pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DualVD: An Adaptive Dual Encoding Model for Deep Visual Understanding in Visual Dialogue
Authors: Xiaoze Jiang, Jing Yu, Zengchang Qin, Yingying Zhuang, Xingxing Zhang, Yue Hu, Qi Wu
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Question Answering, Visual Dialog, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Different from Visual Question Answering task that requires to answer only one question about an image, Visual Dialogue involves multiple questions which cover a broad range of visual content that could be related to any objects, relationships or semantics. The key challenge in Visual Dialogue task is thus to learn a more comprehensive and semantic-rich image representation which may have adaptive attentions on the image for variant questions. In this research, we propose a novel model to depict an image from both visual and semantic perspectives. Specifically, the visual view helps capture the appearance-level information, including objects and their relationships, while the semantic view enables the agent to understand high-level visual semantics from the whole image to the local regions. Futhermore, on top of such multi-view image features, we propose a feature selection framework which is able to adaptively capture question-relevant information hierarchically in fine-grained level. The proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results on benchmark Visual Dialogue datasets. More importantly, we can tell which modality (visual or semantic) has more contribution in answering the current question by visualizing the gate values. It gives us insights in understanding of human cognition in Visual Dialogue.
The Proper Care and Feeding of CAMELS: How Limited Training Data Affects Streamflow Prediction
Authors: Martin Gauch, Juliane Mai, Jimmy Lin
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Accurate streamflow prediction largely relies on historical meteorological records and streamflow measurements. For many regions, however, such data are only scarcely available. Facing this problem, many studies simply trained their machine learning models on the region's available data, leaving possible repercussions of this strategy unclear. In this study, we evaluate the sensitivity of tree- and LSTM-based models to limited training data, both in terms of geographic diversity and different time spans. We feed the models meteorological observations disseminated with the CAMELS dataset, and individually restrict the training period length, number of training basins, and input sequence length. We quantify how additional training data improve predictions and how many previous days of forcings we should feed the models to obtain best predictions for each training set size. Further, our findings show that tree- and LSTM-based models provide similarly accurate predictions on small datasets, while LSTMs are superior given more training data.
Hebbian Synaptic Modifications in Spiking Neurons that Learn
Authors: Peter L. Bartlett, Jonathan Baxter
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, we derive a new model of synaptic plasticity, based on recent algorithms for reinforcement learning (in which an agent attempts to learn appropriate actions to maximize its long-term average reward). We show that these direct reinforcement learning algorithms also give locally optimal performance for the problem of reinforcement learning with multiple agents, without any explicit communication between agents. By considering a network of spiking neurons as a collection of agents attempting to maximize the long-term average of a reward signal, we derive a synaptic update rule that is qualitatively similar to Hebb's postulate. This rule requires only simple computations, such as addition and leaky integration, and involves only quantities that are available in the vicinity of the synapse. Furthermore, it leads to synaptic connection strengths that give locally optimal values of the long term average reward. The reinforcement learning paradigm is sufficiently broad to encompass many learning problems that are solved by the brain. We illustrate, with simulations, that the approach is effective for simple pattern classification and motor learning tasks.
IKEA Furniture Assembly Environment for Long-Horizon Complex Manipulation Tasks
Authors: Youngwoon Lee, Edward S. Hu, Zhengyu Yang, Alex Yin, Joseph J. Lim
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Industrial Robots, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robotic Grasping

The IKEA Furniture Assembly Environment is one of the first benchmarks for testing and accelerating the automation of complex manipulation tasks. The environment is designed to advance reinforcement learning from simple toy tasks to complex tasks requiring both long-term planning and sophisticated low-level control. Our environment supports over 80 different furniture models, Sawyer and Baxter robot simulation, and domain randomization. The IKEA Furniture Assembly Environment is a testbed for methods aiming to solve complex manipulation tasks. The environment is publicly available at https://clvrai.com/furniture
Encouraging an Appropriate Representation Simplifies Training of Neural Networks
Authors: Krisztian Buza
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00

A common assumption about neural networks is that they can learn an appropriate internal representations on their own, see e.g. end-to-end learning. In this work we challenge this assumption. We consider two simple tasks and show that the state-of-the-art training algorithm fails, although the model itself is able to represent an appropriate solution. We will demonstrate that encouraging an appropriate internal representation allows the same model to solve these tasks. While we do not claim that it is impossible to solve these tasks by other means (such as neural networks with more layers), our results illustrate that integration of domain knowledge in form of a desired internal representation may improve the generalization ability of neural networks.
SiamCAR: Siamese Fully Convolutional Classification and Regression for Visual Tracking
Authors: Dongyan Guo, Jun Wang, Ying Cui, Zhenhua Wang, Sheng-Yong Chen
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Region Proposal, regression, Visual Tracking

