pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Feature Aggregation Network for Video Face Recognition
Authors: Zhaoxiang Liu, Huan Hu, Jinqiang Bai, Shaohua Li, Shiguo Lian
Date: 2019-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

This paper aims to learn a compact representation of a video for video face recognition task. We make the following contributions: first, we propose a meta attention-based aggregation scheme which adaptively and fine-grained weighs the feature along each feature dimension among all frames to form a compact and discriminative representation. It makes the best to exploit the valuable or discriminative part of each frame to promote the performance of face recognition, without discarding or despising low quality frames as usual methods do. Second, we build a feature aggregation network comprised of a feature embedding module and a feature aggregation module. The embedding module is a convolutional neural network used to extract a feature vector from a face image, while the aggregation module consists of cascaded two meta attention blocks which adaptively aggregate the feature vectors into a single fixed-length representation. The network can deal with arbitrary number of frames, and is insensitive to frame order. Third, we validate the performance of proposed aggregation scheme. Experiments on publicly available datasets, such as YouTube face dataset and IJB-A dataset, show the effectiveness of our method, and it achieves competitive performances on both the verification and identification protocols.
Statistically Discriminative Sub-trajectory Mining
Authors: Vo Nguyen Le Duy, Takuto Sakuma, Taiju Ishiyama, Hiroki Toda, Kazuya Nishi, Masayuki Karasuyama, Yuta Okubo, Masayuki Sunaga, Yasuo Tabei, Ichiro Takeuchi
Date: 2019-05-06 00:00:00

We study the problem of discriminative sub-trajectory mining. Given two groups of trajectories, the goal of this problem is to extract moving patterns in the form of sub-trajectories which are more similar to sub-trajectories of one group and less similar to those of the other. We propose a new method called Statistically Discriminative Sub-trajectory Mining (SDSM) for this problem. An advantage of the SDSM method is that the statistical significance of the extracted sub-trajectories are properly controlled in the sense that the probability of finding a false positive sub-trajectory is smaller than a specified significance threshold alpha (e.g., 0.05), which is indispensable when the method is used in scientific or social studies under noisy environment. Finding such statistically discriminative sub-trajectories from massive trajectory dataset is both computationally and statistically challenging. In the SDSM method, we resolve the difficulties by introducing a tree representation among sub-trajectories and running an efficient permutation-based statistical inference method on the tree. To the best of our knowledge, SDSM is the first method that can efficiently extract statistically discriminative sub-trajectories from massive trajectory dataset. We illustrate the effectiveness and scalability of the SDSM method by applying it to a real-world dataset with 1,000,000 trajectories which contains 16,723,602,505 sub-trajectories.
Creating Lightweight Object Detectors with Model Compression for Deployment on Edge Devices
Authors: Yiwu Yao, Weiqiang Yang, Haoqi Zhu
Date: 2019-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Object

To achieve lightweight object detectors for deployment on the edge devices, an effective model compression pipeline is proposed in this paper. The compression pipeline consists of automatic channel pruning for the backbone, fixed channel deletion for the branch layers and knowledge distillation for the guidance learning. As results, the Resnet50-v1d is auto-pruned and fine-tuned on ImageNet to attain a compact base model as the backbone of object detector. Then, lightweight object detectors are implemented with proposed compression pipeline. For instance, the SSD-300 with model size=16.3MB, FLOPS=2.31G, and mAP=71.2 is created, revealing a better result than SSD-300-MobileNet.
Differentiable Architecture Search with Ensemble Gumbel-Softmax
Authors: Jianlong Chang, Xinbang Zhang, Yiwen Guo, Gaofeng Meng, Shiming Xiang, Chunhong Pan
Date: 2019-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

For network architecture search (NAS), it is crucial but challenging to simultaneously guarantee both effectiveness and efficiency. Towards achieving this goal, we develop a differentiable NAS solution, where the search space includes arbitrary feed-forward network consisting of the predefined number of connections. Benefiting from a proposed ensemble Gumbel-Softmax estimator, our method optimizes both the architecture of a deep network and its parameters in the same round of backward propagation, yielding an end-to-end mechanism of searching network architectures. Extensive experiments on a variety of popular datasets strongly evidence that our method is capable of discovering high-performance architectures, while guaranteeing the requisite efficiency during searching.
Anonymized BERT: An Augmentation Approach to the Gendered Pronoun Resolution Challenge
Authors: Bo Liu
Date: 2019-05-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 8

