pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Survey on Deep Learning of Small Sample in Biomedical Image Analysis
Authors: Pengyi Zhang, Yunxin Zhong, Yulin Deng, Xiaoying Tang, Xiaoqiong Li
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Data Augmentation, Decision Making, Deep Learning, Miscellaneous, Survey, Transfer Learning, Weakly-supervised Learning

The success of deep learning has been witnessed as a promising technique for computer-aided biomedical image analysis, due to end-to-end learning framework and availability of large-scale labelled samples. However, in many cases of biomedical image analysis, deep learning techniques suffer from the small sample learning (SSL) dilemma caused mainly by lack of annotations. To be more practical for biomedical image analysis, in this paper we survey the key SSL techniques that help relieve the suffering of deep learning by combining with the development of related techniques in computer vision applications. In order to accelerate the clinical usage of biomedical image analysis based on deep learning techniques, we intentionally expand this survey to include the explanation methods for deep models that are important to clinical decision making. We survey the key SSL techniques by dividing them into five categories: (1) explanation techniques, (2) weakly supervised learning techniques, (3) transfer learning techniques, (4) active learning techniques, and (5) miscellaneous techniques involving data augmentation, domain knowledge, traditional shallow methods and attention mechanism. These key techniques are expected to effectively support the application of deep learning in clinical biomedical image analysis, and furtherly improve the analysis performance, especially when large-scale annotated samples are not available. We bulid demos at https://github.com/PengyiZhang/MIADeepSSL.
Tree-Transformer: A Transformer-Based Method for Correction of Tree-Structured Data
Authors: Jacob Harer, Chris Reale, Peter Chin
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00

Many common sequential data sources, such as source code and natural language, have a natural tree-structured representation. These trees can be generated by fitting a sequence to a grammar, yielding a hierarchical ordering of the tokens in the sequence. This structure encodes a high degree of syntactic information, making it ideal for problems such as grammar correction. However, little work has been done to develop neural networks that can operate on and exploit tree-structured data. In this paper we present the Tree-Transformer \textemdash{} a novel neural network architecture designed to translate between arbitrary input and output trees. We applied this architecture to correction tasks in both the source code and natural language domains. On source code, our model achieved an improvement of $25\%$ $\text{F}0.5$ over the best sequential method. On natural language, we achieved comparable results to the most complex state of the art systems, obtaining a $10\%$ improvement in recall on the CoNLL 2014 benchmark and the highest to date $\text{F}0.5$ score on the AESW benchmark of $50.43$.
GANs 'N Lungs: improving pneumonia prediction
Authors: Tatiana Malygina, Elena Ericheva, Ivan Drokin
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Data Augmentation, General Classification, Prediction

We propose a novel method to improve deep learning model performance on highly-imbalanced tasks. The proposed method is based on CycleGAN to achieve balanced dataset. We show that data augmentation with GAN helps to improve accuracy of pneumonia binary classification task even if the generative network was trained on the same training dataset.
Extract and Merge: Merging extracted humans from different images utilizing Mask R-CNN
Authors: Asati Minkesh, Kraisittipong Worranitta, Miyachi Taizo
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Selecting human objects out of the various type of objects in images and merging them with other scenes is manual and day-to-day work for photo editors. Although recently Adobe photoshop released "select subject" tool which automatically selects the foreground object in an image, but still requires fine manual tweaking separately. In this work, we proposed an application utilizing Mask R-CNN (for object detection and mask segmentation) that can extract human instances from multiple images and merge them with a new background. This application does not add any overhead to Mask R-CNN, running at 5 frames per second. It can extract human instances from any number of images or videos from merging them together. We also structured the code to accept videos of different lengths as input and length of the output-video will be equal to the longest input-video. We wanted to create a simple yet effective application that can serve as a base for photo editing and do most time-consuming work automatically, so, editors can focus more on the design part. Other application could be to group people together in a single picture with a new background from different images which could not be physically together. We are showing single-person and multi-person extraction and placement in two different backgrounds. Also, we are showing a video example with single-person extraction.
Efficient Machine Learning for Large-Scale Urban Land-Use Forecasting in Sub-Saharan Africa
Authors: Daniel Omeiza
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Management

