pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RDSNet: A New Deep Architecture for Reciprocal Object Detection and Instance Segmentation
Authors: Shaoru Wang, Yongchao Gong, Junliang Xing, Lichao Huang, Chang Huang, Weiming Hu
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Translation

Object detection and instance segmentation are two fundamental computer vision tasks. They are closely correlated but their relations have not yet been fully explored in most previous work. This paper presents RDSNet, a novel deep architecture for reciprocal object detection and instance segmentation. To reciprocate these two tasks, we design a two-stream structure to learn features on both the object level (i.e., bounding boxes) and the pixel level (i.e., instance masks) jointly. Within this structure, information from the two streams is fused alternately, namely information on the object level introduces the awareness of instance and translation variance to the pixel level, and information on the pixel level refines the localization accuracy of objects on the object level in return. Specifically, a correlation module and a cropping module are proposed to yield instance masks, as well as a mask based boundary refinement module for more accurate bounding boxes. Extensive experimental analyses and comparisons on the COCO dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of RDSNet. The source code is available at https://github.com/wangsr126/RDSNet.
Wide-Area Land Cover Mapping with Sentinel-1 Imagery using Deep Learning Semantic Segmentation Models
Authors: Sanja Šćepanović, Oleg Antropov, Pekka Laurila, Yrjö Rauste, Vladimir Ignatenko, Jaan Praks
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Land cover mapping is essential to monitoring the environment and understanding the effects of human activities on it. The automatic approaches to land cover mapping (i.e., image segmentation) mostly used traditional machine learning that requires heuristic feature design. On natural images, deep learning has outperformed traditional machine learning approaches for image segmentation. On remote sensing images, recent studies demonstrate successful applications of specific deep learning models to small-scale land cover mapping tasks (e.g., to classify wetland complexes). However, it is not readily clear which of the existing models are the best candidates for which remote sensing task. In this study, we answer that question for mapping the fundamental land cover classes using satellite radar data. We took Sentinel-1 C-band SAR images available at no cost to users as representative data. CORINE land cover map was used as a reference, and the models were trained to distinguish between the 5 major CORINE classes. We selected seven among the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models so that they cover a diverse set of approaches: U-Net, DeepLabV3+, PSPNet, BiSeNet, SegNet, FC-DenseNet, and FRRN-B. The models were pre-trained on the ImageNet dataset and further fine-tuned in this study. All the models demonstrated solid performance with overall accuracy between 87.9% and 93.1%, and with good to a very good agreement (kappa statistic between 0.75 and 0.86). The two best models were FC-DenseNet and SegNet, with the latter having a much smaller inference time. Overall, our results indicate that the semantic segmentation models are suitable for efficient wide-area mapping using satellite SAR imagery and also provide baseline accuracy against which the newly proposed models should be evaluated.
Event Outcome Prediction using Sentiment Analysis and Crowd Wisdom in Microblog Feeds
Authors: Rahul Radhakrishnan Iyer, Ronghuo Zheng, Yuezhang Li, Katia Sycara
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Sentiment Analysis of microblog feeds has attracted considerable interest in recent times. Most of the current work focuses on tweet sentiment classification. But not much work has been done to explore how reliable the opinions of the mass (crowd wisdom) in social network microblogs such as twitter are in predicting outcomes of certain events such as election debates. In this work, we investigate whether crowd wisdom is useful in predicting such outcomes and whether their opinions are influenced by the experts in the field. We work in the domain of multi-label classification to perform sentiment classification of tweets and obtain the opinion of the crowd. This learnt sentiment is then used to predict outcomes of events such as: US Presidential Debate winners, Grammy Award winners, Super Bowl Winners. We find that in most of the cases, the wisdom of the crowd does indeed match with that of the experts, and in cases where they don't (particularly in the case of debates), we see that the crowd's opinion is actually influenced by that of the experts.
Completion Reasoning Emulation for the Description Logic EL+
Authors: Aaron Eberhart, Monireh Ebrahimi, Lu Zhou, Cogan Shimizu, Pascal Hitzler
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00

