pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Boundary-Aware Salient Object Detection via Recurrent Two-Stream Guided Refinement Network
Authors: Fangting Lin, Chao Yang, Huizhou Li, Bin Jiang
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Recent deep learning based salient object detection methods which utilize both saliency and boundary features have achieved remarkable performance. However, most of them ignore the complementarity between saliency features and boundary features, thus get worse predictions in scenes with low contrast between foreground and background. To address this issue, we propose a novel Recurrent Two-Stream Guided Refinement Network (RTGRNet) that consists of iterating Two-Stream Guided Refinement Modules (TGRMs). TGRM consists of a Guide Block and two feature streams: saliency and boundary, the Guide Block utilizes the refined features after previous TGRM to further improve the performance of two feature streams in current TGRM. Meanwhile, the low-level integrated features are also utilized as a reference to get better details. Finally, we progressively refine these features by recurrently stacking more TGRMs. Extensive experiments on six public datasets show that our proposed RTGRNet achieves the state-of-the-art performance in salient object detection.
Array Languages Make Neural Networks Fast
Authors: Artjoms Šinkarovs, Hans-Nikolai Vießmann, Sven-Bodo Scholz
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, GPU

Modern machine learning frameworks are complex: they are typically organised in multiple layers each of which is written in a different language and they depend on a number of external libraries, but at their core they mainly consist of tensor operations. As array-oriented languages provide perfect abstractions to implement tensor operations, we consider a minimalistic machine learning framework that is shallowly embedded in an array-oriented language and we study its productivity and performance. We do this by implementing a state of the art Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and compare it against implementations in TensorFlow and PyTorch --- two state of the art industrial-strength frameworks. It turns out that our implementation is 2 and 3 times faster, even after fine-tuning the TensorFlow and PyTorch to our hardware --- a 64-core GPU-accelerated machine. The size of all three CNN specifications is the same, about 150 lines of code. Our mini framework is 150 lines of highly reusable hardware-agnostic code that does not depend on external libraries. The compiler for a host array language automatically generates parallel code for a chosen architecture. The key to such a balance between performance and portability lies in the design of the array language; in particular, the ability to express rank-polymorphic operations concisely, yet being able to do optimisations across them. This design builds on very few assumptions, and it is readily transferable to other contexts offering a clean approach to high-performance machine learning.
HistoNet: Predicting size histograms of object instances
Authors: Kishan Sharma, Moritz Gold, Christian Zurbruegg, Laura Leal-Taixé, Jan Dirk Wegner
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We propose to predict histograms of object sizes in crowded scenes directly without any explicit object instance segmentation. What makes this task challenging is the high density of objects (of the same category), which makes instance identification hard. Instead of explicitly segmenting object instances, we show that directly learning histograms of object sizes improves accuracy while using drastically less parameters. This is very useful for application scenarios where explicit, pixel-accurate instance segmentation is not needed, but there lies interest in the overall distribution of instance sizes. Our core applications are in biology, where we estimate the size distribution of soldier fly larvae, and medicine, where we estimate the size distribution of cancer cells as an intermediate step to calculate the tumor cellularity score. Given an image with hundreds of small object instances, we output the total count and the size histogram. We also provide a new data set for this task, the FlyLarvae data set, which consists of 11,000 larvae instances labeled pixel-wise. Our method results in an overall improvement in the count and size distribution prediction as compared to state-of-the-art instance segmentation method Mask R-CNN.
Context-Aware Dynamic Feature Extraction for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds
Authors: Yonglin Tian, Lichao Huang, Xuesong Li, Kunfeng Wang, Zilei Wang, Fei-Yue Wang
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Region Proposal

Varying density of point clouds increases the difficulty of 3D detection. In this paper, we present a context-aware dynamic network (CADNet) to capture the variance of density by considering both point context and semantic context. Point-level contexts are generated from original point clouds to enlarge the effective receptive filed. They are extracted around the voxelized pillars based on our extended voxelization method and processed with the context encoder in parallel with the pillar features. With a large perception range, we are able to capture the variance of features for potential objects and generate attentive spatial guidance to help adjust the strengths for different regions. In the region proposal network, considering the limited representation ability of traditional convolution where same kernels are shared among different samples and positions, we propose a decomposable dynamic convolutional layer to adapt to the variance of input features by learning from local semantic context. It adaptively generates the position-dependent coefficients for multiple fixed kernels and combines them to convolve with local feature windows. Based on our dynamic convolution, we design a dual-path convolution block to further improve the representation ability. We conduct experiments with our Network on KITTI dataset and achieve good performance on 3D detection task for both precision and speed. Our one-stage detector outperforms SECOND and PointPillars by a large margin and achieves the speed of 30 FPS.
Automatic Analysis of Sewer Pipes Based on Unrolled Monocular Fisheye Images
Authors: Johannes Künzel, Thomas Werner, Ronja Möller, Peter Eisert, Jan Waschnewski, Ralf Hilpert
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00

