pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Irregular Convolutional Auto-Encoder on Point Clouds
Authors: Zhang Yuhui, Greg Gutmann, Konagaya Akihiko
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00

We proposed a novel graph convolutional neural network that could construct a coarse, sparse latent point cloud from a dense, raw point cloud. With a novel non-isotropic convolution operation defined on irregular geometries, the model then can reconstruct the original point cloud from this latent cloud with fine details. Furthermore, we proposed that it is even possible to perform particle simulation using the latent cloud encoded from some simulated particle cloud (e.g. fluids), to accelerate the particle simulation process. Our model has been tested on ShapeNetCore dataset for Auto-Encoding with a limited latent dimension and tested on a synthesis dataset for fluids simulation. We also compare the model with other state-of-the-art models, and several visualizations were done to intuitively understand the model.
Effective Stabilized Self-Training on Few-Labeled Graph Data
Authors: Ziang Zhou, Jieming Shi, Shengzhong Zhang, Zengfeng Huang, Qing Li
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Model Selection, Node Classification

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are designed for semi-supervised node classification on graphs where only a subset of nodes have class labels. However, under extreme cases when very few labels are available (e.g., 1 labeled node per class), GNNs suffer from severe performance degradation. Specifically, we observe that existing GNNs suffer from unstable training process on few-labeled graphs, resulting to inferior performance on node classification. Therefore, we propose an effective framework, Stabilized Self-Training (SST), which is applicable to existing GNNs to handle the scarcity of labeled data, and consequently, boost classification accuracy. We conduct thorough empirical and theoretical analysis to support our findings and motivate the algorithmic designs in SST. We apply SST to two popular GNN models GCN and DAGNN, to get SSTGCN and SSTDA methods respectively, and evaluate the two methods against 10 competitors over 5 benchmarking datasets. Extensive experiments show that the proposed SST framework is highly effective, especially when few labeled data are available. Our methods achieve superior performance under almost all settings over all datasets. For instance, on a Cora dataset with only 1 labeled node per class, the accuracy of SSTGCN is 62.5%, 17.9% higher than GCN, and the accuracy of SSTDA is 66.4%, which outperforms DAGNN by 6.6%.
An Algorithmic Inference Approach to Learn Copulas
Authors: Bruno Apolloni
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00

We introduce a new method for estimating the parameter of the bivariate Clayton copulas within the framework of Algorithmic Inference. The method consists of a variant of the standard boot-strapping procedure for inferring random parameters, which we expressly devise to bypass the two pitfalls of this specific instance: the non independence of the Kendall statistics, customarily at the basis of this inference task, and the absence of a sufficient statistic w.r.t. \alpha. The variant is rooted on a numerical procedure in order to find the \alpha estimate at a fixed point of an iterative routine. Although paired with the customary complexity of the program which computes them, numerical results show an outperforming accuracy of the estimates.
Controllable Sentence Simplification
Authors: Louis Martin, Benoît Sagot, Éric de la Clergerie, Antoine Bordes
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Sentence, Text Simplification

Text simplification aims at making a text easier to read and understand by simplifying grammar and structure while keeping the underlying information identical. It is often considered an all-purpose generic task where the same simplification is suitable for all; however multiple audiences can benefit from simplified text in different ways. We adapt a discrete parametrization mechanism that provides explicit control on simplification systems based on Sequence-to-Sequence models. As a result, users can condition the simplifications returned by a model on attributes such as length, amount of paraphrasing, lexical complexity and syntactic complexity. We also show that carefully chosen values of these attributes allow out-of-the-box Sequence-to-Sequence models to outperform their standard counterparts on simplification benchmarks. Our model, which we call ACCESS (as shorthand for AudienCe-CEntric Sentence Simplification), establishes the state of the art at 41.87 SARI on the WikiLarge test set, a +1.42 improvement over the best previously reported score.
From Google Maps to a Fine-Grained Catalog of Street trees
Authors: Steve Branson, Jan Dirk Wegner, David Hall, Nico Lang, Konrad Schindler, Pietro Perona
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00

