pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Unfairness of Popularity Bias in Music Recommendation: A Reproducibility Study
Authors: Dominik Kowald, Markus Schedl, Elisabeth Lex
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Research has shown that recommender systems are typically biased towards popular items, which leads to less popular items being underrepresented in recommendations. The recent work of Abdollahpouri et al. in the context of movie recommendations has shown that this popularity bias leads to unfair treatment of both long-tail items as well as users with little interest in popular items. In this paper, we reproduce the analyses of Abdollahpouri et al. in the context of music recommendation. Specifically, we investigate three user groups from the LastFM music platform that are categorized based on how much their listening preferences deviate from the most popular music among all LastFM users in the dataset: (i) low-mainstream users, (ii) medium-mainstream users, and (iii) high-mainstream users. In line with Abdollahpouri et al., we find that state-of-the-art recommendation algorithms favor popular items also in the music domain. However, their proposed Group Average Popularity metric yields different results for LastFM than for the movie domain, presumably due to the larger number of available items (i.e., music artists) in the LastFM dataset we use. Finally, we compare the accuracy results of the recommendation algorithms for the three user groups and find that the low-mainstreaminess group significantly receives the worst recommendations.
Transparent Classification with Multilayer Logical Perceptrons and Random Binarization
Authors: Zhuo Wang, Wei zhang, Ning Liu, Jianyong Wang
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Classification, General Classification

Models with transparent inner structure and high classification performance are required to reduce potential risk and provide trust for users in domains like health care, finance, security, etc. However, existing models are hard to simultaneously satisfy the above two properties. In this paper, we propose a new hierarchical rule-based model for classification tasks, named Concept Rule Sets (CRS), which has both a strong expressive ability and a transparent inner structure. To address the challenge of efficiently learning the non-differentiable CRS model, we propose a novel neural network architecture, Multilayer Logical Perceptron (MLLP), which is a continuous version of CRS. Using MLLP and the Random Binarization (RB) method we proposed, we can search the discrete solution of CRS in continuous space using gradient descent and ensure the discrete CRS acts almost the same as the corresponding continuous MLLP. Experiments on 12 public data sets show that CRS outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches and the complexity of the learned CRS is close to the simple decision tree. Source code is available at https://github.com/12wang3/mllp.
Reconstructing Multi-echo Magnetic Resonance Images via Structured Deep Dictionary Learning
Authors: Vanika Singhal, Angshul Majumdar
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Dictionary Learning

Multi-echo magnetic resonance (MR) images are acquired by changing the echo times (for T2 weighted) or relaxation times (for T1 weighted) of scans. The resulting (multi-echo) images are usually used for quantitative MR imaging. Acquiring MR images is a slow process and acquiring multi scans of the same cross section for multi-echo imaging is even slower. In order to accelerate the scan, compressed sensing (CS) based techniques have been advocating partial K-space (Fourier domain) scans; the resulting images are reconstructed via structured CS algorithms. In recent times, it has been shown that instead of using off-the-shelf CS, better results can be obtained by adaptive reconstruction algorithms based on structured dictionary learning. In this work, we show that the reconstruction results can be further improved by using structured deep dictionaries. Experimental results on real datasets show that by using our proposed technique the scan-time can be cut by half compared to the state-of-the-art.
Neural Network Based Explicit MPC for Chemical Reactor Control
Authors: Karol Kiš, Martin Klaučo
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

In this paper, we show the implementation of deep neural networks applied in process control. In our approach, we based the training of the neural network on model predictive control. Model predictive control is popular for its ability to be tuned by the weighting matrices and by the fact that it respects the constraints. We present the neural network that can approximate the behavior of the MPC in the way of mimicking the control input trajectory while the constraints on states and control input remain unimpaired of the value of the weighting matrices. This approach is demonstrated in a simulation case study involving a continuous stirred tank reactor, where multi-component chemical reaction takes place.
Datamorphic Testing: A Methodology for Testing AI Applications
Authors: Hong Zhu, Dongmei Liu, Ian Bayley, Rachel Harrison, Fabio Cuzzolin
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Face Recognition

With the rapid growth of the applications of machine learning (ML) and other artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, adequate testing has become a necessity to ensure their quality. This paper identifies the characteristics of AI applications that distinguish them from traditional software, and analyses the main difficulties in applying existing testing methods. Based on this analysis, we propose a new method called datamorphic testing and illustrate the method with an example of testing face recognition applications. We also report an experiment with four real industrial application systems of face recognition to validate the proposed approach.
Effects of lead position, cardiac rhythm variation and drug-induced QT prolongation on performance of machine learning methods for ECG processing
Authors: Marat Bogdanov, Salim Baigildin, Aygul Fabarisova, Konstantin Ushenin, Olga Solovyova
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Electrocardiography (ECG), Position, Rhythm