The task of detecting and classifying damages in sewer pipes offers an important application area for computer vision algorithms. This paper describes a system, which is capable of accomplishing this task solely based on low quality and severely compressed fisheye images from a pipe inspection robot. Relying on robust image features, we estimate camera poses, model the image lighting, and exploit this information to generate high quality cylindrical unwraps of the pipes' surfaces.Based on the generated images, we apply semantic labeling based on deep convolutional neural networks to detect and classify defects as well as structural elements.
Lane Detection For Prototype Autonomous Vehicle
Authors: Sertap Kamçı, Dogukan Aksu, Muhammed Ali Aydin
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Edge Detection, Lane Detection

Unmanned vehicle technologies are an area of great interest in theory and practice today. These technologies have advanced considerably after the first applications have been implemented and cause a rapid change in human life. Autonomous vehicles are also a big part of these technologies. The most important action of a driver has to do is to follow the lanes on the way to the destination. By using image processing and artificial intelligence techniques, an autonomous vehicle can move successfully without a driver help. They can go from the initial point to the specified target by applying pre-defined rules. There are also rules for proper tracking of the lanes. Many accidents are caused due to insufficient follow-up of the lanes and non-compliance with these rules. The majority of these accidents also result in injury and death. In this paper, we present an autonomous vehicle prototype that follows lanes via image processing techniques, which are a major part of autonomous vehicle technology. Autonomous movement capability is provided by using some image processing algorithms such as canny edge detection, Sobel filter, etc. We implemented and tested these algorithms on the vehicle. The vehicle detected and followed the determined lanes. By that way, it went to the destination successfully.
Snoopy: Sniffing Your Smartwatch Passwords via Deep Sequence Learning
Authors: Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Bowen Du, Hongkai Wen, Sen Wang, Andrew Markham, Ivan Martinovic, Yiran Shen, Niki Trigoni
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00

Demand for smartwatches has taken off in recent years with new models which can run independently from smartphones and provide more useful features, becoming first-class mobile platforms. One can access online banking or even make payments on a smartwatch without a paired phone. This makes smartwatches more attractive and vulnerable to malicious attacks, which to date have been largely overlooked. In this paper, we demonstrate Snoopy, a password extraction and inference system which is able to accurately infer passwords entered on Android/Apple watches within 20 attempts, just by eavesdropping on motion sensors. Snoopy uses a uniform framework to extract the segments of motion data when passwords are entered, and uses novel deep neural networks to infer the actual passwords. We evaluate the proposed Snoopy system in the real-world with data from 362 participants and show that our system offers a 3-fold improvement in the accuracy of inferring passwords compared to the state-of-the-art, without consuming excessive energy or computational resources. We also show that Snoopy is very resilient to user and device heterogeneity: it can be trained on crowd-sourced motion data (e.g. via Amazon Mechanical Turk), and then used to attack passwords from a new user, even if they are wearing a different model. This paper shows that, in the wrong hands, Snoopy can potentially cause serious leaks of sensitive information. By raising awareness, we invite the community and manufacturers to revisit the risks of continuous motion sensing on smart wearable devices.
Efficient Robotic Task Generalization Using Deep Model Fusion Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Tianying Wang, Hao Zhang, Wei Qi Toh, Hongyuan Zhu, Cheston Tan, Yan Wu, Yong liu, Wei Jing
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Learning-based methods have been used to pro-gram robotic tasks in recent years. However, extensive training is usually required not only for the initial task learning but also for generalizing the learned model to the same task but in different environments. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm for efficient task generalization and environment adaptation in the robotic task learning problem. The proposed method is able to efficiently generalize the previously learned task by model fusion to solve the environment adaptation problem. The proposed Deep Model Fusion (DMF) method reuses and combines the previously trained model to improve the learning efficiency and results.Besides, we also introduce a Multi-objective Guided Reward(MGR) shaping technique to further improve training efficiency.The proposed method was benchmarked with previous methods in various environments to validate its effectiveness.
Automatic Spanish Translation of the SQuAD Dataset for Multilingual Question Answering
Authors: Casimiro Pio Carrino, Marta R. Costa-jussà, José A. R. Fonollosa
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, TAR, Translation

