pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Environment Sound Classification using Multiple Feature Channels and Attention based Deep Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Jivitesh Sharma, Ole-Christoffer Granmo, Morten Goodwin
Date: 2019-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Environment Sound Classification, General Classification, Sound Classification

In this paper, we propose a model for the Environment Sound Classification Task (ESC) that consists of multiple feature channels given as input to a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with Attention mechanism. The novelty of the paper lies in using multiple feature channels consisting of Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Gammatone Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (GFCC), the Constant Q-transform (CQT) and Chromagram. Such multiple features have never been used before for signal or audio processing. And, we employ a deeper CNN (DCNN) compared to previous models, consisting of spatially separable convolutions working on time and feature domain separately. Alongside, we use attention modules that perform channel and spatial attention together. We use some data augmentation techniques to further boost performance. Our model is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance on all three benchmark environment sound classification datasets, i.e. the UrbanSound8K (97.52%), ESC-10 (95.75%) and ESC-50 (88.50%). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a single environment sound classification model is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on all three datasets. For ESC-10 and ESC-50 datasets, the accuracy achieved by the proposed model is beyond human accuracy of 95.7% and 81.3% respectively.
Parkinson's Disease Recognition Using SPECT Image and Interpretable AI: A Tutorial
Authors: Theerasarn Pianpanit, Sermkiat Lolak, Phattarapong Sawangjai, Thapanun Sudhawiyangkul, Theerawit Wilaiprasitporn
Date: 2019-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Model Selection

In the past few years, there are several researches on Parkinson's disease (PD) recognition using single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) images with deep learning (DL) approach. However, the DL model's complexity usually results in difficult model interpretation when used in clinical. Even though there are multiple interpretation methods available for the DL model, there is no evidence of which method is suitable for PD recognition application. This tutorial aims to demonstrate the procedure to choose a suitable interpretation method for the PD recognition model. We exhibit four DCNN architectures as an example and introduce six well-known interpretation methods. Finally, we propose an evaluation method to measure the interpretation performance and a method to use the interpreted feedback for assisting in model selection. The evaluation demonstrates that the guided backpropagation and SHAP interpretation methods are suitable for PD recognition methods in different aspects. Guided backpropagation has the best ability to show fine-grained importance, which is proven by the highest Dice coefficient and lowest mean square error. On the other hand, SHAP can generate a better quality heatmap at the uptake depletion location, which outperforms other methods in discriminating the difference between PD and NC subjects. Shortly, the introduced interpretation methods can contribute to not only the PD recognition application but also to sensor data processing in an AI Era (interpretable-AI) as feedback in constructing well-suited deep learning architectures for specific applications.
Stock Price Forecasting and Hypothesis Testing Using Neural Networks
Authors: Kerda Varaku
Date: 2019-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Two-sample testing

In this work we use Recurrent Neural Networks and Multilayer Perceptrons to predict NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX stock prices from historical data. We experiment with different architectures and compare data normalization techniques. Then, we leverage those findings to question the efficient-market hypothesis through a formal statistical test.
Multi-Channel Deep Networks for Block-Based Image Compressive Sensing
Authors: Siwang Zhou, Yan He, Yonghe Liu, Chengqing Li, Jianming Zhang
Date: 2019-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Blocking, Compressive Sensing, Rolling Shutter Correction, SSIM

Incorporating deep neural networks in image compressive sensing (CS) receives intensive attentions in multimedia technology and applications recently. As deep network approaches learn the inverse mapping directly from the CS measurements, the reconstruction speed is significantly faster than the conventional CS algorithms. However, for existing network based approaches, a CS sampling procedure has to map a separate network model. This may potentially degrade the performance of image CS with block-wise sampling because of blocking artifacts, especially when multiple sampling rates are assigned to different blocks within an image. In this paper, we develop a multichannel deep network for block-based image CS by exploiting inter-block correlation with performance significantly exceeding the current state-of-the-art methods. The significant performance improvement is attributed to block-wise approximation but full image removal of blocking artifacts. Specifically, with our multichannel structure, the image blocks with a variety of sampling rates can be reconstructed in a single model. The initially reconstructed blocks are then capable of being reassembled into a full image to improve the recovered images by unrolling a hand-designed block based CS recovery algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art CS methods by a large margin in terms of objective metrics and subjective visual image quality. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/siwangzhou/DeepBCS.
Differentiable Visual Computing
Authors: Tzu-Mao Li
Date: 2019-04-27 00:00:00

