pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Streaming Networks: Increase Noise Robustness and Filter Diversity via Hard-wired and Input-induced Sparsity
Authors: Sergey Tarasenko, Fumihiko Takahashi
Date: 2020-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

The CNNs have achieved a state-of-the-art performance in many applications. Recent studies illustrate that CNN's recognition accuracy drops drastically if images are noise corrupted. We focus on the problem of robust recognition accuracy of noise-corrupted images. We introduce a novel network architecture called Streaming Networks. Each stream is taking a certain intensity slice of the original image as an input, and stream parameters are trained independently. We use network capacity, hard-wired and input-induced sparsity as the dimensions for experiments. The results indicate that only the presence of both hard-wired and input-induces sparsity enables robust noisy image recognition. Streaming Nets is the only architecture which has both types of sparsity and exhibits higher robustness to noise. Finally, to illustrate increase in filter diversity we illustrate that a distribution of filter weights of the first conv layer gradually approaches uniform distribution as the degree of hard-wired and domain-induced sparsity and capacities increases.
FusedProp: Towards Efficient Training of Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Zachary Polizzi, Chuan-Yung Tsai
Date: 2020-03-30 00:00:00

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are capable of generating strikingly realistic samples but state-of-the-art GANs can be extremely computationally expensive to train. In this paper, we propose the fused propagation (FusedProp) algorithm which can be used to efficiently train the discriminator and the generator of common GANs simultaneously using only one forward and one backward propagation. We show that FusedProp achieves 1.49 times the training speed compared to the conventional training of GANs, although further studies are required to improve its stability. By reporting our preliminary results and open-sourcing our implementation, we hope to accelerate future research on the training of GANs.
Predict the model of a camera
Authors: Ciro Javier Diaz Penedo
Date: 2020-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, model, regression

In this work we address the problem of predicting the model of a camera based on the content of their photographs. We use two set of features, one set consist in properties extracted from a Discrete Wavelet Domain (DWD) obtained by applying a 4 level Fast Wavelet Decomposition of the images, and a second set are Local Binary Patterns (LBP) features from the after filter noise of images. The algorithms used for classification were Logistic regression, K-NN and Artificial Neural Networks
An End-to-End Approach for Recognition of Modern and Historical Handwritten Numeral Strings
Authors: Andre G. Hochuli, Alceu S. Britto Jr., Jean P. Barddal, Luiz E. S. Oliveira, Robert Sabourin
Date: 2020-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

An end-to-end solution for handwritten numeral string recognition is proposed, in which the numeral string is considered as composed of objects automatically detected and recognized by a YoLo-based model. The main contribution of this paper is to avoid heuristic-based methods for string preprocessing and segmentation, the need for task-oriented classifiers, and also the use of specific constraints related to the string length. A robust experimental protocol based on several numeral string datasets, including one composed of historical documents, has shown that the proposed method is a feasible end-to-end solution for numeral string recognition. Besides, it reduces the complexity of the string recognition task considerably since it drops out classical steps, in special preprocessing, segmentation, and a set of classifiers devoted to strings with a specific length.
Multiform Fonts-to-Fonts Translation via Style and Content Disentangled Representations of Chinese Character
Authors: Fenxi Xiao, Jie Zhang, Bo Huang, Xia Wu
Date: 2020-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer, Translation

This paper mainly discusses the generation of personalized fonts as the problem of image style transfer. The main purpose of this paper is to design a network framework that can extract and recombine the content and style of the characters. These attempts can be used to synthesize the entire set of fonts with only a small amount of characters. The paper combines various depth networks such as Convolutional Neural Network, Multi-layer Perceptron and Residual Network to find the optimal model to extract the features of the fonts character. The result shows that those characters we have generated is very close to real characters, using Structural Similarity index and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio evaluation criterions.
Automatic Generation of Chinese Handwriting via Fonts Style Representation Learning
Authors: Fenxi Xiao, Bo Huang, Xia Wu
Date: 2020-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Font Generation, Representation Learning

In this paper, we propose and end-to-end deep Chinese font generation system. This system can generate new style fonts by interpolation of latent style-related embeding variables that could achieve smooth transition between different style. Our method is simpler and more effective than other methods, which will help to improve the font design efficiency
Comfort-as-a-Service: Designing a User-Oriented Thermal Comfort Artifact for Office Buildings
Authors: Svenja Laing, Niklas Kühl
Date: 2020-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Management