We present our 7th place solution to the Gendered Pronoun Resolution challenge, which uses BERT without fine-tuning and a novel augmentation strategy designed for contextual embedding token-level tasks. Our method anonymizes the referent by replacing candidate names with a set of common placeholder names. Besides the usual benefits of effectively increasing training data size, this approach diversifies idiosyncratic information embedded in names. Using same set of common first names can also help the model recognize names better, shorten token length, and remove gender and regional biases associated with names. The system scored 0.1947 log loss in stage 2, where the augmentation contributed to an improvements of 0.04. Post-competition analysis shows that, when using different embedding layers, the system scores 0.1799 which would be third place.
Vertex Nomination, Consistent Estimation, and Adversarial Modification
Authors: Joshua Agterberg, Youngser Park, Jonathan Larson, Christopher White, Carey E. Priebe, Vince Lyzinski
Date: 2019-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding

Given a pair of graphs $G_1$ and $G_2$ and a vertex set of interest in $G_1$, the vertex nomination (VN) problem seeks to find the corresponding vertices of interest in $G_2$ (if they exist) and produce a rank list of the vertices in $G_2$, with the corresponding vertices of interest in $G_2$ concentrating, ideally, at the top of the rank list. In this paper, we define and derive the analogue of Bayes optimality for VN with multiple vertices of interest, and we define the notion of maximal consistency classes in vertex nomination. This theory forms the foundation for a novel VN adversarial contamination model, and we demonstrate with real and simulated data that there are VN schemes that perform effectively in the uncontaminated setting, and adversarial network contamination adversely impacts the performance of our VN scheme. We further define a network regularization method for mitigating the impact of the adversarial contamination, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of regularization in both real and synthetic data.
Nostalgin: Extracting 3D City Models from Historical Image Data
Authors: Amol Kapoor, Hunter Larco, Raimondas Kiveris
Date: 2019-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

What did it feel like to walk through a city from the past? In this work, we describe Nostalgin (Nostalgia Engine), a method that can faithfully reconstruct cities from historical images. Unlike existing work in city reconstruction, we focus on the task of reconstructing 3D cities from historical images. Working with historical image data is substantially more difficult, as there are significantly fewer buildings available and the details of the camera parameters which captured the images are unknown. Nostalgin can generate a city model even if there is only a single image per facade, regardless of viewpoint or occlusions. To achieve this, our novel architecture combines image segmentation, rectification, and inpainting. We motivate our design decisions with experimental analysis of individual components of our pipeline, and show that we can improve on baselines in both speed and visual realism. We demonstrate the efficacy of our pipeline by recreating two 1940s Manhattan city blocks. We aim to deploy Nostalgin as an open source platform where users can generate immersive historical experiences from their own photos.
Investigating the Successes and Failures of BERT for Passage Re-Ranking
Authors: Harshith Padigela, Hamed Zamani, W. Bruce Croft
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Passage Re-Ranking, Re-Ranking, Retrieval

The bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model has recently advanced the state-of-the-art in passage re-ranking. In this paper, we analyze the results produced by a fine-tuned BERT model to better understand the reasons behind such substantial improvements. To this aim, we focus on the MS MARCO passage re-ranking dataset and provide potential reasons for the successes and failures of BERT for retrieval. In more detail, we empirically study a set of hypotheses and provide additional analysis to explain the successful performance of BERT.
P3O: Policy-on Policy-off Policy Optimization
Authors: Rasool Fakoor, Pratik Chaudhari, Alexander J. Smola
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

On-policy reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have high sample complexity while off-policy algorithms are difficult to tune. Merging the two holds the promise to develop efficient algorithms that generalize across diverse environments. It is however challenging in practice to find suitable hyper-parameters that govern this trade off. This paper develops a simple algorithm named P3O that interleaves off-policy updates with on-policy updates. P3O uses the effective sample size between the behavior policy and the target policy to control how far they can be from each other and does not introduce any additional hyper-parameters. Extensive experiments on the Atari-2600 and MuJoCo benchmark suites show that this simple technique is effective in reducing the sample complexity of state-of-the-art algorithms. Code to reproduce experiments in this paper is at https://github.com/rasoolfa/P3O.
Understanding urban landuse from the above and ground perspectives: a deep learning, multimodal solution
Authors: Shivangi Srivastava, John E. Vargas-Muñoz, Devis Tuia
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00

Landuse characterization is important for urban planning. It is traditionally performed with field surveys or manual photo interpretation, two practices that are time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, we aim to automate landuse mapping at the urban-object level with a deep learning approach based on data from multiple sources (or modalities). We consider two image modalities: overhead imagery from Google Maps and ensembles of ground-based pictures (side-views) per urban-object from Google Street View (GSV). These modalities bring complementary visual information pertaining to the urban-objects. We propose an end-to-end trainable model, which uses OpenStreetMap annotations as labels. The model can accommodate a variable number of GSV pictures for the ground-based branch and can also function in the absence of ground pictures at prediction time. We test the effectiveness of our model over the area of \^Ile-de-France, France, and test its generalization abilities on a set of urban-objects from the city of Nantes, France. Our proposed multimodal Convolutional Neural Network achieves considerably higher accuracies than methods that use a single image modality, making it suitable for automatic landuse map updates. Additionally, our approach could be easily scaled to multiple cities, because it is based on data sources available for many cities worldwide.
Faster polytope rounding, sampling, and volume computation via a sublinear "Ball Walk"
Authors: Oren Mangoubi, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00

