pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Benchmarking Bonus-Based Exploration Methods on the Arcade Learning Environment
Authors: Adrien Ali Taïga, William Fedus, Marlos C. Machado, Aaron Courville, Marc G. Bellemare
Date: 2019-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Benchmarking, Montezuma's Revenge, Reinforcement Learning

This paper provides an empirical evaluation of recently developed exploration algorithms within the Arcade Learning Environment (ALE). We study the use of different reward bonuses that incentives exploration in reinforcement learning. We do so by fixing the learning algorithm used and focusing only on the impact of the different exploration bonuses in the agent's performance. We use Rainbow, the state-of-the-art algorithm for value-based agents, and focus on some of the bonuses proposed in the last few years. We consider the impact these algorithms have on performance within the popular game Montezuma's Revenge which has gathered a lot of interest from the exploration community, across the the set of seven games identified by Bellemare et al. (2016) as challenging for exploration, and easier games where exploration is not an issue. We find that, in our setting, recently developed bonuses do not provide significantly improved performance on Montezuma's Revenge or hard exploration games. We also find that existing bonus-based methods may negatively impact performance on games in which exploration is not an issue and may even perform worse than $\epsilon$-greedy exploration.
Visual Coin-Tracking: Tracking of Planar Double-Sided Objects
Authors: Jonáš Šerých, Jiří Matas
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We introduce a new video analysis problem -- tracking of rigid planar objects in sequences where both their sides are visible. Such coin-like objects often rotate fast with respect to an arbitrary axis producing unique challenges, such as fast incident light and aspect ratio change and rotational motion blur. Despite being common, neither tracking sequences containing coin-like objects nor suitable algorithm have been published. As a second contribution, we present a novel coin-tracking benchmark containing 17 video sequences annotated with object segmentation masks. Experiments show that the sequences differ significantly from the ones encountered in standard tracking datasets. We propose a baseline coin-tracking method based on convolutional neural network segmentation and explicit pose modeling. Its performance confirms that coin-tracking is an open and challenging problem.
BCN20000: Dermoscopic Lesions in the Wild
Authors: Marc Combalia, Noel C. F. Codella, Veronica Rotemberg, Brian Helba, Veronica Vilaplana, Ofer Reiter, Cristina Carrera, Alicia Barreiro, Allan C. Halpern, Susana Puig, Josep Malvehy
Date: 2019-08-06 00:00:00

This article summarizes the BCN20000 dataset, composed of 19424 dermoscopic images of skin lesions captured from 2010 to 2016 in the facilities of the Hospital Cl\'inic in Barcelona. With this dataset, we aim to study the problem of unconstrained classification of dermoscopic images of skin cancer, including lesions found in hard-to-diagnose locations (nails and mucosa), large lesions which do not fit in the aperture of the dermoscopy device, and hypo-pigmented lesions. The BCN20000 will be provided to the participants of the ISIC Challenge 2019, where they will be asked to train algorithms to classify dermoscopic images of skin cancer automatically.
Towards closing the gap between the theory and practice of SVRG
Authors: Othmane Sebbouh, Nidham Gazagnadou, Samy Jelassi, Francis Bach, Robert M. Gower
Date: 2019-07-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

Among the very first variance reduced stochastic methods for solving the empirical risk minimization problem was the SVRG method (Johnson & Zhang 2013). SVRG is an inner-outer loop based method, where in the outer loop a reference full gradient is evaluated, after which $m \in \mathbb{N}$ steps of an inner loop are executed where the reference gradient is used to build a variance reduced estimate of the current gradient. The simplicity of the SVRG method and its analysis have led to multiple extensions and variants for even non-convex optimization. We provide a more general analysis of SVRG than had been previously done by using arbitrary sampling, which allows us to analyse virtually all forms of mini-batching through a single theorem. Furthermore, our analysis is focused on more practical variants of SVRG including a new variant of the loopless SVRG (Hofman et al 2015, Kovalev et al 2019, Kulunchakov and Mairal 2019) and a variant of k-SVRG (Raj and Stich 2018) where $m=n$ and where $n$ is the number of data points. Since our setup and analysis reflect what is done in practice, we are able to set the parameters such as the mini-batch size and step size using our theory in such a way that produces a more efficient algorithm in practice, as we show in extensive numerical experiments.
Online Planning for Decentralized Stochastic Control with Partial History Sharing
Authors: Kaiqing Zhang, Erik Miehling, Tamer Başar
Date: 2019-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

