pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Alert-Generation Framework for Improving Resiliency in Human-Supervised, Multi-Agent Teams
Authors: Sarah Al-Hussaini, Jason M. Gregory, Shaurya Shriyam, Satyandra K. Gupta
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Humanitarian

Human-supervision in multi-agent teams is a critical requirement to ensure that the decision-maker's risk preferences are utilized to assign tasks to robots. In stressful complex missions that pose risk to human health and life, such as humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief missions, human mistakes or delays in tasking robots can adversely affect the mission. To assist human decision making in such missions, we present an alert-generation framework capable of detecting various modes of potential failure or performance degradation. We demonstrate that our framework, based on state machine simulation and formal methods, offers probabilistic modeling to estimate the likelihood of unfavorable events. We introduce smart simulation that offers a computationally-efficient way of detecting low-probability situations compared to standard Monte-Carlo simulations. Moreover, for certain class of problems, our inference-based method can provide guarantees on correctly detecting task failures.
Learned imaging with constraints and uncertainty quantification
Authors: Felix J. Herrmann, Ali Siahkoohi, Gabrio Rizzuti
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop Deep_Invers 2019 12
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

We outline new approaches to incorporate ideas from deep learning into wave-based least-squares imaging. The aim, and main contribution of this work, is the combination of handcrafted constraints with deep convolutional neural networks, as a way to harness their remarkable ease of generating natural images. The mathematical basis underlying our method is the expectation-maximization framework, where data are divided in batches and coupled to additional "latent" unknowns. These unknowns are pairs of elements from the original unknown space (but now coupled to a specific data batch) and network inputs. In this setting, the neural network controls the similarity between these additional parameters, acting as a "center" variable. The resulting problem amounts to a maximum-likelihood estimation of the network parameters when the augmented data model is marginalized over the latent variables.
Optimization on the Surface of the (Hyper)-Sphere
Authors: Parameswaran Raman, Jiasen Yang
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00

Thomson problem is a classical problem in physics to study how $n$ number of charged particles distribute themselves on the surface of a sphere of $k$ dimensions. When $k=2$, i.e. a 2-sphere (a circle), the particles appear at equally spaced points. Such a configuration can be computed analytically. However, for higher dimensions such as $k \ge 3$, i.e. the case of 3-sphere (standard sphere), there is not much that is understood analytically. Finding global minimum of the problem under these settings is particularly tough since the optimization problem becomes increasingly computationally intensive with larger values of $k$ and $n$. In this work, we explore a wide variety of numerical optimization methods to solve the Thomson problem. In our empirical study, we find stochastic gradient based methods (SGD) to be a compelling choice for this problem as it scales well with the number of points.
F-Cooper: Feature based Cooperative Perception for Autonomous Vehicle Edge Computing System Using 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Qi Chen
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Edge-computing, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Real-Time Object Detection

Autonomous vehicles are heavily reliant upon their sensors to perfect the perception of surrounding environments, however, with the current state of technology, the data which a vehicle uses is confined to that from its own sensors. Data sharing between vehicles and/or edge servers is limited by the available network bandwidth and the stringent real-time constraints of autonomous driving applications. To address these issues, we propose a point cloud feature based cooperative perception framework (F-Cooper) for connected autonomous vehicles to achieve a better object detection precision. Not only will feature based data be sufficient for the training process, we also use the features' intrinsically small size to achieve real-time edge computing, without running the risk of congesting the network. Our experiment results show that by fusing features, we are able to achieve a better object detection result, around 10% improvement for detection within 20 meters and 30% for further distances, as well as achieve faster edge computing with a low communication delay, requiring 71 milliseconds in certain feature selections. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce feature-level data fusion to connected autonomous vehicles for the purpose of enhancing object detection and making real-time edge computing on inter-vehicle data feasible for autonomous vehicles.
Spatio-spectral networks for color-texture analysis
Authors: Leonardo F. S. Scabini, Lucas C. Ribas, Odemir M. Bruno
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Texture Classification

