pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Automated Discovery of Business Process Simulation Models from Event Logs
Authors: Manuel Camargo, Marlon Dumas, Oscar González-Rojas
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00

Business process simulation is a versatile technique to estimate the performance of a process under multiple scenarios. This, in turn, allows analysts to compare alternative options to improve a business process. A common roadblock for business process simulation is that constructing accurate simulation models is cumbersome and error-prone. Modern information systems store detailed execution logs of the business processes they support. Previous work has shown that these logs can be used to discover simulation models. However, existing methods for log-based discovery of simulation models do not seek to optimize the accuracy of the resulting models. Instead they leave it to the user to manually tune the simulation model to achieve the desired level of accuracy. This article presents an accuracy-optimized method to discover business process simulation models from execution logs. The method decomposes the problem into a series of steps with associated configuration parameters. A hyper-parameter optimization method is used to search through the space of possible configurations so as to maximize the similarity between the behavior of the simulation model and the behavior observed in the log. The method has been implemented as a tool and evaluated using logs from different domains.
Capsule and convolutional neural network-based SAR ship classification in Sentinel-1 data
Authors: Leonardo De Laurentiis, Andrea Pomente, Fabio Del Frate, Giovanni Schiavon
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) constitutes a fundamental asset for wide-areas monitoring with high-resolution requirements. The first SAR sensors have given rise to coarse coastal and maritime monitoring applications, including oil spill, ship and ice floes detection. With the upgrade to very high-resolution sensors in the recent years, with relatively new SAR missions such as Sentinel-1, a great deal of data providing a stronger information content has been released, enabling more refined studies on general targets features and thus permitting complex classifications, as for ship classification, which has become increasingly relevant given the growing need for coastal surveillance in commercial and military segments. In the last decade, several works focused on this topic have been presented, generally based on radiometric features processing; furthermore, in the very recent years a significant amount of research works have focused on emerging deep learning techniques, in particular on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). Recently Capsule Neural Networks (CapsNets) have been presented, demonstrating a notable improvement in capturing the properties of given entities, improving the use of spatial informations, in particular of spatial dependence between features, a severely lacking feature in CNNs. In fact, CNNs pooling operations have been criticized for losing spatial relations, thus special capsules, along with a new iterative routing-by-agreement mechanism, have been proposed. In this work a comparison between Capsule and CNNs potential in the ship classification application domain is shown, by leveraging the OpenSARShip, a SAR Sentinel-1 ship chips dataset; in particular, a performance comparison between capsule and various convolutional architectures is built, demonstrating better performances of CapsNet in classifying ships within a small dataset.
Robust Hierarchical-Optimization RLS Against Sparse Outliers
Authors: Konstantinos Slavakis, Sinjini Banerjee
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

This paper fortifies the recently introduced hierarchical-optimization recursive least squares (HO-RLS) against outliers which contaminate infrequently linear-regression models. Outliers are modeled as nuisance variables and are estimated together with the linear filter/system variables via a sparsity-inducing (non-)convexly regularized least-squares task. The proposed outlier-robust HO-RLS builds on steepest-descent directions with a constant step size (learning rate), needs no matrix inversion (lemma), accommodates colored nominal noise of known correlation matrix, exhibits small computational footprint, and offers theoretical guarantees, in a probabilistic sense, for the convergence of the system estimates to the solutions of a hierarchical-optimization problem: Minimize a convex loss, which models a-priori knowledge about the unknown system, over the minimizers of the classical ensemble LS loss. Extensive numerical tests on synthetically generated data in both stationary and non-stationary scenarios showcase notable improvements of the proposed scheme over state-of-the-art techniques.
Network Randomization: A Simple Technique for Generalization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Kimin Lee, Kibok Lee, Jinwoo Shin, Honglak Lee
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents often fail to generalize to unseen environments (yet semantically similar to trained agents), particularly when they are trained on high-dimensional state spaces, such as images. In this paper, we propose a simple technique to improve a generalization ability of deep RL agents by introducing a randomized (convolutional) neural network that randomly perturbs input observations. It enables trained agents to adapt to new domains by learning robust features invariant across varied and randomized environments. Furthermore, we consider an inference method based on the Monte Carlo approximation to reduce the variance induced by this randomization. We demonstrate the superiority of our method across 2D CoinRun, 3D DeepMind Lab exploration and 3D robotics control tasks: it significantly outperforms various regularization and data augmentation methods for the same purpose.
FuseMODNet: Real-Time Camera and LiDAR based Moving Object Detection for robust low-light Autonomous Driving
Authors: Hazem Rashed, Mohamed Ramzy, Victor Vaquero, Ahmad El Sallab, Ganesh Sistu, Senthil Yogamani
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, GPU, Moving Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Flow Estimation