By decomposing the visual tracking task into two subproblems as classification for pixel category and regression for object bounding box at this pixel, we propose a novel fully convolutional Siamese network to solve visual tracking end-to-end in a per-pixel manner. The proposed framework SiamCAR consists of two simple subnetworks: one Siamese subnetwork for feature extraction and one classification-regression subnetwork for bounding box prediction. Our framework takes ResNet-50 as backbone. Different from state-of-the-art trackers like Siamese-RPN, SiamRPN++ and SPM, which are based on region proposal, the proposed framework is both proposal and anchor free. Consequently, we are able to avoid the tricky hyper-parameter tuning of anchors and reduce human intervention. The proposed framework is simple, neat and effective. Extensive experiments and comparisons with state-of-the-art trackers are conducted on many challenging benchmarks like GOT-10K, LaSOT, UAV123 and OTB-50. Without bells and whistles, our SiamCAR achieves the leading performance with a considerable real-time speed.
Adaptive Rates for Total Variation Image Denoising
Authors: Francesco Ortelli, Sara van de Geer
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

We study the theoretical properties of image denoising via total variation penalized least-squares. We define the total vatiation in terms of the two-dimensional total discrete derivative of the image and show that it gives rise to denoised images that are piecewise constant on rectangular sets. We prove that, if the true image is piecewise constant on just a few rectangular sets, the denoised image converges to the true image at a parametric rate, up to a log factor. More generally, we show that the denoised image enjoys oracle properties, that is, it is almost as good as if some aspects of the true image were known. In other words, image denoising with total variation regularization leads to an adaptive reconstruction of the true image.
Learning Query Inseparable ELH Ontologies
Authors: Ana Ozaki, Cosimo Persia, Andrea Mazzullo
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: PAC learning

We investigate the complexity of learning query inseparable ELH ontologies in a variant of Angluin's exact learning model. Given a fixed data instance A* and a query language Q, we are interested in computing an ontology H that entails the same queries as a target ontology T on A*, that is, H and T are inseparable w.r.t. A* and Q. The learner is allowed to pose two kinds of questions. The first is `Does (T,A)\models q?', with A an arbitrary data instance and q and query in Q. An oracle replies this question with `yes' or `no'. In the second, the learner asks `Are H and T inseparable w.r.t. A* and Q?'. If so, the learning process finishes, otherwise, the learner receives (A*,q) with q in Q, (T,A*)\models q and (H,A*)\not\models q (or vice-versa). Then, we analyse conditions in which query inseparability is preserved if A* changes. Finally, we consider the PAC learning model and a setting where the algorithms learn from a batch of classified data, limiting interactions with the oracles.
Error Analysis for Vietnamese Named Entity Recognition on Deep Neural Network Models
Authors: Binh An Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Word Embeddings

In recent years, Vietnamese Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems have had a great breakthrough when using Deep Neural Network methods. This paper describes the primary errors of the state-of-the-art NER systems on Vietnamese language. After conducting experiments on BLSTM-CNN-CRF and BLSTM-CRF models with different word embeddings on the Vietnamese NER dataset. This dataset is provided by VLSP in 2016 and used to evaluate most of the current Vietnamese NER systems. We noticed that BLSTM-CNN-CRF gives better results, therefore, we analyze the errors on this model in detail. Our error-analysis results provide us thorough insights in order to increase the performance of NER for the Vietnamese language and improve the quality of the corpus in the future works.
Iterative Construction of Gaussian Process Surrogate Models for Bayesian Inference
Authors: Leen Alawieh, Jonathan Goodman, John B. Bell
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

A new algorithm is developed to tackle the issue of sampling non-Gaussian model parameter posterior probability distributions that arise from solutions to Bayesian inverse problems. The algorithm aims to mitigate some of the hurdles faced by traditional Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers, through constructing proposal probability densities that are both, easy to sample and that provide a better approximation to the target density than a simple Gaussian proposal distribution would. To achieve that, a Gaussian proposal distribution is augmented with a Gaussian Process (GP) surface that helps capture non-linearities in the log-likelihood function. In order to train the GP surface, an iterative approach is adopted for the optimal selection of points in parameter space. Optimality is sought by maximizing the information gain of the GP surface using a minimum number of forward model simulation runs. The accuracy of the GP-augmented surface approximation is assessed in two ways. The first consists of comparing predictions obtained from the approximate surface with those obtained through running the actual simulation model at hold-out points in parameter space. The second consists of a measure based on the relative variance of sample weights obtained from sampling the approximate posterior probability distribution of the model parameters. The efficacy of this new algorithm is tested on inferring reaction rate parameters in a 3-node and 6-node network toy problems, which imitate idealized reaction networks in combustion applications.
Deep Learning versus Traditional Classifiers on Vietnamese Students' Feedback Corpus
Authors: Phu X. V. Nguyen, Tham T. T. Hong, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, General Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification, Topic Classification