Texture is one of the most-studied visual attribute for image characterization since the 1960s. However, most hand-crafted descriptors are monochromatic, focusing on the gray scale images and discarding the color information. In this context, this work focus on a new method for color texture analysis considering all color channels in a more intrinsic approach. Our proposal consists of modeling color images as directed complex networks that we named Spatio-Spectral Network (SSN). Its topology includes within-channel edges that cover spatial patterns throughout individual image color channels, while between-channel edges tackle spectral properties of channel pairs in an opponent fashion. Image descriptors are obtained through a concise topological characterization of the modeled network in a multiscale approach with radially symmetric neighborhoods. Experiments with four datasets cover several aspects of color-texture analysis, and results demonstrate that SSN overcomes all the compared literature methods, including known deep convolutional networks, and also has the most stable performance between datasets, achieving $98.5(\pm1.1)$ of average accuracy against $97.1(\pm1.3)$ of MCND and $96.8(\pm3.2)$ of AlexNet. Additionally, an experiment verifies the performance of the methods under different color spaces, where results show that SSN also has higher performance and robustness.
Co-Attentive Cross-Modal Deep Learning for Medical Evidence Synthesis and Decision Making
Authors: Devin Taylor, Simeon Spasov, Pietro Liò
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Modern medicine requires generalised approaches to the synthesis and integration of multimodal data, often at different biological scales, that can be applied to a variety of evidence structures, such as complex disease analyses and epidemiological models. However, current methods are either slow and expensive, or ineffective due to the inability to model the complex relationships between data modes which differ in scale and format. We address these issues by proposing a cross-modal deep learning architecture and co-attention mechanism to accurately model the relationships between the different data modes, while further reducing patient diagnosis time. Differentiating Parkinson's Disease (PD) patients from healthy patients forms the basis of the evaluation. The model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art unimodal analysis by 2.35%, while also being 53% more parameter efficient than the industry standard cross-modal model. Furthermore, the evaluation of the attention coefficients allows for qualitative insights to be obtained. Through the coupling with bioinformatics, a novel link between the interferon-gamma-mediated pathway, DNA methylation and PD was identified. We believe that our approach is general and could optimise the process of medical evidence synthesis and decision making in an actionable way.
MinneApple: A Benchmark Dataset for Apple Detection and Segmentation
Authors: Nicolai Häni, Pravakar Roy, Volkan Isler
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation

In this work, we present a new dataset to advance the state-of-the-art in fruit detection, segmentation, and counting in orchard environments. While there has been significant recent interest in solving these problems, the lack of a unified dataset has made it difficult to compare results. We hope to enable direct comparisons by providing a large variety of high-resolution images acquired in orchards, together with human annotations of the fruit on trees. The fruits are labeled using polygonal masks for each object instance to aid in precise object detection, localization, and segmentation. Additionally, we provide data for patch-based counting of clustered fruits. Our dataset contains over 41, 000 annotated object instances in 1000 images. We present a detailed overview of the dataset together with baseline performance analysis for bounding box detection, segmentation, and fruit counting as well as representative results for yield estimation. We make this dataset publicly available and host a CodaLab challenge to encourage comparison of results on a common dataset. To download the data and learn more about MinneApple please see the project website: http://rsn.cs.umn.edu/index.php/MinneApple. Up to date information is available online.
Coupling Rendering and Generative Adversarial Networks for Artificial SAS Image Generation
Authors: Albert Reed, Isaac Gerg, John McKay, Daniel Brown, David Williams, Suren Jayasuriya
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation

Acquisition of Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) datasets is bottlenecked by the costly deployment of SAS imaging systems, and even when data acquisition is possible,the data is often skewed towards containing barren seafloor rather than objects of interest. We present a novel pipeline, called SAS GAN, which couples an optical renderer with a generative adversarial network (GAN) to synthesize realistic SAS images of targets on the seafloor. This coupling enables high levels of SAS image realism while enabling control over image geometry and parameters. We demonstrate qualitative results by presenting examples of images created with our pipeline. We also present quantitative results through the use of t-SNE and the Fr\'echet Inception Distance to argue that our generated SAS imagery potentially augments SAS datasets more effectively than an off-the-shelf GAN.
Adaptive Scheduling for Multi-Task Learning
Authors: Sébastien Jean, Orhan Firat, Melvin Johnson
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Multi-Task Learning, Scheduling, Translation