Up-to-date catalogs of the urban tree population are important for municipalities to monitor and improve quality of life in cities. Despite much research on automation of tree mapping, mainly relying on dedicated airborne LiDAR or hyperspectral campaigns, trees are still mostly mapped manually in practice. We present a fully automated tree detection and species recognition pipeline to process thousands of trees within a few hours using publicly available aerial and street view images of Google MapsTM. These data provide rich information (viewpoints, scales) from global tree shapes to bark textures. Our work-flow is built around a supervised classification that automatically learns the most discriminative features from thousands of trees and corresponding, public tree inventory data. In addition, we introduce a change tracker to keep urban tree inventories up-to-date. Changes of individual trees are recognized at city-scale by comparing street-level images of the same tree location at two different times. Drawing on recent advances in computer vision and machine learning, we apply convolutional neural networks (CNN) for all classification tasks. We propose the following pipeline: download all available panoramas and overhead images of an area of interest, detect trees per image and combine multi-view detections in a probabilistic framework, adding prior knowledge; recognize fine-grained species of detected trees. In a later, separate module, track trees over time and identify the type of change. We believe this is the first work to exploit publicly available image data for fine-grained tree mapping at city-scale, respectively over many thousands of trees. Experiments in the city of Pasadena, California, USA show that we can detect > 70% of the street trees, assign correct species to > 80% for 40 different species, and correctly detect and classify changes in > 90% of the cases.
Interpretable Disentanglement of Neural Networks by Extracting Class-Specific Subnetwork
Authors: Yulong Wang, Xiaolin Hu, Hang Su
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement

We propose a novel perspective to understand deep neural networks in an interpretable disentanglement form. For each semantic class, we extract a class-specific functional subnetwork from the original full model, with compressed structure while maintaining comparable prediction performance. The structure representations of extracted subnetworks display a resemblance to their corresponding class semantic similarities. We also apply extracted subnetworks in visual explanation and adversarial example detection tasks by merely replacing the original full model with class-specific subnetworks. Experiments demonstrate that this intuitive operation can effectively improve explanation saliency accuracy for gradient-based explanation methods, and increase the detection rate for confidence score-based adversarial example detection methods.
Multi-label Detection and Classification of Red Blood Cells in Microscopic Images
Authors: Wei Qiu, Jiaming Guo, Xiang Li, Mengjia Xu, Mo Zhang, Ning Guo, Quanzheng Li
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Detection, Classification, General Classification, Region Proposal

Cell detection and cell type classification from biomedical images play an important role for high-throughput imaging and various clinical application. While classification of single cell sample can be performed with standard computer vision and machine learning methods, analysis of multi-label samples (region containing congregating cells) is more challenging, as separation of individual cells can be difficult (e.g. touching cells) or even impossible (e.g. overlapping cells). As multi-instance images are common in analyzing Red Blood Cell (RBC) for Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) diagnosis, we develop and implement a multi-instance cell detection and classification framework to address this challenge. The framework firstly trains a region proposal model based on Region-based Convolutional Network (RCNN) to obtain bounding-boxes of regions potentially containing single or multiple cells from input microscopic images, which are extracted as image patches. High-level image features are then calculated from image patches through a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with ResNet-50 structure. Using these image features inputs, six networks are then trained to make multi-label prediction of whether a given patch contains cells belonging to a specific cell type. As the six networks are trained with image patches consisting of both individual cells and touching/overlapping cells, they can effectively recognize cell types that are presented in multi-instance image samples. Finally, for the purpose of SCD testing, we train another machine learning classifier to predict whether the given image patch contains abnormal cell type based on outputs from the six networks. Testing result of the proposed framework shows that it can achieve good performance in automatic cell detection and classification.
Deep Kernel Learning via Random Fourier Features
Authors: Jiaxuan Xie, Fanghui Liu, Kaijie Wang, Xiaolin Huang
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Small Data Image Classification

Kernel learning methods are among the most effective learning methods and have been vigorously studied in the past decades. However, when tackling with complicated tasks, classical kernel methods are not flexible or "rich" enough to describe the data and hence could not yield satisfactory performance. In this paper, via Random Fourier Features (RFF), we successfully incorporate the deep architecture into kernel learning, which significantly boosts the flexibility and richness of kernel machines while keeps kernels' advantage of pairwise handling small data. With RFF, we could establish a deep structure and make every kernel in RFF layers could be trained end-to-end. Since RFF with different distributions could represent different kernels, our model has the capability of finding suitable kernels for each layer, which is much more flexible than traditional kernel-based methods where the kernel is pre-selected. This fact also helps yield a more sophisticated kernel cascade connection in the architecture. On small datasets (less than 1000 samples), for which deep learning is generally not suitable due to overfitting, our method achieves superior performance compared to advanced kernel methods. On large-scale datasets, including non-image and image classification tasks, our method also has competitive performance.
BERT for Evidence Retrieval and Claim Verification
Authors: Amir Soleimani, Christof Monz, Marcel Worring
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Claim Verification, Retrieval

