pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Continuous-time Discounted Mirror-Descent Dynamics in Monotone Concave Games
Authors: Bolin Gao, Lacra Pavel
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00

In this paper, we consider concave continuous-kernel games characterized by monotonicity properties and propose discounted mirror descent-type dynamics. We introduce two classes of dynamics whereby the associated mirror map is constructed based on a strongly convex or a Legendre regularizer. Depending on the properties of the regularizer we show that these new dynamics can converge asymptotically in concave games with monotone (negative) pseudo-gradient. Furthermore, we show that when the regularizer enjoys strong convexity, the resulting dynamics can converge even in games with hypo-monotone (negative) pseudo-gradient, which corresponds to a shortage of monotonicity.
Dynamic Convolution: Attention over Convolution Kernels
Authors: Yinpeng Chen, Xiyang Dai, Mengchen Liu, Dong-Dong Chen, Lu Yuan, Zicheng Liu
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Classification, Keypoint Detection

Light-weight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) suffer performance degradation as their low computational budgets constrain both the depth (number of convolution layers) and the width (number of channels) of CNNs, resulting in limited representation capability. To address this issue, we present Dynamic Convolution, a new design that increases model complexity without increasing the network depth or width. Instead of using a single convolution kernel per layer, dynamic convolution aggregates multiple parallel convolution kernels dynamically based upon their attentions, which are input dependent. Assembling multiple kernels is not only computationally efficient due to the small kernel size, but also has more representation power since these kernels are aggregated in a non-linear way via attention. By simply using dynamic convolution for the state-of-the-art architecture MobileNetV3-Small, the top-1 accuracy of ImageNet classification is boosted by 2.9% with only 4% additional FLOPs and 2.9 AP gain is achieved on COCO keypoint detection.
Unsung Challenges of Building and Deploying Language Technologies for Low Resource Language Communities
Authors: Pratik Joshi, Christain Barnes, Sebastin Santy, Simran Khanuja, Sanket Shah, Anirudh Srinivasan, Satwik Bhattamishra, Sunayana Sitaram, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICON 2019 12

In this paper, we examine and analyze the challenges associated with developing and introducing language technologies to low-resource language communities. While doing so, we bring to light the successes and failures of past work in this area, challenges being faced in doing so, and what they have achieved. Throughout this paper, we take a problem-facing approach and describe essential factors which the success of such technologies hinges upon. We present the various aspects in a manner which clarify and lay out the different tasks involved, which can aid organizations looking to make an impact in this area. We take the example of Gondi, an extremely-low resource Indian language, to reinforce and complement our discussion.
Digital Twin: Acquiring High-Fidelity 3D Avatar from a Single Image
Authors: Ruizhe Wang, Chih-Fan Chen, Hao Peng, Xudong Liu, Oliver Liu, Xin Li
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Model, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We present an approach to generate high fidelity 3D face avatar with a high-resolution UV texture map from a single image. To estimate the face geometry, we use a deep neural network to directly predict vertex coordinates of the 3D face model from the given image. The 3D face geometry is further refined by a non-rigid deformation process to more accurately capture facial landmarks before texture projection. A key novelty of our approach is to train the shape regression network on facial images synthetically generated using a high-quality rendering engine. Moreover, our shape estimator fully leverages the discriminative power of deep facial identity features learned from millions of facial images. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our optimized 2D-to-3D rendering approach, especially its excellent generalization property on real-world selfie images. Our proposed system of rendering 3D avatars from 2D images has a wide range of applications from virtual/augmented reality (VR/AR) and telepsychiatry to human-computer interaction and social networks.
A novel guided deep learning algorithm to design low-cost SPP films
Authors: Yingshi Chen, Jinfeng Zhu
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00

The design of surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) films is an ill-posed inverse problem. There are many-to-one correspondence between the structures and user needs. We present a novel guided deep learning algorithm to find optimal solutions (with both high accuracy and low cost). To achieve this goal, we use low cost sample replacement algorithm in training process. The deep CNN would gradually learn better model from samples with lower cost. We have successfully applied this algorithm to the design of low-cost SPP films. Our model learned to replace precious metals with ordinary metals to reduce cost. So the the cost of predicted structure is much lower than standard deep CNN. And the average relative error of spectrum is less than 10%. The source codes are available at https://github.com/closest-git/MetaLab.
Fully Dense Neural Network for the Automatic Modulation Recognition
Authors: Miao Du, Qin Yu, Shaomin Fei, Chen Wang, Xiao-Feng Gong, Ruisen Luo
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Modulation Recognition