Derivatives of computer graphics, image processing, and deep learning algorithms have tremendous use in guiding parameter space searches, or solving inverse problems. As the algorithms become more sophisticated, we no longer only need to differentiate simple mathematical functions, but have to deal with general programs which encode complex transformations of data. This dissertation introduces three tools for addressing the challenges that arise when obtaining and applying the derivatives for complex graphics algorithms. Traditionally, practitioners have been constrained to composing programs with a limited set of operators, or hand-deriving derivatives. We extend the image processing language Halide with reverse-mode automatic differentiation, and the ability to automatically optimize the gradient computations. This enables automatic generation of the gradients of arbitrary Halide programs, at high performance, with little programmer effort. In 3D rendering, the gradient is required with respect to variables such as camera parameters, geometry, and appearance. However, computing the gradient is challenging because the rendering integral includes visibility terms that are not differentiable. We introduce, to our knowledge, the first general-purpose differentiable ray tracer that solves the full rendering equation, while correctly taking the geometric discontinuities into account. Finally, we demonstrate that the derivatives of light path throughput can also be useful for guiding sampling in forward rendering. Simulating light transport in the presence of multi-bounce glossy effects and motion in 3D rendering is challenging due to the hard-to-sample high-contribution areas. We present a Markov Chain Monte Carlo rendering algorithm that extends Metropolis Light Transport by automatically and explicitly adapting to the local integrand, thereby increasing sampling efficiency.
Multivariate Spatial Data Visualization: A Survey
Authors: Xiangyang He, Yubo Tao, Qirui Wang, Hai Lin
Date: 2019-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization, Survey

Multivariate spatial data plays an important role in computational science and engineering simulations. The potential features and hidden relationships in multivariate data can assist scientists to gain an in-depth understanding of a scientific process, verify a hypothesis and further discover a new physical or chemical law. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art techniques for multivariate spatial data visualization. We first introduce the basic concept and characteristics of multivariate spatial data, and describe three main tasks in multivariate data visualization: feature classification, fusion visualization, and correlation analysis. Finally, we prospect potential research topics for multivariate data visualization according to the current research.
Ordered Sets for Data Analysis
Authors: Sergei O. Kuznetsov
Date: 2019-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation

This book dwells on mathematical and algorithmic issues of data analysis based on generality order of descriptions and respective precision. To speak of these topics correctly, we have to go some way getting acquainted with the important notions of relation and order theory. On the one hand, data often have a complex structure with natural order on it. On the other hand, many symbolic methods of data analysis and machine learning allow to compare the obtained classifiers w.r.t. their generality, which is also an order relation. Efficient algorithms are very important in data analysis, especially when one deals with big data, so scalability is a real issue. That is why we analyze the computational complexity of algorithms and problems of data analysis. We start from the basic definitions and facts of algorithmic complexity theory and analyze the complexity of various tools of data analysis we consider. The tools and methods of data analysis, like computing taxonomies, groups of similar objects (concepts and n-clusters), dependencies in data, classification, etc., are illustrated with applications in particular subject domains, from chemoinformatics to text mining and natural language processing.
Semi-supervised deep embedded clustering
Authors: Yazhou Ren, Kangrong Hu, Xinyi Dai, Lili Pan, Steven C. H. Hoi, Zenglin Xu
Date: 2019-01-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: Neurocomputing 2019 1
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Clustering

Clustering is an important topic in machine learning and data mining. Recently, deep clustering, which learns feature representations for clustering tasks using deep neural networks, has attracted increasing attention for various clustering applications. Deep embedded clustering (DEC) is one of the state-of-the-art deep clustering methods. However, DEC does not make use of prior knowledge to guide the learning process. In this paper, we propose a new scheme of semi-supervised deep embedded clustering (SDEC) to overcome this limitation. Concretely, SDEC learns feature representations that favor the clustering tasks and performs clustering assignments simultaneously. In contrast to DEC, SDEC incorporates pairwise constraints in the feature learning process such that data samples belonging to the same cluster are close to each other and data samples belonging to different clusters are far away from each other in the learned feature space. Extensive experiments on real benchmark data sets validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.
A Concert-planning Tool for Independent Musicians by Machine Learning Models
Authors: Xiaohan Yang, Qingyin Ge
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Classification, General Classification, regression

