a key enabler. To overcome the large propagation loss at these very high frequencies, it is inevitable to manage transmissions over highly directional links. However, uncoordinated directional transmissions by a large number of users can cause substantial interference in terahertz networks. While such interference will be received over short random time intervals, the received power can be large. In this work, a new framework based on reinforcement learning is proposed that uses an adaptive multi-thresholding strategy to efficiently detect and mitigate the intermittent interference from directional links in the time domain. To find the optimal thresholds, the problem is formulated as a multidimensional multi-armed bandit system. Then, an algorithm is proposed that allows the receiver to learn the optimal thresholds with very low complexity. Another key advantage of the proposed approach is that it does not rely on any prior knowledge about the interference statistics, and hence, it is suitable for interference mitigation in dynamic scenarios. Simulation results confirm the superior bit-error-rate performance of the proposed method compared with two traditional time-domain interference mitigation approaches.
Benchmarking TinyML Systems: Challenges and Direction
Authors: Colby R. Banbury, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Max Lam, William Fu, Amin Fazel, Jeremy Holleman, Xinyuan Huang, Robert Hurtado, David Kanter, Anton Lokhmotov, David Patterson, Danilo Pau, Jae-sun Seo, Jeff Sieracki, Urmish Thakker, Marian Verhelst, Poonam Yadav
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Position

Recent advancements in ultra-low-power machine learning (TinyML) hardware promises to unlock an entirely new class of smart applications. However, continued progress is limited by the lack of a widely accepted benchmark for these systems. Benchmarking allows us to measure and thereby systematically compare, evaluate, and improve the performance of systems and is therefore fundamental to a field reaching maturity. In this position paper, we present the current landscape of TinyML and discuss the challenges and direction towards developing a fair and useful hardware benchmark for TinyML workloads. Furthermore, we present our four benchmarks and discuss our selection methodology. Our viewpoints reflect the collective thoughts of the TinyMLPerf working group that is comprised of over 30 organizations.
SAD: Saliency-based Defenses Against Adversarial Examples
Authors: Richard Tran, David Patrick, Michael Geyer, Amanda Fernandez
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Music Genre Recognition

With the rise in popularity of machine and deep learning models, there is an increased focus on their vulnerability to malicious inputs. These adversarial examples drift model predictions away from the original intent of the network and are a growing concern in practical security. In order to combat these attacks, neural networks can leverage traditional image processing approaches or state-of-the-art defensive models to reduce perturbations in the data. Defensive approaches that take a global approach to noise reduction are effective against adversarial attacks, however their lossy approach often distorts important data within the image. In this work, we propose a visual saliency based approach to cleaning data affected by an adversarial attack. Our model leverages the salient regions of an adversarial image in order to provide a targeted countermeasure while comparatively reducing loss within the cleaned images. We measure the accuracy of our model by evaluating the effectiveness of state-of-the-art saliency methods prior to attack, under attack, and after application of cleaning methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in comparison with related defenses and against established adversarial attack methods, across two saliency datasets. Our targeted approach shows significant improvements in a range of standard statistical and distance saliency metrics, in comparison with both traditional and state-of-the-art approaches.
Karate Club: An API Oriented Open-source Python Framework for Unsupervised Learning on Graphs
Authors: Benedek Rozemberczki, Oliver Kiss, Rik Sarkar
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CIKM 2020 10
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering, Community Detection, Graph Classification, Graph Embedding, Graph Mining, Node Classification

We present Karate Club a Python framework combining more than 30 state-of-the-art graph mining algorithms which can solve unsupervised machine learning tasks. The primary goal of the package is to make community detection, node and whole graph embedding available to a wide audience of machine learning researchers and practitioners. We designed Karate Club with an emphasis on a consistent application interface, scalability, ease of use, sensible out of the box model behaviour, standardized dataset ingestion, and output generation. This paper discusses the design principles behind this framework with practical examples. We show Karate Club's efficiency with respect to learning performance on a wide range of real world clustering problems, classification tasks and support evidence with regards to its competitive speed.
Explore and Exploit with Heterotic Line Bundle Models
Authors: Magdalena Larfors, Robin Schneider
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We use deep reinforcement learning to explore a class of heterotic $SU(5)$ GUT models constructed from line bundle sums over Complete Intersection Calabi Yau (CICY) manifolds. We perform several experiments where A3C agents are trained to search for such models. These agents significantly outperform random exploration, in the most favourable settings by a factor of 1700 when it comes to finding unique models. Furthermore, we find evidence that the trained agents also outperform random walkers on new manifolds. We conclude that the agents detect hidden structures in the compactification data, which is partly of general nature. The experiments scale well with $h^{(1,1)}$, and may thus provide the key to model building on CICYs with large $h^{(1,1)}$.
Efficient Intent Detection with Dual Sentence Encoders
Authors: Iñigo Casanueva, Tadas Temčinas, Daniela Gerz, Matthew Henderson, Ivan Vulić
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: CPU, Intent Detection, Sentence

