pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
KBSET -- Knowledge-Based Support for Scholarly Editing and Text Processing
Authors: Jana Kittelmann, Christoph Wernhard
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00

KBSET supports a practical workflow for scholarly editing, based on using LaTeX with dedicated commands for semantics-oriented markup and a Prolog-implemented core system. Prolog plays there various roles: as query language and access mechanism for large Semantic Web fact bases, as data representation of structured documents and as a workflow model for advanced application tasks. The core system includes a LaTeX parser and a facility for the identification of named entities. We also sketch future perspectives of this approach to scholarly editing based on techniques of computational logic.
On the rate of convergence of fully connected very deep neural network regression estimates
Authors: Michael Kohler, Sophie Langer
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Recent results in nonparametric regression show that deep learning, i.e., neural network estimates with many hidden layers, are able to circumvent the so-called curse of dimensionality in case that suitable restrictions on the structure of the regression function hold. One key feature of the neural networks used in these results is that their network architecture has a further constraint, namely the network sparsity. In this paper we show that we can get similar results also for least squares estimates based on simple fully connected neural networks with ReLU activation functions. Here either the number of neurons per hidden layer is fixed and the number of hidden layers tends to infinity suitably fast for sample size tending to infinity, or the number of hidden layers is bounded by some logarithmic factor in the sample size and the number of neurons per hidden layer tends to infinity suitably fast for sample size tending to infinity. The proof is based on new approximation results concerning deep neural networks.
Texel-Att: Representing and Classifying Element-based Textures by Attributes
Authors: Marco Godi, Christian Joppi, Andrea Giachetti, Fabio Pellacini, Marco Cristani
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Element-based textures are a kind of texture formed by nameable elements, the texels [1], distributed according to specific statistical distributions; it is of primary importance in many sectors, namely textile, fashion and interior design industry. State-of-theart texture descriptors fail to properly characterize element-based texture, so we present Texel-Att to fill this gap. Texel-Att is the first fine-grained, attribute-based representation and classification framework for element-based textures. It first individuates texels, characterizing them with individual attributes; subsequently, texels are grouped and characterized through layout attributes, which give the Texel-Att representation. Texels are detected by a Mask-RCNN, trained on a brand-new element-based texture dataset, ElBa, containing 30K texture images with 3M fully-annotated texels. Examples of individual and layout attributes are exhibited to give a glimpse on the level of achievable graininess. In the experiments, we present detection results to show that texels can be precisely individuated, even on textures "in the wild"; to this sake, we individuate the element-based classes of the Describable Texture Dataset (DTD), where almost 900K texels have been manually annotated, leading to the Element-based DTD (E-DTD). Subsequently, classification and ranking results demonstrate the expressivity of Texel-Att on ElBa and E-DTD, overcoming the alternative features and relative attributes, doubling the best performance in some cases; finally, we report interactive search results on ElBa and E-DTD: with Texel-Att on the E-DTD dataset we are able to individuate within 10 iterations the desired texture in the 90% of cases, against the 71% obtained with a combination of the finest existing attributes so far. Dataset and code is available at https://github.com/godimarcovr/Texel-Att
Probing Representations Learned by Multimodal Recurrent and Transformer Models
Authors: Jindřich Libovický, Pranava Madhyastha
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Multimodal Machine Translation, Retrieval, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, Translation

Recent literature shows that large-scale language modeling provides excellent reusable sentence representations with both recurrent and self-attentive architectures. However, there has been less clarity on the commonalities and differences in the representational properties induced by the two architectures. It also has been shown that visual information serves as one of the means for grounding sentence representations. In this paper, we present a meta-study assessing the representational quality of models where the training signal is obtained from different modalities, in particular, language modeling, image features prediction, and both textual and multimodal machine translation. We evaluate textual and visual features of sentence representations obtained using predominant approaches on image retrieval and semantic textual similarity. Our experiments reveal that on moderate-sized datasets, a sentence counterpart in a target language or visual modality provides much stronger training signal for sentence representation than language modeling. Importantly, we observe that while the Transformer models achieve superior machine translation quality, representations from the recurrent neural network based models perform significantly better over tasks focused on semantic relevance.
Improving Self-Supervised Single View Depth Estimation by Masking Occlusion
Authors: Maarten Schellevis
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth And Camera Motion, Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Image Reconstruction, Monocular Depth Estimation