Motivated by the promising performance of pre-trained language models, we investigate BERT in an evidence retrieval and claim verification pipeline for the FEVER fact extraction and verification challenge. To this end, we propose to use two BERT models, one for retrieving potential evidence sentences supporting or rejecting claims, and another for verifying claims based on the predicted evidence sets. To train the BERT retrieval system, we use pointwise and pairwise loss functions, and examine the effect of hard negative mining. A second BERT model is trained to classify the samples as supported, refuted, and not enough information. Our system achieves a new state of the art recall of 87.1 for retrieving top five sentences out of the FEVER documents consisting of 50K Wikipedia pages, and scores second in the official leaderboard with the FEVER score of 69.7.
Checkmate: Breaking the Memory Wall with Optimal Tensor Rematerialization
Authors: Paras Jain, Ajay Jain, Aniruddha Nrusimha, Amir Gholami, Pieter Abbeel, Kurt Keutzer, Ion Stoica, Joseph E. Gonzalez
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00

We formalize the problem of trading-off DNN training time and memory requirements as the tensor rematerialization optimization problem, a generalization of prior checkpointing strategies. We introduce Checkmate, a system that solves for optimal rematerialization schedules in reasonable times (under an hour) using off-the-shelf MILP solvers or near-optimal schedules with an approximation algorithm, then uses these schedules to accelerate millions of training iterations. Our method scales to complex, realistic architectures and is hardware-aware through the use of accelerator-specific, profile-based cost models. In addition to reducing training cost, Checkmate enables real-world networks to be trained with up to 5.1x larger input sizes. Checkmate is an open-source project, available at https://github.com/parasj/checkmate.
Riemannian Motion Policy Fusion through Learnable Lyapunov Function Reshaping
Authors: Mustafa Mukadam, Ching-An Cheng, Dieter Fox, Byron Boots, Nathan Ratliff
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

RMPflow is a recently proposed policy-fusion framework based on differential geometry. While RMPflow has demonstrated promising performance, it requires the user to provide sensible subtask policies as Riemannian motion policies (RMPs: a motion policy and an importance matrix function), which can be a difficult design problem in its own right. We propose RMPfusion, a variation of RMPflow, to address this issue. RMPfusion supplements RMPflow with weight functions that can hierarchically reshape the Lyapunov functions of the subtask RMPs according to the current configuration of the robot and environment. This extra flexibility can remedy imperfect subtask RMPs provided by the user, improving the combined policy's performance. These weight functions can be learned by back-propagation. Moreover, we prove that, under mild restrictions on the weight functions, RMPfusion always yields a globally Lyapunov-stable motion policy. This implies that we can treat RMPfusion as a structured policy class in policy optimization that is guaranteed to generate stable policies, even during the immature phase of learning. We demonstrate these properties of RMPfusion in imitation learning experiments both in simulation and on a real-world robot.
A Decentralized Communication Policy for Multi Agent Multi Armed Bandit Problems
Authors: Pathmanathan Pankayaraj, D. H. S. Maithripala
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00

This paper proposes a novel policy for a group of agents to, individually as well as collectively, solve a multi armed bandit (MAB) problem. The policy relies solely on the information that an agent has obtained through sampling of the options on its own and through communication with neighbors. The option selection policy is based on an Upper Confidence Based (UCB) strategy while the communication strategy that is proposed forces agents to communicate with other agents who they believe are most likely to be exploring than exploiting. The overall strategy is shown to significantly outperform an independent Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi (ER) graph based random communication policy. The policy is shown to be cost effective in terms of communication and thus to be easily scalable to a large network of agents.
Deep Hyperedges: a Framework for Transductive and Inductive Learning on Hypergraphs
Authors: Josh Payne
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: hyperedge classification, hypergraph embedding, Inductive Learning, Node Classification

From social networks to protein complexes to disease genomes to visual data, hypergraphs are everywhere. However, the scope of research studying deep learning on hypergraphs is still quite sparse and nascent, as there has not yet existed an effective, unified framework for using hyperedge and vertex embeddings jointly in the hypergraph context, despite a large body of prior work that has shown the utility of deep learning over graphs and sets. Building upon these recent advances, we propose \textit{Deep Hyperedges} (DHE), a modular framework that jointly uses contextual and permutation-invariant vertex membership properties of hyperedges in hypergraphs to perform classification and regression in transductive and inductive learning settings. In our experiments, we use a novel random walk procedure and show that our model achieves and, in most cases, surpasses state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Additionally, we study our framework's performance on a variety of diverse, non-standard hypergraph datasets and propose several avenues of future work to further enhance DHE.
Softmax Is Not an Artificial Trick: An Information-Theoretic View of Softmax in Neural Networks
Authors: Zhenyue Qin, Dongwoo Kim
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00