Building conversational systems in new domains and with added functionality requires resource-efficient models that work under low-data regimes (i.e., in few-shot setups). Motivated by these requirements, we introduce intent detection methods backed by pretrained dual sentence encoders such as USE and ConveRT. We demonstrate the usefulness and wide applicability of the proposed intent detectors, showing that: 1) they outperform intent detectors based on fine-tuning the full BERT-Large model or using BERT as a fixed black-box encoder on three diverse intent detection data sets; 2) the gains are especially pronounced in few-shot setups (i.e., with only 10 or 30 annotated examples per intent); 3) our intent detectors can be trained in a matter of minutes on a single CPU; and 4) they are stable across different hyperparameter settings. In hope of facilitating and democratizing research focused on intention detection, we release our code, as well as a new challenging single-domain intent detection dataset comprising 13,083 annotated examples over 77 intents.
Addressing multiple metrics of group fairness in data-driven decision making
Authors: Marius Miron, Songül Tolan, Emilia Gómez, Carlos Castillo
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Fairness

The Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT-ML) literature proposes a varied set of group fairness metrics to measure discrimination against socio-demographic groups that are characterized by a protected feature, such as gender or race.Such a system can be deemed as either fair or unfair depending on the choice of the metric. Several metrics have been proposed, some of them incompatible with each other.We do so empirically, by observing that several of these metrics cluster together in two or three main clusters for the same groups and machine learning methods. In addition, we propose a robust way to visualize multidimensional fairness in two dimensions through a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the group fairness metrics. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that the PCA decomposition explains the variance between the metrics with one to three components.
Metafeatures-based Rule-Extraction for Classifiers on Behavioral and Textual Data
Authors: Yanou Ramon, David Martens, Theodoros Evgeniou, Stiene Praet
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00

Machine learning models on behavioral and textual data can result in highly accurate prediction models, but are often very difficult to interpret. Rule-extraction techniques have been proposed to combine the desired predictive accuracy of complex "black-box" models with global explainability. However, rule-extraction in the context of high-dimensional, sparse data, where many features are relevant to the predictions, can be challenging, as replacing the black-box model by many rules leaves the user again with an incomprehensible explanation. To address this problem, we develop and test a rule-extraction methodology based on higher-level, less-sparse metafeatures. A key finding of our analysis is that metafeatures-based explanations are better at mimicking the behavior of the black-box prediction model, as measured by the fidelity of explanations.
Pursuing Sources of Heterogeneity in Modeling Clustered Population
Authors: Yan Li, Chun Yu, Yize Zhao, Robert H. Aseltine, Weixin Yao, Kun Chen
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, regression

Researchers often have to deal with heterogeneous population with mixed regression relationships, increasingly so in the era of data explosion. In such problems, when there are many candidate predictors, it is not only of interest to identify the predictors that are associated with the outcome, but also to distinguish the true sources of heterogeneity, i.e., to identify the predictors that have different effects among the clusters and thus are the true contributors to the formation of the clusters. We clarify the concepts of the source of heterogeneity that account for potential scale differences of the clusters and propose a regularized finite mixture effects regression to achieve heterogeneity pursuit and feature selection simultaneously. As the name suggests, the problem is formulated under an effects-model parameterization, in which the cluster labels are missing and the effect of each predictor on the outcome is decomposed to a common effect term and a set of cluster-specific terms. A constrained sparse estimation of these effects leads to the identification of both the variables with common effects and those with heterogeneous effects. We propose an efficient algorithm and show that our approach can achieve both estimation and selection consistency. Simulation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of our method under various practical scenarios. Three applications are presented, namely, an imaging genetics study for linking genetic factors and brain neuroimaging traits in Alzheimer's disease, a public health study for exploring the association between suicide risk among adolescents and their school district characteristics, and a sport analytics study for understanding how the salary levels of baseball players are associated with their performance and contractual status.
Multivariate Functional Regression via Nested Reduced-Rank Regularization
Authors: Xiaokang Liu, Shujie Ma, Kun Chen
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, regression