Student's feedback is an important source of collecting students' opinions to improve the quality of training activities. Implementing sentiment analysis into student feedback data, we can determine sentiments polarities which express all problems in the institution since changes necessary will be applied to improve the quality of teaching and learning. This study focused on machine learning and natural language processing techniques (NaiveBayes, Maximum Entropy, Long Short-Term Memory, Bi-Directional Long Short-Term Memory) on the VietnameseStudents' Feedback Corpus collected from a university. The final results were compared and evaluated to find the most effective model based on different evaluation criteria. The experimental results show that the Bi-Directional LongShort-Term Memory algorithm outperformed than three other algorithms in terms of the F1-score measurement with 92.0% on the sentiment classification task and 89.6% on the topic classification task. In addition, we developed a sentiment analysis application analyzing student feedback. The application will help the institution to recognize students' opinions about a problem and identify shortcomings that still exist. With the use of this application, the institution can propose an appropriate method to improve the quality of training activities in the future.
Real-Time Semantic Segmentation via Multiply Spatial Fusion Network
Authors: Haiyang Si, Zhiqiang Zhang, Feifan Lv, Gang Yu, Feng Lu
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Playing the Game of 2048, Real-Time Semantic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Real-time semantic segmentation plays a significant role in industry applications, such as autonomous driving, robotics and so on. It is a challenging task as both efficiency and performance need to be considered simultaneously. To address such a complex task, this paper proposes an efficient CNN called Multiply Spatial Fusion Network (MSFNet) to achieve fast and accurate perception. The proposed MSFNet uses Class Boundary Supervision to process the relevant boundary information based on our proposed Multi-features Fusion Module which can obtain spatial information and enlarge receptive field. Therefore, the final upsampling of the feature maps of 1/8 original image size can achieve impressive results while maintaining a high speed. Experiments on Cityscapes and Camvid datasets show an obvious advantage of the proposed approach compared with the existing approaches. Specifically, it achieves 77.1% Mean IOU on the Cityscapes test dataset with the speed of 41 FPS for a 1024*2048 input, and 75.4% Mean IOU with the speed of 91 FPS on the Camvid test dataset.
REFIT: A Unified Watermark Removal Framework For Deep Learning Systems With Limited Data
Authors: Xinyun Chen, Wenxiao Wang, Chris Bender, Yiming Ding, Ruoxi Jia, Bo Li, Dawn Song
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00

Training deep neural networks from scratch could be computationally expensive and requires a lot of training data. Recent work has explored different watermarking techniques to protect the pre-trained deep neural networks from potential copyright infringements. However, these techniques could be vulnerable to watermark removal attacks. In this work, we propose REFIT, a unified watermark removal framework based on fine-tuning, which does not rely on the knowledge of the watermarks, and is effective against a wide range of watermarking schemes. In particular, we conduct a comprehensive study of a realistic attack scenario where the adversary has limited training data, which has not been emphasized in prior work on attacks against watermarking schemes. To effectively remove the watermarks without compromising the model functionality under this weak threat model, we propose two techniques that are incorporated into our fine-tuning framework: (1) an adaption of the elastic weight consolidation (EWC) algorithm, which is originally proposed for mitigating the catastrophic forgetting phenomenon; and (2) unlabeled data augmentation (AU), where we leverage auxiliary unlabeled data from other sources. Our extensive evaluation shows the effectiveness of REFIT against diverse watermark embedding schemes. In particular, both EWC and AU significantly decrease the amount of labeled training data needed for effective watermark removal, and the unlabeled data samples used for AU do not necessarily need to be drawn from the same distribution as the benign data for model evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that our fine-tuning based watermark removal attacks could pose real threats to the copyright of pre-trained models, and thus highlight the importance of further investigating the watermarking problem and proposing more robust watermark embedding schemes against the attacks.
Prototypical Networks for Multi-Label Learning
Authors: Zhuo Yang, Yufei Han, Guoxian Yu, Qiang Yang, Xiangliang Zhang
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Multi-Label Learning

