pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MixNMatch: Multifactor Disentanglement and Encoding for Conditional Image Generation
Authors: Yuheng Li, Krishna Kumar Singh, Utkarsh Ojha, Yong Jae Lee
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Disentanglement, Image Generation

We present MixNMatch, a conditional generative model that learns to disentangle and encode background, object pose, shape, and texture from real images with minimal supervision, for mix-and-match image generation. We build upon FineGAN, an unconditional generative model, to learn the desired disentanglement and image generator, and leverage adversarial joint image-code distribution matching to learn the latent factor encoders. MixNMatch requires bounding boxes during training to model background, but requires no other supervision. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate MixNMatch's ability to accurately disentangle, encode, and combine multiple factors for mix-and-match image generation, including sketch2color, cartoon2img, and img2gif applications. Our code/models/demo can be found at https://github.com/Yuheng-Li/MixNMatch
Semi-Supervised Learning for Text Classification by Layer Partitioning
Authors: Alexander Hanbo Li, Abhinav Sethy
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

Most recent neural semi-supervised learning algorithms rely on adding small perturbation to either the input vectors or their representations. These methods have been successful on computer vision tasks as the images form a continuous manifold, but are not appropriate for discrete input such as sentence. To adapt these methods to text input, we propose to decompose a neural network $M$ into two components $F$ and $U$ so that $M = U\circ F$. The layers in $F$ are then frozen and only the layers in $U$ will be updated during most time of the training. In this way, $F$ serves as a feature extractor that maps the input to high-level representation and adds systematical noise using dropout. We can then train $U$ using any state-of-the-art SSL algorithms such as $\Pi$-model, temporal ensembling, mean teacher, etc. Furthermore, this gradually unfreezing schedule also prevents a pretrained model from catastrophic forgetting. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach provides improvements when compared to state of the art methods especially on short texts.
Multi-person Spatial Interaction in a Large Immersive Display Using Smartphones as Touchpads
Authors: Gyanendra Sharma, Richard J. Radke
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00

In this paper, we present a multi-user interaction interface for a large immersive space that supports simultaneous screen interactions by combining (1) user input via personal smartphones and Bluetooth microphones, (2) spatial tracking via an overhead array of Kinect sensors, and (3) WebSocket interfaces to a webpage running on the large screen. Users are automatically, dynamically assigned personal and shared screen sub-spaces based on their tracked location with respect to the screen, and use a webpage on their personal smartphone for touchpad-type input. We report user experiments using our interaction framework that involve image selection and placement tasks, with the ultimate goal of realizing display-wall environments as viable, interactive workspaces with natural multimodal interfaces.
A Measure of Similarity in Textual Data Using Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient
Authors: Nino Arsov, Milan Dukovski, Blagoja Evkoski, Stefan Cvetkovski
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

In the last decade, many diverse advances have occurred in the field of information extraction from data. Information extraction in its simplest form takes place in computing environments, where structured data can be extracted through a series of queries. The continuous expansion of quantities of data have therefore provided an opportunity for knowledge extraction (KE) from a textual document (TD). A typical problem of this kind is the extraction of common characteristics and knowledge from a group of TDs, with the possibility to group such similar TDs in a process known as clustering. In this paper we present a technique for such KE among a group of TDs related to the common characteristics and meaning of their content. Our technique is based on the Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient (SRCC), for which the conducted experiments have proven to be comprehensive measure to achieve a high-quality KE.
Defending Against Adversarial Machine Learning
Authors: Alison Jenkins
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Attribution, BIG-bench Machine Learning

An Adversarial System to attack and an Authorship Attribution System (AAS) to defend itself against the attacks are analyzed. Defending a system against attacks from an adversarial machine learner can be done by randomly switching between models for the system, by detecting and reacting to changes in the distribution of normal inputs, or by using other methods. Adversarial machine learning is used to identify a system that is being used to map system inputs to outputs. Three types of machine learners are using for the model that is being attacked. The machine learners that are used to model the system being attacked are a Radial Basis Function Support Vector Machine, a Linear Support Vector Machine, and a Feedforward Neural Network. The feature masks are evolved using accuracy as the fitness measure. The system defends itself against adversarial machine learning attacks by identifying inputs that do not match the probability distribution of normal inputs. The system also defends itself against adversarial attacks by randomly switching between the feature masks being used to map system inputs to outputs.
Imitation Learning of Robot Policies by Combining Language, Vision and Demonstration
Authors: Simon Stepputtis, Joseph Campbell, Mariano Phielipp, Chitta Baral, Heni Ben Amor
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