Single view depth estimation models can be trained from video footage using a self-supervised end-to-end approach with view synthesis as the supervisory signal. This is achieved with a framework that predicts depth and camera motion, with a loss based on reconstructing a target video frame from temporally adjacent frames. In this context, occlusion relates to parts of a scene that can be observed in the target frame but not in a frame used for image reconstruction. Since the image reconstruction is based on sampling from the adjacent frame, and occluded areas by definition cannot be sampled, reconstructed occluded areas corrupt to the supervisory signal. In previous work arXiv:1806.01260 occlusion is handled based on reconstruction error; at each pixel location, only the reconstruction with the lowest error is included in the loss. The current study aims to determine whether performance improvements of depth estimation models can be gained by during training only ignoring those regions that are affected by occlusion. In this work we introduce occlusion mask, a mask that during training can be used to specifically ignore regions that cannot be reconstructed due to occlusions. Occlusion mask is based entirely on predicted depth information. We introduce two novel loss formulations which incorporate the occlusion mask. The method and implementation of arXiv:1806.01260 serves as the foundation for our modifications as well as the baseline in our experiments. We demonstrate that (i) incorporating occlusion mask in the loss function improves the performance of single image depth prediction models on the KITTI benchmark. (ii) loss functions that select from reconstructions based on error are able to ignore some of the reprojection error caused by object motion.
Texture Retrieval in the Wild through detection-based attributes
Authors: Christian Joppi, Marco Godi, Andrea Giachetti, Fabio Pellacini, Marco Cristani
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Capturing the essence of a textile image in a robust way is important to retrieve it in a large repository, especially if it has been acquired in the wild (by taking a photo of the textile of interest). In this paper we show that a texel-based representation fits well with this task. In particular, we refer to Texel-Att, a recent texel-based descriptor which has shown to capture fine grained variations of a texture, for retrieval purposes. After a brief explanation of Texel-Att, we will show in our experiments that this descriptor is robust to distortions resulting from acquisitions in the wild by setting up an experiment in which textures from the ElBa (an Element-Based texture dataset) are artificially distorted and then used to retrieve the original image. We compare our approach with existing descriptors using a simple ranking framework based on distance functions. Results show that even under extreme conditions (such as a down-sampling with a factor of 10), we perform better than alternative approaches.
Minimum Delay Object Detection From Video
Authors: Dong Lao, Ganesh Sundaramoorthi
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

We consider the problem of detecting objects, as they come into view, from videos in an online fashion. We provide the first real-time solution that is guaranteed to minimize the delay, i.e., the time between when the object comes in view and the declared detection time, subject to acceptable levels of detection accuracy. The method leverages modern CNN-based object detectors that operate on a single frame, to aggregate detection results over frames to provide reliable detection at a rate, specified by the user, in guaranteed minimal delay. To do this, we formulate the problem as a Quickest Detection problem, which provides the aforementioned guarantees. We derive our algorithms from this theory. We show in experiments, that with an overhead of just 50 fps, we can increase the number of correct detections and decrease the overall computational cost compared to running a modern single-frame detector.
Deep Neural Network Ensembles against Deception: Ensemble Diversity, Accuracy and Robustness
Authors: Ling Liu, Wenqi Wei, Ka-Ho Chow, Margaret Loper, Emre Gursoy, Stacey Truex, Yanzhao Wu
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Ensemble Learning