Recently, multilingual question answering became a crucial research topic, and it is receiving increased interest in the NLP community. However, the unavailability of large-scale datasets makes it challenging to train multilingual QA systems with performance comparable to the English ones. In this work, we develop the Translate Align Retrieve (TAR) method to automatically translate the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) v1.1 to Spanish. We then used this dataset to train Spanish QA systems by fine-tuning a Multilingual-BERT model. Finally, we evaluated our QA models with the recently proposed MLQA and XQuAD benchmarks for cross-lingual Extractive QA. Experimental results show that our models outperform the previous Multilingual-BERT baselines achieving the new state-of-the-art value of 68.1 F1 points on the Spanish MLQA corpus and 77.6 F1 and 61.8 Exact Match points on the Spanish XQuAD corpus. The resulting, synthetically generated SQuAD-es v1.1 corpora, with almost 100% of data contained in the original English version, to the best of our knowledge, is the first large-scale QA training resource for Spanish.
Recurrent Transform Learning
Authors: Megha Gupta, Angshul Majumdar
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting, regression

The objective of this work is to improve the accuracy of building demand forecasting. This is a more challenging task than grid level forecasting. For the said purpose, we develop a new technique called recurrent transform learning (RTL). Two versions are proposed. The first one (RTL) is unsupervised; this is used as a feature extraction tool that is further fed into a regression model. The second formulation embeds regression into the RTL framework leading to regressing recurrent transform learning (R2TL). Forecasting experiments have been carried out on three popular publicly available datasets. Both of our proposed techniques yield results superior to the state-of-the-art like long short term memory network, echo state network and sparse coding regression.
Deep motion estimation for parallel inter-frame prediction in video compression
Authors: André Nortje, Herman A. Engelbrecht, Herman Kamper
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Compression

Standard video codecs rely on optical flow to guide inter-frame prediction: pixels from reference frames are moved via motion vectors to predict target video frames. We propose to learn binary motion codes that are encoded based on an input video sequence. These codes are not limited to 2D translations, but can capture complex motion (warping, rotation and occlusion). Our motion codes are learned as part of a single neural network which also learns to compress and decode them. This approach supports parallel video frame decoding instead of the sequential motion estimation and compensation of flow-based methods. We also introduce 3D dynamic bit assignment to adapt to object displacements caused by motion, yielding additional bit savings. By replacing the optical flow-based block-motion algorithms found in an existing video codec with our learned inter-frame prediction model, our approach outperforms the standard H.264 and H.265 video codecs across at low bitrates.
IoU-uniform R-CNN: Breaking Through the Limitations of RPN
Authors: Li Zhu, Zihao Xie, Liman Liu, Bo Tao, Wenbing Tao
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Region Proposal

Region Proposal Network (RPN) is the cornerstone of two-stage object detectors, it generates a sparse set of object proposals and alleviates the extrem foregroundbackground class imbalance problem during training. However, we find that the potential of the detector has not been fully exploited due to the IoU distribution imbalance and inadequate quantity of the training samples generated by RPN. With the increasing intersection over union (IoU), the exponentially smaller numbers of positive samples would lead to the distribution skewed towards lower IoUs, which hinders the optimization of detector at high IoU levels. In this paper, to break through the limitations of RPN, we propose IoU-Uniform R-CNN, a simple but effective method that directly generates training samples with uniform IoU distribution for the regression branch as well as the IoU prediction branch. Besides, we improve the performance of IoU prediction branch by eliminating the feature offsets of RoIs at inference, which helps the NMS procedure by preserving accurately localized bounding box. Extensive experiments on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO dataset show the effectiveness of our method, as well as its compatibility and adaptivity to many object detection architectures. The code is made publicly available at https://github.com/zl1994/IoU-Uniform-R-CNN,
BINet: a binary inpainting network for deep patch-based image compression
Authors: André Nortje, Willie Brink, Herman A. Engelbrecht, Herman Kamper
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