In this work we propose a novel end-to-end imitation learning approach which combines natural language, vision, and motion information to produce an abstract representation of a task, which in turn is used to synthesize specific motion controllers at run-time. This multimodal approach enables generalization to a wide variety of environmental conditions and allows an end-user to direct a robot policy through verbal communication. We empirically validate our approach with an extensive set of simulations and show that it achieves a high task success rate over a variety of conditions while remaining amenable to probabilistic interpretability.
Device-Free User Authentication, Activity Classification and Tracking using Passive Wi-Fi Sensing: A Deep Learning Based Approach
Authors: Vinoj Jayasundara, Hirunima Jayasekara, Tharaka Samarasinghe, Kasun T. Hemachandra
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Privacy issues related to video camera feeds have led to a growing need for suitable alternatives that provide functionalities such as user authentication, activity classification and tracking in a noninvasive manner. Existing infrastructure makes Wi-Fi a possible candidate, yet, utilizing traditional signal processing methods to extract information necessary to fully characterize an event by sensing weak ambient Wi-Fi signals is deemed to be challenging. This paper introduces a novel end to-end deep learning framework that simultaneously predicts the identity, activity and the location of a user to create user profiles similar to the information provided through a video camera. The system is fully autonomous and requires zero user intervention unlike systems that require user-initiated initialization, or a user held transmitting device to facilitate the prediction. The system can also predict the trajectory of the user by predicting the location of a user over consecutive time steps. The performance of the system is evaluated through experiments.
Convolutional Composer Classification
Authors: Harsh Verma, John Thickstun
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

This paper investigates end-to-end learnable models for attributing composers to musical scores. We introduce several pooled, convolutional architectures for this task and draw connections between our approach and classical learning approaches based on global and n-gram features. We evaluate models on a corpus of 2,500 scores from the KernScores collection, authored by a variety of composers spanning the Renaissance era to the early 20th century. This corpus has substantial overlap with the corpora used in several previous, smaller studies; we compare our results on subsets of the corpus to these previous works.
On Scaling Data-Driven Loop Invariant Inference
Authors: Sahil Bhatia, Saswat Padhi, Nagarajan Natarajan, Rahul Sharma, Prateek Jain
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00

Automated synthesis of inductive invariants is an important problem in software verification. Once all the invariants have been specified, software verification reduces to checking of verification conditions. Although static analyses to infer invariants have been studied for over forty years, recent years have seen a flurry of data-driven invariant inference techniques which guess invariants from examples instead of analyzing program text. However, these techniques have been demonstrated to scale only to programs with a small number of variables. In this paper, we study these scalability issues and address them in our tool oasis that improves the scale of data-driven invariant inference and outperforms state-of-the-art systems on benchmarks from the invariant inference track of the Syntax Guided Synthesis competition.
Network Embedding: An Overview
Authors: Nino Arsov, Georgina Mirceva
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering, Link Prediction, Network Embedding

Networks are one of the most powerful structures for modeling problems in the real world. Downstream machine learning tasks defined on networks have the potential to solve a variety of problems. With link prediction, for instance, one can predict whether two persons will become friends on a social network. Many machine learning algorithms, however, require that each input example is a real vector. Network embedding encompasses various methods for unsupervised, and sometimes supervised, learning of feature representations of nodes and links in a network. Typically, embedding methods are based on the assumption that the similarity between nodes in the network should be reflected in the learned feature representations. In this paper, we review significant contributions to network embedding in the last decade. In particular, we look at four methods: Spectral Clustering, DeepWalk, Large-scale Information Network Embedding (LINE), and node2vec. We describe each method and list its advantages and shortcomings. In addition, we give examples of real-world machine learning problems on networks in which the embedding is critical in order to maximize the predictive performance of the machine learning task. Finally, we take a look at research trends and state-of-the art methods in the research on network embedding.
Prediction of Horizontal Data Partitioning Through Query Execution Cost Estimation
Authors: Nino Arsov, Goran Velinov, Aleksandar S. Dimovski, Bojana Koteska, Dragan Sahpaski, Margina Kon-Popovska
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The excessively increased volume of data in modern data management systems demands an improved system performance, frequently provided by data distribution, system scalability and performance optimization techniques. Optimized horizontal data partitioning has a significant influence of distributed data management systems. An optimally partitioned schema found in the early phase of logical database design without loading of real data in the system and its adaptation to changes of business environment are very important for a successful implementation, system scalability and performance improvement. In this paper we present a novel approach for finding an optimal horizontally partitioned schema that manifests a minimal total execution cost of a given database workload. Our approach is based on a formal model that enables abstraction of the predicates in the workload queries, and are subsequently used to define all relational fragments. This approach has predictive features acquired by simulation of horizontal partitioning, without loading any data into the partitions, but instead, altering the statistics in the database catalogs. We define an optimization problem and employ a genetic algorithm (GA) to find an approximately optimal horizontally partitioned schema. The solutions to the optimization problem are evaluated using PostgreSQL's query optimizer. The initial experimental evaluation of our approach confirms its efficiency and correctness, and the numbers imply that the approach is effective in reducing the workload execution cost.
DeepRICH: Learning Deeply Cherenkov Detectors
Authors: Cristiano Fanelli, Jary Pomponi
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00

