pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Domain-Agnostic Few-Shot Classification by Learning Disparate Modulators
Authors: Yongseok Choi, Junyoung Park, Subin Yi, Dong-Yeon Cho
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Classification, Diversity, Few-Shot Learning, General Classification, Meta-Learning, Multi-Task Learning

Although few-shot learning research has advanced rapidly with the help of meta-learning, its practical usefulness is still limited because most of them assumed that all meta-training and meta-testing examples came from a single domain. We propose a simple but effective way for few-shot classification in which a task distribution spans multiple domains including ones never seen during meta-training. The key idea is to build a pool of models to cover this wide task distribution and learn to select the best one for a particular task through cross-domain meta-learning. All models in the pool share a base network while each model has a separate modulator to refine the base network in its own way. This framework allows the pool to have representational diversity without losing beneficial domain-invariant features. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through experiments on various datasets across diverse domains.
Abstraction for Zooming-In to Unsolvability Reasons of Grid-Cell Problems
Authors: Thomas Eiter, Zeynep G. Saribatur, Peter Schüller
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00

Humans are capable of abstracting away irrelevant details when studying problems. This is especially noticeable for problems over grid-cells, as humans are able to disregard certain parts of the grid and focus on the key elements important for the problem. Recently, the notion of abstraction has been introduced for Answer Set Programming (ASP), a knowledge representation and reasoning paradigm widely used in problem solving, with the potential to understand the key elements of a program that play a role in finding a solution. The present paper takes this further and empowers abstraction to deal with structural aspects, and in particular with hierarchical abstraction over the domain. We focus on obtaining the reasons for unsolvability of problems on grids, and show the possibility to automatically achieve human-like abstractions that distinguish only the relevant part of the grid. A user study on abstract explanations confirms the similarity of the focus points in machine vs. human explanations and reaffirms the challenge of employing abstraction to obtain machine explanations.
How Old Are You? Face Age Translation with Identity Preservation Using GANs
Authors: Zipeng Wang, Zhaoxiang Liu, Jianfeng Huang, Shiguo Lian, Yimin Lin
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

We present a novel framework to generate images of different age while preserving identity information, which is known as face aging. Different from most recent popular face aging networks utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs) application, our approach do not simply transfer a young face to an old one. Instead, we employ the edge map as intermediate representations, firstly edge maps of young faces are extracted, a CycleGAN-based network is adopted to transfer them into edge maps of old faces, then another pix2pixHD-based network is adopted to transfer the synthesized edge maps, concatenated with identity information, into old faces. In this way, our method can generate more realistic transfered images, simultaneously ensuring that face identity information be preserved well, and the apparent age of the generated image be accurately appropriate. Experimental results demonstrate that our method is feasible for face age translation.
Learning Dynamic Author Representations with Temporal Language Models
Authors: Edouard Delasalles, Sylvain Lamprier, Ludovic Denoyer
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

Language models are at the heart of numerous works, notably in the text mining and information retrieval communities. These statistical models aim at extracting word distributions, from simple unigram models to recurrent approaches with latent variables that capture subtle dependencies in texts. However, those models are learned from word sequences only, and authors' identities, as well as publication dates, are seldom considered. We propose a neural model, based on recurrent language modeling, which aims at capturing language diffusion tendencies in author communities through time. By conditioning language models with author and temporal vector states, we are able to leverage the latent dependencies between the text contexts. This allows us to beat several temporal and non-temporal language baselines on two real-world corpora, and to learn meaningful author representations that vary through time.
CARS: Continuous Evolution for Efficient Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Zhaohui Yang, Yunhe Wang, Xinghao Chen, Boxin Shi, Chao Xu, Chunjing Xu, Qi Tian, Chang Xu
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: GPU, Neural Architecture Search

Searching techniques in most of existing neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms are mainly dominated by differentiable methods for the efficiency reason. In contrast, we develop an efficient continuous evolutionary approach for searching neural networks. Architectures in the population that share parameters within one SuperNet in the latest generation will be tuned over the training dataset with a few epochs. The searching in the next evolution generation will directly inherit both the SuperNet and the population, which accelerates the optimal network generation. The non-dominated sorting strategy is further applied to preserve only results on the Pareto front for accurately updating the SuperNet. Several neural networks with different model sizes and performances will be produced after the continuous search with only 0.4 GPU days. As a result, our framework provides a series of networks with the number of parameters ranging from 3.7M to 5.1M under mobile settings. These networks surpass those produced by the state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark ImageNet dataset.
Computer-Aided Automated Detection of Gene-Controlled Social Actions of Drosophila
Authors: Khan Faraz, Ahmed Bouridane, Richard Jiang, Tiancheng Xia, Paul Chazot, Abdel Ennaceur
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Classification, Dimensionality Reduction, General Classification, Keypoint Detection

