pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Attention Mechanism Enhanced Kernel Prediction Networks for Denoising of Burst Images
Authors: Bin Zhang, Shenyao Jin, Yili Xia, Yongming Huang, Zixiang Xiong
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Deep learning based image denoising methods have been extensively investigated. In this paper, attention mechanism enhanced kernel prediction networks (AME-KPNs) are proposed for burst image denoising, in which, nearly cost-free attention modules are adopted to first refine the feature maps and to further make a full use of the inter-frame and intra-frame redundancies within the whole image burst. The proposed AME-KPNs output per-pixel spatially-adaptive kernels, residual maps and corresponding weight maps, in which, the predicted kernels roughly restore clean pixels at their corresponding locations via an adaptive convolution operation, and subsequently, residuals are weighted and summed to compensate the limited receptive field of predicted kernels. Simulations and real-world experiments are conducted to illustrate the robustness of the proposed AME-KPNs in burst image denoising.
Towards Computing Inferences from English News Headlines
Authors: Elizabeth Jasmi George, Radhika Mamidi
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00

Newspapers are a popular form of written discourse, read by many people, thanks to the novelty of the information provided by the news content in it. A headline is the most widely read part of any newspaper due to its appearance in a bigger font and sometimes in colour print. In this paper, we suggest and implement a method for computing inferences from English news headlines, excluding the information from the context in which the headlines appear. This method attempts to generate the possible assumptions a reader formulates in mind upon reading a fresh headline. The generated inferences could be useful for assessing the impact of the news headline on readers including children. The understandability of the current state of social affairs depends greatly on the assimilation of the headlines. As the inferences that are independent of the context depend mainly on the syntax of the headline, dependency trees of headlines are used in this approach, to find the syntactical structure of the headlines and to compute inferences out of them.
ALOHA: Artificial Learning of Human Attributes for Dialogue Agents
Authors: Aaron W. Li, Veronica Jiang, Steven Y. Feng, Julia Sprague, Wei Zhou, Jesse Hoey
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Language Modelling, Retrieval

For conversational AI and virtual assistants to communicate with humans in a realistic way, they must exhibit human characteristics such as expression of emotion and personality. Current attempts toward constructing human-like dialogue agents have presented significant difficulties. We propose Human Level Attributes (HLAs) based on tropes as the basis of a method for learning dialogue agents that can imitate the personalities of fictional characters. Tropes are characteristics of fictional personalities that are observed recurrently and determined by viewers' impressions. By combining detailed HLA data with dialogue data for specific characters, we present a dataset, HLA-Chat, that models character profiles and gives dialogue agents the ability to learn characters' language styles through their HLAs. We then introduce a three-component system, ALOHA (which stands for Artificial Learning of Human Attributes), that combines character space mapping, character community detection, and language style retrieval to build a character (or personality) specific language model. Our preliminary experiments demonstrate that two variations of ALOHA, combined with our proposed dataset, can outperform baseline models at identifying the correct dialogue responses of chosen target characters, and are stable regardless of the character's identity, the genre of the show, and the context of the dialogue.
Diversity in Fashion Recommendation using Semantic Parsing
Authors: Sagar Verma, Sukhad Anand, Chetan Arora, Atul Rai
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Retrieval, Semantic Parsing, Triplet

Developing recommendation system for fashion images is challenging due to the inherent ambiguity associated with what criterion a user is looking at. Suggesting multiple images where each output image is similar to the query image on the basis of a different feature or part is one way to mitigate the problem. Existing works for fashion recommendation have used Siamese or Triplet network to learn features between a similar pair and a similar-dissimilar triplet respectively. However, these methods do not provide basic information such as, how two clothing images are similar, or which parts present in the two images make them similar. In this paper, we propose to recommend images by explicitly learning and exploiting part based similarity. We propose a novel approach of learning discriminative features from weakly-supervised data by using visual attention over the parts and a texture encoding network. We show that the learned features surpass the state-of-the-art in retrieval task on DeepFashion dataset. We then use the proposed model to recommend fashion images having an explicit variation with respect to similarity of any of the parts.
Hierarchical Attentive Knowledge Graph Embedding for Personalized Recommendation
Authors: Xiao Sha, Zhu Sun, Jie Zhang
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Graph Neural Network, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have proven to be effective for high-quality recommendation, where the connectivities between users and items provide rich and complementary information to user-item interactions. Most existing methods, however, are insufficient to exploit the KGs for capturing user preferences, as they either represent the user-item connectivities via paths with limited expressiveness or implicitly model them by propagating information over the entire KG with inevitable noise. In this paper, we design a novel hierarchical attentive knowledge graph embedding (HAKG) framework to exploit the KGs for effective recommendation. Specifically, HAKG first extracts the expressive subgraphs that link user-item pairs to characterize their connectivities, which accommodate both the semantics and topology of KGs. The subgraphs are then encoded via a hierarchical attentive subgraph encoding to generate effective subgraph embeddings for enhanced user preference prediction. Extensive experiments show the superiority of HAKG against state-of-the-art recommendation methods, as well as its potential in alleviating the data sparsity issue.
PointRNN: Point Recurrent Neural Network for Moving Point Cloud Processing
Authors: Hehe Fan, Yi Yang
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Moving Point Cloud Processing