Machine learning shows great performance in various problems of electrocardiography (ECG) signal analysis. However, collecting a dataset for biomedical engineering is a very difficult task. Any dataset for ECG processing contains from 100 to 10,000 times fewer cases than datasets for image or text analysis. This issue is especially important because of physiological phenomena that can significantly change the morphology of heartbeats in ECG signals. In this preliminary study, we analyze the effects of lead choice from the standard ECG recordings, variation of ECG during 24-hours, and the effects of QT-prolongation agents on the performance of machine learning methods for ECG processing. We choose the problem of subject identification for analysis, because this problem may be solved for almost any available dataset of ECG data. In a discussion, we compare our findings with observations from other works that use machine learning for ECG processing with different problem statements. Our results show the importance of training dataset enrichment with ECG signals acquired in specific physiological conditions for obtaining good performance of ECG processing for real applications.
DR-GAN: Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Fine-Grained Lesion Synthesis on Diabetic Retinopathy Images
Authors: Yi Zhou, Boyang Wang, Xiaodong He, Shanshan Cui, Ling Shao
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Generative Adversarial Network, Lesion Segmentation

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a complication of diabetes that severely affects eyes. It can be graded into five levels of severity according to international protocol. However, optimizing a grading model to have strong generalizability requires a large amount of balanced training data, which is difficult to collect particularly for the high severity levels. Typical data augmentation methods, including random flipping and rotation, cannot generate data with high diversity. In this paper, we propose a diabetic retinopathy generative adversarial network (DR-GAN) to synthesize high-resolution fundus images which can be manipulated with arbitrary grading and lesion information. Thus, large-scale generated data can be used for more meaningful augmentation to train a DR grading and lesion segmentation model. The proposed retina generator is conditioned on the structural and lesion masks, as well as adaptive grading vectors sampled from the latent grading space, which can be adopted to control the synthesized grading severity. Moreover, a multi-scale spatial and channel attention module is devised to improve the generation ability to synthesize details. Multi-scale discriminators are designed to operate from large to small receptive fields, and joint adversarial losses are adopted to optimize the whole network in an end-to-end manner. With extensive experiments evaluated on the EyePACS dataset connected to Kaggle, as well as the FGADR dataset, we validate the effectiveness of our method, which can both synthesize highly realistic (1280 x 1280) controllable fundus images and contribute to the DR grading task.
How to Evaluate the Next System: Automatic Dialogue Evaluation from the Perspective of Continual Learning
Authors: Lu Li, Zhongheng He, Xiangyang Zhou, dianhai yu
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Dialogue Evaluation, Fairness

Automatic dialogue evaluation plays a crucial role in open-domain dialogue research. Previous works train neural networks with limited annotation for conducting automatic dialogue evaluation, which would naturally affect the evaluation fairness as dialogue systems close to the scope of training corpus would have more preference than the other ones. In this paper, we study alleviating this problem from the perspective of continual learning: given an existing neural dialogue evaluator and the next system to be evaluated, we fine-tune the learned neural evaluator by selectively forgetting/updating its parameters, to jointly fit dialogue systems have been and will be evaluated. Our motivation is to seek for a lifelong and low-cost automatic evaluation for dialogue systems, rather than to reconstruct the evaluator over and over again. Experimental results show that our continual evaluator achieves comparable performance with reconstructing new evaluators, while requires significantly lower resources.
3D-GMNet: Single-View 3D Shape Recovery as A Gaussian Mixture
Authors: Kohei Yamashita, Shohei Nobuhara, Ko Nishino
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Density Estimation, Pose Estimation

In this paper, we introduce 3D-GMNet, a deep neural network for 3D object shape reconstruction from a single image. As the name suggests, 3D-GMNet recovers 3D shape as a Gaussian mixture. In contrast to voxels, point clouds, or meshes, a Gaussian mixture representation provides an analytical expression with a small memory footprint while accurately representing the target 3D shape. At the same time, it offers a number of additional advantages including instant pose estimation and controllable level-of-detail reconstruction, while also enabling interpretation as a point cloud, volume, and a mesh model. We train 3D-GMNet end-to-end with single input images and corresponding 3D models by introducing two novel loss functions, a 3D Gaussian mixture loss and a 2D multi-view loss, which collectively enable accurate shape reconstruction as kernel density estimation. We thoroughly evaluate the effectiveness of 3D-GMNet with synthetic and real images of objects. The results show accurate reconstruction with a compact representation that also realizes novel applications of single-image 3D reconstruction.
Neural Point Cloud Rendering via Multi-Plane Projection
Authors: Peng Dai, yinda zhang, Zhuwen Li, Shuaicheng Liu, Bing Zeng
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6

