pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PENet: Object Detection using Points Estimation in Aerial Images
Authors: Ziyang Tang, Xiang Liu, Guangyu Shen, Baijian Yang
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Aerial imagery has been increasingly adopted in mission-critical tasks, such as traffic surveillance, smart cities, and disaster assistance. However, identifying objects from aerial images faces the following challenges: 1) objects of interests are often too small and too dense relative to the images; 2) objects of interests are often in different relative sizes; and 3) the number of objects in each category is imbalanced. A novel network structure, Points Estimated Network (PENet), is proposed in this work to answer these challenges. PENet uses a Mask Resampling Module (MRM) to augment the imbalanced datasets, a coarse anchor-free detector (CPEN) to effectively predict the center points of the small object clusters, and a fine anchor-free detector FPEN to locate the precise positions of the small objects. An adaptive merge algorithm Non-maximum Merge (NMM) is implemented in CPEN to address the issue of detecting dense small objects, and a hierarchical loss is defined in FPEN to further improve the classification accuracy. Our extensive experiments on aerial datasets visDrone and UAVDT showed that PENet achieved higher precision results than existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our best model achieved 8.7% improvement on visDrone and 20.3% on UAVDT.
How Much Position Information Do Convolutional Neural Networks Encode?
Authors: Md Amirul Islam, Sen Jia, Neil D. B. Bruce
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Position

In contrast to fully connected networks, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve efficiency by learning weights associated with local filters with a finite spatial extent. An implication of this is that a filter may know what it is looking at, but not where it is positioned in the image. Information concerning absolute position is inherently useful, and it is reasonable to assume that deep CNNs may implicitly learn to encode this information if there is a means to do so. In this paper, we test this hypothesis revealing the surprising degree of absolute position information that is encoded in commonly used neural networks. A comprehensive set of experiments show the validity of this hypothesis and shed light on how and where this information is represented while offering clues to where positional information is derived from in deep CNNs.
A Probabilistic Framework for Imitating Human Race Driver Behavior
Authors: Stefan Löckel, Jan Peters, Peter van Vliet
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Car Racing, Imitation Learning

Understanding and modeling human driver behavior is crucial for advanced vehicle development. However, unique driving styles, inconsistent behavior, and complex decision processes render it a challenging task, and existing approaches often lack variability or robustness. To approach this problem, we propose Probabilistic Modeling of Driver behavior (ProMoD), a modular framework which splits the task of driver behavior modeling into multiple modules. A global target trajectory distribution is learned with Probabilistic Movement Primitives, clothoids are utilized for local path generation, and the corresponding choice of actions is performed by a neural network. Experiments in a simulated car racing setting show considerable advantages in imitation accuracy and robustness compared to other imitation learning algorithms. The modular architecture of the proposed framework facilitates straightforward extensibility in driving line adaptation and sequencing of multiple movement primitives for future research.
A Multi-Scale Tensor Network Architecture for Classification and Regression
Authors: Justin Reyes, Miles Stoudenmire
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, regression, Tensor Networks, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We present an algorithm for supervised learning using tensor networks, employing a step of preprocessing the data by coarse-graining through a sequence of wavelet transformations. We represent these transformations as a set of tensor network layers identical to those in a multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) tensor network, and perform supervised learning and regression tasks through a model based on a matrix product state (MPS) tensor network acting on the coarse-grained data. Because the entire model consists of tensor contractions (apart from the initial non-linear feature map), we can adaptively fine-grain the optimized MPS model backwards through the layers with essentially no loss in performance. The MPS itself is trained using an adaptive algorithm based on the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm. We test our methods by performing a classification task on audio data and a regression task on temperature time-series data, studying the dependence of training accuracy on the number of coarse-graining layers and showing how fine-graining through the network may be used to initialize models with access to finer-scale features.
Target-Embedding Autoencoders for Supervised Representation Learning
Authors: Daniel Jarrett, Mihaela van der Schaar
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Representation Learning

