pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Eye Gaze Metrics and Analysis of AOI for Indexing Working Memory towards Predicting ADHD
Authors: Gavindya Jayawardena, Anne Michalek, Sampath Jayarathna
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, valid

ADHD is being recognized as a diagnosis which persists into adulthood impacting economic, occupational, and educational outcomes. There is an increased need to accurately diagnose and recommend interventions for this population. One consideration is the development and implementation of reliable and valid outcome measures which reflect core diagnostic criteria. For example, adults with ADHD have reduced working memory capacity when compared to their peers (Michalek et al., 2014). A reduction in working memory capacity indicates attentional control deficits which align with many symptoms outlined on behavioral checklists used to diagnose ADHD. Using computational methods, such as eye tracking technology, to generate a relationship between ADHD and measures of working memory capacity would be useful to advancing our understanding and treatment of the diagnosis in adults. This chapter will outline a feasibility study in which eye tracking was used to measure eye gaze metrics during a working memory capacity task for adults with and without ADHD and machine learning algorithms were applied to generate a feature set unique to the ADHD diagnosis. The chapter will summarize the purpose, methods, results, and impact of this study.
An Attention-Guided Deep Regression Model for Landmark Detection in Cephalograms
Authors: Zhusi Zhong, Jie Li, Zhenxi Zhang, Zhicheng Jiao, Xinbo Gao
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, regression

Cephalometric tracing method is usually used in orthodontic diagnosis and treatment planning. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based framework to automatically detect anatomical landmarks in cephalometric X-ray images. We train the deep encoder-decoder for landmark detection, and combine global landmark configuration with local high-resolution feature responses. The proposed frame-work is based on 2-stage u-net, regressing the multi-channel heatmaps for land-mark detection. In this framework, we embed attention mechanism with global stage heatmaps, guiding the local stage inferring, to regress the local heatmap patches in a high resolution. Besides, the Expansive Exploration strategy improves robustness while inferring, expanding the searching scope without increasing model complexity. We have evaluated our framework in the most widely-used public dataset of landmark detection in cephalometric X-ray images. With less computation and manually tuning, our framework achieves state-of-the-art results.
Of Cores: A Partial-Exploration Framework for Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Jan Křetínský, Tobias Meggendorfer
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00

We introduce a framework for approximate analysis of Markov decision processes (MDP) with bounded-, unbounded-, and infinite-horizon properties. The main idea is to identify a "core" of an MDP, i.e., a subsystem where we provably remain with high probability, and to avoid computation on the less relevant rest of the state space. Although we identify the core using simulations and statistical techniques, it allows for rigorous error bounds in the analysis. Consequently, we obtain efficient analysis algorithms based on partial exploration for various settings, including the challenging case of strongly connected systems.
Variational Inference with Numerical Derivatives: variance reduction through coupling
Authors: Alexander Immer, Guillaume P. Dehaene
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

The Black Box Variational Inference (Ranganath et al. (2014)) algorithm provides a universal method for Variational Inference, but taking advantage of special properties of the approximation family or of the target can improve the convergence speed significantly. For example, if the approximation family is a transformation family, such as a Gaussian, then switching to the reparameterization gradient (Kingma and Welling (2014)) often yields a major reduction in gradient variance. Ultimately, reducing the variance can reduce the computational cost and yield better approximations. We present a new method to extend the reparameterization trick to more general exponential families including the Wishart, Gamma, and Student distributions. Variational Inference with Numerical Derivatives (VIND) approximates the gradient with numerical derivatives and reduces its variance using a tight coupling of the approximation family. The resulting algorithm is simple to implement and can profit from widely known couplings. Our experiments confirm that VIND effectively decreases the gradient variance and therefore improves the posterior approximation in relevant cases. It thus provides an efficient yet simple Variational Inference method for computing non-Gaussian approximations.
Homogeneous Network Embedding for Massive Graphs via Reweighted Personalized PageRank
Authors: Renchi Yang, Jieming Shi, Xiaokui Xiao, Yin Yang, Sourav S. Bhowmick
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Graph Reconstruction, Link Prediction, Network Embedding, Node Classification

