pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BlockGAN: Learning 3D Object-aware Scene Representations from Unlabelled Images
Authors: Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Christian Richardt, Long Mai, Yong-Liang Yang, Niloy Mitra
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: 3D geometry, Object, Representation Learning

We present BlockGAN, an image generative model that learns object-aware 3D scene representations directly from unlabelled 2D images. Current work on scene representation learning either ignores scene background or treats the whole scene as one object. Meanwhile, work that considers scene compositionality treats scene objects only as image patches or 2D layers with alpha maps. Inspired by the computer graphics pipeline, we design BlockGAN to learn to first generate 3D features of background and foreground objects, then combine them into 3D features for the wholes cene, and finally render them into realistic images. This allows BlockGAN to reason over occlusion and interaction between objects' appearance, such as shadow and lighting, and provides control over each object's 3D pose and identity, while maintaining image realism. BlockGAN is trained end-to-end, using only unlabelled single images, without the need for 3D geometry, pose labels, object masks, or multiple views of the same scene. Our experiments show that using explicit 3D features to represent objects allows BlockGAN to learn disentangled representations both in terms of objects (foreground and background) and their properties (pose and identity).
Comparing recurrent and convolutional neural networks for predicting wave propagation
Authors: Stathi Fotiadis, Eduardo Pignatelli, Mario Lino Valencia, Chris Cantwell, Amos Storkey, Anil A. Bharath
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR Workshop DeepDiffEq 2019 12

Dynamical systems can be modelled by partial differential equations and numerical computations are used everywhere in science and engineering. In this work, we investigate the performance of recurrent and convolutional deep neural network architectures to predict the surface waves. The system is governed by the Saint-Venant equations. We improve on the long-term prediction over previous methods while keeping the inference time at a fraction of numerical simulations. We also show that convolutional networks perform at least as well as recurrent networks in this task. Finally, we assess the generalisation capability of each network by extrapolating in longer time-frames and in different physical settings.
Learning Intermediate Features of Object Affordances with a Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Aria Yuan Wang, Michael J. Tarr
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00

Our ability to interact with the world around us relies on being able to infer what actions objects afford -- often referred to as affordances. The neural mechanisms of object-action associations are realized in the visuomotor pathway where information about both visual properties and actions is integrated into common representations. However, explicating these mechanisms is particularly challenging in the case of affordances because there is hardly any one-to-one mapping between visual features and inferred actions. To better understand the nature of affordances, we trained a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) to recognize affordances from images and to learn the underlying features or the dimensionality of affordances. Such features form an underlying compositional structure for the general representation of affordances which can then be tested against human neural data. We view this representational analysis as the first step towards a more formal account of how humans perceive and interact with the environment.
Affinity and Diversity: Quantifying Mechanisms of Data Augmentation
Authors: Raphael Gontijo-Lopes, Sylvia J. Smullin, Ekin D. Cubuk, Ethan Dyer
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity

Though data augmentation has become a standard component of deep neural network training, the underlying mechanism behind the effectiveness of these techniques remains poorly understood. In practice, augmentation policies are often chosen using heuristics of either distribution shift or augmentation diversity. Inspired by these, we seek to quantify how data augmentation improves model generalization. To this end, we introduce interpretable and easy-to-compute measures: Affinity and Diversity. We find that augmentation performance is predicted not by either of these alone but by jointly optimizing the two.
Differential Privacy for Eye Tracking with Temporal Correlations
Authors: Efe Bozkir, Onur Günlü, Wolfgang Fuhl, Rafael F. Schaefer, Enkelejda Kasneci
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

New generation head-mounted displays, such as VR and AR glasses, are coming into the market with already integrated eye tracking and are expected to enable novel ways of human-computer interaction in numerous applications. However, since eye movement properties contain biometric information, privacy concerns have to be handled properly. Privacy-preservation techniques such as differential privacy mechanisms have recently been applied to eye movement data obtained from such displays. Standard differential privacy mechanisms; however, are vulnerable due to temporal correlations between the eye movement observations. In this work, we propose a novel transform-coding based differential privacy mechanism to further adapt it to the statistics of eye movement feature data and compare various low-complexity methods. We extend the Fourier perturbation algorithm, which is a differential privacy mechanism, and correct a scaling mistake in its proof. Furthermore, we illustrate significant reductions in sample correlations in addition to query sensitivities, which provide the best utility-privacy trade-off in the eye tracking literature. Our results provide significantly high privacy without any essential loss in classification accuracies while hiding personal identifiers.
Deep Multi-Facial Patches Aggregation Network For Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Ahmed Rachid Hazourli, Amine Djeghri, Hanan Salam, Alice Othmani
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, Facial expression generation, Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

