pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
NoduleNet: Decoupled False Positive Reductionfor Pulmonary Nodule Detection and Segmentation
Authors: Hao Tang, Chupeng Zhang, Xiaohui Xie
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction, Segmentation

Pulmonary nodule detection, false positive reduction and segmentation represent three of the most common tasks in the computeraided analysis of chest CT images. Methods have been proposed for eachtask with deep learning based methods heavily favored recently. However training deep learning models to solve each task separately may be sub-optimal - resource intensive and without the benefit of feature sharing. Here, we propose a new end-to-end 3D deep convolutional neural net (DCNN), called NoduleNet, to solve nodule detection, false positive reduction and nodule segmentation jointly in a multi-task fashion. To avoid friction between different tasks and encourage feature diversification, we incorporate two major design tricks: 1) decoupled feature maps for nodule detection and false positive reduction, and 2) a segmentation refinement subnet for increasing the precision of nodule segmentation. Extensive experiments on the large-scale LIDC dataset demonstrate that the multi-task training is highly beneficial, improving the nodule detection accuracy by 10.27%, compared to the baseline model trained to only solve the nodule detection task. We also carry out systematic ablation studies to highlight contributions from each of the added components. Code is available at https://github.com/uci-cbcl/NoduleNet.
Expressive Graph Informer Networks
Authors: Jaak Simm, Adam Arany, Edward De Brouwer, Yves Moreau
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00

Applying machine learning to molecules is challenging because of their natural representation as graphs rather than vectors.Several architectures have been recently proposed for deep learning from molecular graphs, but they suffer from informationbottlenecks because they only pass information from a graph node to its direct neighbors. Here, we introduce a more expressiveroute-based multi-attention mechanism that incorporates features from routes between node pairs. We call the resulting methodGraph Informer. A single network layer can therefore attend to nodes several steps away. We show empirically that the proposedmethod compares favorably against existing approaches in two prediction tasks: (1) 13C Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)spectra, improving the state-of-the-art with an MAE of 1.35 ppm and (2) predicting drug bioactivity and toxicity. Additionally, wedevelop a variant called injective Graph Informer that isprovablyas powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman test for graph isomorphism.Furthermore, we demonstrate that the route information allows the method to be informed about thenonlocal topologyof the graphand, thus, even go beyond the capabilities of the Weisfeiler-Lehman test.
Time Masking: Leveraging Temporal Information in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Authors: Rylan Conway, Lambert Mathias
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 9
Tasks: Spoken Dialogue Systems, Video Salient Object Detection

In a spoken dialogue system, dialogue state tracker (DST) components track the state of the conversation by updating a distribution of values associated with each of the slots being tracked for the current user turn, using the interactions until then. Much of the previous work has relied on modeling the natural order of the conversation, using distance based offsets as an approximation of time. In this work, we hypothesize that leveraging the wall-clock temporal difference between turns is crucial for finer-grained control of dialogue scenarios. We develop a novel approach that applies a {\it time mask}, based on the wall-clock time difference, to the associated slot embeddings and empirically demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing approaches that leverage distance offsets, on both an internal benchmark dataset as well as DSTC2.
Towards Scalable Gaussian Process Modeling
Authors: Piyush Pandita, Jesper Kristensen, Liping Wang
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00

Numerous engineering problems of interest to the industry are often characterized by expensive black-box objective experiments or computer simulations. Obtaining insight into the problem or performing subsequent optimizations requires hundreds of thousands of evaluations of the objective function which is most often a practically unachievable task. Gaussian Process (GP) surrogate modeling replaces the expensive function with a cheap-to-evaluate data-driven probabilistic model. While the GP does not assume a functional form of the problem, it is defined by a set of parameters, called hyperparameters. The hyperparameters define the characteristics of the objective function, such as smoothness, magnitude, periodicity, etc. Accurately estimating these hyperparameters is a key ingredient in developing a reliable and generalizable surrogate model. Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a ubiquitously used Bayesian method to estimate these hyperparameters. At the GE Global Research Center, a customized industry-strength Bayesian hybrid modeling framework utilizing the GP, called GEBHM, has been employed and validated over many years. GEBHM is very effective on problems of small and medium size, typically less than 1000 training points. However, the GP does not scale well in time with a growing dataset and problem dimensionality which can be a major impediment in such problems. In this work, we extend and implement in GEBHM an Adaptive Sequential Monte Carlo (ASMC) methodology for training the GP enabling the modeling of large-scale industry problems. This implementation saves computational time (especially for large-scale problems) while not sacrificing predictability over the current MCMC implementation. We demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of GEBHM with ASMC on four mathematical problems and on two challenging industry applications of varying complexity.
SceneGraphNet: Neural Message Passing for 3D Indoor Scene Augmentation
Authors: Yang Zhou, Zachary While, Evangelos Kalogerakis
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: 3D Object Recognition, Object Recognition, Scene Generation