Our project aims at helping independent musicians to plan their concerts based on the economies of agglomeration in the music industry. Initially, we planned to design an advisory tool for both concert pricing and location selection. Nonetheless, after implementing SGD linear regression and support vector regression models, we realized that concert price does not vary significantly according to different music types, concert time, concert location and ticket venues. Therefore, to offer more useful suggestions, we focus on the location choice problem by turning it to a classification task. The overall performance of our classification model is pretty good. After tuning hyperparameters, we discovered the Random Forest gives the best performance, improving the classification result by 316%. This result reveals that we could help independent musicians better locate their concerts to where similar musicians would go, namely a place with higher network effects.
Trading Redundancy for Communication: Speeding up Distributed SGD for Non-convex Optimization
Authors: Farzin Haddadpour, Mohammad Mahdi Kamani, Mehrdad Mahdavi, Viveck Cadambe
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: International Conference on Machine Learning 2019 7
Tasks: Distributed Optimization, Diversity

Communication overhead is one of the key challenges that hinder the scalability of distributed optimization algorithms to train large neural networks. In recent years, there has been a great deal of research to alleviate communication cost by compressing the gradient vector or using local updates and periodic model averaging. In this paper, we advocate the use of redundancy towards communication-efficient distributed stochastic algorithms for non-convex optimization. In particular, we, both theoretically and practically, show that by properly infusing redundancy to the training data with model averaging, it is possible to significantly reduce the number of communication rounds. To be more precise, we show that redundancy reduces residual error in local averaging, thereby reaching the same level of accuracy with fewer rounds of communication as compared with previous algorithms. Empirical studies on CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet datasets in a distributed environment complement our theoretical results; they show that our algorithms have additional beneficial aspects including tolerance to failures, as well as greater gradient diversity.
Rethinking Irregular Scene Text Recognition
Authors: Shangbang Long, Yushuo Guan, Bingxuan Wang, Kaigui Bian, Cong Yao
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Text Detection

Reading text from natural images is challenging due to the great variety in text font, color, size, complex background and etc.. The perspective distortion and non-linear spatial arrangement of characters make it further difficult. While rectification based method is intuitively grounded and has pushed the envelope by far, its potential is far from being well exploited. In this paper, we present a bag of tricks that prove to significantly improve the performance of rectification based method. On curved text dataset, our method achieves an accuracy of 89.6% on CUTE-80 and 76.3% on Total-Text, an improvement over previous state-of-the-art by 6.3% and 14.7% respectively. Furthermore, our combination of tricks helps us win the ICDAR 2019 Arbitrary-Shaped Text Challenge (Latin script), achieving an accuracy of 74.3% on the held-out test set. We release our code as well as data samples for further exploration at https://github.com/Jyouhou/ICDAR2019-ArT-Recognition-Alchemy
Dual Attention MobDenseNet(DAMDNet) for Robust 3D Face Alignment
Authors: Lei Jiang Xiao-Jun Wu Josef Kittler
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Face Alignment, 3D Face Reconstruction, Face Alignment, Face Reconstruction

3D face alignment of monocular images is a crucial process in the recognition of faces with disguise.3D face reconstruction facilitated by alignment can restore the face structure which is helpful in detcting disguise interference.This paper proposes a dual attention mechanism and an efficient end-to-end 3D face alignment framework.We build a stable network model through Depthwise Separable Convolution, Densely Connected Convolutional and Lightweight Channel Attention Mechanism. In order to enhance the ability of the network model to extract the spatial features of the face region, we adopt Spatial Group-wise Feature enhancement module to improve the representation ability of the network. Different loss functions are applied jointly to constrain the 3D parameters of a 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) and its 3D vertices. We use a variety of data enhancement methods and generate large virtual pose face data sets to solve the data imbalance problem. The experiments on the challenging AFLW,AFLW2000-3D datasets show that our algorithm significantly improves the accuracy of 3D face alignment. Our experiments using the field DFW dataset show that DAMDNet exhibits excellent performance in the 3D alignment and reconstruction of challenging disguised faces.The model parameters and the complexity of the proposed method are also reduced significantly.The code is publicly available at https:// github.com/LeiJiangJNU/DAMDNet
Class-Based Styling: Real-time Localized Style Transfer with Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Lironne Kurzman, David Vazquez, Issam Laradji
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Style Transfer