In this paper, we propose an approach for Facial Expressions Recognition (FER) based on a deep multi-facial patches aggregation network. Deep features are learned from facial patches using deep sub-networks and aggregated within one deep architecture for expression classification . Several problems may affect the performance of deep-learning based FER approaches, in particular, the small size of existing FER datasets which might not be sufficient to train large deep learning networks. Moreover, it is extremely time-consuming to collect and annotate a large number of facial images. To account for this, we propose two data augmentation techniques for facial expression generation to expand FER labeled training datasets. We evaluate the proposed framework on three FER datasets. Results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-art FER deep learning approaches performance when the model is trained and tested on images from the same dataset. Moreover, the proposed data augmentation techniques improve the expression recognition rate, and thus can be a solution for training deep learning FER models using small datasets. The accuracy degrades significantly when testing for dataset bias.
Are Gabor Kernels Optimal for Iris Recognition?
Authors: Aidan Boyd, Adam Czajka, Kevin Bowyer
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Iris Recognition

Gabor kernels are widely accepted as dominant filters for iris recognition. In this work we investigate, given the current interest in neural networks, if Gabor kernels are the only family of functions performing best in iris recognition, or if better filters can be learned directly from iris data. We use (on purpose) a single-layer convolutional neural network as it mimics an iris code-based algorithm. We learn two sets of data-driven kernels; one starting from randomly initialized weights and the other from open-source set of Gabor kernels. Through experimentation, we show that the network does not converge on Gabor kernels, instead converging on a mix of edge detectors, blob detectors and simple waves. In our experiments carried out with three subject-disjoint datasets we found that the performance of these learned kernels is comparable to the open-source Gabor kernels. These lead us to two conclusions: (a) a family of functions offering optimal performance in iris recognition is wider than Gabor kernels, and (b) we probably hit the maximum performance for an iris coding algorithm that uses a single convolutional layer, yet with multiple filters. Released with this work is a framework to learn data-driven kernels that can be easily transplanted into open-source iris recognition software (for instance, OSIRIS -- Open Source IRIS).
Uncertainty Principle for Communication Compression in Distributed and Federated Learning and the Search for an Optimal Compressor
Authors: Mher Safaryan, Egor Shulgin, Peter Richtárik
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Quantization

In order to mitigate the high communication cost in distributed and federated learning, various vector compression schemes, such as quantization, sparsification and dithering, have become very popular. In designing a compression method, one aims to communicate as few bits as possible, which minimizes the cost per communication round, while at the same time attempting to impart as little distortion (variance) to the communicated messages as possible, which minimizes the adverse effect of the compression on the overall number of communication rounds. However, intuitively, these two goals are fundamentally in conflict: the more compression we allow, the more distorted the messages become. We formalize this intuition and prove an {\em uncertainty principle} for randomized compression operators, thus quantifying this limitation mathematically, and {\em effectively providing asymptotically tight lower bounds on what might be achievable with communication compression}. Motivated by these developments, we call for the search for the optimal compression operator. In an attempt to take a first step in this direction, we consider an unbiased compression method inspired by the Kashin representation of vectors, which we call {\em Kashin compression (KC)}. In contrast to all previously proposed compression mechanisms, KC enjoys a {\em dimension independent} variance bound for which we derive an explicit formula even in the regime when only a few bits need to be communicate per each vector entry.
The DIDI dataset: Digital Ink Diagram data
Authors: Philippe Gervais, Thomas Deselaers, Emre Aksan, Otmar Hilliges
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00

We are releasing a dataset of diagram drawings with dynamic drawing information. The dataset aims to foster research in interactive graphical symbolic understanding. The dataset was obtained using a prompted data collection effort.
Stochastic Runge-Kutta methods and adaptive SGD-G2 stochastic gradient descent
Authors: Imen Ayadi, Gabriel Turinici
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00

The minimization of the loss function is of paramount importance in deep neural networks. On the other hand, many popular optimization algorithms have been shown to correspond to some evolution equation of gradient flow type. Inspired by the numerical schemes used for general evolution equations we introduce a second order stochastic Runge Kutta method and show that it yields a consistent procedure for the minimization of the loss function. In addition it can be coupled, in an adaptive framework, with a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) to adjust automatically the learning rate of the SGD, without the need of any additional information on the Hessian of the loss functional. The adaptive SGD, called SGD-G2, is successfully tested on standard datasets.
Kernel and Rich Regimes in Overparametrized Models
Authors: Blake Woodworth, Suriya Gunasekar, Jason D. Lee, Edward Moroshko, Pedro Savarese, Itay Golan, Daniel Soudry, Nathan Srebro
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00

