pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dimensionwise Separable 2-D Graph Convolution for Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs
Authors: Qimai Li, Xiaotong Zhang, Han Liu, Quanyu Dai, Xiao-Ming Wu
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Clustering, Graph Representation Learning, Node Classification, Object, Representation Learning

Graph convolutional neural networks (GCN) have been the model of choice for graph representation learning, which is mainly due to the effective design of graph convolution that computes the representation of a node by aggregating those of its neighbors. However, existing GCN variants commonly use 1-D graph convolution that solely operates on the object link graph without exploring informative relational information among object attributes. This significantly limits their modeling capability and may lead to inferior performance on noisy and sparse real-world networks. In this paper, we explore 2-D graph convolution to jointly model object links and attribute relations for graph representation learning. Specifically, we propose a computationally efficient dimensionwise separable 2-D graph convolution (DSGC) for filtering node features. Theoretically, we show that DSGC can reduce intra-class variance of node features on both the object dimension and the attribute dimension to learn more effective representations. Empirically, we demonstrate that by modeling attribute relations, DSGC achieves significant performance gain over state-of-the-art methods for node classification and clustering on a variety of real-world networks. The source code for reproducing the experimental results is available at https://github.com/liqimai/DSGC.
Learned Point Cloud Geometry Compression
Authors: Jianqiang Wang, Hao Zhu, Zhan Ma, Tong Chen, Haojie Liu, Qiu Shen
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Surface Reconstruction

This paper presents a novel end-to-end Learned Point Cloud Geometry Compression (a.k.a., Learned-PCGC) framework, to efficiently compress the point cloud geometry (PCG) using deep neural networks (DNN) based variational autoencoders (VAE). In our approach, PCG is first voxelized, scaled and partitioned into non-overlapped 3D cubes, which is then fed into stacked 3D convolutions for compact latent feature and hyperprior generation. Hyperpriors are used to improve the conditional probability modeling of latent features. A weighted binary cross-entropy (WBCE) loss is applied in training while an adaptive thresholding is used in inference to remove unnecessary voxels and reduce the distortion. Objectively, our method exceeds the geometry-based point cloud compression (G-PCC) algorithm standardized by well-known Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) with a significant performance margin, e.g., at least 60% BD-Rate (Bjontegaard Delta Rate) gains, using common test datasets. Subjectively, our method has presented better visual quality with smoother surface reconstruction and appealing details, in comparison to all existing MPEG standard compliant PCC methods. Our method requires about 2.5MB parameters in total, which is a fairly small size for practical implementation, even on embedded platform. Additional ablation studies analyze a variety of aspects (e.g., cube size, kernels, etc) to explore the application potentials of our learned-PCGC.
Deep Learning-based Polar Code Design
Authors: Moustafa Ebada, Sebastian Cammerer, Ahmed Elkelesh, Stephan ten Brink
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Deep Learning

In this work, we introduce a deep learning-based polar code construction algorithm. The core idea is to represent the information/frozen bit indices of a polar code as a binary vector which can be interpreted as trainable weights of a neural network (NN). For this, we demonstrate how this binary vector can be relaxed to a soft-valued vector, facilitating the learning process through gradient descent and enabling an efficient code construction. We further show how different polar code design constraints (e.g., code rate) can be taken into account by means of careful binary-to-soft and soft-to-binary conversions, along with rate-adjustment after each learning iteration. Besides its conceptual simplicity, this approach benefits from having the "decoder-in-the-loop", i.e., the nature of the decoder is inherently taken into consideration while learning (designing) the polar code. We show results for belief propagation (BP) decoding over both AWGN and Rayleigh fading channels with considerable performance gains over state-of-the-art construction schemes.
Convex Relaxations for Consensus and Non-Minimal Problems in 3D Vision
Authors: Thomas Probst, Danda Pani Paudel, Ajad Chhatkuli, Luc van Gool
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10

In this paper, we formulate a generic non-minimal solver using the existing tools of Polynomials Optimization Problems (POP) from computational algebraic geometry. The proposed method exploits the well known Shor's or Lasserre's relaxations, whose theoretical aspects are also discussed. Notably, we further exploit the POP formulation of non-minimal solver also for the generic consensus maximization problems in 3D vision. Our framework is simple and straightforward to implement, which is also supported by three diverse applications in 3D vision, namely rigid body transformation estimation, Non-Rigid Structure-from-Motion (NRSfM), and camera autocalibration. In all three cases, both non-minimal and consensus maximization are tested, which are also compared against the state-of-the-art methods. Our results are competitive to the compared methods, and are also coherent with our theoretical analysis. The main contribution of this paper is the claim that a good approximate solution for many polynomial problems involved in 3D vision can be obtained using the existing theory of numerical computational algebra. This claim leads us to reason about why many relaxed methods in 3D vision behave so well? And also allows us to offer a generic relaxed solver in a rather straightforward way. We further show that the convex relaxation of these polynomials can easily be used for maximizing consensus in a deterministic manner. We support our claim using several experiments for aforementioned three diverse problems in 3D vision.
Query Optimization Properties of Modified VBS
Authors: Mieczysław A. Kłopotek, Sławomir T. Wierzchoń
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00