We present a new deep point cloud rendering pipeline through multi-plane projections. The input to the network is the raw point cloud of a scene and the output are image or image sequences from a novel view or along a novel camera trajectory. Unlike previous approaches that directly project features from 3D points onto 2D image domain, we propose to project these features into a layered volume of camera frustum. In this way, the visibility of 3D points can be automatically learnt by the network, such that ghosting effects due to false visibility check as well as occlusions caused by noise interferences are both avoided successfully. Next, the 3D feature volume is fed into a 3D CNN to produce multiple layers of images w.r.t. the space division in the depth directions. The layered images are then blended based on learned weights to produce the final rendering results. Experiments show that our network produces more stable renderings compared to previous methods, especially near the object boundaries. Moreover, our pipeline is robust to noisy and relatively sparse point cloud for a variety of challenging scenes.
WCE Polyp Detection with Triplet based Embeddings
Authors: Pablo Laiz, Jordi Vitrià, Hagen Wenzek, Carolina Malagelada, Fernando Azpiroz, Santi Seguí
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Procedure, Metric Learning, Triplet

Wireless capsule endoscopy is a medical procedure used to visualize the entire gastrointestinal tract and to diagnose intestinal conditions, such as polyps or bleeding. Current analyses are performed by manually inspecting nearly each one of the frames of the video, a tedious and error-prone task. Automatic image analysis methods can be used to reduce the time needed for physicians to evaluate a capsule endoscopy video, however these methods are still in a research phase. In this paper we focus on computer-aided polyp detection in capsule endoscopy images. This is a challenging problem because of the diversity of polyp appearance, the imbalanced dataset structure and the scarcity of data. We have developed a new polyp computer-aided decision system that combines a deep convolutional neural network and metric learning. The key point of the method is the use of the triplet loss function with the aim of improving feature extraction from the images when having small dataset. The triplet loss function allows to train robust detectors by forcing images from the same category to be represented by similar embedding vectors while ensuring that images from different categories are represented by dissimilar vectors. Empirical results show a meaningful increase of AUC values compared to baseline methods. A good performance is not the only requirement when considering the adoption of this technology to clinical practice. Trust and explainability of decisions are as important as performance. With this purpose, we also provide a method to generate visual explanations of the outcome of our polyp detector. These explanations can be used to build a physician's trust in the system and also to convey information about the inner working of the method to the designer for debugging purposes.
Introducing MANtIS: a novel Multi-Domain Information Seeking Dialogues Dataset
Authors: Gustavo Penha, Alexandru Balan, Claudia Hauff
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Conversational search is an approach to information retrieval (IR), where users engage in a dialogue with an agent in order to satisfy their information needs. Previous conceptual work described properties and actions a good agent should exhibit. Unlike them, we present a novel conceptual model defined in terms of conversational goals, which enables us to reason about current research practices in conversational search. Based on the literature, we elicit how existing tasks and test collections from the fields of IR, natural language processing (NLP) and dialogue systems (DS) fit into this model. We describe a set of characteristics that an ideal conversational search dataset should have. Lastly, we introduce MANtIS (the code and dataset are available at https://guzpenha.github.io/MANtIS/), a large-scale dataset containing multi-domain and grounded information seeking dialogues that fulfill all of our dataset desiderata. We provide baseline results for the conversation response ranking and user intent prediction tasks.
Backprop Diffusion is Biologically Plausible
Authors: Alessandro Betti, Marco Gori
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00

The Backpropagation algorithm relies on the abstraction of using a neural model that gets rid of the notion of time, since the input is mapped instantaneously to the output. In this paper, we claim that this abstraction of ignoring time, along with the abrupt input changes that occur when feeding the training set, are in fact the reasons why, in some papers, Backprop biological plausibility is regarded as an arguable issue. We show that as soon as a deep feedforward network operates with neurons with time-delayed response, the backprop weight update turns out to be the basic equation of a biologically plausible diffusion process based on forward-backward waves. We also show that such a process very well approximates the gradient for inputs that are not too fast with respect to the depth of the network. These remarks somewhat disclose the diffusion process behind the backprop equation and leads us to interpret the corresponding algorithm as a degeneration of a more general diffusion process that takes place also in neural networks with cyclic connections.
Classification under local differential privacy
Authors: Thomas Berrett, Cristina Butucea
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification, General Classification