In this paper, we introduce a Point Recurrent Neural Network (PointRNN) for moving point cloud processing. At each time step, PointRNN takes point coordinates $\boldsymbol{P} \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times 3}$ and point features $\boldsymbol{X} \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$ as input ($n$ and $d$ denote the number of points and the number of feature channels, respectively). The state of PointRNN is composed of point coordinates $\boldsymbol{P}$ and point states $\boldsymbol{S} \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d'}$ ($d'$ denotes the number of state channels). Similarly, the output of PointRNN is composed of $\boldsymbol{P}$ and new point features $\boldsymbol{Y} \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d''}$ ($d''$ denotes the number of new feature channels). Since point clouds are orderless, point features and states from two time steps can not be directly operated. Therefore, a point-based spatiotemporally-local correlation is adopted to aggregate point features and states according to point coordinates. We further propose two variants of PointRNN, i.e., Point Gated Recurrent Unit (PointGRU) and Point Long Short-Term Memory (PointLSTM). We apply PointRNN, PointGRU and PointLSTM to moving point cloud prediction, which aims to predict the future trajectories of points in a set given their history movements. Experimental results show that PointRNN, PointGRU and PointLSTM are able to produce correct predictions on both synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating their ability to model point cloud sequences. The code has been released at \url{https://github.com/hehefan/PointRNN}.
Multi-View Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Minne Li, Lisheng Wu, Haitham Bou Ammar, Jun Wang
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper is concerned with multi-view reinforcement learning (MVRL), which allows for decision making when agents share common dynamics but adhere to different observation models. We define the MVRL framework by extending partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) to support more than one observation model and propose two solution methods through observation augmentation and cross-view policy transfer. We empirically evaluate our method and demonstrate its effectiveness in a variety of environments. Specifically, we show reductions in sample complexities and computational time for acquiring policies that handle multi-view environments.
Unsupervised Context Rewriting for Open Domain Conversation
Authors: Kun Zhou, Kai Zhang, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Jingsong Yu
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Decoder, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Response Generation, Retrieval

Context modeling has a pivotal role in open domain conversation. Existing works either use heuristic methods or jointly learn context modeling and response generation with an encoder-decoder framework. This paper proposes an explicit context rewriting method, which rewrites the last utterance by considering context history. We leverage pseudo-parallel data and elaborate a context rewriting network, which is built upon the CopyNet with the reinforcement learning method. The rewritten utterance is beneficial to candidate retrieval, explainable context modeling, as well as enabling to employ a single-turn framework to the multi-turn scenario. The empirical results show that our model outperforms baselines in terms of the rewriting quality, the multi-turn response generation, and the end-to-end retrieval-based chatbots.
Point Process Flows
Authors: Nazanin Mehrasa, Ruizhi Deng, Mohamed Osama Ahmed, Bo Chang, JiaWei He, Thibaut Durand, Marcus Brubaker, Greg Mori
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Processes

Event sequences can be modeled by temporal point processes (TPPs) to capture their asynchronous and probabilistic nature. We propose an intensity-free framework that directly models the point process distribution by utilizing normalizing flows. This approach is capable of capturing highly complex temporal distributions and does not rely on restrictive parametric forms. Comparisons with state-of-the-art baseline models on both synthetic and challenging real-life datasets show that the proposed framework is effective at modeling the stochasticity of discrete event sequences.
Robust modal regression with direct log-density derivative estimation
Authors: Hiroaki Sasaki, Tomoya Sakai, Takafumi Kanamori
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, regression