In this paper we propose a neural message passing approach to augment an input 3D indoor scene with new objects matching their surroundings. Given an input, potentially incomplete, 3D scene and a query location, our method predicts a probability distribution over object types that fit well in that location. Our distribution is predicted though passing learned messages in a dense graph whose nodes represent objects in the input scene and edges represent spatial and structural relationships. By weighting messages through an attention mechanism, our method learns to focus on the most relevant surrounding scene context to predict new scene objects. We found that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of correctly predicting objects missing in a scene based on our experiments in the SUNCG dataset. We also demonstrate other applications of our method, including context-based 3D object recognition and iterative scene generation.
DEAM: Adaptive Momentum with Discriminative Weight for Stochastic Optimization
Authors: Jiyang Bai, Yuxiang Ren, Jiawei Zhang
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

Optimization algorithms with momentum, e.g., (ADAM), have been widely used for building deep learning models due to the faster convergence rates compared with stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Momentum helps accelerate SGD in the relevant directions in parameter updating, which can minify the oscillations of parameters update route. However, there exist errors in some update steps in optimization algorithms with momentum like ADAM. The fixed momentum weight (e.g., \beta_1 in ADAM) will propagate errors in momentum computing. In this paper, we introduce a novel optimization algorithm, namely Discriminative wEight on Adaptive Momentum (DEAM). Instead of assigning the momentum term weight with a fixed hyperparameter, DEAM proposes to compute the momentum weight automatically based on the discriminative angle. In this way, DEAM involves fewer hyperparameters. DEAM also contains a novel backtrack term, which restricts redundant updates when the correction of the last step is needed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DEAM can achieve a faster convergence rate than the existing optimization algorithms in training the deep learning models of both convex and non-convex situations.
Deep Neural Network Symbol Detection for Millimeter Wave Communications
Authors: Yun Liao, Nariman Farsad, Nir Shlezinger, Yonina C. Eldar, Andrea J. Goldsmith
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00

This paper proposes to use a deep neural network (DNN)-based symbol detector for mmWave systems such that CSI acquisition can be bypassed. In particular, we consider a sliding bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN) architecture that is suitable for the long memory length of typical mmWave channels. The performance of the DNN detector is evaluated in comparison to that of the Viterbi detector. The results show that the performance of the DNN detector is close to that of the optimal Viterbi detector with perfect CSI, and that it outperforms the Viterbi algorithm with CSI estimation error. Further experiments show that the DNN detector is robust to a wide range of noise levels and varying channel conditions, and that a pretrained detector can be reliably applied to different mmWave channel realizations with minimal overhead.
Towards meta-learning for multi-target regression problems
Authors: Gabriel Jonas Aguiar, Everton José Santana, Saulo Martiello Mastelini, Rafael Gomes Mantovani, Sylvio Barbon Jr
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Multi-target regression, regression