Urbanization is a common phenomenon in developing countries and it poses serious challenges when not managed effectively. Lack of proper planning and management may cause the encroachment of urban fabrics into reserved or special regions which in turn can lead to an unsustainable increase in population. Ineffective management and planning generally leads to depreciated standard of living, where physical hazards like traffic accidents and disease vector breeding become prevalent. In order to support urban planners and policy makers in effective planning and accurate decision making, we investigate urban land-use in sub-Saharan Africa. Land-use dynamics serves as a crucial parameter in current strategies and policies for natural resource management and monitoring. Focusing on Nairobi, we use an efficient deep learning approach with patch-based prediction to classify regions based on land-use from 2004 to 2018 on a quarterly basis. We estimate changes in land-use within this period, and using the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model, our results forecast land-use for a given future date. Furthermore, we provide labelled land-use maps which will be helpful to urban planners.
ScarfNet: Multi-scale Features with Deeply Fused and Redistributed Semantics for Enhanced Object Detection
Authors: Jin Hyeok Yoo, Dongsuk Kum, Jun Won Choi
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Convolutional neural network (CNN) has led to significant progress in object detection. In order to detect the objects in various sizes, the object detectors often exploit the hierarchy of the multi-scale feature maps called feature pyramid, which is readily obtained by the CNN architecture. However, the performance of these object detectors is limited since the bottom-level feature maps, which experience fewer convolutional layers, lack the semantic information needed to capture the characteristics of the small objects. In order to address such problem, various methods have been proposed to increase the depth for the bottom-level features used for object detection. While most approaches are based on the generation of additional features through the top-down pathway with lateral connections, our approach directly fuses multi-scale feature maps using bidirectional long short term memory (biLSTM) in effort to generate deeply fused semantics. Then, the resulting semantic information is redistributed to the individual pyramidal feature at each scale through the channel-wise attention model. We integrate our semantic combining and attentive redistribution feature network (ScarfNet) with baseline object detectors, i.e., Faster R-CNN, single-shot multibox detector (SSD) and RetinaNet. Our experiments show that our method outperforms the existing feature pyramid methods as well as the baseline detectors and achieve the state of the art performances in the PASCAL VOC and COCO detection benchmarks.
Estimating the standard error of cross-Validation-Based estimators of classifier performance
Authors: Waleed A. Yousef
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

First, we analyze the variance of the Cross Validation (CV)-based estimators used for estimating the performance of classification rules. Second, we propose a novel estimator to estimate this variance using the Influence Function (IF) approach that had been used previously very successfully to estimate the variance of the bootstrap-based estimators. The motivation for this research is that, as the best of our knowledge, the literature lacks a rigorous method for estimating the variance of the CV-based estimators. What is available is a set of ad-hoc procedures that have no mathematical foundation since they ignore the covariance structure among dependent random variables. The conducted experiments show that the IF proposed method has small RMS error with some bias. However, surprisingly, the ad-hoc methods still work better than the IF-based method. Unfortunately, this is due to the lack of enough smoothness if compared to the bootstrap estimator. This opens the research for three points: (1) more comprehensive simulation study to clarify when the IF method win or loose; (2) more mathematical analysis to figure out why the ad-hoc methods work well; and (3) more mathematical treatment to figure out the connection between the appropriate amount of "smoothness" and decreasing the bias of the IF method.
MSnet: A BERT-based Network for Gendered Pronoun Resolution
Authors: Zili Wang
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 8
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

The pre-trained BERT model achieves a remarkable state of the art across a wide range of tasks in natural language processing. For solving the gender bias in gendered pronoun resolution task, I propose a novel neural network model based on the pre-trained BERT. This model is a type of mention score classifier and uses an attention mechanism with no parameters to compute the contextual representation of entity span, and a vector to represent the triple-wise semantic similarity among the pronoun and the entities. In stage 1 of the gendered pronoun resolution task, a variant of this model, trained in the fine-tuning approach, reduced the multi-class logarithmic loss to 0.3033 in the 5-fold cross-validation of training set and 0.2795 in testing set. Besides, this variant won the 2nd place with a score at 0.17289 in stage 2 of the task. The code in this paper is available at: https://github.com/ziliwang/MSnet-for-Gendered-PronounResolution
Simple and Effective Text Matching with Richer Alignment Features
Authors: Runqi Yang, Jianhai Zhang, Xing Gao, Feng Ji, Haiqing Chen
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Answer Selection, Natural Language Inference, Paraphrase Identification, Question Answering, Text Matching