Moving object detection is a critical task for autonomous vehicles. As dynamic objects represent higher collision risk than static ones, our own ego-trajectories have to be planned attending to the future states of the moving elements of the scene. Motion can be perceived using temporal information such as optical flow. Conventional optical flow computation is based on camera sensors only, which makes it prone to failure in conditions with low illumination. On the other hand, LiDAR sensors are independent of illumination, as they measure the time-of-flight of their own emitted lasers. In this work, we propose a robust and real-time CNN architecture for Moving Object Detection (MOD) under low-light conditions by capturing motion information from both camera and LiDAR sensors. We demonstrate the impact of our algorithm on KITTI dataset where we simulate a low-light environment creating a novel dataset "Dark KITTI". We obtain a 10.1% relative improvement on Dark-KITTI, and a 4.25% improvement on standard KITTI relative to our baselines. The proposed algorithm runs at 18 fps on a standard desktop GPU using $256\times1224$ resolution images.
Model-based Interactive Semantic Parsing: A Unified Framework and A Text-to-SQL Case Study
Authors: Ziyu Yao, Yu Su, Huan Sun, Wen-tau Yih
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Semantic Parsing, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

As a promising paradigm, interactive semantic parsing has shown to improve both semantic parsing accuracy and user confidence in the results. In this paper, we propose a new, unified formulation of the interactive semantic parsing problem, where the goal is to design a model-based intelligent agent. The agent maintains its own state as the current predicted semantic parse, decides whether and where human intervention is needed, and generates a clarification question in natural language. A key part of the agent is a world model: it takes a percept (either an initial question or subsequent feedback from the user) and transitions to a new state. We then propose a simple yet remarkably effective instantiation of our framework, demonstrated on two text-to-SQL datasets (WikiSQL and Spider) with different state-of-the-art base semantic parsers. Compared to an existing interactive semantic parsing approach that treats the base parser as a black box, our approach solicits less user feedback but yields higher run-time accuracy.
The Case for Evaluating Causal Models Using Interventional Measures and Empirical Data
Authors: Amanda Gentzel, Dan Garant, David Jensen
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Causal Inference, Fairness, Knowledge Base Construction

Causal inference is central to many areas of artificial intelligence, including complex reasoning, planning, knowledge-base construction, robotics, explanation, and fairness. An active community of researchers develops and enhances algorithms that learn causal models from data, and this work has produced a series of impressive technical advances. However, evaluation techniques for causal modeling algorithms have remained somewhat primitive, limiting what we can learn from experimental studies of algorithm performance, constraining the types of algorithms and model representations that researchers consider, and creating a gap between theory and practice. We argue for more frequent use of evaluation techniques that examine interventional measures rather than structural or observational measures, and that evaluate those measures on empirical data rather than synthetic data. We survey the current practice in evaluation and show that the techniques we recommend are rarely used in practice. We show that such techniques are feasible and that data sets are available to conduct such evaluations. We also show that these techniques produce substantially different results than using structural measures and synthetic data.
ORCCA: Optimal Randomized Canonical Correlation Analysis
Authors: Yinsong Wang, Shahin Shahrampour
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, scoring rule