In decentralized stochastic control, standard approaches for sequential decision-making, e.g. dynamic programming, quickly become intractable due to the need to maintain a complex information state. Computational challenges are further compounded if agents do not possess complete model knowledge. In this paper, we take advantage of the fact that in many problems agents share some common information, or history, termed partial history sharing. Under this information structure the policy search space is greatly reduced. We propose a provably convergent, online tree-search based algorithm that does not require a closed-form model or explicit communication among agents. Interestingly, our algorithm can be viewed as a generalization of several existing heuristic solvers for decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes. To demonstrate the applicability of the model, we propose a novel collaborative intrusion response model, where multiple agents (defenders) possessing asymmetric information aim to collaboratively defend a computer network. Numerical results demonstrate the performance of our algorithm.
Expert Sample Consensus Applied to Camera Re-Localization
Authors: Eric Brachmann, Carsten Rother
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Camera Localization, Mixture-of-Experts, Visual Localization

Fitting model parameters to a set of noisy data points is a common problem in computer vision. In this work, we fit the 6D camera pose to a set of noisy correspondences between the 2D input image and a known 3D environment. We estimate these correspondences from the image using a neural network. Since the correspondences often contain outliers, we utilize a robust estimator such as Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) or Differentiable RANSAC (DSAC) to fit the pose parameters. When the problem domain, e.g. the space of all 2D-3D correspondences, is large or ambiguous, a single network does not cover the domain well. Mixture of Experts (MoE) is a popular strategy to divide a problem domain among an ensemble of specialized networks, so called experts, where a gating network decides which expert is responsible for a given input. In this work, we introduce Expert Sample Consensus (ESAC), which integrates DSAC in a MoE. Our main technical contribution is an efficient method to train ESAC jointly and end-to-end. We demonstrate experimentally that ESAC handles two real-world problems better than competing methods, i.e. scalability and ambiguity. We apply ESAC to fitting simple geometric models to synthetic images, and to camera re-localization for difficult, real datasets.
Explaining Image Classifiers using Statistical Fault Localization
Authors: Youcheng Sun, Hana Chockler, Xiaowei Huang, Daniel Kroening
Date: 2019-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault localization

The black-box nature of deep neural networks (DNNs) makes it impossible to understand why a particular output is produced, creating demand for "Explainable AI". In this paper, we show that statistical fault localization (SFL) techniques from software engineering deliver high quality explanations of the outputs of DNNs, where we define an explanation as a minimal subset of features sufficient for making the same decision as for the original input. We present an algorithm and a tool called DeepCover, which synthesizes a ranking of the features of the inputs using SFL and constructs explanations for the decisions of the DNN based on this ranking. We compare explanations produced by DeepCover with those of the state-of-the-art tools GradCAM, LIME, SHAP, RISE and Extremal and show that explanations generated by DeepCover are consistently better across a broad set of experiments. On a benchmark set with known ground truth, DeepCover achieves 76.7% accuracy, which is 6% better than the second best Extremal.
Experiential AI
Authors: Drew Hemment, Ruth Aylett, Vaishak Belle, Dave Murray-Rust, Ewa Luger, Jane Hillston, Michael Rovatsos, Frank Broz
Date: 2019-08-06 00:00:00

Experiential AI is proposed as a new research agenda in which artists and scientists come together to dispel the mystery of algorithms and make their mechanisms vividly apparent. It addresses the challenge of finding novel ways of opening up the field of artificial intelligence to greater transparency and collaboration between human and machine. The hypothesis is that art can mediate between computer code and human comprehension to overcome the limitations of explanations in and for AI systems. Artists can make the boundaries of systems visible and offer novel ways to make the reasoning of AI transparent and decipherable. Beyond this, artistic practice can explore new configurations of humans and algorithms, mapping the terrain of inter-agencies between people and machines. This helps to viscerally understand the complex causal chains in environments with AI components, including questions about what data to collect or who to collect it about, how the algorithms are chosen, commissioned and configured or how humans are conditioned by their participation in algorithmic processes.
Progressive Transfer Learning
Authors: Zhengxu Yu, Dong Shen, Zhongming Jin, Jianqiang Huang, Deng Cai, Xian-Sheng Hua
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Person Re-Identification, Transfer Learning

