pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SaccadeNet: A Fast and Accurate Object Detector
Authors: Shiyi Lan, Zhou Ren, Yi Wu, Larry S. Davis, Gang Hua
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Understanding

Object detection is an essential step towards holistic scene understanding. Most existing object detection algorithms attend to certain object areas once and then predict the object locations. However, neuroscientists have revealed that humans do not look at the scene in fixed steadiness. Instead, human eyes move around, locating informative parts to understand the object location. This active perceiving movement process is called \textit{saccade}. %In this paper, Inspired by such mechanism, we propose a fast and accurate object detector called \textit{SaccadeNet}. It contains four main modules, the \cenam, the \coram, the \atm, and the \aggatt, which allows it to attend to different informative object keypoints, and predict object locations from coarse to fine. The \coram~is used only during training to extract more informative corner features which brings free-lunch performance boost. On the MS COCO dataset, we achieve the performance of 40.4\% mAP at 28 FPS and 30.5\% mAP at 118 FPS. Among all the real-time object detectors, %that can run faster than 25 FPS, our SaccadeNet achieves the best detection performance, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed detection mechanism.
Pedestrian Detection with Wearable Cameras for the Blind: A Two-way Perspective
Authors: Kyungjun Lee, Daisuke Sato, Saki Asakawa, Hernisa Kacorri, Chieko Asakawa
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Pedestrian Detection

Blind people have limited access to information about their surroundings, which is important for ensuring one's safety, managing social interactions, and identifying approaching pedestrians. With advances in computer vision, wearable cameras can provide equitable access to such information. However, the always-on nature of these assistive technologies poses privacy concerns for parties that may get recorded. We explore this tension from both perspectives, those of sighted passersby and blind users, taking into account camera visibility, in-person versus remote experience, and extracted visual information. We conduct two studies: an online survey with MTurkers (N=206) and an in-person experience study between pairs of blind (N=10) and sighted (N=40) participants, where blind participants wear a working prototype for pedestrian detection and pass by sighted participants. Our results suggest that both of the perspectives of users and bystanders and the several factors mentioned above need to be carefully considered to mitigate potential social tensions.
Gaussian-Dirichlet Random Fields for Inference over High Dimensional Categorical Observations
Authors: John E. San Soucie, Heidi M. Sosik, Yogesh Girdhar
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We propose a generative model for the spatio-temporal distribution of high dimensional categorical observations. These are commonly produced by robots equipped with an imaging sensor such as a camera, paired with an image classifier, potentially producing observations over thousands of categories. The proposed approach combines the use of Dirichlet distributions to model sparse co-occurrence relations between the observed categories using a latent variable, and Gaussian processes to model the latent variable's spatio-temporal distribution. Experiments in this paper show that the resulting model is able to efficiently and accurately approximate the temporal distribution of high dimensional categorical measurements such as taxonomic observations of microscopic organisms in the ocean, even in unobserved (held out) locations, far from other samples. This work's primary motivation is to enable deployment of informative path planning techniques over high dimensional categorical fields, which until now have been limited to scalar or low dimensional vector observations.
FFR V1.0: Fon-French Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Bonaventure F. P. Dossou, Chris C. Emezue
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Machine Translation, Translation

Africa has the highest linguistic diversity in the world. On account of the importance of language to communication, and the importance of reliable, powerful and accurate machine translation models in modern inter-cultural communication, there have been (and still are) efforts to create state-of-the-art translation models for the many African languages. However, the low-resources, diacritical and tonal complexities of African languages are major issues facing African NLP today. The FFR is a major step towards creating a robust translation model from Fon, a very low-resource and tonal language, to French, for research and public use. In this paper, we describe our pilot project: the creation of a large growing corpora for Fon-to-French translations and our FFR v1.0 model, trained on this dataset. The dataset and model are made publicly available.
Real-time information retrieval from Identity cards
Authors: Niloofar Tavakolian, Azadeh Nazemi, Donal Fitzpatrick
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Detection, Information Retrieval, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Retrieval, valid

Information is frequently retrieved from valid personal ID cards by the authorised organisation to address different purposes. The successful information retrieval (IR) depends on the accuracy and timing process. A process which necessitates a long time to respond is frustrating for both sides in the exchange of data. This paper aims to propose a series of state-of-the-art methods for the journey of an Identification card (ID) from the scanning or capture phase to the point before Optical character recognition (OCR). The key factors for this proposal are the accuracy and speed of the process during the journey. The experimental results of this research prove that utilising the methods based on deep learning, such as Efficient and Accurate Scene Text (EAST) detector and Deep Neural Network (DNN) for face detection, instead of traditional methods increase the efficiency considerably.
Enabling Efficient and Flexible FPGA Virtualization for Deep Learning in the Cloud
Authors: Shulin Zeng, Guohao Dai, Hanbo Sun, Kai Zhong, Guangjun Ge, Kaiyuan Guo, Yu Wang, Huazhong Yang
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00