Autoencoder-based learning has emerged as a staple for disciplining representations in unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. This paper analyzes a framework for improving generalization in a purely supervised setting, where the target space is high-dimensional. We motivate and formalize the general framework of target-embedding autoencoders (TEA) for supervised prediction, learning intermediate latent representations jointly optimized to be both predictable from features as well as predictive of targets---encoding the prior that variations in targets are driven by a compact set of underlying factors. As our theoretical contribution, we provide a guarantee of generalization for linear TEAs by demonstrating uniform stability, interpreting the benefit of the auxiliary reconstruction task as a form of regularization. As our empirical contribution, we extend validation of this approach beyond existing static classification applications to multivariate sequence forecasting, verifying their advantage on both linear and nonlinear recurrent architectures---thereby underscoring the further generality of this framework beyond feedforward instantiations.
Continual Local Replacement for Few-shot Learning
Authors: Canyu Le, Zhonggui Chen, Xihan Wei, Biao Wang, Lei Zhang
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, General Classification

The goal of few-shot learning is to learn a model that can recognize novel classes based on one or few training data. It is challenging mainly due to two aspects: (1) it lacks good feature representation of novel classes; (2) a few of labeled data could not accurately represent the true data distribution and thus it's hard to learn a good decision function for classification. In this work, we use a sophisticated network architecture to learn better feature representation and focus on the second issue. A novel continual local replacement strategy is proposed to address the data deficiency problem. It takes advantage of the content in unlabeled images to continually enhance labeled ones. Specifically, a pseudo labeling method is adopted to constantly select semantically similar images on the fly. Original labeled images will be locally replaced by the selected images for the next epoch training. In this way, the model can directly learn new semantic information from unlabeled images and the capacity of supervised signals in the embedding space can be significantly enlarged. This allows the model to improve generalization and learn a better decision boundary for classification. Our method is conceptually simple and easy to implement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that it can achieve state-of-the-art results on various few-shot image recognition benchmarks.
A Bayesian Long Short-Term Memory Model for Value at Risk and Expected Shortfall Joint Forecasting
Authors: Zhengkun Li, Minh-Ngoc Tran, Chao Wang, Richard Gerlach, Junbin Gao
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES) are widely used in the financial sector to measure the market risk and manage the extreme market movement. The recent link between the quantile score function and the Asymmetric Laplace density has led to a flexible likelihood-based framework for joint modelling of VaR and ES. It is of high interest in financial applications to be able to capture the underlying joint dynamics of these two quantities. We address this problem by developing a hybrid model that is based on the Asymmetric Laplace quasi-likelihood and employs the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) time series modelling technique from Machine Learning to capture efficiently the underlying dynamics of VaR and ES. We refer to this model as LSTM-AL. We adopt the adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for Bayesian inference in the LSTM-AL model. Empirical results show that the proposed LSTM-AL model can improve the VaR and ES forecasting accuracy over a range of well-established competing models.
Adaptation of a deep learning malignancy model from full-field digital mammography to digital breast tomosynthesis
Authors: Sadanand Singh, Thomas Paul Matthews, Meet Shah, Brent Mombourquette, Trevor Tsue, Aaron Long, Ranya Almohsen, Stefano Pedemonte, Jason Su
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity, Specificity

Mammography-based screening has helped reduce the breast cancer mortality rate, but has also been associated with potential harms due to low specificity, leading to unnecessary exams or procedures, and low sensitivity. Digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) improves on conventional mammography by increasing both sensitivity and specificity and is becoming common in clinical settings. However, deep learning (DL) models have been developed mainly on conventional 2D full-field digital mammography (FFDM) or scanned film images. Due to a lack of large annotated DBT datasets, it is difficult to train a model on DBT from scratch. In this work, we present methods to generalize a model trained on FFDM images to DBT images. In particular, we use average histogram matching (HM) and DL fine-tuning methods to generalize a FFDM model to the 2D maximum intensity projection (MIP) of DBT images. In the proposed approach, the differences between the FFDM and DBT domains are reduced via HM and then the base model, which was trained on abundant FFDM images, is fine-tuned. When evaluating on image patches extracted around identified findings, we are able to achieve similar areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (ROC AUC) of $\sim 0.9$ for FFDM and $\sim 0.85$ for MIP images, as compared to a ROC AUC of $\sim 0.75$ when tested directly on MIP images.
A Hypersensitive Breast Cancer Detector
Authors: Stefano Pedemonte, Brent Mombourquette, Alexis Goh, Trevor Tsue, Aaron Long, Sadanand Singh, Thomas Paul Matthews, Meet Shah, Jason Su
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