Model fine-tuning is a widely used transfer learning approach in person Re-identification (ReID) applications, which fine-tuning a pre-trained feature extraction model into the target scenario instead of training a model from scratch. It is challenging due to the significant variations inside the target scenario, e.g., different camera viewpoint, illumination changes, and occlusion. These variations result in a gap between the distribution of each mini-batch and the whole dataset's distribution when using mini-batch training. In this paper, we study model fine-tuning from the perspective of the aggregation and utilization of the global information of the dataset when using mini-batch training. Specifically, we introduce a novel network structure called Batch-related Convolutional Cell (BConv-Cell), which progressively collects the global information of the dataset into a latent state and uses it to rectify the extracted feature. Based on BConv-Cells, we further proposed the Progressive Transfer Learning (PTL) method to facilitate the model fine-tuning process by jointly optimizing the BConv-Cells and the pre-trained ReID model. Empirical experiments show that our proposal can improve the performance of the ReID model greatly on MSMT17, Market-1501, CUHK03 and DukeMTMC-reID datasets. Moreover, we extend our proposal to the general image classification task. The experiments in several image classification benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposal can significantly improve the performance of baseline models. The code has been released at \url{https://github.com/ZJULearning/PTL}
Audio-visual Speech Enhancement Using Conditional Variational Auto-Encoders
Authors: Mostafa Sadeghi, Simon Leglaive, Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Laurent Girin, Radu Horaud
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) are deep generative latent variable models that can be used for learning the distribution of complex data. VAEs have been successfully used to learn a probabilistic prior over speech signals, which is then used to perform speech enhancement. One advantage of this generative approach is that it does not require pairs of clean and noisy speech signals at training. In this paper, we propose audio-visual variants of VAEs for single-channel and speaker-independent speech enhancement. We develop a conditional VAE (CVAE) where the audio speech generative process is conditioned on visual information of the lip region. At test time, the audio-visual speech generative model is combined with a noise model based on nonnegative matrix factorization, and speech enhancement relies on a Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm. Experiments are conducted with the recently published NTCD-TIMIT dataset as well as the GRID corpus. The results confirm that the proposed audio-visual CVAE effectively fuses audio and visual information, and it improves the speech enhancement performance compared with the audio-only VAE model, especially when the speech signal is highly corrupted by noise. We also show that the proposed unsupervised audio-visual speech enhancement approach outperforms a state-of-the-art supervised deep learning method.
The power of dynamic social networks to predict individuals' mental health
Authors: Shikang Liu, David Hachen, Omar Lizardo, Christian Poellabauer, Aaron Striegel, Tijana Milenkovic
Date: 2019-08-06 00:00:00

Precision medicine has received attention both in and outside the clinic. We focus on the latter, by exploiting the relationship between individuals' social interactions and their mental health to develop a predictive model of one's likelihood to be depressed or anxious from rich dynamic social network data. To our knowledge, we are the first to do this. Existing studies differ from our work in at least one aspect: they do not model social interaction data as a network; they do so but analyze static network data; they examine "correlation" between social networks and health but without developing a predictive model; or they study other individual traits but not mental health. In a systematic and comprehensive evaluation, we show that our predictive model that uses dynamic social network data is superior to its static network as well as non-network equivalents when run on the same data.
Refining the Structure of Neural Networks Using Matrix Conditioning
Authors: Roozbeh Yousefzadeh, Dianne P. O'Leary
Date: 2019-08-06 00:00:00

Deep learning models have proven to be exceptionally useful in performing many machine learning tasks. However, for each new dataset, choosing an effective size and structure of the model can be a time-consuming process of trial and error. While a small network with few neurons might not be able to capture the intricacies of a given task, having too many neurons can lead to overfitting and poor generalization. Here, we propose a practical method that employs matrix conditioning to automatically design the structure of layers of a feed-forward network, by first adjusting the proportion of neurons among the layers of a network and then scaling the size of network up or down. Results on sample image and non-image datasets demonstrate that our method results in small networks with high accuracies. Finally, guided by matrix conditioning, we provide a method to effectively squeeze models that are already trained. Our techniques reduce the human cost of designing deep learning models and can also reduce training time and the expense of using neural networks for applications.
SpatialSense: An Adversarially Crowdsourced Benchmark for Spatial Relation Recognition
Authors: Kaiyu Yang, Olga Russakovsky, Jia Deng
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Benchmarking, Relation, Spatial Reasoning, Spatial Relation Recognition

Understanding the spatial relations between objects in images is a surprisingly challenging task. A chair may be "behind" a person even if it appears to the left of the person in the image (depending on which way the person is facing). Two students that appear close to each other in the image may not in fact be "next to" each other if there is a third student between them. We introduce SpatialSense, a dataset specializing in spatial relation recognition which captures a broad spectrum of such challenges, allowing for proper benchmarking of computer vision techniques. SpatialSense is constructed through adversarial crowdsourcing, in which human annotators are tasked with finding spatial relations that are difficult to predict using simple cues such as 2D spatial configuration or language priors. Adversarial crowdsourcing significantly reduces dataset bias and samples more interesting relations in the long tail compared to existing datasets. On SpatialSense, state-of-the-art recognition models perform comparably to simple baselines, suggesting that they rely on straightforward cues instead of fully reasoning about this complex task. The SpatialSense benchmark provides a path forward to advancing the spatial reasoning capabilities of computer vision systems. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SpatialSense.
Zero-Shot Deep Hashing and Neural Network Based Error Correction for Face Template Protection
Authors: Veeru Talreja, Matthew C. Valenti, Nasser M. Nasrabadi
Date: 2019-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Hashing