Valuation-Based~System can represent knowledge in different domains including probability theory, Dempster-Shafer theory and possibility theory. More recent studies show that the framework of VBS is also appropriate for representing and solving Bayesian decision problems and optimization problems. In this paper after introducing the valuation based system (VBS) framework, we present Markov-like properties of VBS and a method for resolving queries to VBS.
Towards Understanding the Transferability of Deep Representations
Authors: Hong Liu, Mingsheng Long, Jian-Min Wang, Michael. I. Jordan
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00

Deep neural networks trained on a wide range of datasets demonstrate impressive transferability. Deep features appear general in that they are applicable to many datasets and tasks. Such property is in prevalent use in real-world applications. A neural network pretrained on large datasets, such as ImageNet, can significantly boost generalization and accelerate training if fine-tuned to a smaller target dataset. Despite its pervasiveness, few effort has been devoted to uncovering the reason of transferability in deep feature representations. This paper tries to understand transferability from the perspectives of improved generalization, optimization and the feasibility of transferability. We demonstrate that 1) Transferred models tend to find flatter minima, since their weight matrices stay close to the original flat region of pretrained parameters when transferred to a similar target dataset; 2) Transferred representations make the loss landscape more favorable with improved Lipschitzness, which accelerates and stabilizes training substantially. The improvement largely attributes to the fact that the principal component of gradient is suppressed in the pretrained parameters, thus stabilizing the magnitude of gradient in back-propagation. 3) The feasibility of transferability is related to the similarity of both input and label. And a surprising discovery is that the feasibility is also impacted by the training stages in that the transferability first increases during training, and then declines. We further provide a theoretical analysis to verify our observations.
Modeling Electromagnetic Navigation Systems for Medical Applications using Random Forests and Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Ruoxi Yu, Samuel L. Charreyron, Quentin Boehler, Cameron Weibel, Carmen C. Y. Poon, Bradley J. Nelson
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Electromagnetic Navigation Systems (eMNS) can be used to control a variety of multiscale devices within the human body for remote surgery. Accurate modeling of the magnetic fields generated by the electromagnets of an eMNS is crucial for the precise control of these devices. Existing methods assume a linear behavior of these systems, leading to significant modeling errors within nonlinear regions exhibited at higher magnetic fields. In this paper, we use a random forest (RF) and an artificial neural network (ANN) to model the nonlinear behavior of the magnetic fields generated by an eMNS. Both machine learning methods outperformed the state-of-the-art linear multipole electromagnet method (LMEM). The RF and the ANN model reduced the root mean squared error of the LMEM when predicting the field magnitude by around 40% and 80%, respectively, over the entire current range of the eMNS. At high current regions, especially between 30 and 35 A, the field-magnitude RMSE improvement of the ANN model over the LMEM was over 35 mT. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using machine learning methods to model an eMNS for medical applications, and its ability to account for complex nonlinear behavior at high currents. The use of machine learning thus shows promise for improving surgical procedures that use magnetic navigation.
Selecting Artificially-Generated Sentences for Fine-Tuning Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Alberto Poncelas, Andy Way
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 10
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Sentence, Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models tend to achieve best performance when larger sets of parallel sentences are provided for training. For this reason, augmenting the training set with artificially-generated sentence pairs can boost performance. Nonetheless, the performance can also be improved with a small number of sentences if they are in the same domain as the test set. Accordingly, we want to explore the use of artificially-generated sentences along with data-selection algorithms to improve German-to-English NMT models trained solely with authentic data. In this work, we show how artificially-generated sentences can be more beneficial than authentic pairs, and demonstrate their advantages when used in combination with data-selection algorithms.
Complex Network based Supervised Keyword Extractor
Authors: Swagata Duari, Vasudha Bhatnagar
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyphrase Extraction, Keyword Extraction

