pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards improving the e-learning experience for deaf students: e-LUX
Authors: Fabrizio Borgia, Claudia Bianchini, Maria de Marsico
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00

Deaf people are more heavily affected by the digital divide than many would expect. Moreover, most accessibility guidelines addressing their needs just deal with captioning and audio-content transcription. However, this approach to the problem does not consider that deaf people have big troubles with vocal languages, even in their written form. At present, only a few organizations, like W3C, produced guidelines dealing with one of their most distinctive expressions: Sign Language (SL). SL is, in fact, the visual-gestural language used by many deaf people to communicate with each other. The present work aims at supporting e-learning user experience (e-LUX) for these specific users by enhancing the accessibility of content and container services. In particular, we propose preliminary solutions to tailor activities which can be more fruitful when performed in one's own "native" language, which for most deaf people, especially younger ones, is represented by national SL.
Music Source Separation in the Waveform Domain
Authors: Alexandre Défossez, Nicolas Usunier, Léon Bottou, Francis Bach
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Generation, Audio Synthesis, Data Augmentation, Multi-task Audio Source Seperation, Music Source Separation, Quantization

Source separation for music is the task of isolating contributions, or stems, from different instruments recorded individually and arranged together to form a song. Such components include voice, bass, drums and any other accompaniments.Contrarily to many audio synthesis tasks where the best performances are achieved by models that directly generate the waveform, the state-of-the-art in source separation for music is to compute masks on the magnitude spectrum. In this paper, we compare two waveform domain architectures. We first adapt Conv-Tasnet, initially developed for speech source separation,to the task of music source separation. While Conv-Tasnet beats many existing spectrogram-domain methods, it suffersfrom significant artifacts, as shown by human evaluations. We propose instead Demucs, a novel waveform-to-waveform model,with a U-Net structure and bidirectional LSTM.Experiments on the MusDB dataset show that, with proper data augmentation, Demucs beats allexisting state-of-the-art architectures, including Conv-Tasnet, with 6.3 SDR on average, (and up to 6.8 with 150 extra training songs, even surpassing the IRM oracle for the bass source).Using recent development in model quantization, Demucs can be compressed down to 120MBwithout any loss of accuracy.We also provide human evaluations, showing that Demucs benefit from a large advantagein terms of the naturalness of the audio. However, it suffers from some bleeding,especially between the vocals and other source.
Optimal checkpointing for heterogeneous chains: how to train deep neural networks with limited memory
Authors: Julien Herrmann, Olivier Beaumont, Lionel Eyraud-Dubois, Julien Hermann, Alexis Joly, Alena Shilova
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00

This paper introduces a new activation checkpointing method which allows to significantly decrease memory usage when training Deep Neural Networks with the back-propagation algorithm. Similarly to checkpoint-ing techniques coming from the literature on Automatic Differentiation, it consists in dynamically selecting the forward activations that are saved during the training phase, and then automatically recomputing missing activations from those previously recorded. We propose an original computation model that combines two types of activation savings: either only storing the layer inputs, or recording the complete history of operations that produced the outputs (this uses more memory, but requires fewer recomputations in the backward phase), and we provide an algorithm to compute the optimal computation sequence for this model. This paper also describes a PyTorch implementation that processes the entire chain, dealing with any sequential DNN whose internal layers may be arbitrarily complex and automatically executing it according to the optimal checkpointing strategy computed given a memory limit. Through extensive experiments, we show that our implementation consistently outperforms existing checkpoint-ing approaches for a large class of networks, image sizes and batch sizes.
DoveNet: Deep Image Harmonization via Domain Verification
Authors: Wenyan Cong, Jianfu Zhang, Li Niu, Liu Liu, Zhixin Ling, Weiyuan Li, Liqing Zhang
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Harmonization

Image composition is an important operation in image processing, but the inconsistency between foreground and background significantly degrades the quality of composite image. Image harmonization, aiming to make the foreground compatible with the background, is a promising yet challenging task. However, the lack of high-quality publicly available dataset for image harmonization greatly hinders the development of image harmonization techniques. In this work, we contribute an image harmonization dataset iHarmony4 by generating synthesized composite images based on COCO (resp., Adobe5k, Flickr, day2night) dataset, leading to our HCOCO (resp., HAdobe5k, HFlickr, Hday2night) sub-dataset. Moreover, we propose a new deep image harmonization method DoveNet using a novel domain verification discriminator, with the insight that the foreground needs to be translated to the same domain as background. Extensive experiments on our constructed dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/bcmi/Image_Harmonization_Datasets.
To Trust, or Not to Trust? A Study of Human Bias in Automated Video Interview Assessments
Authors: Chee Wee Leong, Katrina Roohr, Vikram Ramanarayanan, Michelle P. Martin-Raugh, Harrison Kell, Rutuja Ubale, Yao Qian, Zydrune Mladineo, Laura McCulla
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Supervised systems require human labels for training. But, are humans themselves always impartial during the annotation process? We examine this question in the context of automated assessment of human behavioral tasks. Specifically, we investigate whether human ratings themselves can be trusted at their face value when scoring video-based structured interviews, and whether such ratings can impact machine learning models that use them as training data. We present preliminary empirical evidence that indicates there might be biases in such annotations, most of which are visual in nature.
Automated Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis Detection and Weakly Supervised Localization on Coronary CT Angiography with a Deep 3-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Sema Candemir, Richard D. White, Mutlu Demirer, Vikash Gupta, Matthew T. Bigelow, Luciano M. Prevedello, Barbaros S. Erdal
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

