pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Graph Neural Based End-to-end Data Association Framework for Online Multiple-Object Tracking
Authors: Xiaolong Jiang, Peizhao Li, Yanjing Li, Xian-Tong Zhen
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Multiple Object Tracking, Object Tracking

In this work, we present an end-to-end framework to settle data association in online Multiple-Object Tracking (MOT). Given detection responses, we formulate the frame-by-frame data association as Maximum Weighted Bipartite Matching problem, whose solution is learned using a neural network. The network incorporates an affinity learning module, wherein both appearance and motion cues are investigated to encode object feature representation and compute pairwise affinities. Employing the computed affinities as edge weights, the following matching problem on a bipartite graph is resolved by the optimization module, which leverages a graph neural network to adapt with the varying cardinalities of the association problem and solve the combinatorial hardness with favorable scalability and compatibility. To facilitate effective training of the proposed tracking network, we design a multi-level matrix loss in conjunction with the assembled supervision methodology. Being trained end-to-end, all modules in the tracker can co-adapt and co-operate collaboratively, resulting in improved model adaptiveness and less parameter-tuning efforts. Experiment results on the MOT benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach.
Aerial Animal Biometrics: Individual Friesian Cattle Recovery and Visual Identification via an Autonomous UAV with Onboard Deep Inference
Authors: William Andrew, Colin Greatwood, Tilo Burghardt
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: TAG

This paper describes a computationally-enhanced M100 UAV platform with an onboard deep learning inference system for integrated computer vision and navigation able to autonomously find and visually identify by coat pattern individual Holstein Friesian cattle in freely moving herds. We propose an approach that utilises three deep convolutional neural network architectures running live onboard the aircraft; that is, a YoloV2-based species detector, a dual-stream CNN delivering exploratory agency and an InceptionV3-based biometric LRCN for individual animal identification. We evaluate the performance of each of the components offline, and also online via real-world field tests comprising 146.7 minutes of autonomous low altitude flight in a farm environment over a dispersed herd of 17 heifer dairy cows. We report error-free identification performance on this online experiment. The presented proof-of-concept system is the first of its kind and a successful step towards autonomous biometric identification of individual animals from the air in open pasture environments for tag-less AI support in farming and ecology.
Beyond Imitation: Generative and Variational Choreography via Machine Learning
Authors: Mariel Pettee, Chase Shimmin, Douglas Duhaime, Ilya Vidrin
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Our team of dance artists, physicists, and machine learning researchers has collectively developed several original, configurable machine-learning tools to generate novel sequences of choreography as well as tunable variations on input choreographic sequences. We use recurrent neural network and autoencoder architectures from a training dataset of movements captured as 53 three-dimensional points at each timestep. Sample animations of generated sequences and an interactive version of our model can be found at http: //www.beyondimitation.com.
Gain with no Pain: Efficient Kernel-PCA by Nyström Sampling
Authors: Nicholas Sterge, Bharath Sriperumbudur, Lorenzo Rosasco, Alessandro Rudi
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

In this paper, we propose and study a Nystr\"om based approach to efficient large scale kernel principal component analysis (PCA). The latter is a natural nonlinear extension of classical PCA based on considering a nonlinear feature map or the corresponding kernel. Like other kernel approaches, kernel PCA enjoys good mathematical and statistical properties but, numerically, it scales poorly with the sample size. Our analysis shows that Nystr\"om sampling greatly improves computational efficiency without incurring any loss of statistical accuracy. While similar effects have been observed in supervised learning, this is the first such result for PCA. Our theoretical findings, which are also illustrated by numerical results, are based on a combination of analytic and concentration of measure techniques. Our study is more broadly motivated by the question of understanding the interplay between statistical and computational requirements for learning.
retina-VAE: Variationally Decoding the Spectrum of Macular Disease
Authors: Stephen G. Odaibo
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we seek a clinically-relevant latent code for representing the spectrum of macular disease. Towards this end, we construct retina-VAE, a variational autoencoder-based model that accepts a patient profile vector (pVec) as input. The pVec components include clinical exam findings and demographic information. We evaluate the model on a subspectrum of the retinal maculopathies, in particular, exudative age-related macular degeneration, central serous chorioretinopathy, and polypoidal choroidal vasculopathy. For these three maculopathies, a database of 3000 6-dimensional pVecs (1000 each) was synthetically generated based on known disease statistics in the literature. The database was then used to train the VAE and generate latent vector representations. We found training performance to be best for a 3-dimensional latent vector architecture compared to 2 or 4 dimensional latents. Additionally, for the 3D latent architecture, we discovered that the resulting latent vectors were strongly clustered spontaneously into one of 14 clusters. Kmeans was then used only to identify members of each cluster and to inspect cluster properties. These clusters suggest underlying disease subtypes which may potentially respond better or worse to particular pharmaceutical treatments such as anti-vascular endothelial growth factor variants. The retina-VAE framework will potentially yield new fundamental insights into the mechanisms and manifestations of disease. And will potentially facilitate the development of personalized pharmaceuticals and gene therapies.
Cross-Domain Complementary Learning Using Pose for Multi-Person Part Segmentation
Authors: Kevin Lin, Lijuan Wang, Kun Luo, Yinpeng Chen, Zicheng Liu, Ming-Ting Sun
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Human Part Segmentation, Multi-Human Parsing, Pose Estimation, Segmentation

