pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Thermodynamic Cost of Edge Detection in Artificial Neural Network(ANN)-Based Processors
Authors: Seçkin Barışık, İlke Ercan
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Detection

Architecture-based heat dissipation analyses allow us to reveal fundamental sources of inefficiency in a given processor and thereby provide us with road-maps to design less dissipative computing schemes independent of technology-base used to implement them. In this work, we study architectural-level contributions to energy dissipation in an Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based processor that is trained to perform edge-detection task. We compare the training and information processing cost of ANN to that of conventional architectures and algorithms using 64-pixel binary image. Our results reveal the inherent efficiency advantages of an ANN network trained for specific tasks over general-purpose processors based on von Neumann architecture. We also compare the proposed performance improvements to that of Cellular Array Processors (CAPs) and illustrate the reduction in dissipation for special purpose processors. Lastly, we calculate the change in dissipation as a result of input data structure and show the effect of randomness on energetic cost of information processing. The results we obtained provide a basis for comparison for task-based fundamental energy efficiency analyses for a range of processors and therefore contribute to the study of architecture-level descriptions of processors and thermodynamic cost calculations based on physics of computation.
High-Order Information Matters: Learning Relation and Topology for Occluded Person Re-Identification
Authors: Guan'an Wang, Shuo Yang, Huanyu Liu, Zhicheng Wang, Yang Yang, Shuliang Wang, Gang Yu, Erjin Zhou, Jian Sun
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Graph Matching, Occluded Person Re-Identification, Person Re-Identification, Relation

Occluded person re-identification (ReID) aims to match occluded person images to holistic ones across dis-joint cameras. In this paper, we propose a novel framework by learning high-order relation and topology information for discriminative features and robust alignment. At first, we use a CNN backbone and a key-points estimation model to extract semantic local features. Even so, occluded images still suffer from occlusion and outliers. Then, we view the local features of an image as nodes of a graph and propose an adaptive direction graph convolutional (ADGC)layer to pass relation information between nodes. The proposed ADGC layer can automatically suppress the message-passing of meaningless features by dynamically learning di-rection and degree of linkage. When aligning two groups of local features from two images, we view it as a graph matching problem and propose a cross-graph embedded-alignment (CGEA) layer to jointly learn and embed topology information to local features, and straightly predict similarity score. The proposed CGEA layer not only take full use of alignment learned by graph matching but also re-place sensitive one-to-one matching with a robust soft one. Finally, extensive experiments on occluded, partial, and holistic ReID tasks show the effectiveness of our proposed method. Specifically, our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art by6.5%mAP scores on Occluded-Duke dataset.
Discovering Business Area Effects to Process Mining Analysis Using Clustering and Influence Analysis
Authors: Teemu Lehto, Markku Hinkka
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

A common challenge for improving business processes in large organizations is that business people in charge of the operations are lacking a fact-based understanding of the execution details, process variants, and exceptions taking place in business operations. While existing process mining methodologies can discover these details based on event logs, it is challenging to communicate the process mining findings to business people. In this paper, we present a novel methodology for discovering business areas that have a significant effect on the process execution details. Our method uses clustering to group similar cases based on process flow characteristics and then influence analysis for detecting those business areas that correlate most with the discovered clusters. Our analysis serves as a bridge between BPM people and business, people facilitating the knowledge sharing between these groups. We also present an example analysis based on publicly available real-life purchase order process data.
Neuroevolution of Self-Interpretable Agents
Authors: Yujin Tang, Duong Nguyen, David Ha
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Inattentional blindness is the psychological phenomenon that causes one to miss things in plain sight. It is a consequence of the selective attention in perception that lets us remain focused on important parts of our world without distraction from irrelevant details. Motivated by selective attention, we study the properties of artificial agents that perceive the world through the lens of a self-attention bottleneck. By constraining access to only a small fraction of the visual input, we show that their policies are directly interpretable in pixel space. We find neuroevolution ideal for training self-attention architectures for vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, allowing us to incorporate modules that can include discrete, non-differentiable operations which are useful for our agent. We argue that self-attention has similar properties as indirect encoding, in the sense that large implicit weight matrices are generated from a small number of key-query parameters, thus enabling our agent to solve challenging vision based tasks with at least 1000x fewer parameters than existing methods. Since our agent attends to only task critical visual hints, they are able to generalize to environments where task irrelevant elements are modified while conventional methods fail. Videos of our results and source code available at https://attentionagent.github.io/
3D Crowd Counting via Geometric Attention-guided Multi-View Fusion
Authors: Qi Zhang, Antoni B. Chan
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