FPGAs have shown great potential in providing low-latency and energy-efficient solutions for deep neural network (DNN) inference applications. Currently, the majority of FPGA-based DNN accelerators in the cloud run in a time-division multiplexing way for multiple users sharing a single FPGA, and require re-compilation with $\sim$100 s overhead. Such designs lead to poor isolation and heavy performance loss for multiple users, which are far away from providing efficient and flexible FPGA virtualization for neither public nor private cloud scenarios. To solve these problems, we introduce a novel virtualization framework for instruction architecture set (ISA) based on DNN accelerators by sharing a single FPGA. We enable the isolation by introducing a two-level instruction dispatch module and a multi-core based hardware resources pool. Such designs provide isolated and runtime-programmable hardware resources, further leading to performance isolation for multiple users. On the other hand, to overcome the heavy re-compilation overheads, we propose a tiling-based instruction frame package design and two-stage static-dynamic compilation. Only the light-weight runtime information is re-compiled with $\sim$1 ms overhead, thus the performance is guaranteed for the private cloud. Our extensive experimental results show that the proposed virtualization design achieves 1.07-1.69x and 1.88-3.12x throughput improvement over previous static designs using the single-core and the multi-core architectures, respectively.
Online and Real-time Object Tracking Algorithm with Extremely Small Matrices
Authors: Jesmin Jahan Tithi, Sriram Aananthakrishnan, Fabrizio Petrini
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking

Online and Real-time Object Tracking is an interesting workload that can be used to track objects (e.g., car, human, animal) in a series of video sequences in real-time. For simple object tracking on edge devices, the output of object tracking could be as simple as drawing a bounding box around a detected object and in some cases, the input matrices used in such computation are quite small (e.g., 4x7, 3x3, 5x5, etc). As a result, the amount of actual work is low. Therefore, a typical multi-threading based parallelization technique can not accelerate the tracking application; instead, a throughput based parallelization technique where each thread operates on independent video sequences is more rewarding. In this paper, we share our experience in parallelizing a Simple Online and Real-time Tracking (SORT) application on shared-memory multicores.
Representations of molecules and materials for interpolation of quantum-mechanical simulations via machine learning
Authors: Marcel F. Langer, Alex Goeßmann, Matthias Rupp
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Computational study of molecules and materials from first principles is a cornerstone of physics, chemistry, and materials science, but limited by the cost of accurate and precise simulations. In settings involving many simulations, machine learning can reduce these costs, often by orders of magnitude, by interpolating between reference simulations. This requires representations that describe any molecule or material and support interpolation. We comprehensively review and discuss current representations and relations between them, using a unified mathematical framework based on many-body functions, group averaging, and tensor products. For selected state-of-the-art representations, we compare energy predictions for organic molecules, binary alloys, and Al-Ga-In sesquioxides in numerical experiments controlled for data distribution, regression method, and hyper-parameter optimization.
A Machine Learning alternative to placebo-controlled clinical trials upon new diseases: A primer
Authors: Ezequiel Alvarez, Federico Lamagna, Manuel Szewc
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The appearance of a new dangerous and contagious disease requires the development of a drug therapy faster than what is foreseen by usual mechanisms. Many drug therapy developments consist in investigating through different clinical trials the effects of different specific drug combinations by delivering it into a test group of ill patients, meanwhile a placebo treatment is delivered to the remaining ill patients, known as the control group. We compare the above technique to a new technique in which all patients receive a different and reasonable combination of drugs and use this outcome to feed a Neural Network. By averaging out fluctuations and recognizing different patient features, the Neural Network learns the pattern that connects the patients initial state to the outcome of the treatments and therefore can predict the best drug therapy better than the above method. In contrast to many available works, we do not study any detail of drugs composition nor interaction, but instead pose and solve the problem from a phenomenological point of view, which allows us to compare both methods. Although the conclusion is reached through mathematical modeling and is stable upon any reasonable model, this is a proof-of-concept that should be studied within other expertises before confronting a real scenario. All calculations, tools and scripts have been made open source for the community to test, modify or expand it. Finally it should be mentioned that, although the results presented here are in the context of a new disease in medical sciences, these are useful for any field that requires a experimental technique with a control group.
Pedestrian Models for Autonomous Driving Part II: High-Level Models of Human Behavior
Authors: Fanta Camara, Nicola Bellotto, Serhan Cosar, Florian Weber, Dimitris Nathanael, Matthias Althoff, Jingyuan Wu, Johannes Ruenz, André Dietrich, Gustav Markkula, Anna Schieben, Fabio Tango, Natasha Merat, Charles W. Fox
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Descriptive