Supervised deep learning with pixel-wise training labels has great successes on multi-person part segmentation. However, data labeling at pixel-level is very expensive. To solve the problem, people have been exploring to use synthetic data to avoid the data labeling. Although it is easy to generate labels for synthetic data, the results are much worse compared to those using real data and manual labeling. The degradation of the performance is mainly due to the domain gap, i.e., the discrepancy of the pixel value statistics between real and synthetic data. In this paper, we observe that real and synthetic humans both have a skeleton (pose) representation. We found that the skeletons can effectively bridge the synthetic and real domains during the training. Our proposed approach takes advantage of the rich and realistic variations of the real data and the easily obtainable labels of the synthetic data to learn multi-person part segmentation on real images without any human-annotated labels. Through experiments, we show that without any human labeling, our method performs comparably to several state-of-the-art approaches which require human labeling on Pascal-Person-Parts and COCO-DensePose datasets. On the other hand, if part labels are also available in the real-images during training, our method outperforms the supervised state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. We further demonstrate the generalizability of our method on predicting novel keypoints in real images where no real data labels are available for the novel keypoints detection. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/kevinlin311tw/CDCL-human-part-segmentation
Self-Regulated Interactive Sequence-to-Sequence Learning
Authors: Julia Kreutzer, Stefan Riezler
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Active Learning, Machine Translation, Translation

Not all types of supervision signals are created equal: Different types of feedback have different costs and effects on learning. We show how self-regulation strategies that decide when to ask for which kind of feedback from a teacher (or from oneself) can be cast as a learning-to-learn problem leading to improved cost-aware sequence-to-sequence learning. In experiments on interactive neural machine translation, we find that the self-regulator discovers an $\epsilon$-greedy strategy for the optimal cost-quality trade-off by mixing different feedback types including corrections, error markups, and self-supervision. Furthermore, we demonstrate its robustness under domain shift and identify it as a promising alternative to active learning.
Edge Heuristic GAN for Non-uniform Blind Deblurring
Authors: Shuai Zheng, Zhenfeng Zhu, Jian Cheng, Yandong Guo, Yao Zhao
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Generative Adversarial Network

Non-uniform blur, mainly caused by camera shake and motions of multiple objects, is one of the most common causes of image quality degradation. However, the traditional blind deblurring methods based on blur kernel estimation do not perform well on complicated non-uniform motion blurs. Recent studies show that GAN-based approaches achieve impressive performance on deblurring tasks. In this letter, to further improve the performance of GAN-based methods on deblurring tasks, we propose an edge heuristic multi-scale generative adversarial network(GAN), which uses the "coarse-to-fine" scheme to restore clear images in an end-to-end manner. In particular, an edge-enhanced network is designed to generate sharp edges as auxiliary information to guide the deblurring process. Furthermore, We propose a hierarchical content loss function for deblurring tasks. Extensive experiments on different datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in dynamic scene deblurring.
Learning Truthful, Efficient, and Welfare Maximizing Auction Rules
Authors: Andrea Tacchetti, DJ Strouse, Marta Garnelo, Thore Graepel, Yoram Bachrach
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00

From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to imbue our modern institutions with our own values and principles. Here we consider the problem of allocating goods to buyers who have preferences over them in settings where the seller's aim is not to maximize their monetary gains, but rather to advance some notion of social welfare (e.g. the government trying to award construction licenses for hospitals or schools). This problem has a long history in economics, and solutions take the form of auction rules. Researchers have proposed reliable auction rules that work in extremely general settings, and in the presence of information asymmetry and strategic buyers. However, these protocols require significant payments from participants resulting in low aggregate welfare. Here we address this shortcoming by casting auction rule design as a statistical learning problem, and trade generality for participant welfare effectively and automatically with a novel deep learning network architecture and auction representation. Our analysis shows that our auction rules outperform state-of-the art approaches in terms of participants welfare, applicability, robustness.
Privileged Features Distillation at Taobao Recommendations
Authors: Chen Xu, Quan Li, Junfeng Ge, Jinyang Gao, Xiaoyong Yang, Changhua Pei, Fei Sun, Jian Wu, Hanxiao Sun, Wenwu Ou
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00