Nowadays, we mainly use various convolution neural network (CNN) structures to extract features from radio data or spectrogram in AMR. Based on expert experience and spectrograms, they not only increase the difficulty of preprocessing, but also consume a lot of memory. In order to directly use in-phase and quadrature (IQ) data obtained by the receiver and enhance the efficiency of network extraction features to improve the recognition rate of modulation mode, this paper proposes a new network structure called Fully Dense Neural Network (FDNN). This network uses residual blocks to extract features, dense connect to reduce model size, and adds attentions mechanism to recalibrate. Experiments on RML2016.10a show that this network has a higher recognition rate and lower model complexity. And it shows that the FDNN model with dense connections can not only extract features effectively but also greatly reduce model parameters, which also provides a significant contribution for the application of deep learning to the intelligent radio system.
DAVID: Dual-Attentional Video Deblurring
Authors: Junru Wu, Xiang Yu, Ding Liu, Manmohan Chandraker, Zhangyang Wang
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Video Deblurring

Blind video deblurring restores sharp frames from a blurry sequence without any prior. It is a challenging task because the blur due to camera shake, object movement and defocusing is heterogeneous in both temporal and spatial dimensions. Traditional methods train on datasets synthesized with a single level of blur, and thus do not generalize well across levels of blurriness. To address this challenge, we propose a dual attention mechanism to dynamically aggregate temporal cues for deblurring with an end-to-end trainable network structure. Specifically, an internal attention module adaptively selects the optimal temporal scales for restoring the sharp center frame. An external attention module adaptively aggregates and refines multiple sharp frame estimates, from several internal attention modules designed for different blur levels. To train and evaluate on more diverse blur severity levels, we propose a Challenging DVD dataset generated from the raw DVD video set by pooling frames with different temporal windows. Our framework achieves consistently better performance on this more challenging dataset while obtaining strongly competitive results on the original DVD benchmark. Extensive ablative studies and qualitative visualizations further demonstrate the advantage of our method in handling real video blur.
PidginUNMT: Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation from West African Pidgin to English
Authors: Kelechi Ogueji, Orevaoghene Ahia
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Machine Translation, Translation

Over 800 languages are spoken across West Africa. Despite the obvious diversity among people who speak these languages, one language significantly unifies them all - West African Pidgin English. There are at least 80 million speakers of West African Pidgin English. However, there is no known natural language processing (NLP) work on this language. In this work, we perform the first NLP work on the most popular variant of the language, providing three major contributions. First, the provision of a Pidgin corpus of over 56000 sentences, which is the largest we know of. Secondly, the training of the first ever cross-lingual embedding between Pidgin and English. This aligned embedding will be helpful in the performance of various downstream tasks between English and Pidgin. Thirdly, the training of an Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation model between Pidgin and English which achieves BLEU scores of 7.93 from Pidgin to English, and 5.18 from English to Pidgin. In all, this work greatly reduces the barrier of entry for future NLP works on West African Pidgin English.
Spatio-Temporal Pyramid Graph Convolutions for Human Action Recognition and Postural Assessment
Authors: Behnoosh Parsa, Athma Narayanan, Behzad Dariush
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Recognition of human actions and associated interactions with objects and the environment is an important problem in computer vision due to its potential applications in a variety of domains. The most versatile methods can generalize to various environments and deal with cluttered backgrounds, occlusions, and viewpoint variations. Among them, methods based on graph convolutional networks that extract features from the skeleton have demonstrated promising performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Pyramid Graph Convolutional Network (ST-PGN) for online action recognition for ergonomic risk assessment that enables the use of features from all levels of the skeleton feature hierarchy. The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-art action recognition algorithms tested on two public benchmark datasets typically used for postural assessment (TUM and UW-IOM). We also introduce a pipeline to enhance postural assessment methods with online action recognition techniques. Finally, the proposed algorithm is integrated with a traditional ergonomic risk index (REBA) to demonstrate the potential value for assessment of musculoskeletal disorders in occupational safety.
Adversarial Analysis of Natural Language Inference Systems
Authors: Tiffany Chien, Jugal Kalita
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Natural Language Inference