A recent line of work studies overparametrized neural networks in the "kernel regime," i.e. when the network behaves during training as a kernelized linear predictor, and thus training with gradient descent has the effect of finding the minimum RKHS norm solution. This stands in contrast to other studies which demonstrate how gradient descent on overparametrized multilayer networks can induce rich implicit biases that are not RKHS norms. Building on an observation by Chizat and Bach, we show how the scale of the initialization controls the transition between the "kernel" (aka lazy) and "rich" (aka active) regimes and affects generalization properties in multilayer homogeneous models. We also highlight an interesting role for the width of a model in the case that the predictor is not identically zero at initialization. We provide a complete and detailed analysis for a family of simple depth-$D$ models that already exhibit an interesting and meaningful transition between the kernel and rich regimes, and we also demonstrate this transition empirically for more complex matrix factorization models and multilayer non-linear networks.
A Model-Based, Decision-Theoretic Perspective on Automated Cyber Response
Authors: Lashon B. Booker, Scott A. Musman
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Cyber-attacks can occur at machine speeds that are far too fast for human-in-the-loop (or sometimes on-the-loop) decision making to be a viable option. Although human inputs are still important, a defensive Artificial Intelligence (AI) system must have considerable autonomy in these circumstances. When the AI system is model-based, its behavior responses can be aligned with risk-aware cost/benefit tradeoffs that are defined by user-supplied preferences that capture the key aspects of how human operators understand the system, the adversary and the mission. This paper describes an approach to automated cyber response that is designed along these lines. We combine a simulation of the system to be defended with an anytime online planner to solve cyber defense problems characterized as partially observable Markov decision problems (POMDPs).
A Convolutional Neural Network into graph space
Authors: Chloé Martineau, Romain Raveaux, Donatello Conte, Gilles Venturini
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), in a few decades, have outperformed the existing state of the art methods in classification context. However, in the way they were formalised, CNNs are bound to operate on euclidean spaces. Indeed, convolution is a signal operation that are defined on euclidean spaces. This has restricted deep learning main use to euclidean-defined data such as sound or image. And yet, numerous computer application fields (among which network analysis, computational social science, chemo-informatics or computer graphics) induce non-euclideanly defined data such as graphs, networks or manifolds. In this paper we propose a new convolution neural network architecture, defined directly into graph space. Convolution and pooling operators are defined in graph domain. We show its usability in a back-propagation context. Experimental results show that our model performance is at state of the art level on simple tasks. It shows robustness with respect to graph domain changes and improvement with respect to other euclidean and non-euclidean convolutional architectures.
MODMA dataset: a Multi-modal Open Dataset for Mental-disorder Analysis
Authors: Hanshu Cai, Yiwen Gao, Shuting Sun, Na Li, Fuze Tian, Han Xiao, Jianxiu Li, Zhengwu Yang, Xiaowei Li, Qinglin Zhao, Zhenyu Liu, Zhijun Yao, Minqiang Yang, Hong Peng, Jing Zhu, Xiaowei Zhang, Guoping Gao, Fang Zheng, Rui Li, Zhihua Guo, Rong Ma, Jing Yang, Lan Zhang, Xiping Hu, Yumin Li, Bin Hu
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

According to the World Health Organization, the number of mental disorder patients, especially depression patients, has grown rapidly and become a leading contributor to the global burden of disease. However, the present common practice of depression diagnosis is based on interviews and clinical scales carried out by doctors, which is not only labor-consuming but also time-consuming. One important reason is due to the lack of physiological indicators for mental disorders. With the rising of tools such as data mining and artificial intelligence, using physiological data to explore new possible physiological indicators of mental disorder and creating new applications for mental disorder diagnosis has become a new research hot topic. However, good quality physiological data for mental disorder patients are hard to acquire. We present a multi-modal open dataset for mental-disorder analysis. The dataset includes EEG and audio data from clinically depressed patients and matching normal controls. All our patients were carefully diagnosed and selected by professional psychiatrists in hospitals. The EEG dataset includes not only data collected using traditional 128-electrodes mounted elastic cap, but also a novel wearable 3-electrode EEG collector for pervasive applications. The 128-electrodes EEG signals of 53 subjects were recorded as both in resting state and under stimulation; the 3-electrode EEG signals of 55 subjects were recorded in resting state; the audio data of 52 subjects were recorded during interviewing, reading, and picture description. We encourage other researchers in the field to use it for testing their methods of mental-disorder analysis.
Domain Adaptive Adversarial Learning Based on Physics Model Feedback for Underwater Image Enhancement
Authors: Yuan Zhou, Kangming Yan
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Enhancement