We study the problem of "isotropically rounding" a polytope $K\subset\mathbb{R}^n$, that is, computing a linear transformation which makes the uniform distribution on the polytope have roughly identity covariance matrix. We assume $K$ is defined by $m$ linear inequalities, with guarantee that $rB\subset K\subset RB$, where $B$ is the unit ball. We introduce a new variant of the ball walk Markov chain and show that, roughly, the expected number of arithmetic operations per-step of this Markov chain is $O(m)$ that is sublinear in the input size $mn$--the per-step time of all prior Markov chains. Subsequently, we give a rounding algorithm that succeeds with probability $1-\varepsilon$ in $\tilde{O}(mn^{4.5}\mbox{polylog}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon},\frac{R}{r}))$ arithmetic operations. This gives a factor of $\sqrt{n}$ improvement on the previous bound of $\tilde{O}(mn^5\mbox{polylog}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon},\frac{R}{r}))$ for rounding, which uses the hit-and-run algorithm. Since the rounding preprocessing step is in many cases the bottleneck in improving sampling or volume computation, our results imply these tasks can also be achieved in roughly $\tilde{O}(mn^{4.5}\mbox{polylog}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon},\frac{R}{r})+mn^4\delta^{-2})$ operations for computing the volume of $K$ up to a factor $1+\delta$ and $\tilde{O}(mn^{4.5}\mbox{polylog}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon},\frac{R}{r})))$ for uniformly sampling on $K$ with TV error $\varepsilon$. This improves on the previous bounds of $\tilde{O}(mn^5\mbox{polylog}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon},\frac{R}{r})+mn^4\delta^{-2})$ for volume computation when roughly $m\geq n^{2.5}$, and $\tilde{O}(mn^5\mbox{polylog}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon},\frac{R}{r}))$ for sampling when roughly $m\geq n^{1.5}$. We achieve this improvement by a novel method of computing polytope membership, where one avoids checking inequalities estimated to have a very low probability of being violated.
Towards Instance-level Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Zhiqiang Shen, Mingyang Huang, Jianping Shi, xiangyang xue, Thomas Huang
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2019 6
Tasks: Attribute, Image-to-Image Translation, object-detection, Object Detection, Translation

Unpaired Image-to-image Translation is a new rising and challenging vision problem that aims to learn a mapping between unaligned image pairs in diverse domains. Recent advances in this field like MUNIT and DRIT mainly focus on disentangling content and style/attribute from a given image first, then directly adopting the global style to guide the model to synthesize new domain images. However, this kind of approaches severely incurs contradiction if the target domain images are content-rich with multiple discrepant objects. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective instance-aware image-to-image translation approach (INIT), which employs the fine-grained local (instance) and global styles to the target image spatially. The proposed INIT exhibits three import advantages: (1) the instance-level objective loss can help learn a more accurate reconstruction and incorporate diverse attributes of objects; (2) the styles used for target domain of local/global areas are from corresponding spatial regions in source domain, which intuitively is a more reasonable mapping; (3) the joint training process can benefit both fine and coarse granularity and incorporates instance information to improve the quality of global translation. We also collect a large-scale benchmark for the new instance-level translation task. We observe that our synthetic images can even benefit real-world vision tasks like generic object detection.
Breast Tumor Cellularity Assessment using Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Alexander Rakhlin, Aleksei Tiulpin, Alexey A. Shvets, Alexandr A. Kalinin, Vladimir I. Iglovikov, Sergey Nikolenko
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, whole slide images

Breast cancer is one of the main causes of death worldwide. Histopathological cellularity assessment of residual tumors in post-surgical tissues is used to analyze a tumor's response to a therapy. Correct cellularity assessment increases the chances of getting an appropriate treatment and facilitates the patient's survival. In current clinical practice, tumor cellularity is manually estimated by pathologists; this process is tedious and prone to errors or low agreement rates between assessors. In this work, we evaluated three strong novel Deep Learning-based approaches for automatic assessment of tumor cellularity from post-treated breast surgical specimens stained with hematoxylin and eosin. We validated the proposed methods on the BreastPathQ SPIE challenge dataset that consisted of 2395 image patches selected from whole slide images acquired from 64 patients. Compared to expert pathologist scoring, our best performing method yielded the Cohen's kappa coefficient of 0.70 (vs. 0.42 previously known in literature) and the intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.89 (vs. 0.83). Our results suggest that Deep Learning-based methods have a significant potential to alleviate the burden on pathologists, enhance the diagnostic workflow, and, thereby, facilitate better clinical outcomes in breast cancer treatment.
HHMM at SemEval-2019 Task 2: Unsupervised Frame Induction using Contextualized Word Embeddings
Authors: Saba Anwar, Dmitry Ustalov, Nikolay Arefyev, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Chris Biemann, Alexander Panchenko
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2019 6
Tasks: Clustering, Task 2, Word Embeddings

