pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Lifelong Neural Topic Learning in Contextualized Autoregressive Topic Models of Language via Informative Transfers
Authors: Yatin Chaudhary, Pankaj Gupta, Thomas Runkler
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Hallucination, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Lifelong learning, Topic Models

Topic models such as LDA, DocNADE, iDocNADEe have been popular in document analysis. However, the traditional topic models have several limitations including: (1) Bag-of-words (BoW) assumption, where they ignore word ordering, (2) Data sparsity, where the application of topic models is challenging due to limited word co-occurrences, leading to incoherent topics and (3) No Continuous Learning framework for topic learning in lifelong fashion, exploiting historical knowledge (or latent topics) and minimizing catastrophic forgetting. This thesis focuses on addressing the above challenges within neural topic modeling framework. We propose: (1) Contextualized topic model that combines a topic and a language model and introduces linguistic structures (such as word ordering, syntactic and semantic features, etc.) in topic modeling, (2) A novel lifelong learning mechanism into neural topic modeling framework to demonstrate continuous learning in sequential document collections and minimizing catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, we perform a selective data augmentation to alleviate the need for complete historical corpora during data hallucination or replay.
Controllable Data Synthesis Method for Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Liner Yang, Chencheng Wang, Yun Chen, Yongping Du, Erhong Yang
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Grammatical Error Correction

Due to the lack of parallel data in current Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) task, models based on Sequence to Sequence framework cannot be adequately trained to obtain higher performance. We propose two data synthesis methods which can control the error rate and the ratio of error types on synthetic data. The first approach is to corrupt each word in the monolingual corpus with a fixed probability, including replacement, insertion and deletion. Another approach is to train error generation models and further filtering the decoding results of the models. The experiments on different synthetic data show that the error rate is 40% and the ratio of error types is the same can improve the model performance better. Finally, we synthesize about 100 million data and achieve comparable performance as the state of the art, which uses twice as much data as we use.
Pixel-Wise PolSAR Image Classification via a Novel Complex-Valued Deep Fully Convolutional Network
Authors: Yice Cao, Yan Wu, Peng Zhang, Wenkai Liang, Ming Li
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Although complex-valued (CV) neural networks have shown better classification results compared to their real-valued (RV) counterparts for polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) classification, the extension of pixel-level RV networks to the complex domain has not yet thoroughly examined. This paper presents a novel complex-valued deep fully convolutional neural network (CV-FCN) designed for PolSAR image classification. Specifically, CV-FCN uses PolSAR CV data that includes the phase information and utilizes the deep FCN architecture that performs pixel-level labeling. It integrates the feature extraction module and the classification module in a united framework. Technically, for the particularity of PolSAR data, a dedicated complex-valued weight initialization scheme is defined to initialize CV-FCN. It considers the distribution of polarization data to conduct CV-FCN training from scratch in an efficient and fast manner. CV-FCN employs a complex downsampling-then-upsampling scheme to extract dense features. To enrich discriminative information, multi-level CV features that retain more polarization information are extracted via the complex downsampling scheme. Then, a complex upsampling scheme is proposed to predict dense CV labeling. It employs complex max-unpooling layers to greatly capture more spatial information for better robustness to speckle noise. In addition, to achieve faster convergence and obtain more precise classification results, a novel average cross-entropy loss function is derived for CV-FCN optimization. Experiments on real PolSAR datasets demonstrate that CV-FCN achieves better classification performance than other state-of-art methods.
A Pilot Study for Chinese SQL Semantic Parsing
Authors: Qingkai Min, Yuefeng Shi, Yue Zhang
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings, Question Answering, Segmentation, Semantic Parsing, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL, Word Embeddings

The task of semantic parsing is highly useful for dialogue and question answering systems. Many datasets have been proposed to map natural language text into SQL, among which the recent Spider dataset provides cross-domain samples with multiple tables and complex queries. We build a Spider dataset for Chinese, which is currently a low-resource language in this task area. Interesting research questions arise from the uniqueness of the language, which requires word segmentation, and also from the fact that SQL keywords and columns of DB tables are typically written in English. We compare character- and word-based encoders for a semantic parser, and different embedding schemes. Results show that word-based semantic parser is subject to segmentation errors and cross-lingual word embeddings are useful for text-to-SQL.
Model-aided Deep Neural Network for Source Number Detection
Authors: Yuwen Yang, Feifei Gao, Cheng Qian, Guisheng Liao
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00