Recently multi-view crowd counting using deep neural networks has been proposed to enable counting in large and wide scenes using multiple cameras. The current methods project the camera-view features to the average-height plane of the 3D world, and then fuse the projected multi-view features to predict a 2D scene-level density map on the ground (i.e., birds-eye view). Unlike the previous research, we consider the variable height of the people in the 3D world and propose to solve the multi-view crowd counting task through 3D feature fusion with 3D scene-level density maps, instead of the 2D density map on the ground plane. Compared to 2D fusion, the 3D fusion extracts more information of the people along the z-dimension (height), which helps to address the scale variations across multiple views. The 3D density maps still preserve the 2D density maps property that the sum is the count, while also providing 3D information about the crowd density. Furthermore, instead of using the standard method of copying the features along the view ray in the 2D-to-3D projection, we propose an attention module based on a height estimation network, which forces each 2D pixel to be projected to one 3D voxel along the view ray. We also explore the projection consistency among the 3D prediction and the ground truth in the 2D views to further enhance the counting performance. The proposed method is tested on the synthetic and real-world multiview counting datasets and achieves better or comparable counting performance to the state-of-the-art.
How social feedback processing in the brain shapes collective opinion processes in the era of social media
Authors: Sven Banisch, Felix Gaisbauer, Eckehard Olbrich
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00

What are the mechanisms by which groups with certain opinions gain public voice and force others holding a different view into silence? And how does social media play into this? Drawing on recent neuro-scientific insights into the processing of social feedback, we develop a theoretical model that allows to address these questions. The model captures phenomena described by spiral of silence theory of public opinion, provides a mechanism-based foundation for it, and allows in this way more general insight into how different group structures relate to different regimes of collective opinion expression. Even strong majorities can be forced into silence if a minority acts as a cohesive whole. The proposed framework of social feedback theory (SFT) highlights the need for sociological theorising to understand the societal-level implications of findings in social and cognitive neuroscience.
SwapText: Image Based Texts Transfer in Scenes
Authors: Qiangpeng Yang, Hongsheng Jin, Jun Huang, Wei. Lin
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Generation, Translation

Swapping text in scene images while preserving original fonts, colors, sizes and background textures is a challenging task due to the complex interplay between different factors. In this work, we present SwapText, a three-stage framework to transfer texts across scene images. First, a novel text swapping network is proposed to replace text labels only in the foreground image. Second, a background completion network is learned to reconstruct background images. Finally, the generated foreground image and background image are used to generate the word image by the fusion network. Using the proposing framework, we can manipulate the texts of the input images even with severe geometric distortion. Qualitative and quantitative results are presented on several scene text datasets, including regular and irregular text datasets. We conducted extensive experiments to prove the usefulness of our method such as image based text translation, text image synthesis, etc.
The State of Lifelong Learning in Service Robots: Current Bottlenecks in Object Perception and Manipulation
Authors: S. Hamidreza Kasaei, Jorik Melsen, Floris van Beers, Christiaan Steenkist, Klemen Voncina
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning, Object, Self-Learning

Service robots are appearing more and more in our daily life. The development of service robots combines multiple fields of research, from object perception to object manipulation. The state-of-the-art continues to improve to make a proper coupling between object perception and manipulation. This coupling is necessary for service robots not only to perform various tasks in a reasonable amount of time but also to continually adapt to new environments and safely interact with non-expert human users. Nowadays, robots are able to recognize various objects, and quickly plan a collision-free trajectory to grasp a target object in predefined settings. Besides, in most of the cases, there is a reliance on large amounts of training data. Therefore, the knowledge of such robots is fixed after the training phase, and any changes in the environment require complicated, time-consuming, and expensive robot re-programming by human experts. Therefore, these approaches are still too rigid for real-life applications in unstructured environments, where a significant portion of the environment is unknown and cannot be directly sensed or controlled. In such environments, no matter how extensive the training data used for batch learning, a robot will always face new objects. Therefore, apart from batch learning, the robot should be able to continually learn about new object categories and grasp affordances from very few training examples on-site. Moreover, apart from robot self-learning, non-expert users could interactively guide the process of experience acquisition by teaching new concepts, or by correcting insufficient or erroneous concepts. In this way, the robot will constantly learn how to help humans in everyday tasks by gaining more and more experiences without the need for re-programming.
Site2Vec: a reference frame invariant algorithm for vector embedding of protein-ligand binding sites
Authors: Arnab Bhadra, Kalidas Y
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Drug Discovery