Ensemble learning is a methodology that integrates multiple DNN learners for improving prediction performance of individual learners. Diversity is greater when the errors of the ensemble prediction is more uniformly distributed. Greater diversity is highly correlated with the increase in ensemble accuracy. Another attractive property of diversity optimized ensemble learning is its robustness against deception: an adversarial perturbation attack can mislead one DNN model to misclassify but may not fool other ensemble DNN members consistently. In this paper we first give an overview of the concept of ensemble diversity and examine the three types of ensemble diversity in the context of DNN classifiers. We then describe a set of ensemble diversity measures, a suite of algorithms for creating diversity ensembles and for performing ensemble consensus (voted or learned) for generating high accuracy ensemble output by strategically combining outputs of individual members. This paper concludes with a discussion on a set of open issues in quantifying ensemble diversity for robust deep learning.
DV3+HED+: A DCNNs-based Framework to Monitor Temporary Works and ESAs in Railway Construction Project Using VHR Satellite Images
Authors: Rui Guo, Ronghua Liu, Na Li, Wei Liu
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Current VHR(Very High Resolution) satellite images enable the detailed monitoring of the earth and can capture the ongoing works of railway construction. In this paper, we present an integrated framework applied to monitoring the railway construction in China, using QuickBird, GF-2 and Google Earth VHR satellite images. We also construct a novel DCNNs-based (Deep Convolutional Neural Networks) semantic segmentation network to label the temporary works such as borrow & spoil area, camp, beam yard and ESAs(Environmental Sensitive Areas) such as resident houses throughout the whole railway construction project using VHR satellite images. In addition, we employ HED edge detection sub-network to refine the boundary details and attention cross entropy loss function to fit the sample class disequilibrium problem. Our semantic segmentation network is trained on 572 VHR true color images, and tested on the 15 QuickBird true color images along Ruichang-Jiujiang railway during 2015-2017. The experiment results show that compared with the existing state-of-the-art approach, our approach has obvious improvements with an overall accuracy of more than 80%.
Document Hashing with Mixture-Prior Generative Models
Authors: Wei Dong, Qinliang Su, Dinghan Shen, Changyou Chen
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Hashing is promising for large-scale information retrieval tasks thanks to the efficiency of distance evaluation between binary codes. Generative hashing is often used to generate hashing codes in an unsupervised way. However, existing generative hashing methods only considered the use of simple priors, like Gaussian and Bernoulli priors, which limits these methods to further improve their performance. In this paper, two mixture-prior generative models are proposed, under the objective to produce high-quality hashing codes for documents. Specifically, a Gaussian mixture prior is first imposed onto the variational auto-encoder (VAE), followed by a separate step to cast the continuous latent representation of VAE into binary code. To avoid the performance loss caused by the separate casting, a model using a Bernoulli mixture prior is further developed, in which an end-to-end training is admitted by resorting to the straight-through (ST) discrete gradient estimator. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed methods, especially the one using Bernoulli mixture priors, consistently outperform existing ones by a substantial margin.
Solving Discounted Stochastic Two-Player Games with Near-Optimal Time and Sample Complexity
Authors: Aaron Sidford, Mengdi Wang, Lin F. Yang, Yinyu Ye
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we settle the sampling complexity of solving discounted two-player turn-based zero-sum stochastic games up to polylogarithmic factors. Given a stochastic game with discount factor $\gamma\in(0,1)$ we provide an algorithm that computes an $\epsilon$-optimal strategy with high-probability given $\tilde{O}((1 - \gamma)^{-3} \epsilon^{-2})$ samples from the transition function for each state-action-pair. Our algorithm runs in time nearly linear in the number of samples and uses space nearly linear in the number of state-action pairs. As stochastic games generalize Markov decision processes (MDPs) our runtime and sample complexities are optimal due to Azar et al (2013). We achieve our results by showing how to generalize a near-optimal Q-learning based algorithms for MDP, in particular Sidford et al (2018), to two-player strategy computation algorithms. This overcomes limitations of standard Q-learning and strategy iteration or alternating minimization based approaches and we hope will pave the way for future reinforcement learning results by facilitating the extension of MDP results to multi-agent settings with little loss.
StarNet: Targeted Computation for Object Detection in Point Clouds
Authors: Jiquan Ngiam, Benjamin Caine, Wei Han, Brandon Yang, Yuning Chai, Pei Sun, Yin Zhou, Xi Yi, Ouais Alsharif, Patrick Nguyen, Zhifeng Chen, Jonathon Shlens, Vijay Vasudevan
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Pedestrian Detection, Self-Driving Cars

Detecting objects from LiDAR point clouds is an important component of self-driving car technology as LiDAR provides high resolution spatial information. Previous work on point-cloud 3D object detection has re-purposed convolutional approaches from traditional camera imagery. In this work, we present an object detection system called StarNet designed specifically to take advantage of the sparse and 3D nature of point cloud data. StarNet is entirely point-based, uses no global information, has data dependent anchors, and uses sampling instead of learned region proposals. We demonstrate how this design leads to competitive or superior performance on the large Waymo Open Dataset and the KITTI detection dataset, as compared to convolutional baselines. In particular, we show how our detector can outperform a competitive baseline on Pedestrian detection on the Waymo Open Dataset by more than 7 absolute mAP while being more computationally efficient. We show how our redesign---namely using only local information and using sampling instead of learned proposals---leads to a significantly more flexible and adaptable system: we demonstrate how we can vary the computational cost of a single trained StarNet without retraining, and how we can target proposals towards areas of interest with priors and heuristics. Finally, we show how our design allows for incorporating temporal context by using detections from previous frames to target computation of the detector, which leads to further improvements in performance without additional computational cost.
PopEval: A Character-Level Approach to End-To-End Evaluation Compatible with Word-Level Benchmark Dataset
Authors: Hong-Seok Lee, Youngmin Yoon, Pil-Hoon Jang, Chankyu Choi
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The most prevalent scope of interest for OCR applications used to be scanned documents, but it has now shifted towards the natural scene. Despite the change of times, the existing evaluation methods are still based on the old criteria suited better for the past interests. In this paper, we propose PopEval, a novel evaluation approach for the recent OCR interests. The new and past evaluation algorithms were compared through the results on various datasets and OCR models. Compared to the other evaluation methods, the proposed evaluation algorithm was closer to the human's qualitative evaluation than other existing methods. Although the evaluation algorithm was devised as a character-level approach, the comparative experiment revealed that PopEval is also compatible on existing benchmark datasets annotated at word-level. The proposed evaluation algorithm is not only applicable to current end-to-end tasks, but also suggests a new direction to redesign the evaluation concept for further OCR researches.
A Deep Neural Information Fusion Architecture for Textual Network Embeddings
Authors: Zenan Xu, Qinliang Su, Xiaojun Quan, Weijia Zhang
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11

