pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Minimum Class Confusion for Versatile Domain Adaptation
Authors: Ying Jin, Ximei Wang, Mingsheng Long, Jian-Min Wang
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Inductive Bias, Multi-target Domain Adaptation, Partial Domain Adaptation

There are a variety of Domain Adaptation (DA) scenarios subject to label sets and domain configurations, including closed-set and partial-set DA, as well as multi-source and multi-target DA. It is notable that existing DA methods are generally designed only for a specific scenario, and may underperform for scenarios they are not tailored to. To this end, this paper studies Versatile Domain Adaptation (VDA), where one method can handle several different DA scenarios without any modification. Towards this goal, a more general inductive bias other than the domain alignment should be explored. We delve into a missing piece of existing methods: class confusion, the tendency that a classifier confuses the predictions between the correct and ambiguous classes for target examples, which is common in different DA scenarios. We uncover that reducing such pairwise class confusion leads to significant transfer gains. With this insight, we propose a general loss function: Minimum Class Confusion (MCC). It can be characterized as (1) a non-adversarial DA method without explicitly deploying domain alignment, enjoying faster convergence speed; (2) a versatile approach that can handle four existing scenarios: Closed-Set, Partial-Set, Multi-Source, and Multi-Target DA, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods in these scenarios, especially on one of the largest and hardest datasets to date (7.3% on DomainNet). Its versatility is further justified by two scenarios proposed in this paper: Multi-Source Partial DA and Multi-Target Partial DA. In addition, it can also be used as a general regularizer that is orthogonal and complementary to a variety of existing DA methods, accelerating convergence and pushing these readily competitive methods to stronger ones. Code is available at https://github.com/thuml/Versatile-Domain-Adaptation.
SolarNet: A Deep Learning Framework to Map Solar Power Plants In China From Satellite Imagery
Authors: Xin Hou, Biao Wang, Wanqi Hu, Lei Yin, Haishan Wu
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Renewable energy such as solar power is critical to fight the ever more serious climate change. China is the world leading installer of solar panel and numerous solar power plants were built. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning framework named SolarNet which is designed to perform semantic segmentation on large scale satellite imagery data to detect solar farms. SolarNet has successfully mapped 439 solar farms in China, covering near 2000 square kilometers, equivalent to the size of whole Shenzhen city or two and a half of New York city. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that we used deep learning to reveal the locations and sizes of solar farms in China, which could provide insights for solar power companies, market analysts and the government.
Voxel2Mesh: 3D Mesh Model Generation from Volumetric Data
Authors: Udaranga Wickramasinghe, Edoardo Remelli, Graham Knott, Pascal Fua
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Segmentation

CNN-based volumetric methods that label individual voxels now dominate the field of biomedical segmentation. However, 3D surface representations are often required for proper analysis. They can be obtained by post-processing the labeled volumes which typically introduces artifacts and prevents end-to-end training. In this paper, we therefore introduce a novel architecture that goes directly from 3D image volumes to 3D surfaces without post-processing and with better accuracy than current methods. We evaluate it on Electron Microscopy and MRI brain images as well as CT liver scans. We will show that it outperforms state-of-the-art segmentation methods.
Domain-adaptive Crowd Counting via High-quality Image Translation and Density Reconstruction
Authors: Junyu. Gao, Tao Han, Qi. Wang, Yuan Yuan
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, GPR, Translation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Recently, crowd counting using supervised learning achieves a remarkable improvement. Nevertheless, most counters rely on a large amount of manually labeled data. With the release of synthetic crowd data, a potential alternative is transferring knowledge from them to real data without any manual label. However, there is no method to effectively suppress domain gaps and output elaborate density maps during the transferring. To remedy the above problems, this paper proposes a Domain-Adaptive Crowd Counting (DACC) framework, which consists of a high-quality image translation and density map reconstruction. To be specific, the former focuses on translating synthetic data to realistic images, which prompts the translation quality by segregating domain-shared/independent features and designing content-aware consistency loss. The latter aims at generating pseudo labels on real scenes to improve the prediction quality. Next, we retrain a final counter using these pseudo labels. Adaptation experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Detection of False Positive and False Negative Samples in Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Matthias Rottmann, Kira Maag, Robin Chan, Fabian Hüger, Peter Schlicht, Hanno Gottschalk
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Uncertainty Quantification