We consider the binary classification problem in a setup that preserves the privacy of the original sample. We provide a privacy mechanism that is locally differentially private and then construct a classifier based on the private sample that is universally consistent in Euclidean spaces. Under stronger assumptions, we establish the minimax rates of convergence of the excess risk and see that they are slower than in the case when the original sample is available.
SuperNCN: Neighbourhood consensus network for robust outdoor scenes matching
Authors: Grzegorz Kurzejamski, Jacek Komorowski, Lukasz Dabala, Konrad Czarnota, Simon Lynen, Tomasz Trzcinski
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Pose Estimation

In this paper, we present a framework for computing dense keypoint correspondences between images under strong scene appearance changes. Traditional methods, based on nearest neighbour search in the feature descriptor space, perform poorly when environmental conditions vary, e.g. when images are taken at different times of the day or seasons. Our method improves finding keypoint correspondences in such difficult conditions. First, we use Neighbourhood Consensus Networks to build spatially consistent matching grid between two images at a coarse scale. Then, we apply Superpoint-like corner detector to achieve pixel-level accuracy. Both parts use features learned with domain adaptation to increase robustness against strong scene appearance variations. The framework has been tested on a RobotCar Seasons dataset, proving large improvement on pose estimation task under challenging environmental conditions.
Inception Architecture and Residual Connections in Classification of Breast Cancer Histology Images
Authors: Mohammad Ibrahim Sarker, Hyongsuk Kim, Denis Tarasov, Dinar Akhmetzanov
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Cancer Classification, Classification, Classification Of Breast Cancer Histology Images, Data Augmentation, General Classification

This paper presents results of applying Inception v4 deep convolutional neural network to ICIAR-2018 Breast Cancer Classification Grand Challenge, part a. The Challenge task is to classify breast cancer biopsy results, presented in form of hematoxylin and eosin stained images. Breast cancer classification is of primary interest to the medical practitioners and thus binary classification of breast cancer images have been under investigation by many researchers, but multi-class categorization of histology breast images have been challenging due to the subtle differences among the categories. In this work extensive data augmentation is conducted to reduce overfitting and effectiveness of committee of several Inception v4 networks is studied. We report 89% accuracy on 4 class classification task and 93.7% on carcinoma/non-carcinoma two class classification task using our test set of 80 images.
Deep Attention Based Semi-Supervised 2D-Pose Estimation for Surgical Instruments
Authors: Mert Kayhan, Okan Köpüklü, Mhd Hasan Sarhan, Mehmet Yigitsoy, Abouzar Eslami, Gerhard Rigoll
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Pose Estimation, Deep Attention, Pose Estimation

For many practical problems and applications, it is not feasible to create a vast and accurately labeled dataset, which restricts the application of deep learning in many areas. Semi-supervised learning algorithms intend to improve performance by also leveraging unlabeled data. This is very valuable for 2D-pose estimation task where data labeling requires substantial time and is subject to noise. This work aims to investigate if semi-supervised learning techniques can achieve acceptable performance level that makes using these algorithms during training justifiable. To this end, a lightweight network architecture is introduced and mean teacher, virtual adversarial training and pseudo-labeling algorithms are evaluated on 2D-pose estimation for surgical instruments. For the applicability of pseudo-labelling algorithm, we propose a novel confidence measure, total variation. Experimental results show that utilization of semi-supervised learning improves the performance on unseen geometries drastically while maintaining high accuracy for seen geometries. For RMIT benchmark, our lightweight architecture outperforms state-of-the-art with supervised learning. For Endovis benchmark, pseudo-labelling algorithm improves the supervised baseline achieving the new state-of-the-art performance.
OpenBioLink: A benchmarking framework for large-scale biomedical link prediction
Authors: Anna Breit, Simon Ott, Asan Agibetov, Matthias Samwald
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Link Prediction

SUMMARY: Recently, novel machine-learning algorithms have shown potential for predicting undiscovered links in biomedical knowledge networks. However, dedicated benchmarks for measuring algorithmic progress have not yet emerged. With OpenBioLink, we introduce a large-scale, high-quality and highly challenging biomedical link prediction benchmark to transparently and reproducibly evaluate such algorithms. Furthermore, we present preliminary baseline evaluation results. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code, data and supplementary files are openly available at https://github.com/OpenBioLink/OpenBioLink CONTACT: matthias.samwald ((at)) meduniwien.ac.at