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) must share space with pedestrians, both in carriageway cases such as cars at pedestrian crossings and off-carriageway cases such as delivery vehicles navigating through crowds on pedestrianized high-streets. Unlike static obstacles, pedestrians are active agents with complex, interactive motions. Planning AV actions in the presence of pedestrians thus requires modelling of their probable future behaviour as well as detecting and tracking them. This narrative review article is Part II of a pair, together surveying the current technology stack involved in this process, organising recent research into a hierarchical taxonomy ranging from low-level image detection to high-level psychological models, from the perspective of an AV designer. This self-contained Part II covers the higher levels of this stack, consisting of models of pedestrian behaviour, from prediction of individual pedestrians' likely destinations and paths, to game-theoretic models of interactions between pedestrians and autonomous vehicles. This survey clearly shows that, although there are good models for optimal walking behaviour, high-level psychological and social modelling of pedestrian behaviour still remains an open research question that requires many conceptual issues to be clarified. Early work has been done on descriptive and qualitative models of behaviour, but much work is still needed to translate them into quantitative algorithms for practical AV control.
Boolean learning under noise-perturbations in hardware neural networks
Authors: Louis Andreoli, Xavier Porte, Stéphane Chrétien, Maxime Jacquot, Laurent Larger, Daniel Brunner
Date: 2020-03-27 00:00:00

A high efficiency hardware integration of neural networks benefits from realizing nonlinearity, network connectivity and learning fully in a physical substrate. Multiple systems have recently implemented some or all of these operations, yet the focus was placed on addressing technological challenges. Fundamental questions regarding learning in hardware neural networks remain largely unexplored. Noise in particular is unavoidable in such architectures, and here we investigate its interaction with a learning algorithm using an opto-electronic recurrent neural network. We find that noise strongly modifies the system's path during convergence, and surprisingly fully decorrelates the final readout weight matrices. This highlights the importance of understanding architecture, noise and learning algorithm as interacting players, and therefore identifies the need for mathematical tools for noisy, analogue system optimization.
Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms for General Video Game Playing
Authors: Raluca D. Gaina, Sam Devlin, Simon M. Lucas, Diego Perez-Liebana
Date: 2020-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Game-playing Evolutionary Algorithms, specifically Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms, have recently managed to beat the state of the art in win rate across many video games. However, the best results in a game are highly dependent on the specific configuration of modifications and hybrids introduced over several papers, each adding additional parameters to the core algorithm. Further, the best previously published parameters have been found from only a few human-picked combinations, as the possibility space has grown beyond exhaustive search. This paper presents the state of the art in Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithms, combining all modifications described in literature, as well as new ones, for a large resultant hybrid. We then use a parameter optimiser, the N-Tuple Bandit Evolutionary Algorithm, to find the best combination of parameters in 20 games from the General Video Game AI Framework. Further, we analyse the algorithm's parameters and some interesting combinations revealed through the optimisation process. Lastly, we find new state of the art solutions on several games by automatically exploring the large parameter space of RHEA.
Can We Use Split Learning on 1D CNN Models for Privacy Preserving Training?
Authors: Sharif Abuadbba, Kyuyeon Kim, Minki Kim, Chandra Thapa, Seyit A. Camtepe, Yansong Gao, Hyoungshick Kim, Surya Nepal
Date: 2020-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

A new collaborative learning, called split learning, was recently introduced, aiming to protect user data privacy without revealing raw input data to a server. It collaboratively runs a deep neural network model where the model is split into two parts, one for the client and the other for the server. Therefore, the server has no direct access to raw data processed at the client. Until now, the split learning is believed to be a promising approach to protect the client's raw data; for example, the client's data was protected in healthcare image applications using 2D convolutional neural network (CNN) models. However, it is still unclear whether the split learning can be applied to other deep learning models, in particular, 1D CNN. In this paper, we examine whether split learning can be used to perform privacy-preserving training for 1D CNN models. To answer this, we first design and implement an 1D CNN model under split learning and validate its efficacy in detecting heart abnormalities using medical ECG data. We observed that the 1D CNN model under split learning can achieve the same accuracy of 98.9\% like the original (non-split) model. However, our evaluation demonstrates that split learning may fail to protect the raw data privacy on 1D CNN models. To address the observed privacy leakage in split learning, we adopt two privacy leakage mitigation techniques: 1) adding more hidden layers to the client side and 2) applying differential privacy. Although those mitigation techniques are helpful in reducing privacy leakage, they have a significant impact on model accuracy. Hence, based on those results, we conclude that split learning alone would not be sufficient to maintain the confidentiality of raw sequential data in 1D CNN models.
Learning representations in Bayesian Confidence Propagation neural networks
Authors: Naresh Balaji Ravichandran, Anders Lansner, Pawel Herman
Date: 2020-03-27 00:00:00

