pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LightTrack: A Generic Framework for Online Top-Down Human Pose Tracking
Authors: Guanghan Ning, Heng Huang
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Tracking, Pose Estimation, Pose Tracking, Visual Object Tracking

In this paper, we propose a novel effective light-weight framework, called LightTrack, for online human pose tracking. The proposed framework is designed to be generic for top-down pose tracking and is faster than existing online and offline methods. Single-person Pose Tracking (SPT) and Visual Object Tracking (VOT) are incorporated into one unified functioning entity, easily implemented by a replaceable single-person pose estimation module. Our framework unifies single-person pose tracking with multi-person identity association and sheds first light upon bridging keypoint tracking with object tracking. We also propose a Siamese Graph Convolution Network (SGCN) for human pose matching as a Re-ID module in our pose tracking system. In contrary to other Re-ID modules, we use a graphical representation of human joints for matching. The skeleton-based representation effectively captures human pose similarity and is computationally inexpensive. It is robust to sudden camera shift that introduces human drifting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to propose an online human pose tracking framework in a top-down fashion. The proposed framework is general enough to fit other pose estimators and candidate matching mechanisms. Our method outperforms other online methods while maintaining a much higher frame rate, and is very competitive with our offline state-of-the-art. We make the code publicly available at: https://github.com/Guanghan/lighttrack.
Sparse multiresolution representations with adaptive kernels
Authors: Maria Peifer, Luiz. F. O. Chamon, Santiago Paternain, Alejandro Ribeiro
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00

Reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs) are key elements of many non-parametric tools successfully used in signal processing, statistics, and machine learning. In this work, we aim to address three issues of the classical RKHS based techniques. First, they require the RKHS to be known a priori, which is unrealistic in many applications. Furthermore, the choice of RKHS affects the shape and smoothness of the solution, thus impacting its performance. Second, RKHSs are ill-equipped to deal with heterogeneous degrees of smoothness, i.e., with functions that are smooth in some parts of their domain but vary rapidly in others. Finally, the computational complexity of evaluating the solution of these methods grows with the number of data points, rendering these techniques infeasible for many applications. Though kernel learning, local kernel adaptation, and sparsity have been used to address these issues, many of these approaches are computationally intensive or forgo optimality guarantees. We tackle these problems by leveraging a novel integral representation of functions in RKHSs that allows for arbitrary centers and different kernels at each center. To address the complexity issues, we then write the function estimation problem as a sparse functional program that explicitly minimizes the support of the representation leading to low complexity solutions. Despite their non-convexity and infinite dimensionality, we show these problems can be solved exactly and efficiently by leveraging duality, and we illustrate this new approach in simulated and real data.
Collaborative and Privacy-Preserving Machine Teaching via Consensus Optimization
Authors: Yufei Han, Yuzhe ma, Christopher Gates, Kevin Roundy, Yun Shen
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

In this work, we define a collaborative and privacy-preserving machine teaching paradigm with multiple distributed teachers. We focus on consensus super teaching. It aims at organizing distributed teachers to jointly select a compact while informative training subset from data hosted by the teachers to make a learner learn better. The challenges arise from three perspectives. First, the state-of-the-art pool-based super teaching method applies mixed-integer non-linear programming (MINLP) which does not scale well to very large data sets. Second, it is desirable to restrict data access of the teachers to only their own data during the collaboration stage to mitigate privacy leaks. Finally, the teaching collaboration should be communication-efficient since large communication overheads can cause synchronization delays between teachers. To address these challenges, we formulate collaborative teaching as a consensus and privacy-preserving optimization process to minimize teaching risk. We theoretically demonstrate the necessity of collaboration between teachers for improving the learner's learning. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method enjoys a similar property as the Oracle property of adaptive Lasso. The empirical study illustrates that our teaching method can deliver significantly more accurate teaching results with high speed, while the non-collaborative MINLP-based super teaching becomes prohibitively expensive to compute.
Skin Lesion Classification Using CNNs with Patch-Based Attention and Diagnosis-Guided Loss Weighting
Authors: Nils Gessert, Thilo Sentker, Frederic Madesta, Rüdiger Schmitz, Helge Kniep, Ivo Baltruschat, René Werner, Alexander Schlaefer
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Lesion Classification, Sensitivity, Skin Lesion Classification