Several multi-target regression methods were devel-oped in the last years aiming at improving predictive performanceby exploring inter-target correlation within the problem. However, none of these methods outperforms the others for all problems. This motivates the development of automatic approachesto recommend the most suitable multi-target regression method. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning system to recommend the best predictive method for a given multi-target regression problem. We performed experiments with a meta-dataset generated by a total of 648 synthetic datasets. These datasets were created to explore distinct inter-targets characteristics toward recommending the most promising method. In experiments, we evaluated four different algorithms with different biases as meta-learners. Our meta-dataset is composed of 58 meta-features, based on: statistical information, correlation characteristics, linear landmarking, from the distribution and smoothness of the data, and has four different meta-labels. Results showed that induced meta-models were able to recommend the best methodfor different base level datasets with a balanced accuracy superior to 70% using a Random Forest meta-model, which statistically outperformed the meta-learning baselines.
Reducing malicious use of synthetic media research: Considerations and potential release practices for machine learning
Authors: Aviv Ovadya, Jess Whittlestone
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The aim of this paper is to facilitate nuanced discussion around research norms and practices to mitigate the harmful impacts of advances in machine learning (ML). We focus particularly on the use of ML to create "synthetic media" (e.g. to generate or manipulate audio, video, images, and text), and the question of what publication and release processes around such research might look like, though many of the considerations discussed will apply to ML research more broadly. We are not arguing for any specific approach on when or how research should be distributed, but instead try to lay out some useful tools, analogies, and options for thinking about these issues. We begin with some background on the idea that ML research might be misused in harmful ways, and why advances in synthetic media, in particular, are raising concerns. We then outline in more detail some of the different paths to harm from ML research, before reviewing research risk mitigation strategies in other fields and identifying components that seem most worth emulating in the ML and synthetic media research communities. Next, we outline some important dimensions of disagreement on these issues which risk polarizing conversations. Finally, we conclude with recommendations, suggesting that the machine learning community might benefit from: working with subject matter experts to increase understanding of the risk landscape and possible mitigation strategies; building a community and norms around understanding the impacts of ML research, e.g. through regular workshops at major conferences; and establishing institutions and systems to support release practices that would otherwise be onerous and error-prone.
A Novel Approach for Robust Multi Human Action Recognition and Summarization based on 3D Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Noor Almaadeed, Omar Elharrouss, Somaya Al-Maadeed, Ahmed Bouridane, Azeddine Beghdadi
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization, Video Summarization

Human actions in videos are 3D signals. However, there are a few methods available for multiple human action recognition. For long videos, it's difficult to search within a video for a specific action and/or person. For that, this paper proposes a new technic for multiple human action recognition and summarization for surveillance videos. The proposed approach proposes a new representation of the data by extracting the sequence of each person from the scene. This is followed by an analysis of each sequence to detect and recognize the corresponding actions using 3D convolutional neural networks (3DCNNs). Action-based video summarization is performed by saving each person's action at each time of the video. Results of this work revealed that the proposed method provides accurate multi human action recognition that easily used for summarization of any action. Further, for other videos that can be collected from the internet, which are complex and not built for surveillance applications, the proposed model was evaluated on some datasets like UCF101 and YouTube without any preprocessing. For this category of videos, the summarization is performed on the video sequences by summarizing the actions in each subsequence. The results obtained demonstrate its efficiency compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Minimal Solvers for Rectifying from Radially-Distorted Scales and Change of Scales
Authors: James Pritts, Zuzana Kukelova, Viktor Larsson, Yaroslava Lochman, Ondřej Chum
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00

This paper introduces the first minimal solvers that jointly estimate lens distortion and affine rectification from the image of rigidly-transformed coplanar features. The solvers work on scenes without straight lines and, in general, relax strong assumptions about scene content made by the state of the art. The proposed solvers use the affine invariant that coplanar repeats have the same scale in rectified space. The solvers are separated into two groups that differ by how the equal scale invariant of rectified space is used to place constraints on the lens undistortion and rectification parameters. We demonstrate a principled approach for generating stable minimal solvers by the Gr\"obner basis method, which is accomplished by sampling feasible monomial bases to maximize numerical stability. Synthetic and real-image experiments confirm that the proposed solvers demonstrate superior robustness to noise compared to the state of the art. Accurate rectifications on imagery taken with narrow to fisheye field-of-view lenses demonstrate the wide applicability of the proposed method. The method is fully automatic.
As easy as 1, 2... 4? Uncertainty in counting tasks for medical imaging
Authors: Zach Eaton-Rosen, Thomas Varsavsky, Sebastien Ourselin, M. Jorge Cardoso
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00

Counting is a fundamental task in biomedical imaging and count is an important biomarker in a number of conditions. Estimating the uncertainty in the measurement is thus vital to making definite, informed conclusions. In this paper, we first compare a range of existing methods to perform counting in medical imaging and suggest ways of deriving predictive intervals from these. We then propose and test a method for calculating intervals as an output of a multi-task network. These predictive intervals are optimised to be as narrow as possible, while also enclosing a desired percentage of the data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique on histopathological cell counting and white matter hyperintensity counting. Finally, we offer insight into other areas where this technique may apply.
Learning Transparent Object Matting
Authors: Guan-Ying Chen, Kai Han, Kwan-Yee K. Wong
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Matting, Object, Transparent objects