Random features approach has been widely used for kernel approximation in large-scale machine learning. A number of recent studies have explored data-dependent sampling of features, modifying the stochastic oracle from which random features are sampled. While proposed techniques in this realm improve the approximation, their suitability is often verified on a single learning task. In this paper, we propose a task-specific scoring rule for selecting random features, which can be employed for different applications with some adjustments. We restrict our attention to Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA), and we provide a novel, principled guide for finding the score function maximizing the canonical correlations. We prove that this method, called ORCCA, can outperform (in expectation) the corresponding Kernel CCA with a default kernel. Numerical experiments verify that ORCCA is significantly superior than other approximation techniques in the CCA task.
Classification of Resting-State fMRI using Evolutionary Algorithms: Towards a Brain Imaging Biomarker for Parkinson's Disease
Authors: Amir Dehsarvi, Stephen L. Smith
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, Functional Connectivity, General Classification, Management, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Accurate early diagnosis and monitoring of neurodegenerative conditions is essential for effective disease management and delivery of medication and treatment. This research develops automatic methods for detecting brain imaging preclinical biomarkers for Parkinson's disease (PD) by considering the novel application of evolutionary algorithms. A fundamental novel element of this work is the use of evolutionary algorithms to both map and predict the functional connectivity in patients using resting state functional MRI data taken from the PPMI to identify PD progression biomarkers. Specifically, Cartesian Genetic Programming was used to classify DCM data as well as time-series data. The findings were validated using two other commonly used classification methods (Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines) and by employing k-fold cross-validation. Across DCM and time-series analyses, findings revealed maximum accuracies of 75.21% for early stage (prodromal) PD patients versus healthy controls, 85.87% for PD patients versus prodromal PD patients, and 92.09% for PD patients versus healthy controls. Prodromal PD patients were classified from healthy controls with high accuracy - this is notable and represents the key finding of this research since current methods of diagnosing prodromal PD have both low reliability and low accuracy. Furthermore, Cartesian Genetic Programming provided comparable performance accuracy relative to ANN and SVM. Evolutionary algorithms enable us to decode the classifier in terms of understanding the data inputs that are used, more easily than in ANN and SVM. Hence, these findings underscore the relevance of both DCM analyses for classification and CGP as a novel classification tool for brain imaging data with medical implications for disease diagnosis, particularly in early and asymptomatic stages.
TuNet: End-to-end Hierarchical Brain Tumor Segmentation using Cascaded Networks
Authors: Minh H. Vu, Tufve Nyholm, Tommy Löfstedt
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Glioma is one of the most common types of brain tumors; it arises in the glial cells in the human brain and in the spinal cord. In addition to having a high mortality rate, glioma treatment is also very expensive. Hence, automatic and accurate segmentation and measurement from the early stages are critical in order to prolong the survival rates of the patients and to reduce the costs of the treatment. In the present work, we propose a novel end-to-end cascaded network for semantic segmentation that utilizes the hierarchical structure of the tumor sub-regions with ResNet-like blocks and Squeeze-and-Excitation modules after each convolution and concatenation block. By utilizing cross-validation, an average ensemble technique, and a simple post-processing technique, we obtained dice scores of 88.06, 80.84, and 80.29, and Hausdorff Distances (95th percentile) of 6.10, 5.17, and 2.21 for the whole tumor, tumor core, and enhancing tumor, respectively, on the online test set.
AffWild Net and Aff-Wild Database
Authors: Alvertos Benroumpi, Dimitrios Kollias
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00

Emotions recognition is the task of recognizing people's emotions. Usually it is achieved by analyzing expression of peoples faces. There are two ways for representing emotions: The categorical approach and the dimensional approach by using valence and arousal values. Valence shows how negative or positive an emotion is and arousal shows how much it is activated. Recent deep learning models, that have to do with emotions recognition, are using the second approach, valence and arousal. Moreover, a more interesting concept, which is useful in real life is the "in the wild" emotions recognition. "In the wild" means that the images analyzed for the recognition task, come from from real life sources(online videos, online photos, etc.) and not from staged experiments. So, they introduce unpredictable situations in the images, that have to be modeled. The purpose of this project is to study the previous work that was done for the "in the wild" emotions recognition concept, design a new dataset which has as a standard the "Aff-wild" database, implement new deep learning models and evaluate the results. First, already existing databases and deep learning models are presented. Then, inspired by them a new database is created which includes 507.208 frames in total from 106 videos, which were gathered from online sources. Then, the data are tested in a CNN model based on CNN-M architecture, in order to be sure about their usability. Next, the main model of this project is implemented. That is a Regression GAN which can execute unsupervised and supervised learning at the same time. More specifically, it keeps the main functionality of GANs, which is to produce fake images that look as good as the real ones, while it can also predict valence and arousal values for both real and fake images. Finally, the database created earlier is applied to this model and the results are presented and evaluated.
Extreme Few-view CT Reconstruction using Deep Inference
Authors: Hyojin Kim, Rushil Anirudh, K. Aditya Mohan, Kyle Champley
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop Deep_Invers 2019 12
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), CT Reconstruction