Despite great popularity of applying softmax to map the non-normalised outputs of a neural network to a probability distribution over predicting classes, this normalised exponential transformation still seems to be artificial. A theoretic framework that incorporates softmax as an intrinsic component is still lacking. In this paper, we view neural networks embedding softmax from an information-theoretic perspective. Under this view, we can naturally and mathematically derive log-softmax as an inherent component in a neural network for evaluating the conditional mutual information between network output vectors and labels given an input datum. We show that training deterministic neural networks through maximising log-softmax is equivalent to enlarging the conditional mutual information, i.e., feeding label information into network outputs. We also generalise our informative-theoretic perspective to neural networks with stochasticity and derive information upper and lower bounds of log-softmax. In theory, such an information-theoretic view offers rationality support for embedding softmax in neural networks; in practice, we eventually demonstrate a computer vision application example of how to employ our information-theoretic view to filter out targeted objects on images.
Label-PEnet: Sequential Label Propagation and Enhancement Networks for Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation
Authors: Weifeng Ge, Sheng Guo, Weilin Huang, Matthew R. Scott
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: General Classification, Image-level Supervised Instance Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-supervised instance segmentation

Weakly-supervised instance segmentation aims to detect and segment object instances precisely, given imagelevel labels only. Unlike previous methods which are composed of multiple offline stages, we propose Sequential Label Propagation and Enhancement Networks (referred as Label-PEnet) that progressively transform image-level labels to pixel-wise labels in a coarse-to-fine manner. We design four cascaded modules including multi-label classification, object detection, instance refinement and instance segmentation, which are implemented sequentially by sharing the same backbone. The cascaded pipeline is trained alternatively with a curriculum learning strategy that generalizes labels from high-level images to low-level pixels gradually with increasing accuracy. In addition, we design a proposal calibration module to explore the ability of classification networks to find key pixels that identify object parts, which serves as a post validation strategy running in the inverse order. We evaluate the efficiency of our Label-PEnet in mining instance masks on standard benchmarks: PASCAL VOC 2007 and 2012. Experimental results show that Label-PEnet outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms by a clear margin, and obtains comparable performance even with the fully-supervised approaches.
CrowdFix: An Eyetracking Dataset of Real Life Crowd Videos
Authors: Memoona Tahira, Sobas Mehboob, Anis U. Rahman, Omar Arif
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00

Understanding human visual attention and saliency is an integral part of vision research. In this context, there is an ever-present need for fresh and diverse benchmark datasets, particularly for insight into special use cases like crowded scenes. We contribute to this end by: (1) reviewing the dynamics behind saliency and crowds. (2) using eye tracking to create a dynamic human eye fixation dataset over a new set of crowd videos gathered from the Internet. The videos are annotated into three distinct density levels. (3) Finally, we evaluate state-of-the-art saliency models on our dataset to identify possible improvements for the design and creation of a more robust saliency model.
Compositional Generalization for Primitive Substitutions
Authors: Yuanpeng Li, Liang Zhao, Jian-Yu Wang, Joel Hestness
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Compositional generalization is a basic mechanism in human language learning, but current neural networks lack such ability. In this paper, we conduct fundamental research for encoding compositionality in neural networks. Conventional methods use a single representation for the input sentence, making it hard to apply prior knowledge of compositionality. In contrast, our approach leverages such knowledge with two representations, one generating attention maps, and the other mapping attended input words to output symbols. We reduce the entropy in each representation to improve generalization. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements over the conventional methods in five NLP tasks including instruction learning and machine translation. In the SCAN domain, it boosts accuracies from 14.0% to 98.8% in Jump task, and from 92.0% to 99.7% in TurnLeft task. It also beats human performance on a few-shot learning task. We hope the proposed approach can help ease future research towards human-level compositional language learning.
RAMBO: Repeated And Merged Bloom Filter for Multiple Set Membership Testing (MSMT) in Sub-linear time
Authors: Gaurav Gupta, Benjamin Coleman, Tharun Medini, Vijai Mohan, Anshumali Shrivastava
Date: 2019-10-07 00:00:00

Approximate set membership is a common problem with wide applications in databases, networking, and search. Given a set S and a query q, the task is to determine whether q in S. The Bloom Filter (BF) is a popular data structure for approximate membership testing due to its simplicity. In particular, a BF consists of a bit array that can be incrementally updated. A related problem concerning this paper is the Multiple Set Membership Testing (MSMT) problem. Here we are given K different sets, and for any given query q the goal is the find all of the sets containing the query element. Trivially, a multiple set membership instance can be reduced to K membership testing instances, each with the same q, leading to O(K) query time. A simple array of Bloom Filters can achieve that. In this paper, we show the first non-trivial data-structure for streaming keys, RAMBO (Repeated And Merged Bloom Filter) that achieves expected O(sqrt(K) logK) query time with an additional worst case memory cost factor of O(logK) than the array of Bloom Filters. The proposed data-structure is simply a count-min sketch arrangement of Bloom Filters and retains all its favorable properties. We replace the addition operation with a set union and the minimum operation with a set intersection during estimation.