In recent years, deep learning methods have outperformed other methods in image recognition. This has fostered imagination of potential application of deep learning technology including safety relevant applications like the interpretation of medical images or autonomous driving. The passage from assistance of a human decision maker to ever more automated systems however increases the need to properly handle the failure modes of deep learning modules. In this contribution, we review a set of techniques for the self-monitoring of machine-learning algorithms based on uncertainty quantification. In particular, we apply this to the task of semantic segmentation, where the machine learning algorithm decomposes an image according to semantic categories. We discuss false positive and false negative error modes at instance-level and review techniques for the detection of such errors that have been recently proposed by the authors. We also give an outlook on future research directions.
Feature-aware Adaptation and Density Alignment for Crowd Counting in Video Surveillance
Authors: Junyu. Gao, Yuan Yuan, Qi Wang
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Density Estimation, Domain Adaptation

With the development of deep neural networks, the performance of crowd counting and pixel-wise density estimation are continually being refreshed. Despite this, there are still two challenging problems in this field: 1) current supervised learning needs a large amount of training data, but collecting and annotating them is difficult; 2) existing methods can not generalize well to the unseen domain. A recently released synthetic crowd dataset alleviates these two problems. However, the domain gap between the real-world data and synthetic images decreases the models' performance. To reduce the gap, in this paper, we propose a domain-adaptation-style crowd counting method, which can effectively adapt the model from synthetic data to the specific real-world scenes. It consists of Multi-level Featureaware Adaptation (MFA) and Structured Density map Alignment (SDA). To be specific, MFA boosts the model to extract domain-invariant features from multiple layers. SDA guarantees the network outputs fine density maps with a reasonable distribution on the real domain. Finally, we evaluate the proposed method on four mainstream surveillance crowd datasets, Shanghai Tech Part B, WorldExpo'10, Mall and UCSD. Extensive experiments evidence that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for the same cross-domain counting problem.
Short-term Load Forecasting with Dense Average Network
Authors: Zhifang Liao, Haihui Pan, Qi Zeng, Xiaoping Fan, Yan Zhang, Song Yu
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Load Forecasting

As an important part of the power system, power load forecasting directly affects the national economy. The data shows that improving the load forecasting accuracy by 0.01% can save millions of dollars for the power industry. Therefore, improving the accuracy of power load forecasting has always been the pursuing goals for a power system. Based on this goal, this paper proposes a novel connection, the dense average connection, in which the outputs of all preceding layers are averaged as the input of the next layer in a feed-forward fashion. Based on dense average connection , we construct the dense average network for power load forecasting. The predictions of the proposed model for two public datasets are better than those of existing methods. On this basis, we use the ensemble method to further improve the accuracy of the model. To verify the reliability of the model predictions, the robustness is analyzed and verified by adding input disturbances. The experimental results show that the proposed model is effective and robust for power load forecasting.
SampleNet: Differentiable Point Cloud Sampling
Authors: Itai Lang, Asaf Manor, Shai Avidan
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 3D Point Cloud Classification, 3D Point Cloud Reconstruction, Point Cloud Registration

There is a growing number of tasks that work directly on point clouds. As the size of the point cloud grows, so do the computational demands of these tasks. A possible solution is to sample the point cloud first. Classic sampling approaches, such as farthest point sampling (FPS), do not consider the downstream task. A recent work showed that learning a task-specific sampling can improve results significantly. However, the proposed technique did not deal with the non-differentiability of the sampling operation and offered a workaround instead. We introduce a novel differentiable relaxation for point cloud sampling that approximates sampled points as a mixture of points in the primary input cloud. Our approximation scheme leads to consistently good results on classification and geometry reconstruction applications. We also show that the proposed sampling method can be used as a front to a point cloud registration network. This is a challenging task since sampling must be consistent across two different point clouds for a shared downstream task. In all cases, our approach outperforms existing non-learned and learned sampling alternatives. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/itailang/SampleNet.
The Binary Expansion Randomized Ensemble Test (BERET)
Authors: Duyeol Lee, Kai Zhang, Michael R. Kosorok
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00

Recently, the binary expansion testing framework was introduced to test the independence of two continuous random variables by utilizing symmetry statistics that are complete sufficient statistics for dependence. We develop a new test based on an ensemble approach that uses the sum of squared symmetry statistics and distance correlation. Simulation studies suggest that this method improves the power while preserving the clear interpretation of the binary expansion testing. We extend this method to tests of independence of random vectors in arbitrary dimension. Through random projections, the proposed binary expansion randomized ensemble test transforms the multivariate independence testing problem into a univariate problem. Simulation studies and data example analyses show that the proposed method provides relatively robust performance compared with existing methods.
Bidirectional Scene Text Recognition with a Single Decoder
Authors: Maurits Bleeker, Maarten de Rijke
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Scene Text Recognition