Imaging Cherenkov detectors are largely used for particle identification (PID) in nuclear and particle physics experiments, where developing fast reconstruction algorithms is becoming of paramount importance to allow for near real time calibration and data quality control, as well as to speed up offline analysis of large amount of data. In this paper we present DeepRICH, a novel deep learning algorithm for fast reconstruction which can be applied to different imaging Cherenkov detectors. The core of our architecture is a generative model which leverages on a custom Variational Auto-encoder (VAE) combined to Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) extracting features from the space of the latent variables for classification. A thorough comparison with the simulation/reconstruction package FastDIRC is discussed in the text. DeepRICH has the advantage to bypass low-level details needed to build a likelihood, allowing for a sensitive improvement in computation time at potentially the same reconstruction performance of other established reconstruction algorithms. In the conclusions, we address the implications and potentialities of this work, discussing possible future extensions and generalization.
Edge-Guided Occlusion Fading Reduction for a Light-Weighted Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation
Authors: Kuo-Shiuan Peng, Gregory Ditzler, Jerzy Rozenblit
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, GPU, Monocular Depth Estimation

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation methods generally suffer the occlusion fading issue due to the lack of supervision by the per pixel ground truth. Although a post-processing method was proposed by Godard et. al. to reduce the occlusion fading, the compensated results have a severe halo effect. In this paper, we propose a novel Edge-Guided post-processing to reduce the occlusion fading issue for self-supervised monocular depth estimation. We further introduce Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ASPP) into the network to reduce the computational costs and improve the inference performance. The proposed ASPP-based network is lighter, faster, and better than current commonly used depth estimation networks. This light-weight network only needs 8.1 million parameters and can achieve up to 40 frames per second for $256\times512$ input in the inference stage using a single nVIDIA GTX1080 GPU. The proposed network also outperforms the current state-of-the-art on the KITTI benchmarks. The ASPP-based network and Edge-Guided post-processing produce better results either quantitatively and qualitatively than the competitors.
Revisiting Deep Architectures for Head Motion Prediction in 360° Videos
Authors: Miguel Fabian Romero Rondon, Lucile Sassatelli, Ramon Aparicio Pardo, Frederic Precioso
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: motion prediction, Time Series Analysis

We consider predicting the user's head motion in 360-degree videos, with 2 modalities only: the past user's positions and the video content (not knowing other users' traces). We make two main contributions. First, we re-examine existing deep-learning approaches for this problem and identify hidden flaws from a thorough root-cause analysis. Second, from the results of this analysis, we design a new proposal establishing state-of-the-art performance. First, re-assessing the existing methods that use both modalities, we obtain the surprising result that they all perform worse than baselines using the user's trajectory only. A root-cause analysis of the metrics, datasets and neural architectures shows in particular that (i) the content can inform the prediction for horizons longer than 2 to 3 sec. (existing methods consider shorter horizons), and that (ii) to compete with the baselines, it is necessary to have a recurrent unit dedicated to process the positions, but this is not sufficient. Second, from a re-examination of the problem supported with the concept of Structural-RNN, we design a new deep neural architecture, named TRACK. TRACK achieves state-of-the-art performance on all considered datasets and prediction horizons, outperforming competitors by up to 20 percent on focus-type videos and horizons 2-5 seconds. The entire framework (codes and datasets) is online and received an ACM reproducibility badge.
Multi-Vehicle Mixed-Reality Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Multi-Lane Driving
Authors: Rupert Mitchell, Jenny Fletcher, Jacopo Panerati, Amanda Prorok
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Mixed Reality, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Autonomous driving promises to transform road transport. Multi-vehicle and multi-lane scenarios, however, present unique challenges due to constrained navigation and unpredictable vehicle interactions. Learning-based methods---such as deep reinforcement learning---are emerging as a promising approach to automatically design intelligent driving policies that can cope with these challenges. Yet, the process of safely learning multi-vehicle driving behaviours is hard: while collisions---and their near-avoidance---are essential to the learning process, directly executing immature policies on autonomous vehicles raises considerable safety concerns. In this article, we present a safe and efficient framework that enables the learning of driving policies for autonomous vehicles operating in a shared workspace, where the absence of collisions cannot be guaranteed. Key to our learning procedure is a sim2real approach that uses real-world online policy adaptation in a mixed-reality setup, where other vehicles and static obstacles exist in the virtual domain. This allows us to perform safe learning by simulating (and learning from) collisions between the learning agent(s) and other objects in virtual reality. Our results demonstrate that, after only a few runs in mixed-reality, collisions are significantly reduced.
Doc2Vec on the PubMed corpus: study of a new approach to generate related articles
Authors: Emeric Dynomant, Stéfan J. Darmoni, Émeline Lejeune, Gaëtan Kerdelhué, Jean-Philippe Leroy, Vincent Lequertier, Stéphane Canu, Julien Grosjean
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Document Embedding