Modal regression is aimed at estimating the global mode (i.e., global maximum) of the conditional density function of the output variable given input variables, and has led to regression methods robust against heavy-tailed or skewed noises. The conditional mode is often estimated through maximization of the modal regression risk (MRR). In order to apply a gradient method for the maximization, the fundamental challenge is accurate approximation of the gradient of MRR, not MRR itself. To overcome this challenge, in this paper, we take a novel approach of directly approximating the gradient of MRR. To approximate the gradient, we develop kernelized and neural-network-based versions of the least-squares log-density derivative estimator, which directly approximates the derivative of the log-density without density estimation. With direct approximation of the MRR gradient, we first propose a modal regression method with kernels, and derive a new parameter update rule based on a fixed-point method. Then, the derived update rule is theoretically proved to have a monotonic hill-climbing property towards the conditional mode. Furthermore, we indicate that our approach of directly approximating the gradient is compatible with recent sophisticated stochastic gradient methods (e.g., Adam), and then propose another modal regression method based on neural networks. Finally, the superior performance of the proposed methods is demonstrated on various artificial and benchmark datasets.
$b$-Bit Sketch Trie: Scalable Similarity Search on Integer Sketches
Authors: Shunsuke Kanda, Yasuo Tabei
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00

Recently, randomly mapping vectorial data to strings of discrete symbols (i.e., sketches) for fast and space-efficient similarity searches has become popular. Such random mapping is called similarity-preserving hashing and approximates a similarity metric by using the Hamming distance. Although many efficient similarity searches have been proposed, most of them are designed for binary sketches. Similarity searches on integer sketches are in their infancy. In this paper, we present a novel space-efficient trie named $b$-bit sketch trie on integer sketches for scalable similarity searches by leveraging the idea behind succinct data structures (i.e., space-efficient data structures while supporting various data operations in the compressed format) and a favorable property of integer sketches as fixed-length strings. Our experimental results obtained using real-world datasets show that a trie-based index is built from integer sketches and efficiently performs similarity searches on the index by pruning useless portions of the search space, which greatly improves the search time and space-efficiency of the similarity search. The experimental results show that our similarity search is at most one order of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art similarity searches. Besides, our method needs only 10 GiB of memory on a billion-scale database, while state-of-the-art similarity searches need 29 GiB of memory.
Learning to Answer Subjective, Specific Product-Related Queries using Customer Reviews by Adversarial Domain Adaptation
Authors: Manirupa Das, Zhen Wang, Evan Jaffe, Madhuja Chattopadhyay, Eric Fosler-Lussier, Rajiv Ramnath
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Sentence

Online customer reviews on large-scale e-commerce websites, represent a rich and varied source of opinion data, often providing subjective qualitative assessments of product usage that can help potential customers to discover features that meet their personal needs and preferences. Thus they have the potential to automatically answer specific queries about products, and to address the problems of answer starvation and answer augmentation on associated consumer Q & A forums, by providing good answer alternatives. In this work, we explore several recently successful neural approaches to modeling sentence pairs, that could better learn the relationship between questions and ground truth answers, and thus help infer reviews that can best answer a question or augment a given answer. In particular, we hypothesize that our adversarial domain adaptation-based approach, due to its ability to additionally learn domain-invariant features from a large number of unlabeled, unpaired question-review samples, would perform better than our proposed baselines, at answering specific, subjective product-related queries using reviews. We validate this hypothesis using a small gold standard dataset of question-review pairs evaluated by human experts, significantly surpassing our chosen baselines. Moreover, our approach, using no labeled question-review sentence pair data for training, gives performance at par with another method utilizing labeled question-review samples for the same task.
Learning Compositional Koopman Operators for Model-Based Control
Authors: Yunzhu Li, Hao He, Jiajun Wu, Dina Katabi, Antonio Torralba
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: model

Finding an embedding space for a linear approximation of a nonlinear dynamical system enables efficient system identification and control synthesis. The Koopman operator theory lays the foundation for identifying the nonlinear-to-linear coordinate transformations with data-driven methods. Recently, researchers have proposed to use deep neural networks as a more expressive class of basis functions for calculating the Koopman operators. These approaches, however, assume a fixed dimensional state space; they are therefore not applicable to scenarios with a variable number of objects. In this paper, we propose to learn compositional Koopman operators, using graph neural networks to encode the state into object-centric embeddings and using a block-wise linear transition matrix to regularize the shared structure across objects. The learned dynamics can quickly adapt to new environments of unknown physical parameters and produce control signals to achieve a specified goal. Our experiments on manipulating ropes and controlling soft robots show that the proposed method has better efficiency and generalization ability than existing baselines.
BOBBY2: Buffer Based Robust High-Speed Object Tracking
Authors: Keifer Lee, Jun Jet Tai, Swee King Phang
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking, valid, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In this work, a novel high-speed single object tracker that is robust against non-semantic distractor exemplars is introduced; dubbed BOBBY2. It incorporates a novel exemplar buffer module that sparsely caches the target's appearance across time, enabling it to adapt to potential target deformation. As for training, an augmented ImageNet-VID dataset was used in conjunction with the one cycle policy, enabling it to reach convergence with less than 2 epoch worth of data. For validation, the model was benchmarked on the GOT-10k dataset and on an additional small, albeit challenging custom UAV dataset collected with the TU-3 UAV. We demonstrate that the exemplar buffer is capable of providing redundancies in case of unintended target drifts, a desirable trait in any middle to long term tracking. Even when the buffer is predominantly filled with distractors instead of valid exemplars, BOBBY2 is capable of maintaining a near-optimal level of accuracy. BOBBY2 manages to achieve a very competitive result on the GOT-10k dataset and to a lesser degree on the challenging custom TU-3 dataset, without fine-tuning, demonstrating its generalizability. In terms of speed, BOBBY2 utilizes a stripped down AlexNet as feature extractor with 63% less parameters than a vanilla AlexNet, thus being able to run at a competitive 85 FPS.
Eye in the Sky: Drone-Based Object Tracking and 3D Localization
Authors: Haotian Zhang, Gaoang Wang, Zhichao Lei, Jenq-Neng Hwang
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: drone-based object tracking, Multi-Object Tracking, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking

Drones, or general UAVs, equipped with a single camera have been widely deployed to a broad range of applications, such as aerial photography, fast goods delivery and most importantly, surveillance. Despite the great progress achieved in computer vision algorithms, these algorithms are not usually optimized for dealing with images or video sequences acquired by drones, due to various challenges such as occlusion, fast camera motion and pose variation. In this paper, a drone-based multi-object tracking and 3D localization scheme is proposed based on the deep learning based object detection. We first combine a multi-object tracking method called TrackletNet Tracker (TNT) which utilizes temporal and appearance information to track detected objects located on the ground for UAV applications. Then, we are also able to localize the tracked ground objects based on the group plane estimated from the Multi-View Stereo technique. The system deployed on the drone can not only detect and track the objects in a scene, but can also localize their 3D coordinates in meters with respect to the drone camera. The experiments have proved our tracker can reliably handle most of the detected objects captured by drones and achieve favorable 3D localization performance when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.
Entity Summarization: State of the Art and Future Challenges
Authors: Qingxia Liu, Gong Cheng, Kalpa Gunaratna, Yuzhong Qu
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Information Retrieval, Informativeness, Re-Ranking

The increasing availability of semantic data has substantially enhanced Web applications. Semantic data such as RDF data is commonly represented as entity-property-value triples. The magnitude of semantic data, in particular the large number of triples describing an entity, could overload users with excessive amounts of information. This has motivated fruitful research on automated generation of summaries for entity descriptions to satisfy users' information needs efficiently and effectively. We focus on this prominent topic of entity summarization, and our research objective is to present the first comprehensive survey of entity summarization research. Rather than separately reviewing each method, our contributions include (1) identifying and classifying technical features of existing methods to form a high-level overview, (2) identifying and classifying frameworks for combining multiple technical features adopted by existing methods, (3) collecting known benchmarks for intrinsic evaluation and efforts for extrinsic evaluation, and (4) suggesting research directions for future work. By investigating the literature, we synthesized two hierarchies of techniques. The first hierarchy categories generic technical features into several perspectives: frequency and centrality, informativeness, and diversity and coverage. In the second hierarchy we present domain-specific and task-specific technical features, including the use of domain knowledge, context awareness, and personalization. Our review demonstrated that existing methods are mainly unsupervised and they combine multiple technical features using various frameworks: random surfer models, similarity-based grouping, MMR-like re-ranking, or combinatorial optimization. We also found a few deep learning based methods in recent research.
AFO-TAD: Anchor-free One-Stage Detector for Temporal Action Detection
Authors: Yiping Tang, Chuang Niu, Minghao Dong, Shenghan Ren, Jimin Liang
Date: 2019-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Video Understanding

Temporal action detection is a fundamental yet challenging task in video understanding. Many of the state-of-the-art methods predict the boundaries of action instances based on predetermined anchors akin to the two-dimensional object detection detectors. However, it is hard to detect all the action instances with predetermined temporal scales because the durations of instances in untrimmed videos can vary from few seconds to several minutes. In this paper, we propose a novel action detection architecture named anchor-free one-stage temporal action detector (AFO-TAD). AFO-TAD achieves better performance for detecting action instances with arbitrary lengths and high temporal resolution, which can be attributed to two aspects. First, we design a receptive field adaption module which dynamically adjusts the receptive field for precise action detection. Second, AFO-TAD directly predicts the categories and boundaries at every temporal locations without predetermined anchors. Extensive experiments show that AFO-TAD improves the state-of-the-art performance on THUMOS'14.