This paper addresses the problem of image matting for transparent objects. Existing approaches often require tedious capturing procedures and long processing time, which limit their practical use. In this paper, we formulate transparent object matting as a refractive flow estimation problem, and propose a deep learning framework, called TOM-Net, for learning the refractive flow. Our framework comprises two parts, namely a multi-scale encoder-decoder network for producing a coarse prediction, and a residual network for refinement. At test time, TOM-Net takes a single image as input, and outputs a matte (consisting of an object mask, an attenuation mask and a refractive flow field) in a fast feed-forward pass. As no off-the-shelf dataset is available for transparent object matting, we create a large-scale synthetic dataset consisting of $178K$ images of transparent objects rendered in front of images sampled from the Microsoft COCO dataset. We also capture a real dataset consisting of $876$ samples using $14$ transparent objects and $60$ background images. Besides, we show that our method can be easily extended to handle the cases where a trimap or a background image is available.Promising experimental results have been achieved on both synthetic and real data, which clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Interactive Lungs Auscultation with Reinforcement Learning Agent
Authors: Tomasz Grzywalski, Riccardo Belluzzo, Szymon Drgas, Agnieszka Cwalinska, Honorata Hafke-Dys
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

To perform a precise auscultation for the purposes of examination of respiratory system normally requires the presence of an experienced doctor. With most recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, automatic detection of pathological breath phenomena in sounds recorded with stethoscope becomes a reality. But to perform a full auscultation in home environment by layman is another matter, especially if the patient is a child. In this paper we propose a unique application of Reinforcement Learning for training an agent that interactively guides the end user throughout the auscultation procedure. We show that \textit{intelligent} selection of auscultation points by the agent reduces time of the examination fourfold without significant decrease in diagnosis accuracy compared to exhaustive auscultation.
Deep Ranking Based Cost-sensitive Multi-label Learning for Distant Supervision Relation Extraction
Authors: Hai Ye, Zhunchen Luo
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Multi-Label Learning, Relation, Relation Extraction, Retrieval

Knowledge base provides a potential way to improve the intelligence of information retrieval (IR) systems, for that knowledge base has numerous relations between entities which can help the IR systems to conduct inference from one entity to another entity. Relation extraction is one of the fundamental techniques to construct a knowledge base. Distant supervision is a semi-supervised learning method for relation extraction which learns with labeled and unlabeled data. However, this approach suffers the problem of relation overlapping in which one entity tuple may have multiple relation facts. We believe that relation types can have latent connections, which we call class ties, and can be exploited to enhance relation extraction. However, this property between relation classes has not been fully explored before. In this paper, to exploit class ties between relations to improve relation extraction, we propose a general ranking based multi-label learning framework combined with convolutional neural networks, in which ranking based loss functions with regularization technique are introduced to learn the latent connections between relations. Furthermore, to deal with the problem of class imbalance in distant supervision relation extraction, we further adopt cost-sensitive learning to rescale the costs from the positive and negative labels. Extensive experiments on a widely used dataset show the effectiveness of our model to exploit class ties and to relieve class imbalance problem.
Exhaustive Exact String Matching: The Analysis of the Full Human Genome
Authors: Konstantinos F. Xylogiannopoulos
Date: 2019-07-24 00:00:00

Exact string matching has been a fundamental problem in computer science for decades because of many practical applications. Some are related to common procedures, such as searching in files and text editors, or, more recently, to more advanced problems such as pattern detection in Artificial Intelligence and Bioinformatics. Tens of algorithms and methodologies have been developed for pattern matching and several programming languages, packages, applications and online systems exist that can perform exact string matching in biological sequences. These techniques, however, are limited to searching for specific and predefined strings in a sequence. In this paper a novel methodology (called Ex2SM) is presented, which is a pipeline of execution of advanced data structures and algorithms, explicitly designed for text mining, that can detect every possible repeated string in multivariate biological sequences. In contrast to known algorithms in literature, the methodology presented here is string agnostic, i.e., it does not require an input string to search for it, rather it can detect every string that exists at least twice, regardless of its attributes such as length, frequency, alphabet, overlapping etc. The complexity of the problem solved and the potential of the proposed methodology is demonstrated with the experimental analysis performed on the entire human genome. More specifically, all repeated strings with a length of up to 50 characters have been detected, an achievement which is practically impossible using other algorithms due to the exponential number of possible permutations of such long strings.