Textual network embeddings aim to learn a low-dimensional representation for every node in the network so that both the structural and textual information from the networks can be well preserved in the representations. Traditionally, the structural and textual embeddings were learned by models that rarely take the mutual influences between them into account. In this paper, a deep neural architecture is proposed to effectively fuse the two kinds of informations into one representation. The novelties of the proposed architecture are manifested in the aspects of a newly defined objective function, the complementary information fusion method for structural and textual features, and the mutual gate mechanism for textual feature extraction. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the comparing methods on all three datasets.
Targeted Source Detection for Environmental Data
Authors: Guanjie Zheng, Mengqi Liu, Tao Wen, Hongjian Wang, Huaxiu Yao, Susan L. Brantley, Zhenhui Li
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00

In the face of growing needs for water and energy, a fundamental understanding of the environmental impacts of human activities becomes critical for managing water and energy resources, remedying water pollution, and making regulatory policy wisely. Among activities that impact the environment, oil and gas production, wastewater transport, and urbanization are included. In addition to the occurrence of anthropogenic contamination, the presence of some contaminants (e.g., methane, salt, and sulfate) of natural origin is not uncommon. Therefore, scientists sometimes find it difficult to identify the sources of contaminants in the coupled natural and human systems. In this paper, we propose a technique to simultaneously conduct source detection and prediction, which outperforms other approaches in the interdisciplinary case study of the identification of potential groundwater contamination within a region of high-density shale gas development.
Towards Evaluating User Profiling Methods Based on Explicit Ratings on Item Features
Authors: Luca Luciano Costanzo, Yashar Deldjoo, Maurizio Ferrari Dacrema, Markus Schedl, Paolo Cremonesi
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In order to improve the accuracy of recommendations, many recommender systems nowadays use side information beyond the user rating matrix, such as item content. These systems build user profiles as estimates of users' interest on content (e.g., movie genre, director or cast) and then evaluate the performance of the recommender system as a whole e.g., by their ability to recommend relevant and novel items to the target user. The user profile modelling stage, which is a key stage in content-driven RS is barely properly evaluated due to the lack of publicly available datasets that contain user preferences on content features of items. To raise awareness of this fact, we investigate differences between explicit user preferences and implicit user profiles. We create a dataset of explicit preferences towards content features of movies, which we release publicly. We then compare the collected explicit user feature preferences and implicit user profiles built via state-of-the-art user profiling models. Our results show a maximum average pairwise cosine similarity of 58.07\% between the explicit feature preferences and the implicit user profiles modelled by the best investigated profiling method and considering movies' genres only. For actors and directors, this maximum similarity is only 9.13\% and 17.24\%, respectively. This low similarity between explicit and implicit preference models encourages a more in-depth study to investigate and improve this important user profile modelling step, which will eventually translate into better recommendations.
Leveraging Frequent Query Substructures to Generate Formal Queries for Complex Question Answering
Authors: Jiwei Ding, Wei Hu, Qixin Xu, Yuzhong Qu
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Question Answering, Relation, Relation Linking

Formal query generation aims to generate correct executable queries for question answering over knowledge bases (KBs), given entity and relation linking results. Current approaches build universal paraphrasing or ranking models for the whole questions, which are likely to fail in generating queries for complex, long-tail questions. In this paper, we propose SubQG, a new query generation approach based on frequent query substructures, which helps rank the existing (but nonsignificant) query structures or build new query structures. Our experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms the existing ones, especially for complex questions. Also, it achieves promising performance with limited training data and noisy entity/relation linking results.