Most people spend up to 90 % of their time indoors. However, literature in the field of facility management and related disciplines mostly focus on energy and cost saving aspects of buildings. Especially in the area of commercial buildings, only few articles take a user-centric perspective and none of them considers the subjectivity of thermal comfort. This work addresses this research gap and aims to optimize individual environmental comfort in open office environments, taking advantage of changes in modern office infrastructure and considering actual user feedback without interfering with existing systems. Based on a Design Science Research approach, we first perform a user experience testing in an exemplary corporate office building. Furthermore, we build a mechanism to gather user feedback on environmental comfort. Based on this, we build a machine learning model including different IoT data sources (e.g. building data and weather data) with an average coefficient of determination of 41.5%. Using these insights, we are able to suggest current individual comfort zones within the building and help employees to make better informed decisions on where to sit or what to wear, to feel comfortable and work productively. Therefore, we contribute to the body of knowledge by proposing a user-centric design within a cross-disciplinary context on the basis of analytical processes.
Simultaneous Learning from Human Pose and Object Cues for Real-Time Activity Recognition
Authors: Brian Reily, Qingzhao Zhu, Christopher Reardon, Hao Zhang
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition

Real-time human activity recognition plays an essential role in real-world human-centered robotics applications, such as assisted living and human-robot collaboration. Although previous methods based on skeletal data to encode human poses showed promising results on real-time activity recognition, they lacked the capability to consider the context provided by objects within the scene and in use by the humans, which can provide a further discriminant between human activity categories. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to real-time human activity recognition, through simultaneously learning from observations of both human poses and objects involved in the human activity. We formulate human activity recognition as a joint optimization problem under a unified mathematical framework, which uses a regression-like loss function to integrate human pose and object cues and defines structured sparsity-inducing norms to identify discriminative body joints and object attributes. To evaluate our method, we perform extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets and a physical robot in a home assistance setting. Experimental results have shown that our method outperforms previous methods and obtains real-time performance for human activity recognition with a processing speed of 10^4 Hz.
Strategies for Robust Image Classification
Authors: Jason Stock, Andy Dolan, Tom Cavey
Date: 2020-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

In this work we evaluate the impact of digitally altered images on the performance of artificial neural networks. We explore factors that negatively affect the ability of an image classification model to produce consistent and accurate results. A model's ability to classify is negatively influenced by alterations to images as a result of digital abnormalities or changes in the physical environment. The focus of this paper is to discover and replicate scenarios that modify the appearance of an image and evaluate them on state-of-the-art machine learning models. Our contributions present various training techniques that enhance a model's ability to generalize and improve robustness against these alterations.
Deep Open Space Segmentation using Automotive Radar
Authors: Farzan Erlik Nowruzi, Dhanvin Kolhatkar, Prince Kapoor, Fahed Al Hassanat, Elnaz Jahani Heravi, Robert Laganiere, Julien Rebut, Waqas Malik
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00

In this work, we propose the use of radar with advanced deep segmentation models to identify open space in parking scenarios. A publically available dataset of radar observations called SCORP was collected. Deep models are evaluated with various radar input representations. Our proposed approach achieves low memory usage and real-time processing speeds, and is thus very well suited for embedded deployment.
Learning to Accelerate Decomposition for Multi-Directional 3D Printing
Authors: Chen-Ming Wu, Yong-Jin Liu, Charlie C. L. Wang
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00

Multi-directional 3D printing has the capability of decreasing or eliminating the need for support structures. Recent work proposed a beam-guided search algorithm to find an optimized sequence of plane-clipping, which gives volume decomposition of a given 3D model. Different printing directions are employed in different regions to fabricate a model with tremendously less support (or even no support in many cases).To obtain optimized decomposition, a large beam width needs to be used in the search algorithm, leading to a very time-consuming computation. In this paper, we propose a learning framework that can accelerate the beam-guided search by using a smaller number of the original beam width to obtain results with similar quality. Specifically, we use the results of beam-guided search with large beam width to train a scoring function for candidate clipping planes based on six newly proposed feature metrics. With the help of these feature metrics, both the current and the sequence-dependent information are captured by the neural network to score candidates of clipping. As a result, we can achieve around 3x computational speed. We test and demonstrate our accelerated decomposition on a large dataset of models for 3D printing.
ProGen: Language Modeling for Protein Generation
Authors: Ali Madani, Bryan McCann, Nikhil Naik, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Namrata Anand, Raphael R. Eguchi, Po-Ssu Huang, Richard Socher
Date: 2020-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Generative modeling for protein engineering is key to solving fundamental problems in synthetic biology, medicine, and material science. We pose protein engineering as an unsupervised sequence generation problem in order to leverage the exponentially growing set of proteins that lack costly, structural annotations. We train a 1.2B-parameter language model, ProGen, on ~280M protein sequences conditioned on taxonomic and keyword tags such as molecular function and cellular component. This provides ProGen with an unprecedented range of evolutionary sequence diversity and allows it to generate with fine-grained control as demonstrated by metrics based on primary sequence similarity, secondary structure accuracy, and conformational energy.
How to improve your chances against coronavirus
Authors: CNN
Date: 2020-03-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/18/health/coronavirus-surfaces-study/index.html 2020 3