We propose a fully automated algorithm based on a deep learning framework enabling screening of a coronary computed tomography angiography (CCTA) examination for confident detection of the presence or absence of coronary artery atherosclerosis. The system starts with extracting the coronary arteries and their branches from CCTA datasets and representing them with multi-planar reformatted volumes; pre-processing and augmentation techniques are then applied to increase the robustness and generalization ability of the system. A 3-dimensional convolutional neural network (3D-CNN) is utilized to model pathological changes (e.g., atherosclerotic plaques) in coronary vessels. The system learns the discriminatory features between vessels with and without atherosclerosis. The discriminative features at the final convolutional layer are visualized with a saliency map approach to provide visual clues related to atherosclerosis likelihood and location. We have evaluated the system on a reference dataset representing247 patients with atherosclerosis and 246 patients free of atherosclerosis. With five-fold cross-validation,an Accuracy = 90.9%, Positive Predictive Value = 58.8%, Sensitivity = 68.9%, Specificity of 93.6%, and Negative Predictive Value (NPV) = 96.1% are achieved at the artery/branch level with threshold 0.5. The average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve is 0.91. The system indicates a high NPV, which may be potentially useful for assisting interpreting physicians in excluding coronary atherosclerosis in patients with acute chest pain.
ModelHub.AI: Dissemination Platform for Deep Learning Models
Authors: Ahmed Hosny, Michael Schwier, Christoph Berger, Evin P Örnek, Mehmet Turan, Phi V Tran, Leon Weninger, Fabian Isensee, Klaus H. Maier-Hein, Richard McKinley, Michael T Lu, Udo Hoffmann, Bjoern Menze, Spyridon Bakas, Andriy Fedorov, Hugo JWL Aerts
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Deep Learning

Recent advances in artificial intelligence research have led to a profusion of studies that apply deep learning to problems in image analysis and natural language processing among others. Additionally, the availability of open-source computational frameworks has lowered the barriers to implementing state-of-the-art methods across multiple domains. Albeit leading to major performance breakthroughs in some tasks, effective dissemination of deep learning algorithms remains challenging, inhibiting reproducibility and benchmarking studies, impeding further validation, and ultimately hindering their effectiveness in the cumulative scientific progress. In developing a platform for sharing research outputs, we present ModelHub.AI (www.modelhub.ai), a community-driven container-based software engine and platform for the structured dissemination of deep learning models. For contributors, the engine controls data flow throughout the inference cycle, while the contributor-facing standard template exposes model-specific functions including inference, as well as pre- and post-processing. Python and RESTful Application programming interfaces (APIs) enable users to interact with models hosted on ModelHub.AI and allows both researchers and developers to utilize models out-of-the-box. ModelHub.AI is domain-, data-, and framework-agnostic, catering to different workflows and contributors' preferences.
CONAN: Complementary Pattern Augmentation for Rare Disease Detection
Authors: Limeng Cui, Siddharth Biswal, Lucas M. Glass, Greg Lever, Jimeng Sun, Cao Xiao
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00

Rare diseases affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide but are hard to detect since they have extremely low prevalence rates (varying from 1/1,000 to 1/200,000 patients) and are massively underdiagnosed. How do we reliably detect rare diseases with such low prevalence rates? How to further leverage patients with possibly uncertain diagnosis to improve detection? In this paper, we propose a Complementary pattern Augmentation (CONAN) framework for rare disease detection. CONAN combines ideas from both adversarial training and max-margin classification. It first learns self-attentive and hierarchical embedding for patient pattern characterization. Then, we develop a complementary generative adversarial networks (GAN) model to generate candidate positive and negative samples from the uncertain patients by encouraging a max-margin between classes. In addition, CONAN has a disease detector that serves as the discriminator during the adversarial training for identifying rare diseases. We evaluated CONAN on two disease detection tasks. For low prevalence inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) detection, CONAN achieved .96 precision recall area under the curve (PR-AUC) and 50.1% relative improvement over best baseline. For rare disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) detection, CONAN achieves .22 PR-AUC with 41.3% relative improvement over the best baseline.
Intelligent Resource Scheduling for Co-located Latency-critical Services: A Multi-Model Collaborative Learning Approach
Authors: Lei Liu
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling

Latency-critical services have been widely deployed in cloud environments. For cost-efficiency, multiple services are usually co-located on a server. Thus, run-time resource scheduling becomes the pivot for QoS control in these complicated co-location cases. However, the scheduling exploration space enlarges rapidly with the increasing server resources, making the schedulers hardly provide ideal solutions quickly. More importantly, we observe that there are "resource cliffs" in the scheduling exploration space. They affect the exploration efficiency and always lead to severe QoS fluctuations. Resource cliffs cannot be easily avoided in previous schedulers. To address these problems, we propose a novel ML-based intelligent scheduler - OSML. It learns the correlation between architectural hints (e.g., IPC, cache misses, memory footprint, etc.), scheduling solutions and the QoS demands based on a data set we collected from 11 widely deployed services running on off-the-shelf servers. OSML employs multiple ML models to work collaboratively to predict QoS variations, shepherd the scheduling, and recover from QoS violations in complicated co-location cases. OSML can intelligently avoid resource cliffs during scheduling and reach an optimal solution much faster than previous approaches for co-located LC services. Experimental results show that OSML supports higher loads and meets QoS targets with lower scheduling overheads and shorter convergence time than previous studies.
Domain-Aware Dynamic Networks
Authors: Tianyuan Zhang, Bichen Wu, Xin Wang, Joseph Gonzalez, Kurt Keutzer
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, object-detection, Object Detection

Deep neural networks with more parameters and FLOPs have higher capacity and generalize better to diverse domains. But to be deployed on edge devices, the model's complexity has to be constrained due to limited compute resource. In this work, we propose a method to improve the model capacity without increasing inference-time complexity. Our method is based on an assumption of data locality: for an edge device, within a short period of time, the input data to the device are sampled from a single domain with relatively low diversity. Therefore, it is possible to utilize a specialized, low-complexity model to achieve good performance in that input domain. To leverage this, we propose Domain-aware Dynamic Network (DDN), which is a high-capacity dynamic network in which each layer contains multiple weights. During inference, based on the input domain, DDN dynamically combines those weights into one single weight that specializes in the given domain. This way, DDN can keep the inference-time complexity low but still maintain a high capacity. Experiments show that without increasing the parameters, FLOPs, and actual latency, DDN achieves up to 2.6\% higher AP50 than a static network on the BDD100K object-detection benchmark.
An Optimized and Energy-Efficient Parallel Implementation of Non-Iteratively Trained Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Julia El Zini, Yara Rizk, Mariette Awad
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, GPU, Sequential Decision Making, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Prediction

Recurrent neural networks (RNN) have been successfully applied to various sequential decision-making tasks, natural language processing applications, and time-series predictions. Such networks are usually trained through back-propagation through time (BPTT) which is prohibitively expensive, especially when the length of the time dependencies and the number of hidden neurons increase. To reduce the training time, extreme learning machines (ELMs) have been recently applied to RNN training, reaching a 99\% speedup on some applications. Due to its non-iterative nature, ELM training, when parallelized, has the potential to reach higher speedups than BPTT. In this work, we present \opt, an optimized parallel RNN training algorithm based on ELM that takes advantage of the GPU shared memory and of parallel QR factorization algorithms to efficiently reach optimal solutions. The theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithm is presented on six RNN architectures, including LSTM and GRU, and its performance is empirically tested on ten time-series prediction applications. \opt~is shown to reach up to 845 times speedup over its sequential counterpart and to require up to 20x less time to train than parallel BPTT.
AuthorGAN: Improving GAN Reproducibility using a Modular GAN Framework
Authors: Raunak Sinha, Anush Sankaran, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh
Date: 2019-11-26 00:00:00

Generative models are becoming increasingly popular in the literature, with Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) being the most successful variant, yet. With this increasing demand and popularity, it is becoming equally difficult and challenging to implement and consume GAN models. A qualitative user survey conducted across 47 practitioners show that expert level skill is required to use GAN model for a given task, despite the presence of various open source libraries. In this research, we propose a novel system called AuthorGAN, aiming to achieve true democratization of GAN authoring. A highly modularized library agnostic representation of GAN model is defined to enable interoperability of GAN architecture across different libraries such as Keras, Tensorflow, and PyTorch. An intuitive drag-and-drop based visual designer is built using node-red platform to enable custom architecture designing without the need for writing any code. Five different GAN models are implemented as a part of this framework and the performance of the different GAN models are shown using the benchmark MNIST dataset.
Machine Learning-based Signal Detection for PMH Signals in Load-modulated MIMO System
Authors: Jinle Zhu, Qiang Li, Li Hu, Hongyang Chen, Nirwan Ansari
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering

Phase Modulation on the Hypersphere (PMH) is a power efficient modulation scheme for the \textit{load-modulated} multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitters with central power amplifiers (CPA). However, it is difficult to obtain the precise channel state information (CSI), and the traditional optimal maximum likelihood (ML) detection scheme incurs high complexity which increases exponentially with the number of antennas and the number of bits carried per antenna in the PMH modulation. To detect the PMH signals without knowing the prior CSI, we first propose a signal detection scheme, termed as the hypersphere clustering scheme based on the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm with maximum likelihood detection (HEM-ML). By leveraging machine learning, the proposed detection scheme can accurately obtain information of the channel from a few of the received symbols with little resource cost and achieve comparable detection results as that of the optimal ML detector. To further reduce the computational complexity in the ML detection in HEM-ML, we also propose the second signal detection scheme, termed as the hypersphere clustering scheme based on the EM algorithm with KD-tree detection (HEM-KD). The CSI obtained from the EM algorithm is used to build a spatial KD-tree receiver codebook and the signal detection problem can be transformed into a nearest neighbor search (NNS) problem. The detection complexity of HEM-KD is significantly reduced without any detection performance loss as compared to HEM-ML. Extensive simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed detection schemes.
Non-Intrusive Electrical Appliances Monitoring and Classification using K-Nearest Neighbors
Authors: Mohammad Mahmudur Rahman Khan, Md. Abu Bakr Siddique, Shadman Sakib
Date: 2019-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring (NILM) is the method of detecting an individual device's energy signal from an aggregated energy consumption signature [1]. As existing energy meters provide very little to no information regarding the energy consumption of individual appliances apart from the aggregated power rating, the spotting of individual appliances' energy usages by NILM will not only provide consumers the feedback of appliance-specific energy usage but also lead to the changes of their consumption behavior which facilitate energy conservation. B Neenan et al. [2] have demonstrated that direct individual appliance-specific energy usage signals lead to consumers' behavioral changes which improves energy efficiency by as much as 15%. Upon disaggregation of an energy signal, the signal needs to be classified according to the appropriate appliance. Hence, the goal of this paper is to disaggregate total energy consumption data to individual appliance signature and then classify appliance-specific energy loads using a prominent supervised classification method known as K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). To perform this operation we have used a publicly accessible dataset of power signals from several houses known as the REDD dataset. Before applying KNN, data is preprocessed for each device. Then KNN is applied to check whether their energy consumption signature is separable or not. KNN is applied with K=5.
Multi-PCA based Fault Detection Model Combined with Prior knowledge of HVAC
Authors: Ziming Liu, Xiaobo Liu
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection

The traditional PCA fault detection methods completely depend on the training data. The prior knowledge such as the physical principle of the system has not been taken into account. In this paper, we propose a new multi-PCA fault detection model combined with prior knowledge. This new model can adapt to the variable operating conditions of the central air conditioning system, and it can detect small deviation faults of sensors and significantly shorten the time delay of detecting drift faults. We also conducted enough ablation experiments to demonstrate that our model is more robust and efficient.
Machine-learning non-stationary noise out of gravitational wave detectors
Authors: Gabriele Vajente, Yiwen Huang, Maximiliano Isi, Jenne C. Driggers, Jeffrey S. Kissel, Marek J. Szczepanczyk, Salvatore Vitale
Date: 2019-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, parameter estimation

Signal extraction out of background noise is a common challenge in high precision physics experiments, where the measurement output is often a continuous data stream. To improve the signal to noise ratio of the detection, witness sensors are often used to independently measure background noises and subtract them from the main signal. If the noise coupling is linear and stationary, optimal techniques already exist and are routinely implemented in many experiments. However, when the noise coupling is non-stationary, linear techniques often fail or are sub-optimal. Inspired by the properties of the background noise in gravitational wave detectors, this work develops a novel algorithm to efficiently characterize and remove non-stationary noise couplings, provided there exist witnesses of the noise source and of the modulation. In this work, the algorithm is described in its most general formulation, and its efficiency is demonstrated with examples from the data of the Advanced LIGO gravitational wave observatory, where we could obtain an improvement of the detector gravitational wave reach without introducing any bias on the source parameter estimation.