The release of large natural language inference (NLI) datasets like SNLI and MNLI have led to rapid development and improvement of completely neural systems for the task. Most recently, heavily pre-trained, Transformer-based models like BERT and MT-DNN have reached near-human performance on these datasets. However, these standard datasets have been shown to contain many annotation artifacts, allowing models to shortcut understanding using simple fallible heuristics, and still perform well on the test set. So it is no surprise that many adversarial (challenge) datasets have been created that cause models trained on standard datasets to fail dramatically. Although extra training on this data generally improves model performance on just that type of data, transferring that learning to unseen examples is still partial at best. This work evaluates the failures of state-of-the-art models on existing adversarial datasets that test different linguistic phenomena, and find that even though the models perform similarly on MNLI, they differ greatly in their robustness to these attacks. In particular, we find syntax-related attacks to be particularly effective across all models, so we provide a fine-grained analysis and comparison of model performance on those examples. We draw conclusions about the value of model size and multi-task learning (beyond comparing their standard test set performance), and provide suggestions for more effective training data.
Potential Passenger Flow Prediction: A Novel Study for Urban Transportation Development
Authors: Yongshun Gong, Zhibin Li, Jian Zhang, Wei Liu, Jin-Feng Yi
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: MULTI-VIEW LEARNING, Recommendation Systems

Recently, practical applications for passenger flow prediction have brought many benefits to urban transportation development. With the development of urbanization, a real-world demand from transportation managers is to construct a new metro station in one city area that never planned before. Authorities are interested in the picture of the future volume of commuters before constructing a new station, and estimate how would it affect other areas. In this paper, this specific problem is termed as potential passenger flow (PPF) prediction, which is a novel and important study connected with urban computing and intelligent transportation systems. For example, an accurate PPF predictor can provide invaluable knowledge to designers, such as the advice of station scales and influences on other areas, etc. To address this problem, we propose a multi-view localized correlation learning method. The core idea of our strategy is to learn the passenger flow correlations between the target areas and their localized areas with adaptive-weight. To improve the prediction accuracy, other domain knowledge is involved via a multi-view learning process. We conduct intensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our method with real-world official transportation datasets. The results demonstrate that our method can achieve excellent performance compared with other available baselines. Besides, our method can provide an effective solution to the cold-start problem in the recommender system as well, which proved by its outperformed experimental results.
Early Prediction for Merged vs Abandoned Code Changes in Modern Code Reviews
Authors: Md. Khairul Islam, Toufique Ahmed, Rifat Shahriyar, Anindya Iqbal, Gias Uddin
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The modern code review process is an integral part of the current software development practice. Considerable effort is given here to inspect code changes, find defects, suggest an improvement, and address the suggestions of the reviewers. In a code review process, usually, several iterations take place where an author submits code changes and a reviewer gives feedback until is happy to accept the change. In around 12% cases, the changes are abandoned, eventually wasting all the efforts. In this research, our objective is to design a tool that can predict whether a code change would be merged or abandoned at an early stage to reduce the waste of efforts of all stakeholders (e.g., program author, reviewer, project management, etc.) involved. The real-world demand for such a tool was formally identified by a study by Fan et al. [1]. We have mined 146,612 code changes from the code reviews of three large and popular open-source software and trained and tested a suite of supervised machine learning classifiers, both shallow and deep learning based. We consider a total of 25 features in each code change during the training and testing of the models. The best performing model named PredCR (Predicting Code Review), a LightGBM-based classifier achieves around 85% AUC score on average and relatively improves the state-of-the-art [1] by 14-23%. In our empirical study on the 146,612 code changes from the three software projects, we find that (1) The new features like reviewer dimensions that are introduced in PredCR are the most informative. (2) Compared to the baseline, PredCR is more effective towards reducing bias against new developers. (3) PredCR uses historical data in the code review repository and as such the performance of PredCR improves as a software system evolves with new and more data.
Deep Generalization of Structured Low-Rank Algorithms (Deep-SLR)
Authors: Aniket Pramanik, Hemant Aggarwal, Mathews Jacob
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Reconstruction, Low-Rank Matrix Completion, Matrix Completion

Structured low-rank (SLR) algorithms, which exploit annihilation relations between the Fourier samples of a signal resulting from different properties, is a powerful image reconstruction framework in several applications. This scheme relies on low-rank matrix completion to estimate the annihilation relations from the measurements. The main challenge with this strategy is the high computational complexity of matrix completion. We introduce a deep learning (DL) approach to significantly reduce the computational complexity. Specifically, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based filterbank that is trained to estimate the annihilation relations from imperfect (under-sampled and noisy) k-space measurements of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The main reason for the computational efficiency is the pre-learning of the parameters of the non-linear CNN from exemplar data, compared to SLR schemes that learn the linear filterbank parameters from the dataset itself. Experimental comparisons show that the proposed scheme can enable calibration-less parallel MRI; it can offer performance similar to SLR schemes while reducing the runtime by around three orders of magnitude. Unlike pre-calibrated and self-calibrated approaches, the proposed uncalibrated approach is insensitive to motion errors and affords higher acceleration. The proposed scheme also incorporates image domain priors that are complementary, thus significantly improving the performance over that of SLR schemes.
Improved Few-Shot Visual Classification
Authors: Peyman Bateni, Raghav Goyal, Vaden Masrani, Frank Wood, Leonid Sigal
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Image Classification, Few-Shot Learning, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Meta-Learning, Object Recognition