In this paper, we present a fast and strong neural approach for general purpose text matching applications. We explore what is sufficient to build a fast and well-performed text matching model and propose to keep three key features available for inter-sequence alignment: original point-wise features, previous aligned features, and contextual features while simplifying all the remaining components. We conduct experiments on four well-studied benchmark datasets across tasks of natural language inference, paraphrase identification and answer selection. The performance of our model is on par with the state-of-the-art on all datasets with much fewer parameters and the inference speed is at least 6 times faster compared with similarly performed ones.
Featuring the topology with the unsupervised machine learning
Authors: Kenji Fukushima, Shotaro Shiba Funai, Hideaki Iida
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering, Image Clustering

Images of line drawings are generally composed of primitive elements. One of the most fundamental elements to characterize images is the topology; line segments belong to a category different from closed circles, and closed circles with different winding degrees are nonequivalent. We investigate images with nontrivial winding using the unsupervised machine learning. We build an autoencoder model with a combination of convolutional and fully connected neural networks. We confirm that compressed data filtered from the trained model retain more than 90% of correct information on the topology, evidencing that image clustering from the unsupervised learning features the topology.
Graph Neural Networks for Small Graph and Giant Network Representation Learning: An Overview
Authors: Jiawei Zhang
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Classification, Graph Neural Network, Representation Learning

Graph neural networks denote a group of neural network models introduced for the representation learning tasks on graph data specifically. Graph neural networks have been demonstrated to be effective for capturing network structure information, and the learned representations can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on node and graph classification tasks. Besides the different application scenarios, the architectures of graph neural network models also depend on the studied graph types a lot. Graph data studied in research can be generally categorized into two main types, i.e., small graphs vs. giant networks, which differ from each other a lot in the size, instance number and label annotation. Several different types of graph neural network models have been introduced for learning the representations from such different types of graphs already. In this paper, for these two different types of graph data, we will introduce the graph neural networks introduced in recent years. To be more specific, the graph neural networks introduced in this paper include IsoNN, SDBN, LF&ER, GCN, GAT, DifNN, GNL, GraphSage and seGEN. Among these graph neural network models, IsoNN, SDBN and LF&ER are initially proposed for small graphs and the remaining ones are initially proposed for giant networks instead. The readers are also suggested to refer to these papers for detailed information when reading this tutorial paper.
3D Virtual Garment Modeling from RGB Images
Authors: Yi Xu, Shanglin Yang, Wei Sun, Li Tan, Kefeng Li, Hui Zhou
Date: 2019-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixed Reality, Multi-Task Learning

We present a novel approach that constructs 3D virtual garment models from photos. Unlike previous methods that require photos of a garment on a human model or a mannequin, our approach can work with various states of the garment: on a model, on a mannequin, or on a flat surface. To construct a complete 3D virtual model, our approach only requires two images as input, one front view and one back view. We first apply a multi-task learning network called JFNet that jointly predicts fashion landmarks and parses a garment image into semantic parts. The predicted landmarks are used for estimating sizing information of the garment. Then, a template garment mesh is deformed based on the sizing information to generate the final 3D model. The semantic parts are utilized for extracting color textures from input images. The results of our approach can be used in various Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality applications.
Learning Joint Embedding with Multimodal Cues for Cross-Modal Video-Text Retrieval
Authors: Niluthpol Chowdhury Mithun, Juncheng Li, Florian Metze, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury
Date: 2018-06-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICMR 2018 6
Tasks: Image-text Retrieval, Retrieval, Text Retrieval, Video Retrieval, Video-Text Retrieval

Constructing a joint representation invariant across different modalities (e.g., video, language) is of significant importance in many multimedia applications. While there are a number of recent successes in developing effective image-text retrieval methods by learning
joint representations, the video-text retrieval task, in contrast, has not been explored to its fullest extent. In this paper, we study how
to effectively utilize available multi-modal cues from videos for the cross-modal video-text retrieval task. Based on our analysis,
we propose a novel framework that simultaneously utilizes multimodal features (different visual characteristics, audio inputs, and text) by a fusion strategy for efficient retrieval. Furthermore, we explore several loss functions in training the joint embedding and propose a modified pairwise ranking loss for the retrieval task. Experiments on MSVD and MSR-VTT datasets demonstrate that our method achieves significant performance gain compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.
Neural Simplex Architecture
Authors: Dung T. Phan, Radu Grosu, Nils Jansen, Nicola Paoletti, Scott A. Smolka, Scott D. Stoller
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Reinforcement Learning