We present a new approach to integrating deep learning with knowledge-based systems that we believe shows promise. Our approach seeks to emulate reasoning structure, which can be inspected part-way through, rather than simply learning reasoner answers, which is typical in many of the black-box systems currently in use. We demonstrate that this idea is feasible by training a long short-term memory (LSTM) artificial neural network to learn EL+ reasoning patterns with two different data sets. We also show that this trained system is resistant to noise by corrupting a percentage of the test data and comparing the reasoner's and LSTM's predictions on corrupt data with correct answers.
Efficient crowdsourcing of crowd-generated microtasks
Authors: Abigail Hotaling, James P. Bagrow
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Allowing members of the crowd to propose novel microtasks for one another is an effective way to combine the efficiencies of traditional microtask work with the inventiveness and hypothesis generation potential of human workers. However, microtask proposal leads to a growing set of tasks that may overwhelm limited crowdsourcer resources. Crowdsourcers can employ methods to utilize their resources efficiently, but algorithmic approaches to efficient crowdsourcing generally require a fixed task set of known size. In this paper, we introduce *cost forecasting* as a means for a crowdsourcer to use efficient crowdsourcing algorithms with a growing set of microtasks. Cost forecasting allows the crowdsourcer to decide between eliciting new tasks from the crowd or receiving responses to existing tasks based on whether or not new tasks will cost less to complete than existing tasks, efficiently balancing resources as crowdsourcing occurs. Experiments with real and synthetic crowdsourcing data show that cost forecasting leads to improved accuracy. Accuracy and efficiency gains for crowd-generated microtasks hold the promise to further leverage the creativity and wisdom of the crowd, with applications such as generating more informative and diverse training data for machine learning applications and improving the performance of user-generated content and question-answering platforms.
Deep Adaptive Wavelet Network
Authors: Maria Ximena Bastidas Rodriguez, Adrien Gruson, Luisa F. Polania, Shin Fujieda, Flavio Prieto Ortiz, Kohei Takayama, Toshiya Hachisuka
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Even though convolutional neural networks have become the method of choice in many fields of computer vision, they still lack interpretability and are usually designed manually in a cumbersome trial-and-error process. This paper aims at overcoming those limitations by proposing a deep neural network, which is designed in a systematic fashion and is interpretable, by integrating multiresolution analysis at the core of the deep neural network design. By using the lifting scheme, it is possible to generate a wavelet representation and design a network capable of learning wavelet coefficients in an end-to-end form. Compared to state-of-the-art architectures, the proposed model requires less hyper-parameter tuning and achieves competitive accuracy in image classification tasks
Fenton-Wilkinson Order Statistics and German Tanks: A Case Study of an Orienteering Relay Race
Authors: Joonas Pääkkönen
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Ordinal regression falls between discrete-valued classification and continuous-valued regression. Ordinal target variables can be associated with ranked random variables. These random variables are known as order statistics and they are closely related to ordinal regression. However, the challenge of using order statistics for ordinal regression prediction is finding a suitable parent distribution. In this work, we provide a case study of a real-world orienteering relay race by viewing it as a random process. For this process, we show that accurate order statistical ordinal regression predictions of final team rankings, or places, can be obtained by assuming a lognormal distribution of individual leg times. Moreover, we apply Fenton-Wilkinson approximations to intermediate changeover times alongside an estimator for the total number of teams as in the notorious German tank problem. The purpose of this work is, in part, to spark interest in studying the applicability of order statistics in ordinal regression problems.
Imitation Learning via Off-Policy Distribution Matching
Authors: Ilya Kostrikov, Ofir Nachum, Jonathan Tompson
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

When performing imitation learning from expert demonstrations, distribution matching is a popular approach, in which one alternates between estimating distribution ratios and then using these ratios as rewards in a standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. Traditionally, estimation of the distribution ratio requires on-policy data, which has caused previous work to either be exorbitantly data-inefficient or alter the original objective in a manner that can drastically change its optimum. In this work, we show how the original distribution ratio estimation objective may be transformed in a principled manner to yield a completely off-policy objective. In addition to the data-efficiency that this provides, we are able to show that this objective also renders the use of a separate RL optimization unnecessary.Rather, an imitation policy may be learned directly from this objective without the use of explicit rewards. We call the resulting algorithm ValueDICE and evaluate it on a suite of popular imitation learning benchmarks, finding that it can achieve state-of-the-art sample efficiency and performance.
Representational Rényi heterogeneity
Authors: Abraham Nunes, Martin Alda, Timothy Bardouille, Thomas Trappenberg
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00

A discrete system's heterogeneity is measured by the R\'enyi heterogeneity family of indices (also known as Hill numbers or Hannah--Kay indices), whose units are {the numbers equivalent}. Unfortunately, numbers equivalent heterogeneity measures for non-categorical data require {a priori} (A) categorical partitioning and (B) pairwise distance measurement on the observable data space, thereby precluding application to problems with ill-defined categories or where semantically relevant features must be learned as abstractions from some data. We thus introduce representational R\'enyi heterogeneity (RRH), which transforms an observable domain onto a latent space upon which the R\'enyi heterogeneity is both tractable and semantically relevant. This method requires neither {a priori} binning nor definition of a distance function on the observable space. We show that RRH can generalize existing biodiversity and economic equality indices. Compared with existing indices on a beta-mixture distribution, we show that RRH responds more appropriately to changes in mixture component separation and weighting. Finally, we demonstrate the measurement of RRH in a set of natural images, with respect to abstract representations learned by a deep neural network. The RRH approach will further enable heterogeneity measurement in disciplines whose data do not easily conform to the assumptions of existing indices.
SpineNet: Learning Scale-Permuted Backbone for Recognition and Localization
Authors: Xianzhi Du, Tsung-Yi Lin, Pengchong Jin, Golnaz Ghiasi, Mingxing Tan, Yin Cui, Quoc V. Le, Xiaodan Song
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, Neural Architecture Search, object-detection, Object Detection, Point Cloud Registration, Real-Time Object Detection