Features play an important role in the prediction tasks of e-commerce recommendations. To guarantee the consistency of off-line training and on-line serving, we usually utilize the same features that are both available. However, the consistency in turn neglects some discriminative features. For example, when estimating the conversion rate (CVR), i.e., the probability that a user would purchase the item if she clicked it, features like dwell time on the item detailed page are informative. However, CVR prediction should be conducted for on-line ranking before the click happens. Thus we cannot get such post-event features during serving. We define the features that are discriminative but only available during training as the privileged features. Inspired by the distillation techniques which bridge the gap between training and inference, in this work, we propose privileged features distillation (PFD). We train two models, i.e., a student model that is the same as the original one and a teacher model that additionally utilizes the privileged features. Knowledge distilled from the more accurate teacher is transferred to the student to improve its accuracy. During serving, only the student part is extracted and it relies on no privileged features. We conduct experiments on two fundamental prediction tasks at Taobao recommendations, i.e., click-through rate (CTR) at coarse-grained ranking and CVR at fine-grained ranking. By distilling the interacted features that are prohibited during serving for CTR and the post-event features for CVR, we achieve significant improvements over their strong baselines. During the on-line A/B tests, the click metric is improved by +5.0% in the CTR task. And the conversion metric is improved by +2.3% in the CVR task. Besides, by addressing several issues of training PFD, we obtain comparable training speed as the baselines without any distillation.
Disease classification of macular Optical Coherence Tomography scans using deep learning software: validation on independent, multi-centre data
Authors: Kanwal K. Bhatia, Mark S. Graham, Louise Terry, Ashley Wood, Paris Tranos, Sameer Trikha, Nicolas Jaccard
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00

Purpose: To evaluate Pegasus-OCT, a clinical decision support software for the identification of features of retinal disease from macula OCT scans, across heterogenous populations involving varying patient demographics, device manufacturers, acquisition sites and operators. Methods: 5,588 normal and anomalous macular OCT volumes (162,721 B-scans), acquired at independent centres in five countries, were processed using the software. Results were evaluated against ground truth provided by the dataset owners. Results: Pegasus-OCT performed with AUROCs of at least 98% for all datasets in the detection of general macular anomalies. For scans of sufficient quality, the AUROCs for general AMD and DME detection were found to be at least 99% and 98%, respectively. Conclusions: The ability of a clinical decision support system to cater for different populations is key to its adoption. Pegasus-OCT was shown to be able to detect AMD, DME and general anomalies in OCT volumes acquired across multiple independent sites with high performance. Its use thus offers substantial promise, with the potential to alleviate the burden of growing demand in eye care services caused by retinal disease.
Fairness without Regret
Authors: Marcus Hutter
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