We propose a Class-Based Styling method (CBS) that can map different styles for different object classes in real-time. CBS achieves real-time performance by carrying out two steps simultaneously. While a semantic segmentation method is used to obtain the mask of each object class in a video frame, a styling method is used to style that frame globally. Then an object class can be styled by combining the segmentation mask and the styled image. The user can also select multiple styles so that different object classes can have different styles in a single frame. For semantic segmentation, we leverage DABNet that achieves high accuracy, yet only has 0.76 million parameters and runs at 104 FPS. For the style transfer step, we use a popular real-time method proposed by Johnson et al. [7]. We evaluated CBS on a video of the CityScapes dataset and observed high-quality localized style transfer results for different object classes and real-time performance.
Revisiting CycleGAN for semi-supervised segmentation
Authors: Arnab Kumar Mondal, Aniket Agarwal, Jose Dolz, Christian Desrosiers
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Style Transfer

In this work, we study the problem of training deep networks for semantic image segmentation using only a fraction of annotated images, which may significantly reduce human annotation efforts. Particularly, we propose a strategy that exploits the unpaired image style transfer capabilities of CycleGAN in semi-supervised segmentation. Unlike recent works using adversarial learning for semi-supervised segmentation, we enforce cycle consistency to learn a bidirectional mapping between unpaired images and segmentation masks. This adds an unsupervised regularization effect that boosts the segmentation performance when annotated data is limited. Experiments on three different public segmentation benchmarks (PASCAL VOC 2012, Cityscapes and ACDC) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The proposed model achieves 2-4% of improvement with respect to the baseline and outperforms recent approaches for this task, particularly in low labeled data regime.
LU-Net: An Efficient Network for 3D LiDAR Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation Based on End-to-End-Learned 3D Features and U-Net
Authors: Pierre Biasutti, Vincent Lepetit, Jean-François Aujol, Mathieu Brédif, Aurélie Bugeau
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Specificity

We propose LU-Net -- for LiDAR U-Net, a new method for the semantic segmentation of a 3D LiDAR point cloud. Instead of applying some global 3D segmentation method such as PointNet, we propose an end-to-end architecture for LiDAR point cloud semantic segmentation that efficiently solves the problem as an image processing problem. We first extract high-level 3D features for each point given its 3D neighbors. Then, these features are projected into a 2D multichannel range-image by considering the topology of the sensor. Thanks to these learned features and this projection, we can finally perform the segmentation using a simple U-Net segmentation network, which performs very well while being very efficient. In this way, we can exploit both the 3D nature of the data and the specificity of the LiDAR sensor. This approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by a large margin on the KITTI dataset, as our experiments show. Moreover, this approach operates at 24fps on a single GPU. This is above the acquisition rate of common LiDAR sensors which makes it suitable for real-time applications.
Which Has Better Visual Quality: The Clear Blue Sky or a Blurry Animal?
Authors: Dingquan Li, Tingting Jiang, Weisi Lin, Ming Jiang
Date: 2018-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 2018 10
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Image content variation is a typical and challenging problem in no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). This work pays special attention to the impact of image content variation on NR-IQA methods. To better analyze this impact, we focus on blur-dominated distortions to exclude the impacts of distortion-type variations. We empirically show that current NR-IQA methods are inconsistent with human visual perception when predicting the relative quality of image pairs with different image contents. In view of deep semantic features of pretrained image classification neural networks always containing discriminative image content information, we put forward a new NR-IQA method based on semantic feature aggregation (SFA) to alleviate the impact of image content variation. Specifically, instead of resizing the image, we first crop multiple overlapping patches over the entire distorted image to avoid introducing geometric deformations. Then, according to an adaptive layer selection procedure, we extract deep semantic features by leveraging the power of a pretrained image classification model for its inherent content-aware property. After that, the local patch features are aggregated using several statistical structures. Finally, a linear regression model is trained for mapping the aggregated global features to image-quality scores. The proposed method, SFA, is compared with nine representative blur-specific NR-IQA methods, two general-purpose NR-IQA methods, and two extra full-reference IQA methods on Gaussian blur images (with and without Gaussian noise/JPEG compression) and realistic blur images from multiple databases, including LIVE, TID2008, TID2013, MLIVE1, MLIVE2, BID, and CLIVE. Experimental results show that SFA is superior to the state-of-the-art NR methods on all seven databases. It is also verified that deep semantic features play a crucial role in addressing image content variation, and this provides a new perspective for NR-IQA.