Gene expression of social actions in Drosophilae has been attracting wide interest from biologists, medical scientists and psychologists. Gene-edited Drosophilae have been used as a test platform for experimental investigation. For example, Parkinson's genes can be embedded into a group of newly bred Drosophilae for research purpose. However, human observation of numerous tiny Drosophilae for a long term is an arduous work, and the dependence on human's acute perception is highly unreliable. As a result, an automated system of social action detection using machine learning has been highly demanded. In this study, we propose to automate the detection and classification of two innate aggressive actions demonstrated by Drosophilae. Robust keypoint detection is achieved using selective spatio-temporal interest points (sSTIP) which are then described using the 3D Scale Invariant Feature Transform (3D-SIFT) descriptors. Dimensionality reduction is performed using Spectral Regression Kernel Discriminant Analysis (SR-KDA) and classification is done using the nearest centre rule. The classification accuracy shown demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed system.
Monitoring Achilles tendon healing progress in ultrasound imaging with convolutional neural networks
Authors: Piotr Woznicki, Przemyslaw Przybyszewski, Norbert Kapinski, Jakub Zielinski, Beata Ciszkowska-Lyson, Bartosz A. Borucki, Tomasz Trzcinski, Krzysztof S. Nowinski
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00

Achilles tendon rupture is a debilitating injury, which is typically treated with surgical repair and long-term rehabilitation. The recovery, however, is protracted and often incomplete. Diagnosis, as well as healing progress assessment, are largely based on ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging. In this paper, we propose an automatic method based on deep learning for analysis of Achilles tendon condition and estimation of its healing progress on ultrasound images. We develop custom convolutional neural networks for classification and regression on healing score and feature extraction. Our models are trained and validated on an acquired dataset of over 250.000 sagittal and over 450.000 axial ultrasound slices. The obtained estimates show a high correlation with the assessment of expert radiologists, with respect to all key parameters describing healing progress. We also observe that parameters associated with i.a. intratendinous healing processes are better modeled with sagittal slices. We prove that ultrasound imaging is quantitatively useful for clinical assessment of Achilles tendon healing process and should be viewed as complementary to magnetic resonance imaging.
WSOD^2: Learning Bottom-up and Top-down Objectness Distillation for Weakly-supervised Object Detection
Authors: Zhaoyang Zeng, Bei Liu, Jianlong Fu, Hongyang Chao, Lei Zhang
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Region Proposal, regression, Weakly Supervised Object Detection

We study on weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) which plays a vital role in relieving human involvement from object-level annotations. Predominant works integrate region proposal mechanisms with convolutional neural networks (CNN). Although CNN is proficient in extracting discriminative local features, grand challenges still exist to measure the likelihood of a bounding box containing a complete object (i.e., "objectness"). In this paper, we propose a novel WSOD framework with Objectness Distillation (i.e., WSOD^2) by designing a tailored training mechanism for weakly-supervised object detection. Multiple regression targets are specifically determined by jointly considering bottom-up (BU) and top-down (TD) objectness from low-level measurement and CNN confidences with an adaptive linear combination. As bounding box regression can facilitate a region proposal learning to approach its regression target with high objectness during training, deep objectness representation learned from bottom-up evidences can be gradually distilled into CNN by optimization. We explore different adaptive training curves for BU/TD objectness, and show that the proposed WSOD^2 can achieve state-of-the-art results.
Report on the 8th International Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval (BIR 2019)
Authors: Guillaume Cabanac, Ingo Frommholz, Philipp Mayr
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

The Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval workshop series (BIR) at ECIR tackled issues related to academic search, at the crossroads between Information Retrieval and Bibliometrics. BIR is a hot topic investigated by both academia (e.g., ArnetMiner, CiteSeerx, DocEar) and the industry (e.g., Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, Semantic Scholar). This report presents the 8th iteration of the one-day BIR workshop held at ECIR 2019 in Cologne, Germany.
AnimalWeb: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Dataset of Annotated Animal Faces
Authors: Muhammad Haris Khan, John McDonagh, Salman Khan, Muhammad Shahabuddin, Aditya Arora, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ling Shao, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Face Alignment, Face Detection