A popular approach of achieving fairness in optimization problems is by constraining the solution space to "fair" solutions, which unfortunately typically reduces solution quality. In practice, the ultimate goal is often an aggregate of sub-goals without a unique or best way of combining them or which is otherwise only partially known. I turn this problem into a feature and suggest to use a parametrized objective and vary the parameters within reasonable ranges to get a "set" of optimal solutions, which can then be optimized using secondary criteria such as fairness without compromising the primary objective, i.e. without regret (societal cost).
Amplifying Rényi Differential Privacy via Shuffling
Authors: Eloïse Berthier, Sai Praneeth Karimireddy
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Differential privacy is a useful tool to build machine learning models which do not release too much information about the training data. We study the R\'enyi differential privacy of stochastic gradient descent when each training example is sampled without replacement (also known as cyclic SGD). Cyclic SGD is typically faster than traditional SGD and is the algorithm of choice in large-scale implementations. We recover privacy guarantees for cyclic SGD which are competitive with those known for sampling with replacement. Our proof techniques make no assumptions on the model or on the data and are hence widely applicable.
Forecasting remaining useful life: Interpretable deep learning approach via variational Bayesian inferences
Authors: Mathias Kraus, Stefan Feuerriegel
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Predicting the remaining useful life of machinery, infrastructure, or other equipment can facilitate preemptive maintenance decisions, whereby a failure is prevented through timely repair or replacement. This allows for a better decision support by considering the anticipated time-to-failure and thus promises to reduce costs. Here a common baseline may be derived by fitting a probability density function to past lifetimes and then utilizing the (conditional) expected remaining useful life as a prognostic. This approach finds widespread use in practice because of its high explanatory power. A more accurate alternative is promised by machine learning, where forecasts incorporate deterioration processes and environmental variables through sensor data. However, machine learning largely functions as a black-box method and its forecasts thus forfeit most of the desired interpretability. As our primary contribution, we propose a structured-effect neural network for predicting the remaining useful life which combines the favorable properties of both approaches: its key innovation is that it offers both a high accountability and the flexibility of deep learning. The parameters are estimated via variational Bayesian inferences. The different approaches are compared based on the actual time-to-failure for aircraft engines. This demonstrates the performance and superior interpretability of our method, while we finally discuss implications for decision support.
Deep Active Learning for Axon-Myelin Segmentation on Histology Data
Authors: Melanie Lubrano di Scandalea, Christian S. Perone, Mathieu Boudreau, Julien Cohen-Adad
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Anatomy, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a crucial task in biomedical image processing, which recent breakthroughs in deep learning have allowed to improve. However, deep learning methods in general are not yet widely used in practice since they require large amount of data for training complex models. This is particularly challenging for biomedical images, because data and ground truths are a scarce resource. Annotation efforts for biomedical images come with a real cost, since experts have to manually label images at pixel-level on samples usually containing many instances of the target anatomy (e.g. in histology samples: neurons, astrocytes, mitochondria, etc.). In this paper we provide a framework for Deep Active Learning applied to a real-world scenario. Our framework relies on the U-Net architecture and overall uncertainty measure to suggest which sample to annotate. It takes advantage of the uncertainty measure obtained by taking Monte Carlo samples while using Dropout regularization scheme. Experiments were done on spinal cord and brain microscopic histology samples to perform a myelin segmentation task. Two realistic small datasets of 14 and 24 images were used, from different acquisition settings (Serial Block-Face Electron Microscopy and Transmitting Electron Microscopy) and showed that our method reached a maximum Dice value after adding 3 uncertainty-selected samples to the initial training set, versus 15 randomly-selected samples, thereby significantly reducing the annotation effort. We focused on a plausible scenario and showed evidence that this straightforward implementation achieves a high segmentation performance with very few labelled samples. We believe our framework may benefit any biomedical researcher willing to obtain fast and accurate image segmentation on their own dataset. The code is freely available at https://github.com/neuropoly/deep-active-learning.
PreCall: A Visual Interface for Threshold Optimization in ML Model Selection
Authors: Christoph Kinkeldey, Claudia Müller-Birn, Tom Gülenman, Jesse Josua Benjamin, Aaron Halfaker
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Model Selection

Machine learning systems are ubiquitous in various kinds of digital applications and have a huge impact on our everyday life. But a lack of explainability and interpretability of such systems hinders meaningful participation by people, especially by those without a technical background. Interactive visual interfaces (e.g., providing means for manipulating parameters in the user interface) can help tackle this challenge. In this paper we present PreCall, an interactive visual interface for ORES, a machine learning-based web service for Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. While ORES can be used for a number of settings, it can be challenging to translate requirements from the application domain into formal parameter sets needed to configure the ORES models. Assisting Wikipedia editors in finding damaging edits, for example, can be realized at various stages of automatization, which might impact the precision of the applied model. Our prototype PreCall attempts to close this translation gap by interactively visualizing the relationship between major model metrics (recall, precision, false positive rate) and a parameter (the threshold between valuable and damaging edits). Furthermore, PreCall visualizes the probable results for the current model configuration to improve the human's understanding of the relationship between metrics and outcome when using ORES. We describe PreCall's components and present a use case that highlights the benefits of our approach. Finally, we pose further research questions we would like to discuss during the workshop.
Kernel Trajectory Maps for Multi-Modal Probabilistic Motion Prediction
Authors: Weiming Zhi, Lionel Ott, Fabio Ramos
Date: 2019-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: motion prediction, Prediction

Understanding the dynamics of an environment, such as the movement of humans and vehicles, is crucial for agents to achieve long-term autonomy in urban environments. This requires the development of methods to capture the multi-modal and probabilistic nature of motion patterns. We present Kernel Trajectory Maps (KTM) to capture the trajectories of movement in an environment. KTMs leverage the expressiveness of kernels from non-parametric modelling by projecting input trajectories onto a set of representative trajectories, to condition on a sequence of observed waypoint coordinates, and predict a multi-modal distribution over possible future trajectories. The output is a mixture of continuous stochastic processes, where each realisation is a continuous functional trajectory, which can be queried at arbitrarily fine time steps.