Source number detection is a critical problem in array signal processing. Conventional model-driven methods e.g., Akaikes information criterion (AIC) and minimum description length (MDL), suffer from severe performance degradation when the number of snapshots is small or the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low. In this paper, we exploit the model-aided based deep neural network (DNN) to estimate the source number. Specifically, we first propose the eigenvalue based regression network (ERNet) and classification network (ECNet) to estimate the number of non-coherent sources, where the eigenvalues of the received signal covariance matrix and the source number are used as the input and the supervise label of the networks, respectively. Then, we extend the ERNet and ECNet for estimating the number of coherent sources, where the forward-backward spatial smoothing (FBSS) scheme is adopted to improve the performance of ERNet and ECNet. Numerical results demonstrate the outstanding performance of ERNet and ECNet over the conventional AIC and MDL methods as well as their excellent generalization capability, which also shows their great potentials for practical applications.
AdaptivFloat: A Floating-point based Data Type for Resilient Deep Learning Inference
Authors: Thierry Tambe, En-Yu Yang, Zishen Wan, Yuntian Deng, Vijay Janapa Reddi, Alexander Rush, David Brooks, Gu-Yeon Wei
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Conventional hardware-friendly quantization methods, such as fixed-point or integer, tend to perform poorly at very low word sizes as their shrinking dynamic ranges cannot adequately capture the wide data distributions commonly seen in sequence transduction models. We present AdaptivFloat, a floating-point inspired number representation format for deep learning that dynamically maximizes and optimally clips its available dynamic range, at a layer granularity, in order to create faithful encoding of neural network parameters. AdaptivFloat consistently produces higher inference accuracies compared to block floating-point, uniform, IEEE-like float or posit encodings at very low precision ($\leq$ 8-bit) across a diverse set of state-of-the-art neural network topologies. And notably, AdaptivFloat is seen surpassing baseline FP32 performance by up to +0.3 in BLEU score and -0.75 in word error rate at weight bit widths that are $\leq$ 8-bit. Experimental results on a deep neural network (DNN) hardware accelerator, exploiting AdaptivFloat logic in its computational datapath, demonstrate per-operation energy and area that is 0.9$\times$ and 1.14$\times$, respectively, that of equivalent bit width integer-based accelerator variants.
Adaptive Control for Marine Vessels Against Harsh Environmental Variation
Authors: Fangwen Tu, Shuzhi Sam Ge, Yoo Sang Choo, Chang Chieh Hang
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00

In this paper, robust control with sea state observer and dynamic thrust allocation is proposed for the Dynamic Positioning (DP) of an accommodation vessel in the presence of unknown hydrodynamic force variation and the input time delay. In order to overcome the huge force variation due to the adjoining Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) and accommodation vessel, a novel sea state observer is designed. The sea observer can effectively monitor the variation of the drift wave-induced force on the vessel and activate Neural Network (NN) compensator in the controller when large wave force is identified. Moreover, the wind drag coefficients can be adaptively approximated in the sea observer so that a feedforward control can be achieved. Based on this, a robust constrained control is developed to guarantee a safe operation. The time delay inside the control input is also considered. Dynamic thrust allocation module is presented to distribute the generalized control input among azimuth thrusters. Under the proposed sea observer and control, the boundedness of all the closed-loop signals are demonstrated via rigorous Lyapunov analysis. A set of simulation studies are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.
Active Anomaly Detection for time-domain discoveries
Authors: Emille E. O. Ishida, Matwey V. Kornilov, Konstantin L. Malanchev, Maria V. Pruzhinskaya, Alina A. Volnova, Vladimir S. Korolev, Florian Mondon, Sreevarsha Sreejith, Anastasia Malancheva, Shubhomoy Das
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Anomaly Detection

We present the first evidence that adaptive learning techniques can boost the discovery of unusual objects within astronomical light curve data sets. Our method follows an active learning strategy where the learning algorithm chooses objects which can potentially improve the learner if additional information about them is provided. This new information is subsequently used to update the machine learning model, allowing its accuracy to evolve with each new information. For the case of anomaly detection, the algorithm aims to maximize the number of scientifically interesting anomalies presented to the expert by slightly modifying the weights of a traditional Isolation Forest (IF) at each iteration. In order to demonstrate the potential of such techniques, we apply the Active Anomaly Discovery (AAD) algorithm to 2 data sets: simulated light curves from the PLAsTiCC challenge and real light curves from the Open Supernova Catalog. We compare the AAD results to those of a static IF. For both methods, we performed a detailed analysis for all objects with the ~2% highest anomaly scores. We show that, in the real data scenario, AAD was able to identify ~80\% more true anomalies than the IF. This result is the first evidence that AAD algorithms can play a central role in the search for new physics in the era of large scale sky surveys.
EpO-Net: Exploiting Geometric Constraints on Dense Trajectories for Motion Saliency
Authors: Muhammad Faisal, Ijaz Akhter, Mohsen Ali, Richard Hartley
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: WACV 2020 3
Tasks: Motion Segmentation, Optical Flow Estimation, Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation

The existing approaches for salient motion segmentation are unable to explicitly learn geometric cues and often give false detections on prominent static objects. We exploit multiview geometric constraints to avoid such shortcomings. To handle the nonrigid background like a sea, we also propose a robust fusion mechanism between motion and appearance-based features. We find dense trajectories, covering every pixel in the video, and propose trajectory-based epipolar distances to distinguish between background and foreground regions. Trajectory epipolar distances are data-independent and can be readily computed given a few features' correspondences between the images. We show that by combining epipolar distances with optical flow, a powerful motion network can be learned. Enabling the network to leverage both of these features, we propose a simple mechanism, we call input-dropout. Comparing the motion-only networks, we outperform the previous state of the art on DAVIS-2016 dataset by 5.2% in the mean IoU score. By robustly fusing our motion network with an appearance network using the input-dropout mechanism, we also outperform the previous methods on DAVIS-2016, 2017 and Segtrackv2 dataset.
Learning to Align Multi-Camera Domains using Part-Aware Clustering for Unsupervised Video Person Re-Identification
Authors: Youngeun Kim, Seokeon Choi, Taekyung Kim, Sumin Lee, Changick Kim
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Metric Learning, Person Re-Identification, Representation Learning, Video-Based Person Re-Identification

Most video person re-identification (re-ID) methods are mainly based on supervised learning, which requires cross-camera ID labeling. Since the cost of labeling increases dramatically as the number of cameras increases, it is difficult to apply the re-identification algorithm to a large camera network. In this paper, we address the scalability issue by presenting deep representation learning without ID information across multiple cameras. Technically, we train neural networks to generate both ID-discriminative and camera-invariant features. To achieve the ID discrimination ability of the embedding features, we maximize feature distances between different person IDs within a camera by using a metric learning approach. At the same time, considering each camera as a different domain, we apply adversarial learning across multiple camera domains for generating camera-invariant features. We also propose a part-aware adaptation module, which effectively performs multi-camera domain invariant feature learning in different spatial regions. We carry out comprehensive experiments on three public re-ID datasets (i.e., PRID-2011, iLIDS-VID, and MARS). Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin of about 20\% in terms of rank-1 accuracy on the large-scale MARS dataset.
RPM-Net: Robust Pixel-Level Matching Networks for Self-Supervised Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Youngeun Kim, Seokeon Choi, Hankyeol Lee, Taekyung Kim, Changick Kim
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce a self-supervised approach for video object segmentation without human labeled data.Specifically, we present Robust Pixel-level Matching Net-works (RPM-Net), a novel deep architecture that matches pixels between adjacent frames, using only color information from unlabeled videos for training. Technically, RPM-Net can be separated in two main modules. The embed-ding module first projects input images into high dimensional embedding space. Then the matching module with deformable convolution layers matches pixels between reference and target frames based on the embedding features.Unlike previous methods using deformable convolution, our matching module adopts deformable convolution to focus on similar features in spatio-temporally neighboring pixels.Our experiments show that the selective feature sampling improves the robustness to challenging problems in video object segmentation such as camera shake, fast motion, deformation, and occlusion. Also, we carry out comprehensive experiments on three public datasets (i.e., DAVIS-2017,SegTrack-v2, and Youtube-Objects) and achieve state-of-the-art performance on self-supervised video object seg-mentation. Moreover, we significantly reduce the performance gap between self-supervised and fully-supervised video object segmentation (41.0% vs. 52.5% on DAVIS-2017 validation set)
Spatiotemporal Co-attention Recurrent Neural Networks for Human-Skeleton Motion Prediction
Authors: Xiangbo Shu, Liyan Zhang, Guo-Jun Qi, Wei Liu, Jinhui Tang
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Human motion prediction, motion prediction