Convolutional neural networks typically encode an input image into a series of intermediate features with decreasing resolutions. While this structure is suited to classification tasks, it does not perform well for tasks requiring simultaneous recognition and localization (e.g., object detection). The encoder-decoder architectures are proposed to resolve this by applying a decoder network onto a backbone model designed for classification tasks. In this paper, we argue encoder-decoder architecture is ineffective in generating strong multi-scale features because of the scale-decreased backbone. We propose SpineNet, a backbone with scale-permuted intermediate features and cross-scale connections that is learned on an object detection task by Neural Architecture Search. Using similar building blocks, SpineNet models outperform ResNet-FPN models by ~3% AP at various scales while using 10-20% fewer FLOPs. In particular, SpineNet-190 achieves 52.5% AP with a MaskR-CNN detector and achieves 52.1% AP with a RetinaNet detector on COCO for a single model without test-time augmentation, significantly outperforms prior art of detectors. SpineNet can transfer to classification tasks, achieving 5% top-1 accuracy improvement on a challenging iNaturalist fine-grained dataset. Code is at: https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/detection.
Learning Domain Adaptive Features with Unlabeled Domain Bridges
Authors: Yichen Li, Xingchao Peng
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Conventional cross-domain image-to-image translation or unsupervised domain adaptation methods assume that the source domain and target domain are closely related. This neglects a practical scenario where the domain discrepancy between the source and target is excessively large. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to learn domain adaptive features between the largely-gapped source and target domains with unlabeled domain bridges. Firstly, we introduce the framework of Cycle-consistency Flow Generative Adversarial Networks (CFGAN) that utilizes domain bridges to perform image-to-image translation between two distantly distributed domains. Secondly, we propose the Prototypical Adversarial Domain Adaptation (PADA) model which utilizes unlabeled bridge domains to align feature distribution between source and target with a large discrepancy. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed models.
Fuzzy Rule Interpolation Toolbox for the GNU Open-Source OCTAVE
Authors: Maen Alzubi, Mohammad Almseidin, Mohd Aaqib Lone, Szilveszter Kovacs
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00

In most fuzzy control applications (applying classical fuzzy reasoning), the reasoning method requires a complete fuzzy rule-base, i.e all the possible observations must be covered by the antecedents of the fuzzy rules, which is not always available. Fuzzy control systems based on the Fuzzy Rule Interpolation (FRI) concept play a major role in different platforms, in case if only a sparse fuzzy rule-base is available. This cases the fuzzy model contains only the most relevant rules, without covering all the antecedent universes. The first FRI toolbox being able to handle different FRI methods was developed by Johanyak et. al. in 2006 for the MATLAB environment. The goal of this paper is to introduce some details of the adaptation of the FRI toolbox to support the GNU/OCTAVE programming language. The OCTAVE Fuzzy Rule Interpolation (OCTFRI) Toolbox is an open-source toolbox for OCTAVE programming language, providing a large functionally compatible subset of the MATLAB FRI toolbox as well as many extensions. The OCTFRI Toolbox includes functions that enable the user to evaluate Fuzzy Inference Systems (FISs) from the command line and from OCTAVE scripts, read/write FISs and OBS to/from files, and produce a graphical visualisation of both the membership functions and the FIS outputs. Future work will focus on implementing advanced fuzzy inference techniques and GUI tools.
Almost Uniform Sampling From Neural Networks
Authors: Changlong Wu, Narayana Prasad Santhanam
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00

Given a length $n$ sample from $\mathbb{R}^d$ and a neural network with a fixed architecture with $W$ weights, $k$ neurons, linear threshold activation functions, and binary outputs on each neuron, we study the problem of uniformly sampling from all possible labelings on the sample corresponding to different choices of weights. We provide an algorithm that runs in time polynomial both in $n$ and $W$ such that any labeling appears with probability at least $\left(\frac{W}{2ekn}\right)^W$ for $W<n$. For a single neuron, we also provide a random walk based algorithm that samples exactly uniformly.
What You See is What You Get: Exploiting Visibility for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Peiyun Hu, Jason Ziglar, David Held, Deva Ramanan
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Data Augmentation, object-detection, Object Detection