Scene Text Recognition (STR) is the problem of recognizing the correct word or character sequence in a cropped word image. To obtain more robust output sequences, the notion of bidirectional STR has been introduced. So far, bidirectional STRs have been implemented by using two separate decoders; one for left-to-right decoding and one for right-to-left. Having two separate decoders for almost the same task with the same output space is undesirable from a computational and optimization point of view. We introduce the bidirectional Scene Text Transformer (Bi-STET), a novel bidirectional STR method with a single decoder for bidirectional text decoding. With its single decoder, Bi-STET outperforms methods that apply bidirectional decoding by using two separate decoders while also being more efficient than those methods, Furthermore, we achieve or beat state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on all STR benchmarks with Bi-STET. Finally, we provide analyses and insights into the performance of Bi-STET.
Human-to-AI Coach: Improving Human Inputs to AI Systems
Authors: Johannes Schneider
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00

Humans increasingly interact with Artificial intelligence(AI) systems. AI systems are optimized for objectives such as minimum computation or minimum error rate in recognizing and interpreting inputs from humans. In contrast, inputs created by humans are often treated as a given. We investigate how inputs of humans can be altered to reduce misinterpretation by the AI system and to improve efficiency of input generation for the human while altered inputs should remain as similar as possible to the original inputs. These objectives result in trade-offs that are analyzed for a deep learning system classifying handwritten digits. To create examples that serve as demonstrations for humans to improve, we develop a model based on a conditional convolutional autoencoder (CCAE). Our quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows that in many occasions the generated proposals lead to lower error rates, require less effort to create and differ only modestly from the original samples.
ILS-SUMM: Iterated Local Search for Unsupervised Video Summarization
Authors: Yair Shemer, Daniel Rotman, Nahum Shimkin
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Metaheuristic Optimization, Unsupervised Video Summarization, Video Summarization

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in building video summarization tools, where the goal is to automatically create a short summary of an input video that properly represents the original content. We consider shot-based video summarization where the summary consists of a subset of the video shots which can be of various lengths. A straightforward approach to maximize the representativeness of a subset of shots is by minimizing the total distance between shots and their nearest selected shots. We formulate the task of video summarization as an optimization problem with a knapsack-like constraint on the total summary duration. Previous studies have proposed greedy algorithms to solve this problem approximately, but no experiments were presented to measure the ability of these methods to obtain solutions with low total distance. Indeed, our experiments on video summarization datasets show that the success of current methods in obtaining results with low total distance still has much room for improvement. In this paper, we develop ILS-SUMM, a novel video summarization algorithm to solve the subset selection problem under the knapsack constraint. Our algorithm is based on the well-known metaheuristic optimization framework -- Iterated Local Search (ILS), known for its ability to avoid weak local minima and obtain a good near-global minimum. Extensive experiments show that our method finds solutions with significantly better total distance than previous methods. Moreover, to indicate the high scalability of ILS-SUMM, we introduce a new dataset consisting of videos of various lengths.
Compressing 3DCNNs Based on Tensor Train Decomposition
Authors: Dingheng Wang, Guangshe Zhao, Guoqi Li, Lei Deng, Yang Wu
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Hand Gesture Recognition, Hand-Gesture Recognition, Neural Network Compression, Quantization, Video Games

Three dimensional convolutional neural networks (3DCNNs) have been applied in many tasks, e.g., video and 3D point cloud recognition. However, due to the higher dimension of convolutional kernels, the space complexity of 3DCNNs is generally larger than that of traditional two dimensional convolutional neural networks (2DCNNs). To miniaturize 3DCNNs for the deployment in confining environments such as embedded devices, neural network compression is a promising approach. In this work, we adopt the tensor train (TT) decomposition, a straightforward and simple in situ training compression method, to shrink the 3DCNN models. Through proposing tensorizing 3D convolutional kernels in TT format, we investigate how to select appropriate TT ranks for achieving higher compression ratio. We have also discussed the redundancy of 3D convolutional kernels for compression, core significance and future directions of this work, as well as the theoretical computation complexity versus practical executing time of convolution in TT. In the light of multiple contrast experiments based on VIVA challenge, UCF11, and UCF101 datasets, we conclude that TT decomposition can compress 3DCNNs by around one hundred times without significant accuracy loss, which will enable its applications in extensive real world scenarios.
SaLite : A light-weight model for salient object detection
Authors: Kitty Varghese, Sauradip Nag
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Decoder, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Saliency Detection, Salient Object Detection