Human motion prediction aims to generate future motions based on the observed human motions. Witnessing the success of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) in modeling the sequential data, recent works utilize RNN to model human-skeleton motion on the observed motion sequence and predict future human motions. However, these methods did not consider the existence of the spatial coherence among joints and the temporal evolution among skeletons, which reflects the crucial characteristics of human motion in spatiotemporal space. To this end, we propose a novel Skeleton-joint Co-attention Recurrent Neural Networks (SC-RNN) to capture the spatial coherence among joints, and the temporal evolution among skeletons simultaneously on a skeleton-joint co-attention feature map in spatiotemporal space. First, a skeleton-joint feature map is constructed as the representation of the observed motion sequence. Second, we design a new Skeleton-joint Co-Attention (SCA) mechanism to dynamically learn a skeleton-joint co-attention feature map of this skeleton-joint feature map, which can refine the useful observed motion information to predict one future motion. Third, a variant of GRU embedded with SCA collaboratively models the human-skeleton motion and human-joint motion in spatiotemporal space by regarding the skeleton-joint co-attention feature map as the motion context. Experimental results on human motion prediction demonstrate the proposed method outperforms the related methods.
Context agnostic trajectory prediction based on $λ$-architecture
Authors: Evangelos Psomakelis, Konstantinos Tserpes, Dimitris Zissisc, Dimosthenis Anagnostopoulos, Theodora Varvarigou
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Predicting the next position of movable objects has been a problem for at least the last three decades, referred to as trajectory prediction. In our days, the vast amounts of data being continuously produced add the big data dimension to the trajectory prediction problem, which we are trying to tackle by creating a {\lambda}-Architecture based analytics platform. This platform performs both batch and stream analytics tasks and then combines them to perform analytical tasks that cannot be performed by analyzing any of these layers by itself. The biggest benefit of this platform is its context agnostic trait, which allows us to use it for any use case, as long as a time-stamped geolocation stream is provided. The experimental results presented prove that each part of the {\lambda}-Architecture performs well at certain targets, making a combination of these parts a necessity in order to improve the overall accuracy and performance of the platform.
Salient Instance Segmentation via Subitizing and Clustering
Authors: Jialun Pei, He Tang, Chao Liu, Chuanbo Chen
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The goal of salient region detection is to identify the regions of an image that attract the most attention. Many methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance levels on this task. Recently, salient instance segmentation has become an even more challenging task than traditional salient region detection; however, few of the existing methods have concentrated on this underexplored problem. Unlike the existing methods, which usually employ object proposals to roughly count and locate object instances, our method applies salient objects subitizing to predict an accurate number of instances for salient instance segmentation. In this paper, we propose a multitask densely connected neural network (MDNN) to segment salient instances in an image. In contrast to existing approaches, our framework is proposal-free and category-independent. The MDNN contains two parallel branches: the first is a densely connected subitizing network (DSN) used for subitizing prediction; the second is a densely connected fully convolutional network (DFCN) used for salient region detection. The MDNN simultaneously outputs saliency maps and salient object subitizing. Then, an adaptive deep feature-based spectral clustering operation segments the salient regions into instances based on the subitizing and saliency maps. The experimental results on both salient region detection and salient instance segmentation datasets demonstrate the satisfactory performance of our framework. Notably, its APr@0.5 and Apr@0.7 reaches 73.46% and 60.14% in the salient instance dataset, substantially higher than the results achieved by the state-of-the-art algorithm.
Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Irregular Convolutional Kernels
Authors: Weiyu Guo, Jiabin Ma, Liang Wang, Yongzhen Huang
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00

As deep neural networks are increasingly used in applications suited for low-power devices, a fundamental dilemma becomes apparent: the trend is to grow models to absorb increasing data that gives rise to memory intensive; however low-power devices are designed with very limited memory that can not store large models. Parameters pruning is critical for deep model deployment on low-power devices. Existing efforts mainly focus on designing highly efficient structures or pruning redundant connections for networks. They are usually sensitive to the tasks or relay on dedicated and expensive hashing storage strategies. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for achieving a lightweight model from the views of reconstructing the structure of convolutional kernels and efficient storage. Our approach transforms a traditional square convolution kernel to line segments, and automatically learn a proper strategy for equipping these line segments to model diverse features. The experimental results indicate that our approach can massively reduce the number of parameters (pruned 69% on DenseNet-40) and calculations (pruned 59% on DenseNet-40) while maintaining acceptable performance (only lose less than 2% accuracy).
Test-Time Training with Self-Supervision for Generalization under Distribution Shifts
Authors: Yu Sun, Xiaolong Wang, Zhuang Liu, John Miller, Alexei A. Efros, Moritz Hardt
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Building change detection for remote sensing images, CARLA MAP Leaderboard, image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modelling, Low-Light Image Enhancement, Self-Supervised Learning, Supervised Video Summarization, Video Quality Assessment

In this paper, we propose Test-Time Training, a general approach for improving the performance of predictive models when training and test data come from different distributions. We turn a single unlabeled test sample into a self-supervised learning problem, on which we update the model parameters before making a prediction. This also extends naturally to data in an online stream. Our simple approach leads to improvements on diverse image classification benchmarks aimed at evaluating robustness to distribution shifts.