Given an input graph G and a node v in G, homogeneous network embedding (HNE) maps the graph structure in the vicinity of v to a compact, fixed-dimensional feature vector. This paper focuses on HNE for massive graphs, e.g., with billions of edges. On this scale, most existing approaches fail, as they incur either prohibitively high costs, or severely compromised result utility. Our proposed solution, called Node-Reweighted PageRank (NRP), is based on a classic idea of deriving embedding vectors from pairwise personalized PageRank (PPR) values. Our contributions are twofold: first, we design a simple and efficient baseline HNE method based on PPR that is capable of handling billion-edge graphs on commodity hardware; second and more importantly, we identify an inherent drawback of vanilla PPR, and address it in our main proposal NRP. Specifically, PPR was designed for a very different purpose, i.e., ranking nodes in G based on their relative importance from a source node's perspective. In contrast, HNE aims to build node embeddings considering the whole graph. Consequently, node embeddings derived directly from PPR are of suboptimal utility. The proposed NRP approach overcomes the above deficiency through an effective and efficient node reweighting algorithm, which augments PPR values with node degree information, and iteratively adjusts embedding vectors accordingly. Overall, NRP takes O(mlogn) time and O(m) space to compute all node embeddings for a graph with m edges and n nodes. Our extensive experiments that compare NRP against 18 existing solutions over 7 real graphs demonstrate that NRP achieves higher result utility than all the solutions for link prediction, graph reconstruction and node classification, while being up to orders of magnitude faster. In particular, on a billion-edge Twitter graph, NRP terminates within 4 hours, using a single CPU core.
PolSAR Image Classification based on Polarimetric Scattering Coding and Sparse Support Matrix Machine
Authors: Xu Liu, Licheng Jiao, Dan Zhang, Fang Liu
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

POLSAR image has an advantage over optical image because it can be acquired independently of cloud cover and solar illumination. PolSAR image classification is a hot and valuable topic for the interpretation of POLSAR image. In this paper, a novel POLSAR image classification method is proposed based on polarimetric scattering coding and sparse support matrix machine. First, we transform the original POLSAR data to get a real value matrix by the polarimetric scattering coding, which is called polarimetric scattering matrix and is a sparse matrix. Second, the sparse support matrix machine is used to classify the sparse polarimetric scattering matrix and get the classification map. The combination of these two steps takes full account of the characteristics of POLSAR. The experimental results show that the proposed method can get better results and is an effective classification method.
A gray-box approach for curriculum learning
Authors: Francesco Foglino, Matteo Leonetti, Simone Sagratella, Ruggiero Seccia
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

Curriculum learning is often employed in deep reinforcement learning to let the agent progress more quickly towards better behaviors. Numerical methods for curriculum learning in the literature provides only initial heuristic solutions, with little to no guarantee on their quality. We define a new gray-box function that, including a suitable scheduling problem, can be effectively used to reformulate the curriculum learning problem. We propose different efficient numerical methods to address this gray-box reformulation. Preliminary numerical results on a benchmark task in the curriculum learning literature show the viability of the proposed approach.
Equivariant neural networks and equivarification
Authors: Erkao Bao, Linqi Song
Date: 2019-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

We provide a process to modify a neural network to an equivariant one, which we call equivarification. As an illustration, we build an equivariant neural network for image classification by equivarifying a convolutional neural network.
Yoga-Veganism: Correlation Mining of Twitter Health Data
Authors: Tunazzina Islam
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00

Nowadays social media is a huge platform of data. People usually share their interest, thoughts via discussions, tweets, status. It is not possible to go through all the data manually. We need to mine the data to explore hidden patterns or unknown correlations, find out the dominant topic in data and understand people's interest through the discussions. In this work, we explore Twitter data related to health. We extract the popular topics under different categories (e.g. diet, exercise) discussed in Twitter via topic modeling, observe model behavior on new tweets, discover interesting correlation (i.e. Yoga-Veganism). We evaluate accuracy by comparing with ground truth using manual annotation both for train and test data.
A Books Recommendation Approach Based on Online Bookstore Data
Authors: Xinyu Wei, Jiahui Chen, Jing Chen, Bernie Liu
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00