Unsupervised learning of hierarchical representations has been one of the most vibrant research directions in deep learning during recent years. In this work we study biologically inspired unsupervised strategies in neural networks based on local Hebbian learning. We propose new mechanisms to extend the Bayesian Confidence Propagating Neural Network (BCPNN) architecture, and demonstrate their capability for unsupervised learning of salient hidden representations when tested on the MNIST dataset.
Evolutionary Bin Packing for Memory-Efficient Dataflow Inference Acceleration on FPGA
Authors: Mairin Kroes, Lucian Petrica, Sorin Cotofana, Michaela Blott
Date: 2020-03-24 00:00:00

Convolutional neural network (CNN) dataflow inference accelerators implemented in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have demonstrated increased energy efficiency and lower latency compared to CNN execution on CPUs or GPUs. However, the complex shapes of CNN parameter memories do not typically map well to FPGA on-chip memories (OCM), which results in poor OCM utilization and ultimately limits the size and types of CNNs which can be effectively accelerated on FPGAs. In this work, we present a design methodology that improves the mapping efficiency of CNN parameters to FPGA OCM. We frame the mapping as a bin packing problem and determine that traditional bin packing algorithms are not well suited to solve the problem within FPGA- and CNN-specific constraints. We hybridize genetic algorithms and simulated annealing with traditional bin packing heuristics to create flexible mappers capable of grouping parameter memories such that each group optimally fits FPGA on-chip memories. We evaluate these algorithms on a variety of FPGA inference accelerators. Our hybrid mappers converge to optimal solutions in a matter of seconds for all CNN use-cases, achieve an increase of up to 65% in OCM utilization efficiency for deep CNNs, and are up to 200$\times$ faster than current state-of-the-art simulated annealing approaches.
Information-Theoretic Probing with Minimum Description Length
Authors: Elena Voita, Ivan Titov
Date: 2020-03-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11

To measure how well pretrained representations encode some linguistic property, it is common to use accuracy of a probe, i.e. a classifier trained to predict the property from the representations. Despite widespread adoption of probes, differences in their accuracy fail to adequately reflect differences in representations. For example, they do not substantially favour pretrained representations over randomly initialized ones. Analogously, their accuracy can be similar when probing for genuine linguistic labels and probing for random synthetic tasks. To see reasonable differences in accuracy with respect to these random baselines, previous work had to constrain either the amount of probe training data or its model size. Instead, we propose an alternative to the standard probes, information-theoretic probing with minimum description length (MDL). With MDL probing, training a probe to predict labels is recast as teaching it to effectively transmit the data. Therefore, the measure of interest changes from probe accuracy to the description length of labels given representations. In addition to probe quality, the description length evaluates "the amount of effort" needed to achieve the quality. This amount of effort characterizes either (i) size of a probing model, or (ii) the amount of data needed to achieve the high quality. We consider two methods for estimating MDL which can be easily implemented on top of the standard probing pipelines: variational coding and online coding. We show that these methods agree in results and are more informative and stable than the standard probes.
Semantic Enrichment of Nigerian Pidgin English for Contextual Sentiment Classification
Authors: Wuraola Fisayo Oyewusi, Olubayo Adekanmbi, Olalekan Akinsande
Date: 2020-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Nigerian English adaptation, Pidgin, has evolved over the years through multi-language code switching, code mixing and linguistic adaptation. While Pidgin preserves many of the words in the normal English language corpus, both in spelling and pronunciation, the fundamental meaning of these words have changed significantly. For example,'ginger' is not a plant but an expression of motivation and 'tank' is not a container but an expression of gratitude. The implication is that the current approach of using direct English sentiment analysis of social media text from Nigeria is sub-optimal, as it will not be able to capture the semantic variation and contextual evolution in the contemporary meaning of these words. In practice, while many words in Nigerian Pidgin adaptation are the same as the standard English, the full English language based sentiment analysis models are not designed to capture the full intent of the Nigerian pidgin when used alone or code-mixed. By augmenting scarce human labelled code-changed text with ample synthetic code-reformatted text and meaning, we achieve significant improvements in sentiment scoring. Our research explores how to understand sentiment in an intrasentential code mixing and switching context where there has been significant word localization.This work presents a 300 VADER lexicon compatible Nigerian Pidgin sentiment tokens and their scores and a 14,000 gold standard Nigerian Pidgin tweets and their sentiments labels.