Early detection of breast cancer through screening mammography yields a 20-35% increase in survival rate; however, there are not enough radiologists to serve the growing population of women seeking screening mammography. Although commercial computer aided detection (CADe) software has been available to radiologists for decades, it has failed to improve the interpretation of full-field digital mammography (FFDM) images due to its low sensitivity over the spectrum of findings. In this work, we leverage a large set of FFDM images with loose bounding boxes of mammographically significant findings to train a deep learning detector with extreme sensitivity. Building upon work from the Hourglass architecture, we train a model that produces segmentation-like images with high spatial resolution, with the aim of producing 2D Gaussian blobs centered on ground-truth boxes. We replace the pixel-wise $L_2$ norm with a weak-supervision loss designed to achieve high sensitivity, asymmetrically penalizing false positives and false negatives while softening the noise of the loose bounding boxes by permitting a tolerance in misaligned predictions. The resulting system achieves a sensitivity for malignant findings of 0.99 with only 4.8 false positive markers per image. When utilized in a CADe system, this model could enable a novel workflow where radiologists can focus their attention with trust on only the locations proposed by the model, expediting the interpretation process and bringing attention to potential findings that could otherwise have been missed. Due to its nearly perfect sensitivity, the proposed detector can also be used as a high-performance proposal generator in two-stage detection systems.
A One-Shot Learning Framework for Assessment of Fibrillar Collagen from Second Harmonic Generation Images of an Infarcted Myocardium
Authors: Qun Liu, Supratik Mukhopadhyay, Maria Ximena Bastidas Rodriguez, Xing Fu, Sushant Sahu, David Burk, Manas Gartia
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: One-Shot Learning, Specificity

Myocardial infarction (MI) is a scientific term that refers to heart attack. In this study, we infer highly relevant second harmonic generation (SHG) cues from collagen fibers exhibiting highly non-centrosymmetric assembly together with two-photon excited cellular autofluorescence in infarcted mouse heart to quantitatively probe fibrosis, especially targeted at an early stage after MI. We present a robust one-shot machine learning algorithm that enables determination of 2D assembly of collagen with high spatial resolution along with its structural arrangement in heart tissues post-MI with spectral specificity and sensitivity. Detection, evaluation, and precise quantification of fibrosis extent at early stage would guide one to develop treatment therapies that may prevent further progression and determine heart transplant needs for patient survival.
Linking Bank Clients using Graph Neural Networks Powered by Rich Transactional Data
Authors: Valentina Shumovskaia, Kirill Fedyanin, Ivan Sukharev, Dmitry Berestnev, Maxim Panov
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Link Prediction, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Financial institutions obtain enormous amounts of data about user transactions and money transfers, which can be considered as a large graph dynamically changing in time. In this work, we focus on the task of predicting new interactions in the network of bank clients and treat it as a link prediction problem. We propose a new graph neural network model, which uses not only the topological structure of the network but rich time-series data available for the graph nodes and edges. We evaluate the developed method using the data provided by a large European bank for several years. The proposed model outperforms the existing approaches, including other neural network models, with a significant gap in ROC AUC score on link prediction problem and also allows to improve the quality of credit scoring.
Fast, Compact and Highly Scalable Visual Place Recognition through Sequence-based Matching of Overloaded Representations
Authors: Sourav Garg, Michael Milford
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Quantization, Visual Localization, Visual Place Recognition

Visual place recognition algorithms trade off three key characteristics: their storage footprint, their computational requirements, and their resultant performance, often expressed in terms of recall rate. Significant prior work has investigated highly compact place representations, sub-linear computational scaling and sub-linear storage scaling techniques, but have always involved a significant compromise in one or more of these regards, and have only been demonstrated on relatively small datasets. In this paper we present a novel place recognition system which enables for the first time the combination of ultra-compact place representations, near sub-linear storage scaling and extremely lightweight compute requirements. Our approach exploits the inherently sequential nature of much spatial data in the robotics domain and inverts the typical target criteria, through intentionally coarse scalar quantization-based hashing that leads to more collisions but is resolved by sequence-based matching. For the first time, we show how effective place recognition rates can be achieved on a new very large 10 million place dataset, requiring only 8 bytes of storage per place and 37K unitary operations to achieve over 50% recall for matching a sequence of 100 frames, where a conventional state-of-the-art approach both consumes 1300 times more compute and fails catastrophically. We present analysis investigating the effectiveness of our hashing overload approach under varying sizes of quantized vector length, comparison of near miss matches with the actual match selections and characterise the effect of variance re-scaling of data on quantization.
On the human evaluation of audio adversarial examples
Authors: Jon Vadillo, Roberto Santana
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00