In this paper, we present a supervised framework for automatic keyword extraction from single document. We model the text as complex network, and construct the feature set by extracting select node properties from it. Several node properties have been exploited by unsupervised, graph-based keyword extraction methods to discriminate keywords from non-keywords. We exploit the complex interplay of node properties to design a supervised keyword extraction method. The training set is created from the feature set by assigning a label to each candidate keyword depending on whether the candidate is listed as a gold-standard keyword or not. Since the number of keywords in a document is much less than non-keywords, the curated training set is naturally imbalanced. We train a binary classifier to predict keywords after balancing the training set. The model is trained using two public datasets from scientific domain and tested using three unseen scientific corpora and one news corpus. Comparative study of the results with several recent keyword and keyphrase extraction methods establishes that the proposed method performs better in most cases. This substantiates our claim that graph-theoretic properties of words are effective discriminators between keywords and non-keywords. We support our argument by showing that the improved performance of the proposed method is statistically significant for all datasets. We also evaluate the effectiveness of the pre-trained model on Hindi and Assamese language documents. We observe that the model performs equally well for the cross-language text even though it was trained only on English language documents. This shows that the proposed method is independent of the domain, collection, and language of the training corpora.
CoPhy: Counterfactual Learning of Physical Dynamics
Authors: Fabien Baradel, Natalia Neverova, Julien Mille, Greg Mori, Christian Wolf
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: counterfactual, Video Prediction

Understanding causes and effects in mechanical systems is an essential component of reasoning in the physical world. This work poses a new problem of counterfactual learning of object mechanics from visual input. We develop the CoPhy benchmark to assess the capacity of the state-of-the-art models for causal physical reasoning in a synthetic 3D environment and propose a model for learning the physical dynamics in a counterfactual setting. Having observed a mechanical experiment that involves, for example, a falling tower of blocks, a set of bouncing balls or colliding objects, we learn to predict how its outcome is affected by an arbitrary intervention on its initial conditions, such as displacing one of the objects in the scene. The alternative future is predicted given the altered past and a latent representation of the confounders learned by the model in an end-to-end fashion with no supervision. We compare against feedforward video prediction baselines and show how observing alternative experiences allows the network to capture latent physical properties of the environment, which results in significantly more accurate predictions at the level of super human performance.
The Stroke Correspondence Problem, Revisited
Authors: Dominik Klein
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00

We revisit the stroke correspondence problem [13,14]. We optimize this algorithm by 1) evaluating suitable preprocessing (normalization) methods 2) extending the algorithm with an additional distance measure to handle Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji characters with a low number of strokes and c) simplify the stroke linking algorithms. Our contributions are implemented in the free, open-source library ctegaki and in the demo-tools jTegaki and Kanjicanvas.
Synergistic Team Composition: A Computational Approach to Foster Diversity in Teams
Authors: Ewa Andrejczuk, Filippo Bistaffa, Christian Blum, Juan A. Rodríguez-Aguilar, Carles Sierra
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Co-operative learning in heterogeneous teams refers to learning methods in which teams are organised both to accomplish academic tasks and for individuals to gain knowledge. Competencies, personality and the gender of team members are key factors that influence team performance. Here, we introduce a team composition problem, the so-called synergistic team composition problem (STCP), which incorporates such key factors when arranging teams. Thus, the goal of the STCP is to partition a set of individuals into a set of synergistic teams: teams that are diverse in personality and gender and whose members cover all required competencies to complete a task. Furthermore, the STCP requires that all teams are balanced in that they are expected to exhibit similar performances when completing the task. We propose two efficient algorithms to solve the STCP. Our first algorithm is based on a linear programming formulation and is appropriate to solve small instances of the problem. Our second algorithm is an anytime heuristic that is effective for large instances of the STCP. Finally, we thoroughly study the computational properties of both algorithms in an educational context when grouping students in a classroom into teams using actual-world data.
Support Vector Machines on Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum Computers
Authors: Jiaying Yang, Ahsan Javed Awan, Gemma Vall-Llosera
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00

Support vector machine algorithms are considered essential for the implementation of automation in a radio access network. Specifically, they are critical in the prediction of the quality of user experience for video streaming based on device and network-level metrics. Quantum SVM is the quantum analogue of the classical SVM algorithm, which utilizes the properties of quantum computers to speed up the algorithm exponentially. In this work, we derive an optimized preprocessing unit for a quantum SVM that allows classifying any two-dimensional datasets that are linearly separable. We further provide a result readout method of the kernel matrix generation circuit to avoid quantum tomography that, in turn, reduces the quantum circuit depth. We also derive a quantum SVM system based on an optimized HHL quantum circuit with reduced circuit depth.
Subjective and Objective De-raining Quality Assessment Towards Authentic Rain Image
Authors: Qingbo Wu, Lei Wang, King N. Ngan, Hongliang Li, Fanman Meng, Linfeng Xu
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Image Quality Assessment, Image Quality Assessment, Rain Removal