he coronavirus driving the current pandemic can live on plastic and stainless steel surfaces for up to three days, researchers say in a study published as a letter to the editor in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Slicing and dicing soccer: automatic detection of complex events from spatio-temporal data
Authors: Lia Morra, Francesco Manigrasso, Giuseppe Canto, Claudio Gianfrate, Enrico Guarino, Fabrizio Lamberti
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00

The automatic detection of events in sport videos has im-portant applications for data analytics, as well as for broadcasting andmedia companies. This paper presents a comprehensive approach for de-tecting a wide range of complex events in soccer videos starting frompositional data. The event detector is designed as a two-tier system thatdetectsatomicandcomplex events. Atomic events are detected basedon temporal and logical combinations of the detected objects, their rel-ative distances, as well as spatio-temporal features such as velocity andacceleration. Complex events are defined as temporal and logical com-binations of atomic and complex events, and are expressed by meansof a declarative Interval Temporal Logic (ITL). The effectiveness of theproposed approach is demonstrated over 16 different events, includingcomplex situations such as tackles and filtering passes. By formalizingevents based on principled ITL, it is possible to easily perform reason-ing tasks, such as understanding which passes or crosses result in a goalbeing scored. To counterbalance the lack of suitable, annotated publicdatasets, we built on an open source soccer simulation engine to re-lease the synthetic SoccER (Soccer Event Recognition) dataset, whichincludes complete positional data and annotations for more than 1.6 mil-lion atomic events and 9,000 complex events. The dataset and code areavailable at https://gitlab.com/grains2/slicing-and-dicing-soccer
Self-Supervised Monocular Scene Flow Estimation
Authors: Junhwa Hur, Stefan Roth
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation, Scene Flow Estimation, Self-Supervised Learning

Scene flow estimation has been receiving increasing attention for 3D environment perception. Monocular scene flow estimation -- obtaining 3D structure and 3D motion from two temporally consecutive images -- is a highly ill-posed problem, and practical solutions are lacking to date. We propose a novel monocular scene flow method that yields competitive accuracy and real-time performance. By taking an inverse problem view, we design a single convolutional neural network (CNN) that successfully estimates depth and 3D motion simultaneously from a classical optical flow cost volume. We adopt self-supervised learning with 3D loss functions and occlusion reasoning to leverage unlabeled data. We validate our design choices, including the proxy loss and augmentation setup. Our model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among unsupervised/self-supervised learning approaches to monocular scene flow, and yields competitive results for the optical flow and monocular depth estimation sub-tasks. Semi-supervised fine-tuning further improves the accuracy and yields promising results in real-time.
Empirical Perspectives on One-Shot Semi-supervised Learning
Authors: Leslie N. Smith, Adam Conovaloff
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

One of the greatest obstacles in the adoption of deep neural networks for new applications is that training the network typically requires a large number of manually labeled training samples. We empirically investigate the scenario where one has access to large amounts of unlabeled data but require labeling only a single prototypical sample per class in order to train a deep network (i.e., one-shot semi-supervised learning). Specifically, we investigate the recent results reported in FixMatch for one-shot semi-supervised learning to understand the factors that affect and impede high accuracies and reliability for one-shot semi-supervised learning of Cifar-10. For example, we discover that one barrier to one-shot semi-supervised learning for high-performance image classification is the unevenness of class accuracy during the training. These results point to solutions that might enable more widespread adoption of one-shot semi-supervised training methods for new applications.
CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Aravind Srinivas, Michael Laskin, Pieter Abbeel
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Atari Games 100k, Continuous Control, Contrastive Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning. CURL extracts high-level features from raw pixels using contrastive learning and performs off-policy control on top of the extracted features. CURL outperforms prior pixel-based methods, both model-based and model-free, on complex tasks in the DeepMind Control Suite and Atari Games showing 1.9x and 1.2x performance gains at the 100K environment and interaction steps benchmarks respectively. On the DeepMind Control Suite, CURL is the first image-based algorithm to nearly match the sample-efficiency of methods that use state-based features. Our code is open-sourced and available at https://github.com/MishaLaskin/curl.
A computational theoretical approach for mining data on transient events from databases of high energy astrophysics experiments
Authors: Francesco Lazzarotto, Marco Feroci, Maria Teresa Pazienza
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00