We present the Neural Simplex Architecture (NSA), a new approach to runtime assurance that provides safety guarantees for neural controllers (obtained e.g. using reinforcement learning) of autonomous and other complex systems without unduly sacrificing performance. NSA is inspired by the Simplex control architecture of Sha et al., but with some significant differences. In the traditional approach, the advanced controller (AC) is treated as a black box; when the decision module switches control to the baseline controller (BC), the BC remains in control forever. There is relatively little work on switching control back to the AC, and there are no techniques for correcting the AC's behavior after it generates a potentially unsafe control input that causes a failover to the BC. Our NSA addresses both of these limitations. NSA not only provides safety assurances in the presence of a possibly unsafe neural controller, but can also improve the safety of such a controller in an online setting via retraining, without overly degrading its performance. To demonstrate NSA's benefits, we have conducted several significant case studies in the continuous control domain. These include a target-seeking ground rover navigating an obstacle field, and a neural controller for an artificial pancreas system.
Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Xiaolu Lu, Soumajit Pramanik, Rishiraj Saha Roy, Abdalghani Abujabal, Yafang Wang, Gerhard Weikum
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on-the-fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding training-data bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Estimation of Tire-Road Friction for Road Vehicles: a Time Delay Neural Network Approach
Authors: Alexandre M. Ribeiro, Alexandra Moutinho, André R. Fioravanti, Ely C. de Paiva
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Friction

The performance of vehicle active safety systems is dependent on the friction force arising from the contact of tires and the road surface. Therefore, an adequate knowledge of the tire-road friction coefficient is of great importance to achieve a good performance of different vehicle control systems. This paper deals with the tire-road friction coefficient estimation problem through the knowledge of lateral tire force. A time delay neural network (TDNN) is adopted for the proposed estimation design. The TDNN aims at detecting road friction coefficient under lateral force excitations avoiding the use of standard mathematical tire models, which may provide a more efficient method with robust results. Moreover, the approach is able to estimate the road friction at each wheel independently, instead of using lumped axle models simplifications. Simulations based on a realistic vehicle model are carried out on different road surfaces and driving maneuvers to verify the effectiveness of the proposed estimation method. The results are compared with a classical approach, a model-based method modeled as a nonlinear regression.
InSituNet: Deep Image Synthesis for Parameter Space Exploration of Ensemble Simulations
Authors: Wenbin He, Junpeng Wang, Hanqi Guo, Ko-Chih Wang, Han-Wei Shen, Mukund Raj, Youssef S. G. Nashed, Tom Peterka
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

We propose InSituNet, a deep learning based surrogate model to support parameter space exploration for ensemble simulations that are visualized in situ. In situ visualization, generating visualizations at simulation time, is becoming prevalent in handling large-scale simulations because of the I/O and storage constraints. However, in situ visualization approaches limit the flexibility of post-hoc exploration because the raw simulation data are no longer available. Although multiple image-based approaches have been proposed to mitigate this limitation, those approaches lack the ability to explore the simulation parameters. Our approach allows flexible exploration of parameter space for large-scale ensemble simulations by taking advantage of the recent advances in deep learning. Specifically, we design InSituNet as a convolutional regression model to learn the mapping from the simulation and visualization parameters to the visualization results. With the trained model, users can generate new images for different simulation parameters under various visualization settings, which enables in-depth analysis of the underlying ensemble simulations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of InSituNet in combustion, cosmology, and ocean simulations through quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
Clinical acceptance of software based on artificial intelligence technologies (radiology)
Authors: S. P. Morozov, A. V. Vladzymyrskyy, V. G. Klyashtornyy, A. E. Andreychenko, N. S. Kulberg, V. A. Gombolevsky, K. A. Sergunova
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00

Aim: provide a methodological framework for the process of clinical tests, clinical acceptance, and scientific assessment of algorithms and software based on the artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Clinical tests are considered as a preparation stage for the software registration as a medical product. The authors propose approaches to evaluate accuracy and efficiency of the AI algorithms for radiology.
Popt4jlib: A Parallel/Distributed Optimization Library for Java
Authors: Ioannis T. Christou
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Optimization

This paper describes the architectural design as well as key implementation details of the Open Source popt4jlib library (https://githhub.org/ioannischristou/popt4jlib) that contains a fairly large number of meta-heuristic and other exact optimization algorithms parallel/distributed Java implementations. Although we report on speedup and efficiency issues on some of the algorithms in the library, our main concern is to detail the design decisions for the key parallel/distributed infrastructure built into the library, so as to make it easier for developers to develop their own parallel implementations of the algorithms of their choice, rather than simply using it as an off-the-self application library.