Being heavily reliant on animals, it is our ethical obligation to improve their well-being by understanding their needs. Several studies show that animal needs are often expressed through their faces. Though remarkable progress has been made towards the automatic understanding of human faces, this has regrettably not been the case with animal faces. There exists significant room and appropriate need to develop automatic systems capable of interpreting animal faces. Among many transformative impacts, such a technology will foster better and cheaper animal healthcare, and further advance animal psychology understanding. We believe the underlying research progress is mainly obstructed by the lack of an adequately annotated dataset of animal faces, covering a wide spectrum of animal species. To this end, we introduce a large-scale, hierarchical annotated dataset of animal faces, featuring 21.9K faces from 334 diverse species and 21 animal orders across biological taxonomy. These faces are captured `in-the-wild' conditions and are consistently annotated with 9 landmarks on key facial features. The proposed dataset is structured and scalable by design; its development underwent four systematic stages involving rigorous, manual annotation effort of over 6K man-hours. We benchmark it for face alignment using the existing art under novel problem settings. Results showcase its challenging nature, unique attributes and present definite prospects for novel, adaptive, and generalized face-oriented CV algorithms. We further benchmark the dataset for face detection and fine-grained recognition tasks, to demonstrate multi-task applications and room for improvement. Experiments indicate that this dataset will push the algorithmic advancements across many related CV tasks and encourage the development of novel systems for animal facial behaviour monitoring. We will make the dataset publicly available.
BERTgrid: Contextualized Embedding for 2D Document Representation and Understanding
Authors: Timo I. Denk, Christian Reisswig
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop Document_Intelligen 2019 12
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Semantic Segmentation

For understanding generic documents, information like font sizes, column layout, and generally the positioning of words may carry semantic information that is crucial for solving a downstream document intelligence task. Our novel BERTgrid, which is based on Chargrid by Katti et al. (2018), represents a document as a grid of contextualized word piece embedding vectors, thereby making its spatial structure and semantics accessible to the processing neural network. The contextualized embedding vectors are retrieved from a BERT language model. We use BERTgrid in combination with a fully convolutional network on a semantic instance segmentation task for extracting fields from invoices. We demonstrate its performance on tabulated line item and document header field extraction.
Multi-Sensor 3D Object Box Refinement for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Peiliang Li, Si-Qi Liu, Shaojie Shen
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

We propose a 3D object detection system with multi-sensor refinement in the context of autonomous driving. In our framework, the monocular camera serves as the fundamental sensor for 2D object proposal and initial 3D bounding box prediction. While the stereo cameras and LiDAR are treated as adaptive plug-in sensors to refine the 3D box localization performance. For each observed element in the raw measurement domain (e.g., pixels for stereo, 3D points for LiDAR), we model the local geometry as an instance vector representation, which indicates the 3D coordinate of each element respecting to the object frame. Using this unified geometric representation, the 3D object location can be unified refined by the stereo photometric alignment or point cloud alignment. We demonstrate superior 3D detection and localization performance compared to state-of-the-art monocular, stereo methods and competitive performance compared with the baseline LiDAR method on the KITTI object benchmark.
InceptionTime: Finding AlexNet for Time Series Classification
Authors: Hassan Ismail Fawaz, Benjamin Lucas, Germain Forestier, Charlotte Pelletier, Daniel F. Schmidt, Jonathan Weber, Geoffrey I. Webb, Lhassane Idoumghar, Pierre-Alain Muller, François Petitjean
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, General Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

This paper brings deep learning at the forefront of research into Time Series Classification (TSC). TSC is the area of machine learning tasked with the categorization (or labelling) of time series. The last few decades of work in this area have led to significant progress in the accuracy of classifiers, with the state of the art now represented by the HIVE-COTE algorithm. While extremely accurate, HIVE-COTE cannot be applied to many real-world datasets because of its high training time complexity in O(N2 * T4) for a dataset with N time series of length T. For example, it takes HIVE-COTE more than 8 days to learn from a small dataset with N = 1500 time series of short length T = 46. Meanwhile deep learning has received enormous attention because of its high accuracy and scalability. Recent approaches to deep learning for TSC have been scalable, but less accurate than HIVE-COTE. We introduce InceptionTime - an ensemble of deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, inspired by the Inception-v4 architecture. Our experiments show that InceptionTime is on par with HIVE-COTE in terms of accuracy while being much more scalable: not only can it learn from 1,500 time series in one hour but it can also learn from 8M time series in 13 hours, a quantity of data that is fully out of reach of HIVE-COTE.
Joint Learning of Graph Representation and Node Features in Graph Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Jiaxiang Tang, Wei Hu, Xiang Gao, Zongming Guo
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Metric Learning

Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNNs) extend classical CNNs to graph data domain, such as brain networks, social networks and 3D point clouds. It is critical to identify an appropriate graph for the subsequent graph convolution. Existing methods manually construct or learn one fixed graph for all the layers of a GCNN. In order to adapt to the underlying structure of node features in different layers, we propose dynamic learning of graphs and node features jointly in GCNNs. In particular, we cast the graph optimization problem as distance metric learning to capture pairwise similarities of features in each layer. We deploy the Mahalanobis distance metric and further decompose the metric matrix into a low-dimensional matrix, which converts graph learning to the optimization of a low-dimensional matrix for efficient implementation. Extensive experiments on point clouds and citation network datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of both accuracies and robustness.
Multi-Year Vector Dynamic Time Warping Based Crop Mapping
Authors: Mustafa Teke, Yasemin Yardımcı
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, General Classification, Time Series Analysis

Recent automated crop mapping via supervised learning-based methods have demonstrated unprecedented improvement over classical techniques. However, most crop mapping studies are limited to same-year crop mapping in which the present year's labeled data is used to predict the same year's crop map. Classification accuracies of these methods degrade considerably in cross-year mapping. Cross-year crop mapping is more useful as it allows the prediction of the following years' crop maps using previously labeled data. We propose Vector Dynamic Time Warping (VDTW), a novel multi-year classification approach based on warping of angular distances between phenological vectors. The results prove that the proposed VDTW method is robust to temporal and spectral variations compensating for different farming practices, climate and atmospheric effects, and measurement errors between years. We also describe a method for determining the most discriminative time window that allows high classification accuracies with limited data. We carried out tests of our approach with Landsat 8 time-series imagery from years 2013 to 2016 for classification of corn and cotton in the Harran Plain, and corn, cotton, and soybean in the Bismil Plain of Southeastern Turkey. In addition, we tested VDTW corn and soybean in Kansas, the US for 2017 and 2018 with the Harmonized Landsat Sentinel data. The VDTW method achieved 99.85% and 99.74% overall accuracies for the same and cross years, respectively with fewer training samples compared to other state-of-the-art approaches, i.e. spectral angle mapper (SAM), dynamic time warping (DTW), time-weighted DTW (TWDTW), random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM) and deep long short-term memory (LSTM) methods. The proposed method could be expanded for other crop types and/or geographical areas.
On weighted uncertainty sampling in active learning
Authors: Vinay Jethava
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

This note explores probabilistic sampling weighted by uncertainty in active learning. This method has been previously used and authors have tangentially remarked on its efficacy. The scheme has several benefits: (1) it is computationally cheap, (2) it can be implemented in a single-pass streaming fashion which is a benefit when deployed in real-world systems where different subsystems perform the suggestion scoring and extraction of user feedback, and (3) it is easily parameterizable. In this paper, we show on publicly available datasets that using probabilistic weighting is often beneficial and strikes a good compromise between exploration and representation especially when the starting set of labelled points is biased.
How Does BERT Answer Questions? A Layer-Wise Analysis of Transformer Representations
Authors: Betty van Aken, Benjamin Winter, Alexander Löser, Felix A. Gers
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) reach state-of-the-art results in a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks. However, understanding of their internal functioning is still insufficient and unsatisfactory. In order to better understand BERT and other Transformer-based models, we present a layer-wise analysis of BERT's hidden states. Unlike previous research, which mainly focuses on explaining Transformer models by their attention weights, we argue that hidden states contain equally valuable information. Specifically, our analysis focuses on models fine-tuned on the task of Question Answering (QA) as an example of a complex downstream task. We inspect how QA models transform token vectors in order to find the correct answer. To this end, we apply a set of general and QA-specific probing tasks that reveal the information stored in each representation layer. Our qualitative analysis of hidden state visualizations provides additional insights into BERT's reasoning process. Our results show that the transformations within BERT go through phases that are related to traditional pipeline tasks. The system can therefore implicitly incorporate task-specific information into its token representations. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that fine-tuning has little impact on the models' semantic abilities and that prediction errors can be recognized in the vector representations of even early layers.
Correcting Predictions for Approximate Bayesian Inference
Authors: Tomasz Kuśmierczyk, Joseph Sakaya, Arto Klami
Date: 2019-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Decision Making

Bayesian models quantify uncertainty and facilitate optimal decision-making in downstream applications. For most models, however, practitioners are forced to use approximate inference techniques that lead to sub-optimal decisions due to incorrect posterior predictive distributions. We present a novel approach that corrects for inaccuracies in posterior inference by altering the decision-making process. We train a separate model to make optimal decisions under the approximate posterior, combining interpretable Bayesian modeling with optimization of direct predictive accuracy in a principled fashion. The solution is generally applicable as a plug-in module for predictive decision-making for arbitrary probabilistic programs, irrespective of the posterior inference strategy. We demonstrate the approach empirically in several problems, confirming its potential.