To train neural machine translation models simultaneously on multiple tasks (languages), it is common to sample each task uniformly or in proportion to dataset sizes. As these methods offer little control over performance trade-offs, we explore different task scheduling approaches. We first consider existing non-adaptive techniques, then move on to adaptive schedules that over-sample tasks with poorer results compared to their respective baseline. As explicit schedules can be inefficient, especially if one task is highly over-sampled, we also consider implicit schedules, learning to scale learning rates or gradients of individual tasks instead. These techniques allow training multilingual models that perform better for low-resource language pairs (tasks with small amount of data), while minimizing negative effects on high-resource tasks.
Recommendation or Discrimination?: Quantifying Distribution Parity in Information Retrieval Systems
Authors: Rinat Khaziev, Bryce Casavant, Pearce Washabaugh, Amy A. Winecoff, Matthew Graham
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Information retrieval (IR) systems often leverage query data to suggest relevant items to users. This introduces the possibility of unfairness if the query (i.e., input) and the resulting recommendations unintentionally correlate with latent factors that are protected variables (e.g., race, gender, and age). For instance, a visual search system for fashion recommendations may pick up on features of the human models rather than fashion garments when generating recommendations. In this work, we introduce a statistical test for "distribution parity" in the top-K IR results, which assesses whether a given set of recommendations is fair with respect to a specific protected variable. We evaluate our test using both simulated and empirical results. First, using artificially biased recommendations, we demonstrate the trade-off between statistically detectable bias and the size of the search catalog. Second, we apply our test to a visual search system for fashion garments, specifically testing for recommendation bias based on the skin tone of fashion models. Our distribution parity test can help ensure that IR systems' results are fair and produce a good experience for all users.
Responsive Planning and Recognition for Closed-Loop Interaction
Authors: Richard G. Freedman, Yi Ren Fung, Roman Ganchin, Shlomo Zilberstein
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00

Many intelligent systems currently interact with others using at least one of fixed communication inputs or preset responses, resulting in rigid interaction experiences and extensive efforts developing a variety of scenarios for the system. Fixed inputs limit the natural behavior of the user in order to effectively communicate, and preset responses prevent the system from adapting to the current situation unless it was specifically implemented. Closed-loop interaction instead focuses on dynamic responses that account for what the user is currently doing based on interpretations of their perceived activity. Agents employing closed-loop interaction can also monitor their interactions to ensure that the user responds as expected. We introduce a closed-loop interactive agent framework that integrates planning and recognition to predict what the user is trying to accomplish and autonomously decide on actions to take in response to these predictions. Based on a recent demonstration of such an assistive interactive agent in a turn-based simulated game, we also discuss new research challenges that are not present in the areas of artificial intelligence planning or recognition alone.
Zero-Shot Action Recognition in Videos: A Survey
Authors: Valter Estevam, Helio Pedrini, David Menotti
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Action Recognition In Still Images, Action Recognition In Videos, Survey, Temporal Action Localization, Video Understanding, Zero-Shot Action Recognition

Zero-Shot Action Recognition has attracted attention in the last years and many approaches have been proposed for recognition of objects, events and actions in images and videos. There is a demand for methods that can classify instances from classes that are not present in the training of models, especially in the complex problem of automatic video understanding, since collecting, annotating and labeling videos are difficult and laborious tasks. We have identified that there are many methods available in the literature, however, it is difficult to categorize which techniques can be considered state of the art. Despite the existence of some surveys about zero-shot action recognition in still images and experimental protocol, there is no work focused on videos. Therefore, we present a survey of the methods that comprise techniques to perform visual feature extraction and semantic feature extraction as well to learn the mapping between these features considering specifically zero-shot action recognition in videos. We also provide a complete description of datasets, experiments and protocols, presenting open issues and directions for future work, essential for the development of the computer vision research field.
Enabling Intuitive Human-Robot Teaming Using Augmented Reality and Gesture Control
Authors: Jason M. Gregory, Christopher Reardon, Kevin Lee, Geoffrey White, Ki Ng, Caitlyn Sims
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00

Human-robot teaming offers great potential because of the opportunities to combine strengths of heterogeneous agents. However, one of the critical challenges in realizing an effective human-robot team is efficient information exchange - both from the human to the robot as well as from the robot to the human. In this work, we present and analyze an augmented reality-enabled, gesture-based system that supports intuitive human-robot teaming through improved information exchange. Our proposed system requires no external instrumentation aside from human-wearable devices and shows promise of real-world applicability for service-oriented missions. Additionally, we present preliminary results from a pilot study with human participants, and highlight lessons learned and open research questions that may help direct future development, fielding, and experimentation of autonomous HRI systems.
Learning Household Task Knowledge from WikiHow Descriptions
Authors: Yilun Zhou, Julie A. Shah, Steven Schockaert
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 8
Tasks: Articles

Commonsense procedural knowledge is important for AI agents and robots that operate in a human environment. While previous attempts at constructing procedural knowledge are mostly rule- and template-based, recent advances in deep learning provide the possibility of acquiring such knowledge directly from natural language sources. As a first step in this direction, we propose a model to learn embeddings for tasks, as well as the individual steps that need to be taken to solve them, based on WikiHow articles. We learn these embeddings such that they are predictive of both step relevance and step ordering. We also experiment with the use of integer programming for inferring consistent global step orderings from noisy pairwise predictions.
Image inpainting: A review
Authors: Omar Elharrouss, Noor Almaadeed, Somaya Al-Maadeed, Younes Akbari
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting

Although image inpainting, or the art of repairing the old and deteriorated images, has been around for many years, it has gained even more popularity because of the recent development in image processing techniques. With the improvement of image processing tools and the flexibility of digital image editing, automatic image inpainting has found important applications in computer vision and has also become an important and challenging topic of research in image processing. This paper is a brief review of the existing image inpainting approaches we first present a global vision on the existing methods for image inpainting. We attempt to collect most of the existing approaches and classify them into three categories, namely, sequential-based, CNN-based and GAN-based methods. In addition, for each category, a list of methods for the different types of distortion on the images is presented. Furthermore, collect a list of the available datasets and discuss these in our paper. This is a contribution for digital image inpainting researchers trying to look for the available datasets because there is a lack of datasets available for image inpainting. As the final step in this overview, we present the results of real evaluations of the three categories of image inpainting methods performed on the datasets used, for the different types of image distortion. In the end, we also present the evaluations metrics and discuss the performance of these methods in terms of these metrics. This overview can be used as a reference for image inpainting researchers, and it can also facilitate the comparison of the methods as well as the datasets used. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation of the three categories of image inpainting methods along with a list of available datasets that the researchers can use to evaluate their proposed methodology against.
Horizontal Flows and Manifold Stochastics in Geometric Deep Learning
Authors: Stefan Sommer, Alex Bronstein
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We introduce two constructions in geometric deep learning for 1) transporting orientation-dependent convolutional filters over a manifold in a continuous way and thereby defining a convolution operator that naturally incorporates the rotational effect of holonomy; and 2) allowing efficient evaluation of manifold convolution layers by sampling manifold valued random variables that center around a weighted diffusion mean. Both methods are inspired by stochastics on manifolds and geometric statistics, and provide examples of how stochastic methods -- here horizontal frame bundle flows and non-linear bridge sampling schemes, can be used in geometric deep learning. We outline the theoretical foundation of the two methods, discuss their relation to Euclidean deep networks and existing methodology in geometric deep learning, and establish important properties of the proposed constructions.
Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting Reconstruction Using Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Elisabeth Hoppe, Florian Thamm, Gregor Körzdörfer, Christopher Syben, Franziska Schirrmacher, Mathias Nittka, Josef Pfeuffer, Heiko Meyer, Andreas Maier
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting, Template Matching

Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) is an imaging technique acquiring unique time signals for different tissues. Although the acquisition is highly accelerated, the reconstruction time remains a problem, as the state-of-the-art template matching compares every signal with a set of possible signals. To overcome this limitation, deep learning based approaches, e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been proposed. In this work, we investigate the applicability of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for this reconstruction problem, as the signals are correlated in time. Compared to previous methods based on CNNs, RNN models yield significantly improved results using in-vivo data.
Spectral Analysis Of Weighted Laplacians Arising In Data Clustering
Authors: Franca Hoffmann, Bamdad Hosseini, Assad A. Oberai, Andrew M. Stuart
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Graph Laplacians computed from weighted adjacency matrices are widely used to identify geometric structure in data, and clusters in particular; their spectral properties play a central role in a number of unsupervised and semi-supervised learning algorithms. When suitably scaled, graph Laplacians approach limiting continuum operators in the large data limit. Studying these limiting operators, therefore, sheds light on learning algorithms. This paper is devoted to the study of a parameterized family of divergence form elliptic operators that arise as the large data limit of graph Laplacians. The link between a three-parameter family of graph Laplacians and a three-parameter family of differential operators is explained. The spectral properties of these differential operators are analyzed in the situation where the data comprises two nearly separated clusters, in a sense which is made precise. In particular, we investigate how the spectral gap depends on the three parameters entering the graph Laplacian, and on a parameter measuring the size of the perturbation from the perfectly clustered case. Numerical results are presented which exemplify and extend the analysis: the computations study situations in which there are two nearly separated clusters, but which violate the assumptions used in our theory; situations in which more than two clusters are present, also going beyond our theory; and situations which demonstrate the relevance of our studies of differential operators for the understanding of finite data problems via the graph Laplacian. The findings provide insight into parameter choices made in learning algorithms which are based on weighted adjacency matrices; they also provide the basis for analysis of the consistency of various unsupervised and semi-supervised learning algorithms, in the large data limit.