pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A diffusion approach to Stein's method on Riemannian manifolds
Authors: Huiling Le, Alexander Lewis, Karthik Bharath, Christopher Fallaize
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

We detail an approach to develop Stein's method for bounding integral metrics on probability measures defined on a Riemannian manifold $\mathbf M$. Our approach exploits the relationship between the generator of a diffusion on $\mathbf M$ with target invariant measure and its characterising Stein operator. We consider a pair of such diffusions with different starting points, and through analysis of the distance process between the pair, derive Stein factors, which bound the solution to the Stein equation and its derivatives. The Stein factors contain curvature-dependent terms and reduce to those currently available for $\mathbb R^m$, and moreover imply that the bounds for $\mathbb R^m$ remain valid when $\mathbf M$ is a flat manifold
A multivariate water quality parameter prediction model using recurrent neural network
Authors: Dhruti Dheda, Ling Cheng
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Parameter Prediction

The global degradation of water resources is a matter of great concern, especially for the survival of humanity. The effective monitoring and management of existing water resources is necessary to achieve and maintain optimal water quality. The prediction of the quality of water resources will aid in the timely identification of possible problem areas and thus increase the efficiency of water management. The purpose of this research is to develop a water quality prediction model based on water quality parameters through the application of a specialised recurrent neural network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and the use of historical water quality data over several years. Both multivariate single and multiple step LSTM models were developed, using a Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function and a Root Mean Square Propagation (RMSprop) optimiser was developed. The single step model attained an error of 0.01 mg/L, whilst the multiple step model achieved a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.227 mg/L.
Scalable Variational Gaussian Process Regression Networks
Authors: Shibo Li, Wei Xing, Mike Kirby, Shandian Zhe
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Variational Inference

Gaussian process regression networks (GPRN) are powerful Bayesian models for multi-output regression, but their inference is intractable. To address this issue, existing methods use a fully factorized structure (or a mixture of such structures) over all the outputs and latent functions for posterior approximation, which, however, can miss the strong posterior dependencies among the latent variables and hurt the inference quality. In addition, the updates of the variational parameters are inefficient and can be prohibitively expensive for a large number of outputs. To overcome these limitations, we propose a scalable variational inference algorithm for GPRN, which not only captures the abundant posterior dependencies but also is much more efficient for massive outputs. We tensorize the output space and introduce tensor/matrix-normal variational posteriors to capture the posterior correlations and to reduce the parameters. We jointly optimize all the parameters and exploit the inherent Kronecker product structure in the variational model evidence lower bound to accelerate the computation. We demonstrate the advantages of our method in several real-world applications.
PiP: Planning-informed Trajectory Prediction for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Haoran Song, Wenchao Ding, Yuxuan Chen, Shaojie Shen, Michael Yu Wang, Qifeng Chen
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Future prediction, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

It is critical to predict the motion of surrounding vehicles for self-driving planning, especially in a socially compliant and flexible way. However, future prediction is challenging due to the interaction and uncertainty in driving behaviors. We propose planning-informed trajectory prediction (PiP) to tackle the prediction problem in the multi-agent setting. Our approach is differentiated from the traditional manner of prediction, which is only based on historical information and decoupled with planning. By informing the prediction process with the planning of ego vehicle, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance of multi-agent forecasting on highway datasets. Moreover, our approach enables a novel pipeline which couples the prediction and planning, by conditioning PiP on multiple candidate trajectories of the ego vehicle, which is highly beneficial for autonomous driving in interactive scenarios.
Commentaries on "Learning Sensorimotor Control with Neuromorphic Sensors: Toward Hyperdimensional Active Perception" [Science Robotics Vol. 4 Issue 30 (2019) 1-10
Authors: Denis Kleyko, Ross W. Gayler, Evgeny Osipov
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00

This correspondence comments on the findings reported in a recent Science Robotics article by Mitrokhin et al. [1]. The main goal of this commentary is to expand on some of the issues touched on in that article. Our experience is that hyperdimensional computing is very different from other approaches to computation and that it can take considerable exposure to its concepts before attaining practically useful understanding. Therefore, in order to provide an overview of the area to the first time reader of [1], the commentary includes a brief historic overview as well as connects the findings of the article to a larger body of literature existing in the area.
Derivation of Coupled PCA and SVD Learning Rules from a Newton Zero-Finding Framework
Authors: Ralf Möller
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00