Protein-ligand interactions are one of the fundamental types of molecular interactions in living systems. Ligands are small molecules that interact with protein molecules at specific regions on their surfaces called binding sites. Tasks such as assessment of protein functional similarity and detection of side effects of drugs need identification of similar binding sites of disparate proteins across diverse pathways. Machine learning methods for similarity assessment require feature descriptors of binding sites. Traditional methods based on hand engineered motifs and atomic configurations are not scalable across several thousands of sites. In this regard, deep neural network algorithms are now deployed which can capture very complex input feature space. However, one fundamental challenge in applying deep learning to structures of binding sites is the input representation and the reference frame. We report here a novel algorithm Site2Vec that derives reference frame invariant vector embedding of a protein-ligand binding site. The method is based on pairwise distances between representative points and chemical compositions in terms of constituent amino acids of a site. The vector embedding serves as a locality sensitive hash function for proximity queries and determining similar sites. The method has been the top performer with more than 95% quality scores in extensive benchmarking studies carried over 10 datasets and against 23 other site comparison methods. The algorithm serves for high throughput processing and has been evaluated for stability with respect to reference frame shifts, coordinate perturbations and residue mutations. We provide Site2Vec as a stand alone executable and a web service hosted at \url{http://services.iittp.ac.in/bioinfo/home}.
A Novel Twitter Sentiment Analysis Model with Baseline Correlation for Financial Market Prediction with Improved Efficiency
Authors: Xinyi Guo, Jinfeng Li
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Prediction, regression, Sentiment Analysis, Twitter Sentiment Analysis

A novel social networks sentiment analysis model is proposed based on Twitter sentiment score (TSS) for real-time prediction of the future stock market price FTSE 100, as compared with conventional econometric models of investor sentiment based on closed-end fund discount (CEFD). The proposed TSS model features a new baseline correlation approach, which not only exhibits a decent prediction accuracy, but also reduces the computation burden and enables a fast decision making without the knowledge of historical data. Polynomial regression, classification modelling and lexicon-based sentiment analysis are performed using R. The obtained TSS predicts the future stock market trend in advance by 15 time samples (30 working hours) with an accuracy of 67.22% using the proposed baseline criterion without referring to historical TSS or market data. Specifically, TSS's prediction performance of an upward market is found far better than that of a downward market. Under the logistic regression and linear discriminant analysis, the accuracy of TSS in predicting the upward trend of the future market achieves 97.87%.
A Driver Fatigue Recognition Algorithm Based on Spatio-Temporal Feature Sequence
Authors: Chen Zhang, Xiaobo Lu, Zhiliang Huang
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Detection, Facial Landmark Detection, Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Researches show that fatigue driving is one of the important causes of road traffic accidents, so it is of great significance to study the driver fatigue recognition algorithm to improve road traffic safety. In recent years, with the development of deep learning, the field of pattern recognition has made great development. This paper designs a real-time fatigue state recognition algorithm based on spatio-temporal feature sequence, which can be mainly applied to the scene of fatigue driving recognition. The algorithm is divided into three task networks: face detection network, facial landmark detection and head pose estimation network, fatigue recognition network. Experiments show that the algorithm has the advantages of small volume, high speed and high accuracy.
Gender Representation in Open Source Speech Resources
Authors: Mahault Garnerin, Solange Rossato, Laurent Besacier
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Ethics, Fairness

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the growing use of deep-learning architectures, the question of ethics, transparency and fairness of AI systems has become a central concern within the research community. We address transparency and fairness in spoken language systems by proposing a study about gender representation in speech resources available through the Open Speech and Language Resource platform. We show that finding gender information in open source corpora is not straightforward and that gender balance depends on other corpus characteristics (elicited/non elicited speech, low/high resource language, speech task targeted). The paper ends with recommendations about metadata and gender information for researchers in order to assure better transparency of the speech systems built using such corpora.
Rotate-and-Render: Unsupervised Photorealistic Face Rotation from Single-View Images
Authors: Hang Zhou, Jihao Liu, Ziwei Liu, Yu Liu, Xiaogang Wang
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 3D Face Modelling, Data Augmentation, Face Recognition

Though face rotation has achieved rapid progress in recent years, the lack of high-quality paired training data remains a great hurdle for existing methods. The current generative models heavily rely on datasets with multi-view images of the same person. Thus, their generated results are restricted by the scale and domain of the data source. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised framework that can synthesize photo-realistic rotated faces using only single-view image collections in the wild. Our key insight is that rotating faces in the 3D space back and forth, and re-rendering them to the 2D plane can serve as a strong self-supervision. We leverage the recent advances in 3D face modeling and high-resolution GAN to constitute our building blocks. Since the 3D rotation-and-render on faces can be applied to arbitrary angles without losing details, our approach is extremely suitable for in-the-wild scenarios (i.e. no paired data are available), where existing methods fall short. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach has superior synthesis quality as well as identity preservation over the state-of-the-art methods, across a wide range of poses and domains. Furthermore, we validate that our rotate-and-render framework naturally can act as an effective data augmentation engine for boosting modern face recognition systems even on strong baseline models.
Block Layer Decomposition schemes for training Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Laura Palagi, Ruggiero Seccia
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00