Objective: This work addresses two key problems of skin lesion classification. The first problem is the effective use of high-resolution images with pretrained standard architectures for image classification. The second problem is the high class imbalance encountered in real-world multi-class datasets. Methods: To use high-resolution images, we propose a novel patch-based attention architecture that provides global context between small, high-resolution patches. We modify three pretrained architectures and study the performance of patch-based attention. To counter class imbalance problems, we compare oversampling, balanced batch sampling, and class-specific loss weighting. Additionally, we propose a novel diagnosis-guided loss weighting method which takes the method used for ground-truth annotation into account. Results: Our patch-based attention mechanism outperforms previous methods and improves the mean sensitivity by 7%. Class balancing significantly improves the mean sensitivity and we show that our diagnosis-guided loss weighting method improves the mean sensitivity by 3% over normal loss balancing. Conclusion: The novel patch-based attention mechanism can be integrated into pretrained architectures and provides global context between local patches while outperforming other patch-based methods. Hence, pretrained architectures can be readily used with high-resolution images without downsampling. The new diagnosis-guided loss weighting method outperforms other methods and allows for effective training when facing class imbalance. Significance: The proposed methods improve automatic skin lesion classification. They can be extended to other clinical applications where high-resolution image data and class imbalance are relevant.
Fast Neural Network Approach for Direct Covariant Forces Prediction in Complex Multi-Element Extended Systems
Authors: Jonathan P. Mailoa, Mordechai Kornbluth, Simon L. Batzner, Georgy Samsonidze, Stephen T. Lam, Chris Ablitt, Nicola Molinari, Boris Kozinsky
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Atomic Forces

Neural network force field (NNFF) is a method for performing regression on atomic structure-force relationships, bypassing expensive quantum mechanics calculation which prevents the execution of long ab-initio quality molecular dynamics simulations. However, most NNFF methods for complex multi-element atomic systems indirectly predict atomic force vectors by exploiting just atomic structure rotation-invariant features and the network-feature spatial derivatives which are computationally expensive. We develop a staggered NNFF architecture exploiting both rotation-invariant and covariant features separately to directly predict atomic force vectors without using spatial derivatives, thereby reducing expensive structural feature calculation by ~180-480x. This acceleration enables us to develop NNFF which directly predicts atomic forces in complex ternary and quaternary-element extended systems comprised of long polymer chains, amorphous oxide, and surface chemical reactions. The staggered rotation-invariant-covariant architecture described here can also directly predict complex covariant vector outputs from local physical structures in domains beyond computational material science.
Variational training of neural network approximations of solution maps for physical models
Authors: Yingzhou Li, Jianfeng Lu, Anqi Mao
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00

A novel solve-training framework is proposed to train neural network in representing low dimensional solution maps of physical models. Solve-training framework uses the neural network as the ansatz of the solution map and train the network variationally via loss functions from the underlying physical models. Solve-training framework avoids expensive data preparation in the traditional supervised training procedure, which prepares labels for input data, and still achieves effective representation of the solution map adapted to the input data distribution. The efficiency of solve-training framework is demonstrated through obtaining solutions maps for linear and nonlinear elliptic equations, and maps from potentials to ground states of linear and nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations.
Robust Dense Mapping for Large-Scale Dynamic Environments
Authors: Ioan Andrei Bârsan, Peidong Liu, Marc Pollefeys, Andreas Geiger
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, Visual Odometry

We present a stereo-based dense mapping algorithm for large-scale dynamic urban environments. In contrast to other existing methods, we simultaneously reconstruct the static background, the moving objects, and the potentially moving but currently stationary objects separately, which is desirable for high-level mobile robotic tasks such as path planning in crowded environments. We use both instance-aware semantic segmentation and sparse scene flow to classify objects as either background, moving, or potentially moving, thereby ensuring that the system is able to model objects with the potential to transition from static to dynamic, such as parked cars. Given camera poses estimated from visual odometry, both the background and the (potentially) moving objects are reconstructed separately by fusing the depth maps computed from the stereo input. In addition to visual odometry, sparse scene flow is also used to estimate the 3D motions of the detected moving objects, in order to reconstruct them accurately. A map pruning technique is further developed to improve reconstruction accuracy and reduce memory consumption, leading to increased scalability. We evaluate our system thoroughly on the well-known KITTI dataset. Our system is capable of running on a PC at approximately 2.5Hz, with the primary bottleneck being the instance-aware semantic segmentation, which is a limitation we hope to address in future work. The source code is available from the project website (http://andreibarsan.github.io/dynslam).
Uncertainty-Aware Data Aggregation for Deep Imitation Learning
Authors: Yuchen Cui, David Isele, Scott Niekum, Kikuo Fujimura
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Imitation Learning

Estimating statistical uncertainties allows autonomous agents to communicate their confidence during task execution and is important for applications in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving. In this work, we present the uncertainty-aware imitation learning (UAIL) algorithm for improving end-to-end control systems via data aggregation. UAIL applies Monte Carlo Dropout to estimate uncertainty in the control output of end-to-end systems, using states where it is uncertain to selectively acquire new training data. In contrast to prior data aggregation algorithms that force human experts to visit sub-optimal states at random, UAIL can anticipate its own mistakes and switch control to the expert in order to prevent visiting a series of sub-optimal states. Our experimental results from simulated driving tasks demonstrate that our proposed uncertainty estimation method can be leveraged to reliably predict infractions. Our analysis shows that UAIL outperforms existing data aggregation algorithms on a series of benchmark tasks.
Optimal Randomness in Swarm-Based Search
Authors: Jiamin Wei, YangQuan Chen, Yongguang Yu, Yuquan Chen
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00