In coupled learning rules for PCA (principal component analysis) and SVD (singular value decomposition), the update of the estimates of eigenvectors or singular vectors is influenced by the estimates of eigenvalues or singular values, respectively. This coupled update mitigates the speed-stability problem since the update equations converge from all directions with approximately the same speed. A method to derive coupled learning rules from information criteria by Newton optimization is known. However, these information criteria have to be designed, offer no explanatory value, and can only impose Euclidean constraints on the vector estimates. Here we describe an alternative approach where coupled PCA and SVD learning rules can systematically be derived from a Newton zero-finding framework. The derivation starts from an objective function, combines the equations for its extrema with arbitrary constraints on the vector estimates, and solves the resulting vector zero-point equation using Newton's zero-finding method. To demonstrate the framework, we derive PCA and SVD learning rules with constant Euclidean length or constant sum of the vector estimates.
Verification and Design Methods for the BrainScaleS Neuromorphic Hardware System
Authors: Andreas Grübl, Sebastian Billaudelle, Benjamin Cramer, Vitali Karasenko, Johannes Schemmel
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00

This paper presents verification and implementation methods that have been developed for the design of the BrainScaleS-2 65nm ASICs. The 2nd generation BrainScaleS chips are mixed-signal devices with tight coupling between full-custom analog neuromorphic circuits and two general purpose microprocessors (PPU) with SIMD extension for on-chip learning and plasticity. Simulation methods for automated analysis and pre-tapeout calibration of the highly parameterizable analog neuron and synapse circuits and for hardware-software co-development of the digital logic and software stack are presented. Accelerated operation of neuromorphic circuits and highly-parallel digital data buses between the full-custom neuromorphic part and the PPU require custom methodologies to close the digital signal timing at the interfaces. Novel extensions to the standard digital physical implementation design flow are highlighted. We present early results from the first full-size BrainScaleS-2 ASIC containing 512 neurons and 130K synapses, demonstrating the successful application of these methods. An application example illustrates the full functionality of the BrainScaleS-2 hybrid plasticity architecture.
Multi-faceted Trust-based Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Noemi Mauro, Liliana Ardissono, Zhongli Filippo Hu
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems

Many collaborative recommender systems leverage social correlation theories to improve suggestion performance. However, they focus on explicit relations between users and they leave out other types of information that can contribute to determine users' global reputation; e.g., public recognition of reviewers' quality. We are interested in understanding if and when these additional types of feedback improve Top-N recommendation. For this purpose, we propose a multi-faceted trust model to integrate local trust, represented by social links, with various types of global trust evidence provided by social networks. We aim at identifying general classes of data in order to make our model applicable to different case studies. Then, we test the model by applying it to a variant of User-to-User Collaborative filtering (U2UCF) which supports the fusion of rating similarity, local trust derived from social relations, and multi-faceted reputation for rating prediction. We test our model on two datasets: the Yelp one publishes generic friend relations between users but provides different types of trust feedback, including user profile endorsements. The LibraryThing dataset offers fewer types of feedback but it provides more selective friend relations aimed at content sharing. The results of our experiments show that, on the Yelp dataset, our model outperforms both U2UCF and state-of-the-art trust-based recommenders that only use rating similarity and social relations. Differently, in the LibraryThing dataset, the combination of social relations and rating similarity achieves the best results. The lesson we learn is that multi-faceted trust can be a valuable type of information for recommendation. However, before using it in an application domain, an analysis of the type and amount of available trust evidence has to be done to assess its real impact on recommendation performance.
Preferential Batch Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Eero Siivola, Akash Kumar Dhaka, Michael Riis Andersen, Javier Gonzalez, Pablo Garcia Moreno, Aki Vehtari
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Recommendation Systems

Most research in Bayesian optimization (BO) has focused on \emph{direct feedback} scenarios, where one has access to exact values of some expensive-to-evaluate objective. This direction has been mainly driven by the use of BO in machine learning hyper-parameter configuration problems. However, in domains such as modelling human preferences, A/B tests, or recommender systems, there is a need for methods that can replace direct feedback with \emph{preferential feedback}, obtained via rankings or pairwise comparisons. In this work, we present preferential batch Bayesian optimization (PBBO), a new framework that allows finding the optimum of a latent function of interest, given any type of parallel preferential feedback for a group of two or more points. We do so by using a Gaussian process model with a likelihood specially designed to enable parallel and efficient data collection mechanisms, which are key in modern machine learning. We show how the acquisitions developed under this framework generalize and augment previous approaches in Bayesian optimization, expanding the use of these techniques to a wider range of domains. An extensive simulation study shows the benefits of this approach, both with simulated functions and four real data sets.
Design-unbiased statistical learning in survey sampling
Authors: Luis Sanguiao Sande, Li-Chun Zhang
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Learning Theory, Survey, Survey Sampling, valid