Salient object detection is a prevalent computer vision task that has applications ranging from abnormality detection to abnormality processing. Context modelling is an important criterion in the domain of saliency detection. A global context helps in determining the salient object in a given image by contrasting away other objects in the global view of the scene. However, the local context features detects the boundaries of the salient object with higher accuracy in a given region. To incorporate the best of both worlds, our proposed SaLite model uses both global and local contextual features. It is an encoder-decoder based architecture in which the encoder uses a lightweight SqueezeNet and decoder is modelled using convolution layers. Modern deep based models entitled for saliency detection use a large number of parameters, which is difficult to deploy on embedded systems. This paper attempts to solve the above problem using SaLite which is a lighter process for salient object detection without compromising on performance. Our approach is extensively evaluated on three publicly available datasets namely DUTS, MSRA10K, and SOC. Experimental results show that our proposed SaLite has significant and consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
Capsule-Based Persian/Arabic Robust Handwritten Digit Recognition Using EM Routing
Authors: Ali Ghofrani, Rahil Mahdian Toroghi
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Handwritten Digit Recognition

In this paper, the problem of handwritten digit recognition has been addressed. However, the underlying language is Persian/Arabic, and the system with which this task is a capsule network (CapsNet) has recently emerged as a more advanced architecture than its ancestor, namely CNN (Convolutional Neural Network). The training of the architecture is performed using the Hoda dataset, which has been provided for Persian/Arabic handwritten digits. The output of the system clearly outperforms the results achieved by its ancestors, as well as other previously presented recognition algorithms.
View-invariant Deep Architecture for Human Action Recognition using late fusion
Authors: Chhavi Dhiman, Dinesh Kumar Vishwakarma
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, SSIM, Temporal Action Localization

Human action Recognition for unknown views is a challenging task. We propose a view-invariant deep human action recognition framework, which is a novel integration of two important action cues: motion and shape temporal dynamics (STD). The motion stream encapsulates the motion content of action as RGB Dynamic Images (RGB-DIs) which are processed by the fine-tuned InceptionV3 model. The STD stream learns long-term view-invariant shape dynamics of action using human pose model (HPM) based view-invariant features mined from structural similarity index matrix (SSIM) based key depth human pose frames. To predict the score of the test sample, three types of late fusion (maximum, average and product) techniques are applied on individual stream scores. To validate the performance of the proposed novel framework the experiments are performed using both cross subject and cross-view validation schemes on three publically available benchmarks- NUCLA multi-view dataset, UWA3D-II Activity dataset and NTU RGB-D Activity dataset. Our algorithm outperforms with existing state-of-the-arts significantly that is reported in terms of accuracy, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under the curve (AUC).
Face Beautification: Beyond Makeup Transfer
Authors: Xudong Liu, Ruizhe Wang, Chih-Fan Chen, Minglei Yin, Hao Peng, Shukhan Ng, Xin Li
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Facial appearance plays an important role in our social lives. Subjective perception of women's beauty depends on various face-related (e.g., skin, shape, hair) and environmental (e.g., makeup, lighting, angle) factors. Similar to cosmetic surgery in the physical world, virtual face beautification is an emerging field with many open issues to be addressed. Inspired by the latest advances in style-based synthesis and face beauty prediction, we propose a novel framework of face beautification. For a given reference face with a high beauty score, our GAN-based architecture is capable of translating an inquiry face into a sequence of beautified face images with referenced beauty style and targeted beauty score values. To achieve this objective, we propose to integrate both style-based beauty representation (extracted from the reference face) and beauty score prediction (trained on SCUT-FBP database) into the process of beautification. Unlike makeup transfer, our approach targets at many-to-many (instead of one-to-one) translation where multiple outputs can be defined by either different references or varying beauty scores. Extensive experimental results are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed face beautification framework.
VoronoiNet: General Functional Approximators with Local Support
Authors: Francis Williams, Daniele Panozzo, Kwang Moo Yi, Andrea Tagliasacchi
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00

Voronoi diagrams are highly compact representations that are used in various Graphics applications. In this work, we show how to embed a differentiable version of it -- via a novel deep architecture -- into a generative deep network. By doing so, we achieve a highly compact latent embedding that is able to provide much more detailed reconstructions, both in 2D and 3D, for various shapes. In this tech report, we introduce our representation and present a set of preliminary results comparing it with recently proposed implicit occupancy networks.