Few-shot learning is a fundamental task in computer vision that carries the promise of alleviating the need for exhaustively labeled data. Most few-shot learning approaches to date have focused on progressively more complex neural feature extractors and classifier adaptation strategies, as well as the refinement of the task definition itself. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that a simple class-covariance-based distance metric, namely the Mahalanobis distance, adopted into a state of the art few-shot learning approach (CNAPS) can, in and of itself, lead to a significant performance improvement. We also discover that it is possible to learn adaptive feature extractors that allow useful estimation of the high dimensional feature covariances required by this metric from surprisingly few samples. The result of our work is a new "Simple CNAPS" architecture which has up to 9.2% fewer trainable parameters than CNAPS and performs up to 6.1% better than state of the art on the standard few-shot image classification benchmark dataset.
An Empirical Study on the Relation between Network Interpretability and Adversarial Robustness
Authors: Adam Noack, Isaac Ahern, Dejing Dou, Boyang Li
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Image Classification, Network Interpretation, Relation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have had many successes, but they suffer from two major issues: (1) a vulnerability to adversarial examples and (2) a tendency to elude human interpretation. Interestingly, recent empirical and theoretical evidence suggests these two seemingly disparate issues are actually connected. In particular, robust models tend to provide more interpretable gradients than non-robust models. However, whether this relationship works in the opposite direction remains obscure. With this paper, we seek empirical answers to the following question: can models acquire adversarial robustness when they are trained to have interpretable gradients? We introduce a theoretically inspired technique called Interpretation Regularization (IR), which encourages a model's gradients to (1) match the direction of interpretable target salience maps and (2) have small magnitude. To assess model performance and tease apart factors that contribute to adversarial robustness, we conduct extensive experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 with both $\ell_2$ and $\ell_\infty$ attacks. We demonstrate that training the networks to have interpretable gradients improves their robustness to adversarial perturbations. Applying the network interpretation technique SmoothGrad yields additional performance gains, especially in cross-norm attacks and under heavy perturbations. The results indicate that the interpretability of the model gradients is a crucial factor for adversarial robustness. Code for the experiments can be found at https://github.com/a1noack/interp_regularization.
Self-Supervised 3D Keypoint Learning for Ego-motion Estimation
Authors: Jiexiong Tang, Rares Ambrus, Vitor Guizilini, Sudeep Pillai, Hanme Kim, Patric Jensfelt, Adrien Gaidon
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Depth Estimation, Geometric Matching, Keypoint Detection, Motion Estimation, Pose Estimation, Self-Supervised Learning, Visual Odometry

Detecting and matching robust viewpoint-invariant keypoints is critical for visual SLAM and Structure-from-Motion. State-of-the-art learning-based methods generate training samples via homography adaptation to create 2D synthetic views with known keypoint matches from a single image. This approach, however, does not generalize to non-planar 3D scenes with illumination variations commonly seen in real-world videos. In this work, we propose self-supervised learning of depth-aware keypoints directly from unlabeled videos. We jointly learn keypoint and depth estimation networks by combining appearance and geometric matching via a differentiable structure-from-motion module based on Procrustean residual pose correction. We describe how our self-supervised keypoints can be integrated into state-of-the-art visual odometry frameworks for robust and accurate ego-motion estimation of autonomous vehicles in real-world conditions.
Cascaded Deep Neural Networks for Retinal Layer Segmentation of Optical Coherence Tomography with Fluid Presence
Authors: Donghuan Lu, Morgan Heisler, Da Ma, Setareh Dabiri, Sieun Lee, Gavin Weiguang Ding, Marinko V. Sarunic, Mirza Faisal Beg
Date: 2019-12-07 00:00:00

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a non-invasive imaging technology which can provide micrometer-resolution cross-sectional images of the inner structures of the eye. It is widely used for the diagnosis of ophthalmic diseases with retinal alteration, such as layer deformation and fluid accumulation. In this paper, a novel framework was proposed to segment retinal layers with fluid presence. The main contribution of this study is two folds: 1) we developed a cascaded network framework to incorporate the prior structural knowledge; 2) we proposed a novel deep neural network based on U-Net and fully convolutional network, termed LF-UNet. Cross validation experiments proved that the proposed LF-UNet has superior performance comparing with the state-of-the-art methods, and incorporating the relative distance map structural prior information could further improve the performance regardless the network.