In this paper, we present a novel architecture that integrates a deep hashing framework with a neural network decoder (NND) for application to face template protection. It improves upon existing face template protection techniques to provide better matching performance with one-shot and multi-shot enrollment. A key novelty of our proposed architecture is that the framework can also be used with zero-shot enrollment. This implies that our architecture does not need to be re-trained even if a new subject is to be enrolled into the system. The proposed architecture consists of two major components: a deep hashing (DH) component, which is used for robust mapping of face images to their corresponding intermediate binary codes, and a NND component, which corrects errors in the intermediate binary codes that are caused by differences in the enrollment and probe biometrics due to factors such as variation in pose, illumination, and other factors. The final binary code generated by the NND is then cryptographically hashed and stored as a secure face template in the database. The efficacy of our approach with zero-shot, one-shot, and multi-shot enrollments is shown for CMU-PIE, Extended Yale B, WVU multimodal and Multi-PIE face databases. With zero-shot enrollment, the system achieves approximately 85% genuine accept rates (GAR) at 0.01% false accept rate (FAR), and with one-shot and multi-shot enrollments, it achieves approximately 99.95% GAR at 0.01% FAR, while providing a high level of template security.
Continuous Graph Flow
Authors: Zhiwei Deng, Megha Nawhal, Lili Meng, Greg Mori
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Graph Generation, Layout Generation

In this paper, we propose Continuous Graph Flow, a generative continuous flow based method that aims to model complex distributions of graph-structured data. Once learned, the model can be applied to an arbitrary graph, defining a probability density over the random variables represented by the graph. It is formulated as an ordinary differential equation system with shared and reusable functions that operate over the graphs. This leads to a new type of neural graph message passing scheme that performs continuous message passing over time. This class of models offers several advantages: a flexible representation that can generalize to variable data dimensions; ability to model dependencies in complex data distributions; reversible and memory-efficient; and exact and efficient computation of the likelihood of the data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on a diverse set of generation tasks across different domains: graph generation, image puzzle generation, and layout generation from scene graphs. Our proposed model achieves significantly better performance compared to state-of-the-art models.
Interactive Learning for Identifying Relevant Tweets to Support Real-time Situational Awareness
Authors: Luke S. Snyder, Yi-Shan Lin, Morteza Karimzadeh, Dan Goldwasser, David S. Ebert
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Various domain users are increasingly leveraging real-time social media data to gain rapid situational awareness. However, due to the high noise in the deluge of data, effectively determining semantically relevant information can be difficult, further complicated by the changing definition of relevancy by each end user for different events. The majority of existing methods for short text relevance classification fail to incorporate users' knowledge into the classification process. Existing methods that incorporate interactive user feedback focus on historical datasets. Therefore, classifiers cannot be interactively retrained for specific events or user-dependent needs in real-time. This limits real-time situational awareness, as streaming data that is incorrectly classified cannot be corrected immediately, permitting the possibility for important incoming data to be incorrectly classified as well. We present a novel interactive learning framework to improve the classification process in which the user iteratively corrects the relevancy of tweets in real-time to train the classification model on-the-fly for immediate predictive improvements. We computationally evaluate our classification model adapted to learn at interactive rates. Our results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art machine learning models. In addition, we integrate our framework with the extended Social Media Analytics and Reporting Toolkit (SMART) 2.0 system, allowing the use of our interactive learning framework within a visual analytics system tailored for real-time situational awareness. To demonstrate our framework's effectiveness, we provide domain expert feedback from first responders who used the extended SMART 2.0 system.
Robust Learning with Jacobian Regularization
Authors: Judy Hoffman, Daniel A. Roberts, Sho Yaida
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, General Classification

Design of reliable systems must guarantee stability against input perturbations. In machine learning, such guarantee entails preventing overfitting and ensuring robustness of models against corruption of input data. In order to maximize stability, we analyze and develop a computationally efficient implementation of Jacobian regularization that increases classification margins of neural networks. The stabilizing effect of the Jacobian regularizer leads to significant improvements in robustness, as measured against both random and adversarial input perturbations, without severely degrading generalization properties on clean data.