Reconstruction of few-view x-ray Computed Tomography (CT) data is a highly ill-posed problem. It is often used in applications that require low radiation dose in clinical CT, rapid industrial scanning, or fixed-gantry CT. Existing analytic or iterative algorithms generally produce poorly reconstructed images, severely deteriorated by artifacts and noise, especially when the number of x-ray projections is considerably low. This paper presents a deep network-driven approach to address extreme few-view CT by incorporating convolutional neural network-based inference into state-of-the-art iterative reconstruction. The proposed method interprets few-view sinogram data using attention-based deep networks to infer the reconstructed image. The predicted image is then used as prior knowledge in the iterative algorithm for final reconstruction. We demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed approach by performing reconstruction experiments on a chest CT dataset.
Rotation-invariant shipwreck recognition with forward-looking sonar
Authors: Gustavo Neves, Rômulo Cerqueira, Jan Albiez, Luciano Oliveira
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

Under the sea, visible spectrum cameras have limited sensing capacity, being able to detect objects only in clear water, but in a constrained range. Considering any sea water condition, sonars are more suitable to support autonomous underwater vehicles' navigation, even in turbid condition. Despite that sonar suitability, this type of sensor does not provide high-density information, such as optical sensors, making the process of object recognition to be more complex. To deal with that problem, we propose a novel trainable method to detect and recognize (identify) specific target objects under the sea with a forward-looking sonar. Our method has a preprocessing step in charge of strongly reducing the sensor noise and seabed background. To represent the object, our proposed method uses histogram of orientation gradient (HOG) as feature extractor. HOG ultimately feed a multi-scale oriented detector combined with a support vector machine to recognize specific trained objects in a rotation-invariant way. Performance assessment demonstrated promising results, favoring the method to be applied in underwater remote sensing.
Deep Learning Based Detection and Correction of Cardiac MR Motion Artefacts During Reconstruction for High-Quality Segmentation
Authors: Ilkay Oksuz, James R. Clough, Bram Ruijsink, Esther Puyol Anton, Aurelien Bustin, Gastao Cruz, Claudia Prieto, Andrew P. King, Julia A. Schnabel
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Segmenting anatomical structures in medical images has been successfully addressed with deep learning methods for a range of applications. However, this success is heavily dependent on the quality of the image that is being segmented. A commonly neglected point in the medical image analysis community is the vast amount of clinical images that have severe image artefacts due to organ motion, movement of the patient and/or image acquisition related issues. In this paper, we discuss the implications of image motion artefacts on cardiac MR segmentation and compare a variety of approaches for jointly correcting for artefacts and segmenting the cardiac cavity. The method is based on our recently developed joint artefact detection and reconstruction method, which reconstructs high quality MR images from k-space using a joint loss function and essentially converts the artefact correction task to an under-sampled image reconstruction task by enforcing a data consistency term. In this paper, we propose to use a segmentation network coupled with this in an end-to-end framework. Our training optimises three different tasks: 1) image artefact detection, 2) artefact correction and 3) image segmentation. We train the reconstruction network to automatically correct for motion-related artefacts using synthetically corrupted cardiac MR k-space data and uncorrected reconstructed images. Using a test set of 500 2D+time cine MR acquisitions from the UK Biobank data set, we achieve demonstrably good image quality and high segmentation accuracy in the presence of synthetic motion artefacts. We showcase better performance compared to various image correction architectures.
Reliable and Low-Complexity MIMO Detector Selection using Neural Network
Authors: Shailesh Chaudhari, HyukJoon Kwon, Kee-Bong Song
Date: 2019-10-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose to dynamically select a MIMO detector using neural network for each resource element (RE) in the transport block of 5G NR/LTE communication system. The objective is to minimize the computational complexity of MIMO detection while keeping the transport block error rate (BLER) close to the BLER when dimension-reduced maximum-likelihood (DR-ML) detection is used. A detector selection problem is formulated to achieve this objective. However, since the problem is high dimensional and NP-hard, we first decompose the problem into smaller problems and train a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network to obtain the solution. The MLP network is trained to select a low-complexity, yet reliable, detector using instantaneous channel condition in the RE. We first propose a method to generate a labeled dataset to select a low-complexity detector. Then, the MLP is trained twice using quasi-Newton method to select a reliable detector for each RE. The performance of online detector selection is evaluated in 5G NR link level simulator in terms of BLER and the complexity is quantified in terms of the number of Euclidean distance (ED) computations and the number of real additions and multiplication. Results show that the computational complexity in the MIMO detector can be reduced by ~10X using the proposed method.