We present our system for semantic frame induction that showed the best performance in Subtask B.1 and finished as the runner-up in Subtask A of the SemEval 2019 Task 2 on unsupervised semantic frame induction (QasemiZadeh et al., 2019). Our approach separates this task into two independent steps: verb clustering using word and their context embeddings and role labeling by combining these embeddings with syntactical features. A simple combination of these steps shows very competitive results and can be extended to process other datasets and languages.
Better the Devil you Know: An Analysis of Evasion Attacks using Out-of-Distribution Adversarial Examples
Authors: Vikash Sehwag, Arjun Nitin Bhagoji, Liwei Song, Chawin Sitawarin, Daniel Cullina, Mung Chiang, Prateek Mittal
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, General Classification

A large body of recent work has investigated the phenomenon of evasion attacks using adversarial examples for deep learning systems, where the addition of norm-bounded perturbations to the test inputs leads to incorrect output classification. Previous work has investigated this phenomenon in closed-world systems where training and test inputs follow a pre-specified distribution. However, real-world implementations of deep learning applications, such as autonomous driving and content classification are likely to operate in the open-world environment. In this paper, we demonstrate the success of open-world evasion attacks, where adversarial examples are generated from out-of-distribution inputs (OOD adversarial examples). In our study, we use 11 state-of-the-art neural network models trained on 3 image datasets of varying complexity. We first demonstrate that state-of-the-art detectors for out-of-distribution data are not robust against OOD adversarial examples. We then consider 5 known defenses for adversarial examples, including state-of-the-art robust training methods, and show that against these defenses, OOD adversarial examples can achieve up to 4$\times$ higher target success rates compared to adversarial examples generated from in-distribution data. We also take a quantitative look at how open-world evasion attacks may affect real-world systems. Finally, we present the first steps towards a robust open-world machine learning system.
Few-Shot Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Ming-Yu Liu, Xun Huang, Arun Mallya, Tero Karras, Timo Aila, Jaakko Lehtinen, Jan Kautz
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation, Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation

Unsupervised image-to-image translation methods learn to map images in a given class to an analogous image in a different class, drawing on unstructured (non-registered) datasets of images. While remarkably successful, current methods require access to many images in both source and destination classes at training time. We argue this greatly limits their use. Drawing inspiration from the human capability of picking up the essence of a novel object from a small number of examples and generalizing from there, we seek a few-shot, unsupervised image-to-image translation algorithm that works on previously unseen target classes that are specified, at test time, only by a few example images. Our model achieves this few-shot generation capability by coupling an adversarial training scheme with a novel network design. Through extensive experimental validation and comparisons to several baseline methods on benchmark datasets, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Our implementation and datasets are available at https://github.com/NVlabs/FUNIT .
Intra-clip Aggregation for Video Person Re-identification
Authors: Takashi Isobe, Jian Han, Fang Zhu, Ya-Li Li, Shengjin Wang
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Person Re-Identification, Video-Based Person Re-Identification

Video-based person re-identification has drawn massive attention in recent years due to its extensive applications in video surveillance. While deep learning-based methods have led to significant progress, these methods are limited by ineffectively using complementary information, which is blamed on necessary data augmentation in the training process. Data augmentation has been widely used to mitigate the over-fitting trap and improve the ability of network representation. However, the previous methods adopt image-based data augmentation scheme to individually process the input frames, which corrupts the complementary information between consecutive frames and causes performance degradation. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms the most recent state-of-the-art methods. We also perform cross-dataset validation to prove the generality of our method.
Curious Meta-Controller: Adaptive Alternation between Model-Based and Model-Free Control in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Muhammad Burhan Hafez, Cornelius Weber, Matthias Kerzel, Stefan Wermter
Date: 2019-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, model, Reinforcement Learning

Recent success in deep reinforcement learning for continuous control has been dominated by model-free approaches which, unlike model-based approaches, do not suffer from representational limitations in making assumptions about the world dynamics and model errors inevitable in complex domains. However, they require a lot of experiences compared to model-based approaches that are typically more sample-efficient. We propose to combine the benefits of the two approaches by presenting an integrated approach called Curious Meta-Controller. Our approach alternates adaptively between model-based and model-free control using a curiosity feedback based on the learning progress of a neural model of the dynamics in a learned latent space. We demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve the sample efficiency and achieve near-optimal performance on learning robotic reaching and grasping tasks from raw-pixel input in both dense and sparse reward settings.