Data on transient events, like GRBs, are often contained in large databases of unstructured data from space experiments, merged with potentially large amount of background or simply undesired information. We present a computational formal model to apply techniques of modern computer science -such as Data Mining (DM) and Knowledge Discovering in Databases (KDD)- to a generic, large database derived from a high energy astrophysics experiment. This method is aimed to search, identify and extract expected information, and maybe to discover unexpected information .
Putting a Spin on Language: A Quantum Interpretation of Unary Connectives for Linguistic Applications
Authors: Adriana D. Correia, Henk T. C. Stoof, Michael Moortgat
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00

Extended versions of the Lambek Calculus currently used in computational linguistics rely on unary modalities to allow for the controlled application of structural rules affecting word order and phrase structure. These controlled structural operations give rise to derivational ambiguities that are missed by the original Lambek Calculus or its pregroup simplification. Proposals for compositional interpretation of extended Lambek Calculus in the compact closed category of FVect and linear maps have been made, but in these proposals the syntax-semantics mapping ignores the control modalities, effectively restricting their role to the syntax. Our aim is to turn the modalities into first-class citizens of the vectorial interpretation. Building on the directional density matrix semantics, we extend the interpretation of the type system with an extra spin density matrix space. The interpretation of proofs then results in ambiguous derivations being tensored with orthogonal spin states. Our method introduces a way of simultaneously representing co-existing interpretations of ambiguous utterances, and provides a uniform framework for the integration of lexical and derivational ambiguity.
LadaBERT: Lightweight Adaptation of BERT through Hybrid Model Compression
Authors: Yihuan Mao, Yujing Wang, Chufan Wu, Chen Zhang, Yang Wang, Yaming Yang, Quanlu Zhang, Yunhai Tong, Jing Bai
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Blocking, Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Natural Language Understanding

BERT is a cutting-edge language representation model pre-trained by a large corpus, which achieves superior performances on various natural language understanding tasks. However, a major blocking issue of applying BERT to online services is that it is memory-intensive and leads to unsatisfactory latency of user requests, raising the necessity of model compression. Existing solutions leverage the knowledge distillation framework to learn a smaller model that imitates the behaviors of BERT. However, the training procedure of knowledge distillation is expensive itself as it requires sufficient training data to imitate the teacher model. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a hybrid solution named LadaBERT (Lightweight adaptation of BERT through hybrid model compression), which combines the advantages of different model compression methods, including weight pruning, matrix factorization and knowledge distillation. LadaBERT achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on various public datasets while the training overheads can be reduced by an order of magnitude.
Entity-Switched Datasets: An Approach to Auditing the In-Domain Robustness of Named Entity Recognition Models
Authors: Oshin Agarwal, Yinfei Yang, Byron C. Wallace, Ani Nenkova
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Named entity recognition systems perform well on standard datasets comprising English news. But given the paucity of data, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the robustness of systems with respect to recognizing a diverse set of entities. We propose a method for auditing the in-domain robustness of systems, focusing specifically on differences in performance due to the national origin of entities. We create entity-switched datasets, in which named entities in the original texts are replaced by plausible named entities of the same type but of different national origin. We find that state-of-the-art systems' performance vary widely even in-domain: In the same context, entities from certain origins are more reliably recognized than entities from elsewhere. Systems perform best on American and Indian entities, and worst on Vietnamese and Indonesian entities. This auditing approach can facilitate the development of more robust named entity recognition systems, and will allow research in this area to consider fairness criteria that have received heightened attention in other predictive technology work.
Skin Diseases Detection using LBP and WLD- An Ensembling Approach
Authors: Arnab Banerjee, Nibaran Das, Mita Nasipuri
Date: 2020-04-08 00:00:00

In all developing and developed countries in the world, skin diseases are becoming a very frequent health problem for the humans of all age groups. Skin problems affect mental health, develop addiction to alcohol and drugs and sometimes causes social isolation. Considering the importance, we propose an automatic technique to detect three popular skin diseases- Leprosy, Tinea versicolor and Vitiligofrom the images of skin lesions. The proposed technique involves Weber local descriptor and Local binary pattern to represent texture pattern of the affected skin regions. This ensemble technique achieved 91.38% accuracy using multi-level support vector machine classifier, where features are extracted from different regions that are based on center of gravity. We have also applied some popular deep learn-ing networks such as MobileNet, ResNet_152, GoogLeNet,DenseNet_121, and ResNet_101. We get 89% accuracy using ResNet_101. The ensemble approach clearly outperform all of the used deep learning networks. This imaging tool will be useful for early skin disease screening.