Deep Feedforward Neural Networks' (DFNNs) weights estimation relies on the solution of a very large nonconvex optimization problem that may have many local (no global) minimizers, saddle points and large plateaus. As a consequence, optimization algorithms can be attracted toward local minimizers which can lead to bad solutions or can slow down the optimization process. Furthermore, the time needed to find good solutions to the training problem depends on both the number of samples and the number of variables. In this work, we show how Block Coordinate Descent (BCD) methods can be applied to improve performance of state-of-the-art algorithms by avoiding bad stationary points and flat regions. We first describe a batch BCD method ables to effectively tackle the network's depth and then we further extend the algorithm proposing a \textit{minibatch} BCD framework able to scale with respect to both the number of variables and the number of samples by embedding a BCD approach into a minibatch framework. By extensive numerical results on standard datasets for several architecture networks, we show how the application of BCD methods to the training phase of DFNNs permits to outperform standard batch and minibatch algorithms leading to an improvement on both the training phase and the generalization performance of the networks.
The Future of Digital Health with Federated Learning
Authors: Nicola Rieke, Jonny Hancox, Wenqi Li, Fausto Milletari, Holger Roth, Shadi Albarqouni, Spyridon Bakas, Mathieu N. Galtier, Bennett Landman, Klaus Maier-Hein, Sebastien Ourselin, Micah Sheller, Ronald M. Summers, Andrew Trask, Daguang Xu, Maximilian Baust, M. Jorge Cardoso
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Data-driven Machine Learning has emerged as a promising approach for building accurate and robust statistical models from medical data, which is collected in huge volumes by modern healthcare systems. Existing medical data is not fully exploited by ML primarily because it sits in data silos and privacy concerns restrict access to this data. However, without access to sufficient data, ML will be prevented from reaching its full potential and, ultimately, from making the transition from research to clinical practice. This paper considers key factors contributing to this issue, explores how Federated Learning (FL) may provide a solution for the future of digital health and highlights the challenges and considerations that need to be addressed.
Transformer Networks for Trajectory Forecasting
Authors: Francesco Giuliari, Irtiza Hasan, Marco Cristani, Fabio Galasso
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Trajectory Forecasting, Trajectory Prediction

Most recent successes on forecasting the people motion are based on LSTM models and all most recent progress has been achieved by modelling the social interaction among people and the people interaction with the scene. We question the use of the LSTM models and propose the novel use of Transformer Networks for trajectory forecasting. This is a fundamental switch from the sequential step-by-step processing of LSTMs to the only-attention-based memory mechanisms of Transformers. In particular, we consider both the original Transformer Network (TF) and the larger Bidirectional Transformer (BERT), state-of-the-art on all natural language processing tasks. Our proposed Transformers predict the trajectories of the individual people in the scene. These are "simple" model because each person is modelled separately without any complex human-human nor scene interaction terms. In particular, the TF model without bells and whistles yields the best score on the largest and most challenging trajectory forecasting benchmark of TrajNet. Additionally, its extension which predicts multiple plausible future trajectories performs on par with more engineered techniques on the 5 datasets of ETH + UCY. Finally, we show that Transformers may deal with missing observations, as it may be the case with real sensor data. Code is available at https://github.com/FGiuliari/Trajectory-Transformer.
Efficient improper learning for online logistic regression
Authors: Rémi Jézéquel, Pierre Gaillard, Alessandro Rudi
Date: 2020-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We consider the setting of online logistic regression and consider the regret with respect to the 2-ball of radius B. It is known (see [Hazan et al., 2014]) that any proper algorithm which has logarithmic regret in the number of samples (denoted n) necessarily suffers an exponential multiplicative constant in B. In this work, we design an efficient improper algorithm that avoids this exponential constant while preserving a logarithmic regret. Indeed, [Foster et al., 2018] showed that the lower bound does not apply to improper algorithms and proposed a strategy based on exponential weights with prohibitive computational complexity. Our new algorithm based on regularized empirical risk minimization with surrogate losses satisfies a regret scaling as O(B log(Bn)) with a per-round time-complexity of order O(d^2).