Human-machine interaction is increasingly dependent on speech communication. Machine Learning models are usually applied to interpret human speech commands. However, these models can be fooled by adversarial examples, which are inputs intentionally perturbed to produce a wrong prediction without being noticed. While much research has been focused on developing new techniques to generate adversarial perturbations, less attention has been given to aspects that determine whether and how the perturbations are noticed by humans. This question is relevant since high fooling rates of proposed adversarial perturbation strategies are only valuable if the perturbations are not detectable. In this paper we investigate to which extent the distortion metrics proposed in the literature for audio adversarial examples, and which are commonly applied to evaluate the effectiveness of methods for generating these attacks, are a reliable measure of the human perception of the perturbations. Using an analytical framework, and an experiment in which 18 subjects evaluate audio adversarial examples, we demonstrate that the metrics employed by convention are not a reliable measure of the perceptual similarity of adversarial examples in the audio domain.
A Large Scale Event-based Detection Dataset for Automotive
Authors: Pierre de Tournemire, Davide Nitti, Etienne Perot, Davide Migliore, Amos Sironi
Date: 2020-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Event-based vision, object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Flow Estimation, Self-Supervised Learning

We introduce the first very large detection dataset for event cameras. The dataset is composed of more than 39 hours of automotive recordings acquired with a 304x240 ATIS sensor. It contains open roads and very diverse driving scenarios, ranging from urban, highway, suburbs and countryside scenes, as well as different weather and illumination conditions. Manual bounding box annotations of cars and pedestrians contained in the recordings are also provided at a frequency between 1 and 4Hz, yielding more than 255,000 labels in total. We believe that the availability of a labeled dataset of this size will contribute to major advances in event-based vision tasks such as object detection and classification. We also expect benefits in other tasks such as optical flow, structure from motion and tracking, where for example, the large amount of data can be leveraged by self-supervised learning methods.
ExEm: Expert Embedding using dominating set theory with deep learning approaches
Authors: N. Nikzad-Khasmakhi, M. A. Balafar, M. Reza Feizi-Derakhshi, Cina Motamed
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Link Prediction, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Recommendation Systems

A collaborative network is a social network that is comprised of experts who cooperate with each other to fulfill a special goal. Analyzing this network yields meaningful information about the expertise of these experts and their subject areas. To perform the analysis, graph embedding techniques have emerged as an effective and promising tool. Graph embedding attempts to represent graph nodes as low-dimensional vectors. In this paper, we propose a graph embedding method, called ExEm, that uses dominating-set theory and deep learning approaches to capture node representations. ExEm finds dominating nodes of the collaborative network and constructs intelligent random walks that comprise of at least two dominating nodes. One dominating node should appear at the beginning of each path sampled to characterize the local neighborhoods. Moreover, the second dominating node reflects the global structure information. To learn the node embeddings, ExEm exploits three embedding methods including Word2vec, fastText and the concatenation of these two. The final result is the low-dimensional vectors of experts, called expert embeddings. The extracted expert embeddings can be applied to many applications. In order to extend these embeddings into the expert recommendation system, we introduce a novel strategy that uses expert vectors to calculate experts' scores and recommend experts. At the end, we conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of ExEm through assessing its performance over the multi-label classification, link prediction, and recommendation tasks on common datasets and our collected data formed by crawling the vast author Scopus profiles. The experiments show that ExEm outperforms the baselines especially in dense networks.
Multi-Level Representation Learning for Deep Subspace Clustering
Authors: Mohsen Kheirandishfard, Fariba Zohrizadeh, Farhad Kamangar
Date: 2020-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Decoder, Representation Learning

This paper proposes a novel deep subspace clustering approach which uses convolutional autoencoders to transform input images into new representations lying on a union of linear subspaces. The first contribution of our work is to insert multiple fully-connected linear layers between the encoder layers and their corresponding decoder layers to promote learning more favorable representations for subspace clustering. These connection layers facilitate the feature learning procedure by combining low-level and high-level information for generating multiple sets of self-expressive and informative representations at different levels of the encoder. Moreover, we introduce a novel loss minimization problem which leverages an initial clustering of the samples to effectively fuse the multi-level representations and recover the underlying subspaces more accurately. The loss function is then minimized through an iterative scheme which alternatively updates the network parameters and produces new clusterings of the samples. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our approach exhibits superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods on most of the subspace clustering problems.