Images acquired by outdoor vision systems easily suffer poor visibility and annoying interference due to the rainy weather, which brings great challenge for accurately understanding and describing the visual contents. Recent researches have devoted great efforts on the task of rain removal for improving the image visibility. However, there is very few exploration about the quality assessment of de-rained image, even it is crucial for accurately measuring the performance of various de-raining algorithms. In this paper, we first create a de-raining quality assessment (DQA) database that collects 206 authentic rain images and their de-rained versions produced by 6 representative single image rain removal algorithms. Then, a subjective study is conducted on our DQA database, which collects the subject-rated scores of all de-rained images. To quantitatively measure the quality of de-rained image with non-uniform artifacts, we propose a bi-directional feature embedding network (B-FEN) which integrates the features of global perception and local difference together. Experiments confirm that the proposed method significantly outperforms many existing universal blind image quality assessment models. To help the research towards perceptually preferred de-raining algorithm, we will publicly release our DQA database and B-FEN source code on https://github.com/wqb-uestc.
Spoken Conversational Search for General Knowledge
Authors: Lina M. Rojas-Barahona, Pascal Bellec, Benoit Besset, Martinho Dos-Santos, Johannes Heinecke, Munshi Asadullah, Olivier Le-Blouch, Jean Y. Lancien, Géraldine Damnati, Emmanuel Mory, Frédéric Herledan
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 9
Tasks: Conversational Question Answering, Conversational Search, General Knowledge, Question Answering

We present a spoken conversational question answering proof of concept that is able to answer questions about general knowledge from Wikidata. The dialogue component does not only orchestrate various components but also solve coreferences and ellipsis.
Stochastic Weight Matrix-based Regularization Methods for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Patrik Reizinger, Bálint Gyires-Tóth
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The aim of this paper is to introduce two widely applicable regularization methods based on the direct modification of weight matrices. The first method, Weight Reinitialization, utilizes a simplified Bayesian assumption with partially resetting a sparse subset of the parameters. The second one, Weight Shuffling, introduces an entropy- and weight distribution-invariant non-white noise to the parameters. The latter can also be interpreted as an ensemble approach. The proposed methods are evaluated on benchmark datasets, such as MNIST, CIFAR-10 or the JSB Chorales database, and also on time series modeling tasks. We report gains both regarding performance and entropy of the analyzed networks. We also made our code available as a GitHub repository (https://github.com/rpatrik96/lod-wmm-2019).
Learning Energy-based Spatial-Temporal Generative ConvNets for Dynamic Patterns
Authors: Jianwen Xie, Song-Chun Zhu, Ying Nian Wu
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00

Video sequences contain rich dynamic patterns, such as dynamic texture patterns that exhibit stationarity in the temporal domain, and action patterns that are non-stationary in either spatial or temporal domain. We show that an energy-based spatial-temporal generative ConvNet can be used to model and synthesize dynamic patterns. The model defines a probability distribution on the video sequence, and the log probability is defined by a spatial-temporal ConvNet that consists of multiple layers of spatial-temporal filters to capture spatial-temporal patterns of different scales. The model can be learned from the training video sequences by an "analysis by synthesis" learning algorithm that iterates the following two steps. Step 1 synthesizes video sequences from the currently learned model. Step 2 then updates the model parameters based on the difference between the synthesized video sequences and the observed training sequences. We show that the learning algorithm can synthesize realistic dynamic patterns. We also show that it is possible to learn the model from incomplete training sequences with either occluded pixels or missing frames, so that model learning and pattern completion can be accomplished simultaneously.
Read, Attend and Comment: A Deep Architecture for Automatic News Comment Generation
Authors: Ze Yang, Can Xu, Wei Wu, Zhoujun Li
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Comment Generation, Text Generation

Automatic news comment generation is a new testbed for techniques of natural language generation. In this paper, we propose a "read-attend-comment" procedure for news comment generation and formalize the procedure with a reading network and a generation network. The reading network comprehends a news article and distills some important points from it, then the generation network creates a comment by attending to the extracted discrete points and the news title. We optimize the model in an end-to-end manner by maximizing a variational lower bound of the true objective using the back-propagation algorithm. Experimental results on two datasets indicate that our model can significantly outperform existing methods in terms of both automatic evaluation and human judgment.