Design-consistent model-assisted estimation has become the standard practice in survey sampling. However, a general theory is lacking so far, which allows one to incorporate modern machine-learning techniques that can lead to potentially much more powerful assisting models. We propose a subsampling Rao-Blackwell method, and develop a statistical learning theory for exactly design-unbiased estimation with the help of linear or non-linear prediction models. Our approach makes use of classic ideas from Statistical Science as well as the rapidly growing field of Machine Learning. Provided rich auxiliary information, it can yield considerable efficiency gains over standard linear model-assisted methods, while ensuring valid estimation for the given target population, which is robust against potential mis-specifications of the assisting model at the individual level.
Bayesian Sparsification Methods for Deep Complex-valued Networks
Authors: Ivan Nazarov, Evgeny Burnaev
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Transcription

With continual miniaturization ever more applications of deep learning can be found in embedded systems, where it is common to encounter data with natural complex domain representation. To this end we extend Sparse Variational Dropout to complex-valued neural networks and verify the proposed Bayesian technique by conducting a large numerical study of the performance-compression trade-off of C-valued networks on two tasks: image recognition on MNIST-like and CIFAR10 datasets and music transcription on MusicNet. We replicate the state-of-the-art result by Trabelsi et al. [2018] on MusicNet with a complex-valued network compressed by 50-100x at a small performance penalty.
Convergence of Recursive Stochastic Algorithms using Wasserstein Divergence
Authors: Abhishek Gupta, William B. Haskell
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning

This paper develops a unified framework, based on iterated random operator theory, to analyze the convergence of constant stepsize recursive stochastic algorithms (RSAs). RSAs use randomization to efficiently compute expectations, and so their iterates form a stochastic process. The key idea of our analysis is to lift the RSA into an appropriate higher-dimensional space and then express it as an equivalent Markov chain. Instead of determining the convergence of this Markov chain (which may not converge under constant stepsize), we study the convergence of the distribution of this Markov chain. To study this, we define a new notion of Wasserstein divergence. We show that if the distribution of the iterates in the Markov chain satisfy a contraction property with respect to the Wasserstein divergence, then the Markov chain admits an invariant distribution. We show that convergence of a large family of constant stepsize RSAs can be understood using this framework, and we provide several detailed examples.
Discriminative Viewer Identification using Generative Models of Eye Gaze
Authors: Silvia Makowski, Lena A. Jäger, Lisa Schwetlick, Hans Trukenbrod, Ralf Engbert, Tobias Scheffer
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

We study the problem of identifying viewers of arbitrary images based on their eye gaze. Psychological research has derived generative stochastic models of eye movements. In order to exploit this background knowledge within a discriminatively trained classification model, we derive Fisher kernels from different generative models of eye gaze. Experimentally, we find that the performance of the classifier strongly depends on the underlying generative model. Using an SVM with Fisher kernel improves the classification performance over the underlying generative model.
Fisheye Distortion Rectification from Deep Straight Lines
Authors: Zhu-Cun Xue, Nan Xue, Gui-Song Xia
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: SSIM

This paper presents a novel line-aware rectification network (LaRecNet) to address the problem of fisheye distortion rectification based on the classical observation that straight lines in 3D space should be still straight in image planes. Specifically, the proposed LaRecNet contains three sequential modules to (1) learn the distorted straight lines from fisheye images; (2) estimate the distortion parameters from the learned heatmaps and the image appearance; and (3) rectify the input images via a proposed differentiable rectification layer. To better train and evaluate the proposed model, we create a synthetic line-rich fisheye (SLF) dataset that contains the distortion parameters and well-annotated distorted straight lines of fisheye images. The proposed method enables us to simultaneously calibrate the geometric distortion parameters and rectify fisheye images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both geometric accuracy and image quality on several evaluation metrics. In particular, the images rectified by LaRecNet achieve an average reprojection error of 0.33 pixels on the SLF dataset and produce the highest peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structure similarity index (SSIM) compared with the groundtruth.
Mapping the Landscape of Artificial Intelligence Applications against COVID-19
Authors: Joseph Bullock, Alexandra Luccioni, Katherine Hoffmann Pham, Cynthia Sin Nga Lam, Miguel Luengo-Oroz
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has been declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, which has reported over 18 million confirmed cases as of August 5, 2020. In this review, we present an overview of recent studies using Machine Learning and, more broadly, Artificial Intelligence, to tackle many aspects of the COVID-19 crisis. We have identified applications that address challenges posed by COVID-19 at different scales, including: molecular, by identifying new or existing drugs for treatment; clinical, by supporting diagnosis and evaluating prognosis based on medical imaging and non-invasive measures; and societal, by tracking both the epidemic and the accompanying infodemic using multiple data sources. We also review datasets, tools, and resources needed to facilitate Artificial Intelligence research, and discuss strategic considerations related to the operational implementation of multidisciplinary partnerships and open science. We highlight the need for international cooperation to maximize the potential of AI in this and future pandemics.
Circumventing Outliers of AutoAugment with Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Longhui Wei, An Xiao, Lingxi Xie, Xin Chen, Xiaopeng Zhang, Qi Tian
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Data Augmentation, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation

AutoAugment has been a powerful algorithm that improves the accuracy of many vision tasks, yet it is sensitive to the operator space as well as hyper-parameters, and an improper setting may degenerate network optimization. This paper delves deep into the working mechanism, and reveals that AutoAugment may remove part of discriminative information from the training image and so insisting on the ground-truth label is no longer the best option. To relieve the inaccuracy of supervision, we make use of knowledge distillation that refers to the output of a teacher model to guide network training. Experiments are performed in standard image classification benchmarks, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in suppressing noise of data augmentation and stabilizing training. Upon the cooperation of knowledge distillation and AutoAugment, we claim the new state-of-the-art on ImageNet classification with a top-1 accuracy of 85.8%.
Data Uncertainty Learning in Face Recognition
Authors: Jie Chang, Zhonghao Lan, Changmao Cheng, Yichen Wei
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Face Recognition

Modeling data uncertainty is important for noisy images, but seldom explored for face recognition. The pioneer work, PFE, considers uncertainty by modeling each face image embedding as a Gaussian distribution. It is quite effective. However, it uses fixed feature (mean of the Gaussian) from an existing model. It only estimates the variance and relies on an ad-hoc and costly metric. Thus, it is not easy to use. It is unclear how uncertainty affects feature learning. This work applies data uncertainty learning to face recognition, such that the feature (mean) and uncertainty (variance) are learnt simultaneously, for the first time. Two learning methods are proposed. They are easy to use and outperform existing deterministic methods as well as PFE on challenging unconstrained scenarios. We also provide insightful analysis on how incorporating uncertainty estimation helps reducing the adverse effects of noisy samples and affects the feature learning.
SPFCN: Select and Prune the Fully Convolutional Networks for Real-time Parking Slot Detection
Authors: Zhuoping Yu, Zhong Gao, Hansheng Chen, Yuyao Huang
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

For vehicles equipped with the automatic parking system, the accuracy and speed of the parking slot detection are crucial. But the high accuracy is obtained at the price of low speed or expensive computation equipment, which are sensitive for many car manufacturers. In this paper, we proposed a detector using CNN(convolutional neural networks) for faster speed and smaller model size while keeps accuracy. To achieve the optimal balance, we developed a strategy to select the best receptive fields and prune the redundant channels automatically after each training epoch. The proposed model is capable of jointly detecting corners and line features of parking slots while running efficiently in real time on average processors. The model has a frame rate of about 30 FPS on a 2.3 GHz CPU core, yielding parking slot corner localization error of 1.51$\pm$2.14 cm (std. err.) and slot detection accuracy of 98\%, generally satisfying the requirements in both speed and accuracy on on-board mobile terminals.
ACNMP: Skill Transfer and Task Extrapolation through Learning from Demonstration and Reinforcement Learning via Representation Sharing
Authors: M. Tuluhan Akbulut, Erhan Oztop, M. Yunus Seker, Honghu Xue, Ahmet E. Tekden, Emre Ugur
Date: 2020-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

To equip robots with dexterous skills, an effective approach is to first transfer the desired skill via Learning from Demonstration (LfD), then let the robot improve it by self-exploration via Reinforcement Learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a novel LfD+RL framework, namely Adaptive Conditional Neural Movement Primitives (ACNMP), that allows efficient policy improvement in novel environments and effective skill transfer between different agents. This is achieved through exploiting the latent representation learned by the underlying Conditional Neural Process (CNP) model, and simultaneous training of the model with supervised learning (SL) for acquiring the demonstrated trajectories and via RL for new trajectory discovery. Through simulation experiments, we show that (i) ACNMP enables the system to extrapolate to situations where pure LfD fails; (ii) Simultaneous training of the system through SL and RL preserves the shape of demonstrations while adapting to novel situations due to the shared representations used by both learners; (iii) ACNMP enables order-of-magnitude sample-efficient RL in extrapolation of reaching tasks compared to the existing approaches; (iv) ACNMPs can be used to implement skill transfer between robots having different morphology, with competitive learning speeds and importantly with less number of assumptions compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. Finally, we show the real-world suitability of ACNMPs through real robot experiments that involve obstacle avoidance, pick and place and pouring actions.