We propose a nested reduced-rank regression (NRRR) approach in fitting regression model with multivariate functional responses and predictors, to achieve tailored dimension reduction and facilitate interpretation/visualization of the resulting functional model. Our approach is based on a two-level low-rank structure imposed on the functional regression surfaces. A global low-rank structure identifies a small set of latent principal functional responses and predictors that drives the underlying regression association. A local low-rank structure then controls the complexity and smoothness of the association between the principal functional responses and predictors. Through a basis expansion approach, the functional problem boils down to an interesting integrated matrix approximation task, where the blocks or submatrices of an integrated low-rank matrix share some common row space and/or column space. An iterative algorithm with convergence guarantee is developed. We establish the consistency of NRRR and also show through non-asymptotic analysis that it can achieve at least a comparable error rate to that of the reduced-rank regression. Simulation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of NRRR. We apply NRRR in an electricity demand problem, to relate the trajectories of the daily electricity consumption with those of the daily temperatures.
Reconstruction of 3D flight trajectories from ad-hoc camera networks
Authors: Jingtong Li, Jesse Murray, Dorina Ismaili, Konrad Schindler, Cenek Albl
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00

We present a method to reconstruct the 3D trajectory of an airborne robotic system only from videos recorded with cameras that are unsynchronized, may feature rolling shutter distortion, and whose viewpoints are unknown. Our approach enables robust and accurate outside-in tracking of dynamically flying targets, with cheap and easy-to-deploy equipment. We show that, in spite of the weakly constrained setting, recent developments in computer vision make it possible to reconstruct trajectories in 3D from unsynchronized, uncalibrated networks of consumer cameras, and validate the proposed method in a realistic field experiment. We make our code available along with the data, including cm-accurate ground-truth from differential GNSS navigation.
Off-Road Drivable Area Extraction Using 3D LiDAR Data
Authors: Biao Gao, Anran Xu, Yancheng Pan, Xijun Zhao, Wen Yao, Huijing Zhao
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

We propose a method for off-road drivable area extraction using 3D LiDAR data with the goal of autonomous driving application. A specific deep learning framework is designed to deal with the ambiguous area, which is one of the main challenges in the off-road environment. To reduce the considerable demand for human-annotated data for network training, we utilize the information from vast quantities of vehicle paths and auto-generated obstacle labels. Using these autogenerated annotations, the proposed network can be trained using weakly supervised or semi-supervised methods, which can achieve better performance with fewer human annotations. The experiments on our dataset illustrate the reasonability of our framework and the validity of our weakly and semi-supervised methods.
ENTMOOT: A Framework for Optimization over Ensemble Tree Models
Authors: Alexander Thebelt, Jan Kronqvist, Miten Mistry, Robert M. Lee, Nathan Sudermann-Merx, Ruth Misener
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Gradient boosted trees and other regression tree models perform well in a wide range of real-world, industrial applications. These tree models (i) offer insight into important prediction features, (ii) effectively manage sparse data, and (iii) have excellent prediction capabilities. Despite their advantages, they are generally unpopular for decision-making tasks and black-box optimization, which is due to their difficult-to optimize structure and the lack of a reliable uncertainty measure. ENTMOOT is our new framework for integrating (already trained) tree models into larger optimization problems. The contributions of ENTMOOT include: (i) explicitly introducing a reliable uncertainty measure that is compatible with tree models, (ii) solving the larger optimization problems that incorporate these uncertainty aware tree models, (iii) proving that the solutions are globally optimal, i.e. no better solution exists. In particular, we show how the ENTMOOT approach allows a simple integration of tree models into decision-making and black-box optimization, where it proves as a strong competitor to commonly-used frameworks.
Multi-Task Recurrent Neural Network for Surgical Gesture Recognition and Progress Prediction
Authors: Beatrice van Amsterdam, Matthew J. Clarkson, Danail Stoyanov
Date: 2020-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition, Surgical Gesture Recognition

Surgical gesture recognition is important for surgical data science and computer-aided intervention. Even with robotic kinematic information, automatically segmenting surgical steps presents numerous challenges because surgical demonstrations are characterized by high variability in style, duration and order of actions. In order to extract discriminative features from the kinematic signals and boost recognition accuracy, we propose a multi-task recurrent neural network for simultaneous recognition of surgical gestures and estimation of a novel formulation of surgical task progress. To show the effectiveness of the presented approach, we evaluate its application on the JIGSAWS dataset, that is currently the only publicly available dataset for surgical gesture recognition featuring robot kinematic data. We demonstrate that recognition performance improves in multi-task frameworks with progress estimation without any additional manual labelling and training.