L\'{e}vy flights is a random walk where the step-lengths have a probability distribution that is heavy-tailed. It has been shown that L\'{e}vy flights can maximize the efficiency of resource searching in uncertain environments, and also movements of many foragers and wandering animals have been shown to follow a L\'{e}vy distribution. The reason mainly comes from that the L\'{e}vy distribution, has an infinite second moment, and hence is more likely to generate an offspring that is farther away from its parent. However, the investigation into the efficiency of other different heavy-tailed probability distributions in swarm-based searches is still insufficient up to now. For swarm-based search algorithms, randomness plays a significant role in both exploration and exploitation, or diversification and intensification. Therefore, it's necessary to discuss the optimal randomness in swarm-based search algorithms. In this study, CS is taken as a representative method of swarm-based optimization algorithms, and the results can be generalized to other swarm-based search algorithms. In this paper, four different types of commonly used heavy-tailed distributions, including Mittag-Leffler distribution, Pareto distribution, Cauchy distribution, and Weibull distribution, are considered to enhance the searching ability of CS. Then four novel CS algorithms are proposed and experiments are carried out on 20 benchmark functions to compare their searching performances. Finally, the proposed methods are used to system identification to demonstrate the effectiveness.
Generalization ability of region proposal networks for multispectral person detection
Authors: Kevin Fritz, Daniel König, Ulrich Klauck, Michael Teutsch
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Region Proposal, Semantic Segmentation

Multispectral person detection aims at automatically localizing humans in images that consist of multiple spectral bands. Usually, the visual-optical (VIS) and the thermal infrared (IR) spectra are combined to achieve higher robustness for person detection especially in insufficiently illuminated scenes. This paper focuses on analyzing existing detection approaches for their generalization ability. Generalization is a key feature for machine learning based detection algorithms that are supposed to perform well across different datasets. Inspired by recent literature regarding person detection in the VIS spectrum, we perform a cross-validation study to empirically determine the most promising dataset to train a well-generalizing detector. Therefore, we pick one reference Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) architecture and three different multispectral datasets. The Region Proposal Network (RPN) originally introduced for object detection within the popular Faster R-CNN is chosen as a reference DCNN. The reason is that a stand-alone RPN is able to serve as a competitive detector for two-class problems such as person detection. Furthermore, current state-of-the-art approaches initially apply an RPN followed by individual classifiers. The three considered datasets are the KAIST Multispectral Pedestrian Benchmark including recently published improved annotations for training and testing, the Tokyo Multi-spectral Semantic Segmentation dataset, and the OSU Color-Thermal dataset including recently released annotations. The experimental results show that the KAIST Multispectral Pedestrian Benchmark with its improved annotations provides the best basis to train a DCNN with good generalization ability compared to the other two multispectral datasets. On average, this detection model achieves a log-average Miss Rate (MR) of 29.74 % evaluated on the reasonable test subsets of the three datasets.
Uncertainty Modeling of Contextual-Connections between Tracklets for Unconstrained Video-based Face Recognition
Authors: Jingxiao Zheng, Ruichi Yu, Jun-Cheng Chen, Boyu Lu, Carlos D. Castillo, Rama Chellappa
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Face Recognition

Unconstrained video-based face recognition is a challenging problem due to significant within-video variations caused by pose, occlusion and blur. To tackle this problem, an effective idea is to propagate the identity from high-quality faces to low-quality ones through contextual connections, which are constructed based on context such as body appearance. However, previous methods have often propagated erroneous information due to lack of uncertainty modeling of the noisy contextual connections. In this paper, we propose the Uncertainty-Gated Graph (UGG), which conducts graph-based identity propagation between tracklets, which are represented by nodes in a graph. UGG explicitly models the uncertainty of the contextual connections by adaptively updating the weights of the edge gates according to the identity distributions of the nodes during inference. UGG is a generic graphical model that can be applied at only inference time or with end-to-end training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UGG with state-of-the-art results in the recently released challenging Cast Search in Movies and IARPA Janus Surveillance Video Benchmark dataset.
DeepSWIR: A Deep Learning Based Approach for the Synthesis of Short-Wave InfraRed Band using Multi-Sensor Concurrent Datasets
Authors: Litu Rout, Yatharath Bhateja, Ankur Garg, Indranil Mishra, S Manthira Moorthi, Debjyoti Dhar
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Stitching

Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is achieving remarkable progress in various computer vision tasks. In the past few years, the remote sensing community has observed Deep Neural Network (DNN) finally taking off in several challenging fields. In this study, we propose a DNN to generate a predefined High Resolution (HR) synthetic spectral band using an ensemble of concurrent Low Resolution (LR) bands and existing HR bands. Of particular interest, the proposed network, namely DeepSWIR, synthesizes Short-Wave InfraRed (SWIR) band at 5m Ground Sampling Distance (GSD) using Green (G), Red (R) and Near InfraRed (NIR) bands at both 24m and 5m GSD, and SWIR band at 24m GSD. To our knowledge, the highest spatial resolution of commercially deliverable SWIR band is at 7.5m GSD. Also, we propose a Gaussian feathering based image stitching approach in light of processing large satellite imagery. To experimentally validate the synthesized HR SWIR band, we critically analyse the qualitative and quantitative results produced by DeepSWIR using state-of-the-art evaluation metrics. Further, we convert the synthesized DN values to Top Of Atmosphere (TOA) reflectance and compare with the corresponding band of Sentinel-2B. Finally, we show one real world application of the synthesized band by using it to map wetland resources over our region of interest.
LiStereo: Generate Dense Depth Maps from LIDAR and Stereo Imagery
Authors: Jun-ming Zhang, Manikandasriram Srinivasan Ramanagopal, Ram Vasudevan, Matthew Johnson-Roberson
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Stereo-LiDAR Fusion, Stereo Matching, Stereo Matching Hand

An accurate depth map of the environment is critical to the safe operation of autonomous robots and vehicles. Currently, either light detection and ranging (LIDAR) or stereo matching algorithms are used to acquire such depth information. However, a high-resolution LIDAR is expensive and produces sparse depth map at large range; stereo matching algorithms are able to generate denser depth maps but are typically less accurate than LIDAR at long range. This paper combines these approaches together to generate high-quality dense depth maps. Unlike previous approaches that are trained using ground-truth labels, the proposed model adopts a self-supervised training process. Experiments show that the proposed method is able to generate high-quality dense depth maps and performs robustly even with low-resolution inputs. This shows the potential to reduce the cost by using LIDARs with lower resolution in concert with stereo systems while maintaining high resolution.
Inverse Rendering for Complex Indoor Scenes: Shape, Spatially-Varying Lighting and SVBRDF from a Single Image
Authors: Zhengqin Li, Mohammad Shafiei, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Manmohan Chandraker
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: GPU, Inverse Rendering

We propose a deep inverse rendering framework for indoor scenes. From a single RGB image of an arbitrary indoor scene, we create a complete scene reconstruction, estimating shape, spatially-varying lighting, and spatially-varying, non-Lambertian surface reflectance. To train this network, we augment the SUNCG indoor scene dataset with real-world materials and render them with a fast, high-quality, physically-based GPU renderer to create a large-scale, photorealistic indoor dataset. Our inverse rendering network incorporates physical insights -- including a spatially-varying spherical Gaussian lighting representation, a differentiable rendering layer to model scene appearance, a cascade structure to iteratively refine the predictions and a bilateral solver for refinement -- allowing us to jointly reason about shape, lighting, and reflectance. Experiments show that our framework outperforms previous methods for estimating individual scene components, which also enables various novel applications for augmented reality, such as photorealistic object insertion and material editing. Code and data will be made publicly available.
Deep Landscape Forecasting for Real-time Bidding Advertising
Authors: Kan Ren, Jiarui Qin, Lei Zheng, Zhengyu Yang, Wei-Nan Zhang, Yong Yu
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis

The emergence of real-time auction in online advertising has drawn huge attention of modeling the market competition, i.e., bid landscape forecasting. The problem is formulated as to forecast the probability distribution of market price for each ad auction. With the consideration of the censorship issue which is caused by the second-price auction mechanism, many researchers have devoted their efforts on bid landscape forecasting by incorporating survival analysis from medical research field. However, most existing solutions mainly focus on either counting-based statistics of the segmented sample clusters, or learning a parameterized model based on some heuristic assumptions of distribution forms. Moreover, they neither consider the sequential patterns of the feature over the price space. In order to capture more sophisticated yet flexible patterns at fine-grained level of the data, we propose a Deep Landscape Forecasting (DLF) model which combines deep learning for probability distribution forecasting and survival analysis for censorship handling. Specifically, we utilize a recurrent neural network to flexibly model the conditional winning probability w.r.t. each bid price. Then we conduct the bid landscape forecasting through probability chain rule with strict mathematical derivations. And, in an end-to-end manner, we optimize the model by minimizing two negative likelihood losses with comprehensive motivations. Without any specific assumption for the distribution form of bid landscape, our model shows great advantages over previous works on fitting various sophisticated market price distributions. In the experiments over two large-scale real-world datasets, our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art solutions under various metrics.