We propose to formulate multi-label learning as a estimation of class distribution in a non-linear embedding space, where for each label, its positive data embeddings and negative data embeddings distribute compactly to form a positive component and negative component respectively, while the positive component and negative component are pushed away from each other. Duo to the shared embedding space for all labels, the distribution of embeddings preserves instances' label membership and feature matrix, thus encodes the feature-label relation and nonlinear label dependency. Labels of a given instance are inferred in the embedding space by measuring the probabilities of its belongingness to the positive or negative components of each label. Specially, the probabilities are modeled as the distance from the given instance to representative positive or negative prototypes. Extensive experiments validate that the proposed solution can provide distinctively more accurate multi-label classification than other state-of-the-art algorithms.
Countering Inconsistent Labelling by Google's Vision API for Rotated Images
Authors: Aman Apte, Aritra Bandyopadhyay, K Akhilesh Shenoy, Jason Peter Andrews, Aditya Rathod, Manish Agnihotri, Aditya Jajodia
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00

Google's Vision API analyses images and provides a variety of output predictions, one such type is context-based labelling. In this paper, it is shown that adversarial examples that cause incorrect label prediction and spoofing can be generated by rotating the images. Due to the black-boxed nature of the API, a modular context-based pre-processing pipeline is proposed consisting of a Res-Net50 model, that predicts the angle by which the image must be rotated to correct its orientation. The pipeline successfully performs the correction whilst maintaining the image's resolution and feeds it to the API which generates labels similar to the original correctly oriented image and using a Percentage Error metric, the performance of the corrected images as compared to its rotated counter-parts is found to be significantly higher. These observations imply that the API can benefit from such a pre-processing pipeline to increase robustness to rotational perturbances.
Common Artist Music Assistance
Authors: Manish Agnihotri, Adiyta Rathod, Aditya Jajodia, Chethan Sharma
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00

In today's world of growing number of songs, the need of finding apposite music content according to a user's interest is crucial. Furthermore, recommendations suitable to one user may be irrelevant to another. In this paper, we propose a recommendation system for users with common-artist music listening patterns. We use "random walk with restart" algorithm to get relevant recommendations and conduct experiments to find the optimal values of multiple parameters.
Rumor Detection on Social Media: Datasets, Methods and Opportunities
Authors: Quanzhi Li, Qiong Zhang, Luo Si, Yingchi Liu
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 11

Social media platforms have been used for information and news gathering, and they are very valuable in many applications. However, they also lead to the spreading of rumors and fake news. Many efforts have been taken to detect and debunk rumors on social media by analyzing their content and social context using machine learning techniques. This paper gives an overview of the recent studies in the rumor detection field. It provides a comprehensive list of datasets used for rumor detection, and reviews the important studies based on what types of information they exploit and the approaches they take. And more importantly, we also present several new directions for future research.
Smoothed Inference for Adversarially-Trained Models
Authors: Yaniv Nemcovsky, Evgenii Zheltonozhskii, Chaim Baskin, Brian Chmiel, Maxim Fishman, Alex M. Bronstein, Avi Mendelson
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense

Deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Current methods of defense from such attacks are based on either implicit or explicit regularization, e.g., adversarial training. Randomized smoothing, the averaging of the classifier outputs over a random distribution centered in the sample, has been shown to guarantee the performance of a classifier subject to bounded perturbations of the input. In this work, we study the application of randomized smoothing as a way to improve performance on unperturbed data as well as to increase robustness to adversarial attacks. The proposed technique can be applied on top of any existing adversarial defense, but works particularly well with the randomized approaches. We examine its performance on common white-box (PGD) and black-box (transfer and NAttack) attacks on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, substantially outperforming previous art for most scenarios and comparable on others. For example, we achieve 60.4% accuracy under a PGD attack on CIFAR-10 using ResNet-20, outperforming previous art by 11.7%. Since our method is based on sampling, it lends itself well for trading-off between the model inference complexity and its performance. A reference implementation of the proposed techniques is provided at https://github.com/yanemcovsky/SIAM
Transductive Zero-Shot Hashing for Multilabel Image Retrieval
Authors: Qin Zou, Zheng Zhang, Ling Cao, Long Chen, Song Wang
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Multi-Label Image Retrieval, Quantization, Retrieval

Hash coding has been widely used in approximate nearest neighbor search for large-scale image retrieval. Given semantic annotations such as class labels and pairwise similarities of the training data, hashing methods can learn and generate effective and compact binary codes. While some newly introduced images may contain undefined semantic labels, which we call unseen images, zeor-shot hashing techniques have been studied. However, existing zeor-shot hashing methods focus on the retrieval of single-label images, and cannot handle multi-label images. In this paper, for the first time, a novel transductive zero-shot hashing method is proposed for multi-label unseen image retrieval. In order to predict the labels of the unseen/target data, a visual-semantic bridge is built via instance-concept coherence ranking on the seen/source data. Then, pairwise similarity loss and focal quantization loss are constructed for training a hashing model using both the seen/source and unseen/target data. Extensive evaluations on three popular multi-label datasets demonstrate that, the proposed hashing method achieves significantly better results than the competing methods.