In the era of information explosion, facing complex information, it is difficult for users to choose the information of interest, and businesses also need detailed information on ways to let the ad stand out. By this time, it is recommended that a good way. We firstly by using random interviews, simulations, asking experts, summarizes methods outlined the main factors affecting the scores of books that users drew. In order to further illustrate the impact of these factors, we also by combining the AHP consistency test, then fuzzy evaluation method, empowered each factor, influencing factors and the degree of influence come. For the second question, predict user evaluation of the listed books from the predict annex. First, given the books Annex labels, user data extraction scorebooks and mathematical analysis of data obtained from SPSS user preferences and then use software to nearest neighbor analysis to result in predicted value.
High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera
Authors: Henri Rebecq, René Ranftl, Vladlen Koltun, Davide Scaramuzza
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Event-based Object Segmentation, Video Reconstruction, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Event cameras are novel sensors that report brightness changes in the form of a stream of asynchronous "events" instead of intensity frames. They offer significant advantages with respect to conventional cameras: high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, and no motion blur. While the stream of events encodes in principle the complete visual signal, the reconstruction of an intensity image from a stream of events is an ill-posed problem in practice. Existing reconstruction approaches are based on hand-crafted priors and strong assumptions about the imaging process as well as the statistics of natural images. In this work we propose to learn to reconstruct intensity images from event streams directly from data instead of relying on any hand-crafted priors. We propose a novel recurrent network to reconstruct videos from a stream of events, and train it on a large amount of simulated event data. During training we propose to use a perceptual loss to encourage reconstructions to follow natural image statistics. We further extend our approach to synthesize color images from color event streams. Our network surpasses state-of-the-art reconstruction methods by a large margin in terms of image quality (> 20%), while comfortably running in real-time. We show that the network is able to synthesize high framerate videos (> 5,000 frames per second) of high-speed phenomena (e.g. a bullet hitting an object) and is able to provide high dynamic range reconstructions in challenging lighting conditions. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our reconstructions as an intermediate representation for event data. We show that off-the-shelf computer vision algorithms can be applied to our reconstructions for tasks such as object classification and visual-inertial odometry and that this strategy consistently outperforms algorithms that were specifically designed for event data.
Single-Channel Signal Separation and Deconvolution with Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Qiuqiang Kong, Yong Xu, Wenwu Wang, Philip J. B. Jackson, Mark D. Plumbley
Date: 2019-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Inpainting

Single-channel signal separation and deconvolution aims to separate and deconvolve individual sources from a single-channel mixture and is a challenging problem in which no prior knowledge of the mixing filters is available. Both individual sources and mixing filters need to be estimated. In addition, a mixture may contain non-stationary noise which is unseen in the training set. We propose a synthesizing-decomposition (S-D) approach to solve the single-channel separation and deconvolution problem. In synthesizing, a generative model for sources is built using a generative adversarial network (GAN). In decomposition, both mixing filters and sources are optimized to minimize the reconstruction error of the mixture. The proposed S-D approach achieves a peak-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) of 18.9 dB and 15.4 dB in image inpainting and completion, outperforming a baseline convolutional neural network PSNR of 15.3 dB and 12.2 dB, respectively and achieves a PSNR of 13.2 dB in source separation together with deconvolution, outperforming a convolutive non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) baseline of 10.1 dB.
Agriculture Commodity Arrival Prediction using Remote Sensing Data: Insights and Beyond
Authors: Gautam Prasad, Upendra Reddy Vuyyuru, Mithun Das Gupta
Date: 2019-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, regression

In developing countries like India agriculture plays an extremely important role in the lives of the population. In India, around 80\% of the population depend on agriculture or its by-products as the primary means for employment. Given large population dependency on agriculture, it becomes extremely important for the government to estimate market factors in advance and prepare for any deviation from those estimates. Commodity arrivals to market is an extremely important factor which is captured at district level throughout the country. Historical data and short-term prediction of important variables such as arrivals, prices, crop quality etc. for commodities are used by the government to take proactive steps and decide various policy measures. In this paper, we present a framework to work with short timeseries in conjunction with remote sensing data to predict future commodity arrivals. We deal with extremely high dimensional data which exceed the observation sizes by multiple orders of magnitude. We use cascaded layers of dimensionality reduction techniques combined with regularized regression models for prediction. We present results to predict arrivals to major markets and state wide prices for `Tur' (red gram) crop in Karnataka, India. Our model consistently beats popular ML techniques on many instances. Our model is scalable, time efficient and can be generalized to many other crops and regions. We draw multiple insights from the regression parameters, some of which are important aspects to consider when predicting more complex quantities such as prices in the future. We also combine the insights to generate important recommendations for different government organizations.
Trans-Sense: Real Time Transportation Schedule Estimation Using Smart Phones
Authors: Ali AbdelAziz, Amin Shoukry, Walid Gomaa, Moustafa Youssef
Date: 2019-06-14 00:00:00