PubMed is the biggest and most used bibliographic database worldwide, hosting more than 26M biomedical publications. One of its useful features is the "similar articles" section, allowing the end-user to find scientific articles linked to the consulted document in term of context. The aim of this study is to analyze whether it is possible to replace the statistic model PubMed Related Articles (pmra) with a document embedding method. Doc2Vec algorithm was used to train models allowing to vectorize documents. Six of its parameters were optimised by following a grid-search strategy to train more than 1,900 models. Parameters combination leading to the best accuracy was used to train models on abstracts from the PubMed database. Four evaluations tasks were defined to determine what does or does not influence the proximity between documents for both Doc2Vec and pmra. The two different Doc2Vec architectures have different abilities to link documents about a common context. The terminological indexing, words and stems contents of linked documents are highly similar between pmra and Doc2Vec PV-DBOW architecture. These algorithms are also more likely to bring closer documents having a similar size. In contrary, the manual evaluation shows much better results for the pmra algorithm. While the pmra algorithm links documents by explicitly using terminological indexing in its formula, Doc2Vec does not need a prior indexing. It can infer relations between documents sharing a similar indexing, without any knowledge about them, particularly regarding the PV-DBOW architecture. In contrary, the human evaluation, without any clear agreement between evaluators, implies future studies to better understand this difference between PV-DBOW and pmra algorithm.
Emergent Structures and Lifetime Structure Evolution in Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Siavash Golkar
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop Neuro_AI 2019 12

Motivated by the flexibility of biological neural networks whose connectivity structure changes significantly during their lifetime, we introduce the Unstructured Recursive Network (URN) and demonstrate that it can exhibit similar flexibility during training via gradient descent. We show empirically that many of the different neural network structures commonly used in practice today (including fully connected, locally connected and residual networks of different depths and widths) can emerge dynamically from the same URN. These different structures can be derived using gradient descent on a single general loss function where the structure of the data and the relative strengths of various regulator terms determine the structure of the emergent network. We show that this loss function and the regulators arise naturally when considering the symmetries of the network as well as the geometric properties of the input data.
Join Query Optimization with Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Authors: Jonas Heitz, Kurt Stockinger
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Ensemble Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Join query optimization is a complex task and is central to the performance of query processing. In fact it belongs to the class of NP-hard problems. Traditional query optimizers use dynamic programming (DP) methods combined with a set of rules and restrictions to avoid exhaustive enumeration of all possible join orders. However, DP methods are very resource intensive. Moreover, given simplifying assumptions of attribute independence, traditional query optimizers rely on erroneous cost estimations, which can lead to suboptimal query plans. Recent success of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) creates new opportunities for the field of query optimization to tackle the above-mentioned problems. In this paper, we present our DRL-based Fully Observed Optimizer (FOOP) which is a generic query optimization framework that enables plugging in different machine learning algorithms. The main idea of FOOP is to use a data-adaptive learning query optimizer that avoids exhaustive enumerations of join orders and is thus significantly faster than traditional approaches based on dynamic programming. In particular, we evaluate various DRL-algorithms and show that Proximal Policy Optimization significantly outperforms Q-learning based algorithms. Finally we demonstrate how ensemble learning techniques combined with DRL can further improve the query optimizer.