Owing to refraction, absorption, and scattering of light by suspended particles in water, raw underwater images suffer from low contrast, blurred details, and color distortion. These characteristics can significantly interfere with the visibility of underwater images and the result of visual tasks, such as segmentation and tracking. To address this problem, we propose a new robust adversarial learning framework via physics model based feedback control and domain adaptation mechanism for enhancing underwater images to get realistic results. A new method for simulating underwater-like training dataset from RGB-D data by underwater image formation model is proposed. Upon the synthetic dataset, a novel enhancement framework, which introduces a domain adaptive mechanism as well as a physics model constraint feedback control, is trained to enhance the underwater scenes. Final enhanced results on synthetic and real underwater images demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, which outperforms nondeep and deep learning methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Furthermore, we perform an ablation study to show the contributions of each component we proposed.
Efficient Trainable Front-Ends for Neural Speech Enhancement
Authors: Jonah Casebeer, Umut Isik, Shrikant Venkataramani, Arvindh Krishnaswamy
Date: 2020-02-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Many neural speech enhancement and source separation systems operate in the time-frequency domain. Such models often benefit from making their Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) front-ends trainable. In current literature, these are implemented as large Discrete Fourier Transform matrices; which are prohibitively inefficient for low-compute systems. We present an efficient, trainable front-end based on the butterfly mechanism to compute the Fast Fourier Transform, and show its accuracy and efficiency benefits for low-compute neural speech enhancement models. We also explore the effects of making the STFT window trainable.
SummaryNet: A Multi-Stage Deep Learning Model for Automatic Video Summarisation
Authors: Ziyad Jappie, David Torpey, Turgay Celik
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, regression

Video summarisation can be posed as the task of extracting important parts of a video in order to create an informative summary of what occurred in the video. In this paper we introduce SummaryNet as a supervised learning framework for automated video summarisation. SummaryNet employs a two-stream convolutional network to learn spatial (appearance) and temporal (motion) representations. It utilizes an encoder-decoder model to extract the most salient features from the learned video representations. Lastly, it uses a sigmoid regression network with bidirectional long short-term memory cells to predict the probability of a frame being a summary frame. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method achieves comparable or significantly better results than the state-of-the-art video summarisation methods.
Human Action Recognition using Local Two-Stream Convolution Neural Network Features and Support Vector Machines
Authors: David Torpey, Turgay Celik
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition, Optical Flow Estimation, Temporal Action Localization

This paper proposes a simple yet effective method for human action recognition in video. The proposed method separately extracts local appearance and motion features using state-of-the-art three-dimensional convolutional neural networks from sampled snippets of a video. These local features are then concatenated to form global representations which are then used to train a linear SVM to perform the action classification using full context of the video, as partial context as used in previous works. The videos undergo two simple proposed preprocessing techniques, optical flow scaling and crop filling. We perform an extensive evaluation on three common benchmark dataset to empirically show the benefit of the SVM, and the two preprocessing steps.
Fast Implementation of Morphological Filtering Using ARM NEON Extension
Authors: Elena Limonova, Arseny Terekhin, Dmitry Nikolaev, Vladimir Arlazarov
Date: 2020-02-19 00:00:00

In this paper we consider speedup potential of morphological image filtering on ARM processors. Morphological operations are widely used in image analysis and recognition and their speedup in some cases can significantly reduce overall execution time of recognition. More specifically, we propose fast implementation of erosion and dilation using ARM SIMD extension NEON. These operations with the rectangular structuring element are separable. They were implemented using the advantages of separability as sequential horizontal and vertical passes. Each pass was implemented using van Herk/Gil-Werman algorithm for large windows and low-constant linear complexity algorithm for small windows. Final implementation was improved with SIMD and used a combination of these methods. We also considered fast transpose implementation of 8x8 and 16x16 matrices using ARM NEON to get additional computational gain for morphological operations. Experiments showed 3 times efficiency increase for final implementation of erosion and dilation compared to van Herk/Gil-Werman algorithm without SIMD, 5.7 times speedup for 8x8 matrix transpose and 12 times speedup for 16x16 matrix transpose compared to transpose without SIMD.