Developing countries suffer from traffic congestion, poorly planned road/rail networks, and lack of access to public transportation facilities. This context results in an increase in fuel consumption, pollution level, monetary losses, massive delays, and less productivity. On the other hand, it has a negative impact on the commuters feelings and moods. Availability of real-time transit information - by providing public transportation vehicles locations using GPS devices - helps in estimating a passenger's waiting time and addressing the above issues. However, such solution is expensive for developing countries. This paper aims at designing and implementing a crowd-sourced mobile phones-based solution to estimate the expected waiting time of a passenger in public transit systems, the prediction of the remaining time to get on/off a vehicle, and to construct a real time public transit schedule. Trans-Sense has been evaluated using real data collected for over 800 hours, on a daily basis, by different Android phones, and using different light rail transit lines at different time spans. The results show that Trans-Sense can achieve an average recall and precision of 95.35% and 90.1%, respectively, in discriminating lightrail stations. Moreover, the empirical distributions governing the different time delays affecting a passenger's total trip time enable predicting the right time of arrival of a passenger to her destination with an accuracy of 91.81%.In addition, the system estimates the stations dimensions with an accuracy of 95.71%.
Enforcing temporal consistency in Deep Learning segmentation of brain MR images
Authors: Malav Bateriwala, Pierrick Bourgeat
Date: 2019-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Medical Imaging Segmentation, 4D Spatio Temporal Semantic Segmentation, Brain Image Segmentation, Deep Learning, Hippocampus, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Longitudinal analysis has great potential to reveal developmental trajectories and monitor disease progression in medical imaging. This process relies on consistent and robust joint 4D segmentation. Traditional techniques are dependent on the similarity of images over time and the use of subject-specific priors to reduce random variation and improve the robustness and sensitivity of the overall longitudinal analysis. This is however slow and computationally intensive as subject-specific templates need to be rebuilt every time. The focus of this work to accelerate this analysis with the use of deep learning. The proposed approach is based on deep CNNs and incorporates semantic segmentation and provides a longitudinal relationship for the same subject. The proposed approach is based on deep CNNs and incorporates semantic segmentation and provides a longitudinal relationship for the same subject. The state of art using 3D patches as inputs to modified Unet provides results around ${0.91 \pm 0.5}$ Dice and using multi-view atlas in CNNs provide around the same results. In this work, different models are explored, each offers better accuracy and fast results while increasing the segmentation quality. These methods are evaluated on 135 scans from the EADC-ADNI Harmonized Hippocampus Protocol. Proposed CNN based segmentation approaches demonstrate how 2D segmentation using prior slices can provide similar results to 3D segmentation while maintaining good continuity in the 3D dimension and improved speed. Just using 2D modified sagittal slices provide us a better Dice and longitudinal analysis for a given subject. For the ADNI dataset, using the simple UNet CNN technique gives us ${0.84 \pm 0.5}$ and while using modified CNN techniques on the same input yields ${0.89 \pm 0.5}$. Rate of atrophy and RMS error are calculated for several test cases using various methods and analyzed.
Recovering shared structure from multiple networks with unknown edge distributions
Authors: Keith Levin, Asad Lodhia, Elizaveta Levina
Date: 2019-06-13 00:00:00

In increasingly many settings, data sets consist of multiple samples from a population of networks, with vertices aligned across these networks. For example, brain connectivity networks in neuroscience consist of measures of interaction between brain regions that have been aligned to a common template. We consider the setting where the observed networks have a shared expectation, but may differ in the noise structure on their edges. Our approach exploits the shared mean structure to denoise edge-level measurements of the observed networks and estimate the underlying population-level parameters. We also explore the extent to which edge-level errors influence estimation and downstream inference. We establish a finite-sample concentration inequality for the low-rank eigenvalue truncation of a random weighted adjacency matrix that may be of independent interest. The proposed approach is illustrated on synthetic networks and on data from an fMRI study of schizophrenia.
The Dynamics of Handwriting Improves the Automated Diagnosis of Dysgraphia
Authors: Konrad Zolna, Thibault Asselborn, Caroline Jolly, Laurence Casteran, Marie-Ange~Nguyen-Morel, Wafa Johal, Pierre Dillenbourg
Date: 2019-06-12 00:00:00

Handwriting disorder (termed dysgraphia) is a far from a singular problem as nearly 8.6% of the population in France is considered dysgraphic. Moreover, research highlights the fundamental importance to detect and remediate these handwriting difficulties as soon as possible as they may affect a child's entire life, undermining performance and self-confidence in a wide variety of school activities. At the moment, the detection of handwriting difficulties is performed through a standard test called BHK. This detection, performed by therapists, is laborious because of its high cost and subjectivity. We present a digital approach to identify and characterize handwriting difficulties via a Recurrent Neural Network model (RNN). The child under investigation is asked to write on a graphics tablet all the letters of the alphabet as well as the ten digits. Once complete, the RNN delivers a diagnosis in a few milliseconds and demonstrates remarkable efficiency as it correctly identifies more than 90% of children diagnosed as dysgraphic using the BHK test. The main advantage of our tablet-based system is that it captures the dynamic features of writing -- something a human expert, such as a teacher, is unable to do. We show that incorporating the dynamic information available by the use of tablet is highly beneficial to our digital test to discriminate between typically-developing and dysgraphic children.