Recent deep learning models outperform standard lossy image compression codecs. However, applying these models on a patch-by-patch basis requires that each image patch be encoded and decoded independently. The influence from adjacent patches is therefore lost, leading to block artefacts at low bitrates. We propose the Binary Inpainting Network (BINet), an autoencoder framework which incorporates binary inpainting to reinstate interdependencies between adjacent patches, for improved patch-based compression of still images. When decoding a patch, BINet additionally uses the binarised encodings from surrounding patches to guide its reconstruction. In contrast to sequential inpainting methods where patches are decoded based on previons reconstructions, BINet operates directly on the binary codes of surrounding patches without access to the original or reconstructed image data. Encoding and decoding can therefore be performed in parallel. We demonstrate that BINet improves the compression quality of a competitive deep image codec across a range of compression levels.
Variational Learning with Disentanglement-PyTorch
Authors: Amir H. Abdi, Purang Abolmaesumi, Sidney Fels
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Scheduling

Unsupervised learning of disentangled representations is an open problem in machine learning. The Disentanglement-PyTorch library is developed to facilitate research, implementation, and testing of new variational algorithms. In this modular library, neural architectures, dimensionality of the latent space, and the training algorithms are fully decoupled, allowing for independent and consistent experiments across variational methods. The library handles the training scheduling, logging, and visualizations of reconstructions and latent space traversals. It also evaluates the encodings based on various disentanglement metrics. The library, so far, includes implementations of the following unsupervised algorithms VAE, Beta-VAE, Factor-VAE, DIP-I-VAE, DIP-II-VAE, Info-VAE, and Beta-TCVAE, as well as conditional approaches such as CVAE and IFCVAE. The library is compatible with the Disentanglement Challenge of NeurIPS 2019, hosted on AICrowd, and achieved the 3rd rank in both the first and second stages of the challenge.
Tensor Completion via Gaussian Process Based Initialization
Authors: Yermek Kapushev, Ivan Oseledets, Evgeny Burnaev
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

In this paper, we consider the tensor completion problem representing the solution in the tensor train (TT) format. It is assumed that tensor is high-dimensional, and tensor values are generated by an unknown smooth function. The assumption allows us to develop an efficient initialization scheme based on Gaussian Process Regression and TT-cross approximation technique. The proposed approach can be used in conjunction with any optimization algorithm that is usually utilized in tensor completion problems. We empirically justify that in this case the reconstruction error improves compared to the tensor completion with random initialization. As an additional benefit, our technique automatically selects rank thanks to using the TT-cross approximation technique.
Character 3-gram Mover's Distance: An Effective Method for Detecting Near-duplicate Japanese-language Recipes
Authors: Masaki Oguni, Yohei Seki, Yu Hirate
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00

In user-generated recipe websites, users post their-original recipes. Some recipes, however, are very similar in major components such as the cooking instructions to other recipes. We refer to such recipes as "near-duplicate recipes". In this study, we propose a method that extends the "Word Mover's Distance", which calculates distances between texts based on word embedding, to character 3-gram embedding. Using a corpus of over 1.21 million recipes, we learned the word embedding and the character 3-gram embedding by using a Skip-Gram model with negative sampling and fastText to extract candidate pairs of near-duplicate recipes. We then annotated these candidates and evaluated the proposed method against a comparison method. Our results demonstrated that near-duplicate recipes that were not detected by the comparison method were successfully detected by the proposed method.
Image Classification with Deep Learning in the Presence of Noisy Labels: A Survey
Authors: Görkem Algan, Ilkay Ulusoy
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Image classification systems recently made a giant leap with the advancement of deep neural networks. However, these systems require an excessive amount of labeled data to be adequately trained. Gathering a correctly annotated dataset is not always feasible due to several factors, such as the expensiveness of the labeling process or difficulty of correctly classifying data, even for the experts. Because of these practical challenges, label noise is a common problem in real-world datasets, and numerous methods to train deep neural networks with label noise are proposed in the literature. Although deep neural networks are known to be relatively robust to label noise, their tendency to overfit data makes them vulnerable to memorizing even random noise. Therefore, it is crucial to consider the existence of label noise and develop counter algorithms to fade away its adverse effects to train deep neural networks efficiently. Even though an extensive survey of machine learning techniques under label noise exists, the literature lacks a comprehensive survey of methodologies centered explicitly around deep learning in the presence of noisy labels. This paper aims to present these algorithms while categorizing them into one of the two subgroups: noise model based and noise model free methods. Algorithms in the first group aim to estimate the noise structure and use this information to avoid the adverse effects of noisy labels. Differently, methods in the second group try to come up with inherently noise robust algorithms by using approaches like robust losses, regularizers or other learning paradigms.