Recent advances in 3D sensing have created unique challenges for computer vision. One fundamental challenge is finding a good representation for 3D sensor data. Most popular representations (such as PointNet) are proposed in the context of processing truly 3D data (e.g. points sampled from mesh models), ignoring the fact that 3D sensored data such as a LiDAR sweep is in fact 2.5D. We argue that representing 2.5D data as collections of (x, y, z) points fundamentally destroys hidden information about freespace. In this paper, we demonstrate such knowledge can be efficiently recovered through 3D raycasting and readily incorporated into batch-based gradient learning. We describe a simple approach to augmenting voxel-based networks with visibility: we add a voxelized visibility map as an additional input stream. In addition, we show that visibility can be combined with two crucial modifications common to state-of-the-art 3D detectors: synthetic data augmentation of virtual objects and temporal aggregation of LiDAR sweeps over multiple time frames. On the NuScenes 3D detection benchmark, we show that, by adding an additional stream for visibility input, we can significantly improve the overall detection accuracy of a state-of-the-art 3D detector.
Phase Retrieval Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Tobias Uelwer, Alexander Oberstraß, Stefan Harmeling
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

In this paper, we propose the application of conditional generative adversarial networks to solve various phase retrieval problems. We show that including knowledge of the measurement process at training time leads to an optimization at test time that is more robust to initialization than existing approaches involving generative models. In addition, conditioning the generator network on the measurements enables us to achieve much more detailed results. We empirically demonstrate that these advantages provide meaningful solutions to the Fourier and the compressive phase retrieval problem and that our method outperforms well-established projection-based methods as well as existing methods that are based on neural networks. Like other deep learning methods, our approach is very robust to noise and can therefore be very useful for real-world applications.
Advances in Online Audio-Visual Meeting Transcription
Authors: Takuya Yoshioka, Igor Abramovski, Cem Aksoylar, Zhuo Chen, Moshe David, Dimitrios Dimitriadis, Yifan Gong, Ilya Gurvich, Xuedong Huang, Yan Huang, Aviv Hurvitz, Li Jiang, Sharon Koubi, Eyal Krupka, Ido Leichter, Changliang Liu, Partha Parthasarathy, Alon Vinnikov, Lingfeng Wu, Xiong Xiao, Wayne Xiong, Huaming Wang, Zhenghao Wang, Jun Zhang, Yong Zhao, Tianyan Zhou
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Sound Source Localization, speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization, Speaker Identification, Speech Separation

This paper describes a system that generates speaker-annotated transcripts of meetings by using a microphone array and a 360-degree camera. The hallmark of the system is its ability to handle overlapped speech, which has been an unsolved problem in realistic settings for over a decade. We show that this problem can be addressed by using a continuous speech separation approach. In addition, we describe an online audio-visual speaker diarization method that leverages face tracking and identification, sound source localization, speaker identification, and, if available, prior speaker information for robustness to various real world challenges. All components are integrated in a meeting transcription framework called SRD, which stands for "separate, recognize, and diarize". Experimental results using recordings of natural meetings involving up to 11 attendees are reported. The continuous speech separation improves a word error rate (WER) by 16.1% compared with a highly tuned beamformer. When a complete list of meeting attendees is available, the discrepancy between WER and speaker-attributed WER is only 1.0%, indicating accurate word-to-speaker association. This increases marginally to 1.6% when 50% of the attendees are unknown to the system.
Advances and Open Problems in Federated Learning
Authors: Peter Kairouz, H. Brendan McMahan, Brendan Avent, Aurélien Bellet, Mehdi Bennis, Arjun Nitin Bhagoji, Kallista Bonawitz, Zachary Charles, Graham Cormode, Rachel Cummings, Rafael G. L. D'Oliveira, Hubert Eichner, Salim El Rouayheb, David Evans, Josh Gardner, Zachary Garrett, Adrià Gascón, Badih Ghazi, Phillip B. Gibbons, Marco Gruteser, Zaid Harchaoui, Chaoyang He, Lie He, Zhouyuan Huo, Ben Hutchinson, Justin Hsu, Martin Jaggi, Tara Javidi, Gauri Joshi, Mikhail Khodak, Jakub Konečný, Aleksandra Korolova, Farinaz Koushanfar, Sanmi Koyejo, Tancrède Lepoint, Yang Liu, Prateek Mittal, Mehryar Mohri, Richard Nock, Ayfer Özgür, Rasmus Pagh, Mariana Raykova, Hang Qi, Daniel Ramage, Ramesh Raskar, Dawn Song, Weikang Song, Sebastian U. Stich, Ziteng Sun, Ananda Theertha Suresh, Florian Tramèr, Praneeth Vepakomma, Jianyu Wang, Li Xiong, Zheng Xu, Qiang Yang, Felix X. Yu, Han Yu, Sen Zhao
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.