pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Conditional Finite Mixtures of Poisson Distributions for Context-Dependent Neural Correlations
Authors: Sacha Sokoloski, Ruben Coen-Cagli
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00

Parallel recordings of neural spike counts have revealed the existence of context-dependent noise correlations in neural populations. Theories of population coding have also shown that such correlations can impact the information encoded by neural populations about external stimuli. Although studies have shown that these correlations often have a low-dimensional structure, it has proven difficult to capture this structure in a model that is compatible with theories of rate coding in correlated populations. To address this difficulty we develop a novel model based on conditional finite mixtures of independent Poisson distributions. The model can be conditioned on context variables (e.g. stimuli or task variables), and the number of mixture components in the model can be cross-validated to estimate the dimensionality of the target correlations. We derive an expectation-maximization algorithm to efficiently fit the model to realistic amounts of data from large neural populations. We then demonstrate that the model successfully captures stimulus-dependent correlations in the responses of macaque V1 neurons to oriented gratings. Our model incorporates arbitrary nonlinear context-dependence, and can thus be applied to improve predictions of neural activity based on deep neural networks.
Optimize TSK Fuzzy Systems for Classification Problems: Mini-Batch Gradient Descent with Uniform Regularization and Batch Normalization
Authors: Yuqi Cui, Jian Huang, Dongrui Wu
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Interpretable Machine Learning

Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) fuzzy systems are flexible and interpretable machine learning models; however, they may not be easily optimized when the data size is large, and/or the data dimensionality is high. This paper proposes a mini-batch gradient descent (MBGD) based algorithm to efficiently and effectively train TSK fuzzy classifiers. It integrates two novel techniques: 1) uniform regularization (UR), which forces the rules to have similar average contributions to the output, and hence to increase the generalization performance of the TSK classifier; and, 2) batch normalization (BN), which extends BN from deep neural networks to TSK fuzzy classifiers to expedite the convergence and improve the generalization performance. Experiments on 12 UCI datasets from various application domains, with varying size and dimensionality, demonstrated that UR and BN are effective individually, and integrating them can further improve the classification performance.
Black-box Adversarial ML Attack on Modulation Classification
Authors: Muhammad Usama, Junaid Qadir, Ala Al-Fuqaha
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Classification, General Classification

Recently, many deep neural networks (DNN) based modulation classification schemes have been proposed in the literature. We have evaluated the robustness of two famous such modulation classifiers (based on the techniques of convolutional neural networks and long short term memory) against adversarial machine learning attacks in black-box settings. We have used Carlini \& Wagner (C-W) attack for performing the adversarial attack. To the best of our knowledge, the robustness of these modulation classifiers has not been evaluated through C-W attack before. Our results clearly indicate that state-of-art deep machine learning-based modulation classifiers are not robust against adversarial attacks.
Neural Architecture based on Fuzzy Perceptual Representation For Online Multilingual Handwriting Recognition
Authors: Hanen Akouaydi, Sourour Njah, Wael Ouarda, Anis Samet, Thameur Dhieb, Mourad Zaied, Adel M. ALIMI
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Handwriting Recognition

Due to the omnipresence of mobile devices, online handwritten scripts have become the most important feeding input to smartphones and tablet devices. To increase online handwriting recognition performance, deeper neural networks have extensively been used. In this context, our paper handles the problem of online handwritten script recognition based on extraction features system and deep approach system for sequences classification. Many solutions have appeared in order to facilitate the recognition of handwriting. Accordingly, we used an existent method and combined with new classifiers in order to get a flexible system. Good results are achieved compared to online characters and words recognition system on Latin and Arabic scripts. The performance of our two proposed systems is assessed by using five databases. Indeed, the recognition rate exceeds 98%.
A Randomized Algorithm for Preconditioner Selection
Authors: Conner DiPaolo, Weiqing Gu
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00

The task of choosing a preconditioner $\boldsymbol{M}$ to use when solving a linear system $\boldsymbol{Ax}=\boldsymbol{b}$ with iterative methods is difficult. For instance, even if one has access to a collection $\boldsymbol{M}_1,\boldsymbol{M}_2,\ldots,\boldsymbol{M}_n$ of candidate preconditioners, it is currently unclear how to practically choose the $\boldsymbol{M}_i$ which minimizes the number of iterations of an iterative algorithm to achieve a suitable approximation to $\boldsymbol{x}$. This paper makes progress on this sub-problem by showing that the preconditioner stability $\|\boldsymbol{I}-\boldsymbol{M}^{-1}\boldsymbol{A}\|_\mathsf{F}$, known to forecast preconditioner quality, can be computed in the time it takes to run a constant number of iterations of conjugate gradients through use of sketching methods. This is in spite of folklore which suggests the quantity is impractical to compute, and a proof we give that ensures the quantity could not possibly be approximated in a useful amount of time by a deterministic algorithm. Using our estimator, we provide a method which can provably select the minimal stability preconditioner among $n$ candidates using floating point operations commensurate with running on the order of $n\log n$ steps of the conjugate gradients algorithm. Our method can also advise the practitioner to use no preconditioner at all if none of the candidates appears useful. The algorithm is extremely easy to implement and trivially parallelizable. In one of our experiments, we use our preconditioner selection algorithm to create to the best of our knowledge the first preconditioned method for kernel regression reported to never use more iterations than the non-preconditioned analog in standard tests.
Deep Optics for Single-shot High-dynamic-range Imaging
Authors: Christopher A. Metzler, Hayato Ikoma, Yifan Peng, Gordon Wetzstein
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Decoder, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

High-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging is crucial for many computer graphics and vision applications. Yet, acquiring HDR images with a single shot remains a challenging problem. Whereas modern deep learning approaches are successful at hallucinating plausible HDR content from a single low-dynamic-range (LDR) image, saturated scene details often cannot be faithfully recovered. Inspired by recent deep optical imaging approaches, we interpret this problem as jointly training an optical encoder and electronic decoder where the encoder is parameterized by the point spread function (PSF) of the lens, the bottleneck is the sensor with a limited dynamic range, and the decoder is a convolutional neural network (CNN). The lens surface is then jointly optimized with the CNN in a training phase; we fabricate this optimized optical element and attach it as a hardware add-on to a conventional camera during inference. In extensive simulations and with a physical prototype, we demonstrate that this end-to-end deep optical imaging approach to single-shot HDR imaging outperforms both purely CNN-based approaches and other PSF engineering approaches.
A self-organizing fuzzy neural network for sequence learning
Authors: Armin Salimi-Badr, Mohammad Mehdi Ebadzadeh
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00

In this paper, a new self-organizing fuzzy neural network model is presented which is able to learn and reproduce different sequences accurately. Sequence learning is important in performing skillful tasks, such as writing and playing piano. The structure of the proposed network is composed of two parts: 1-sequence identifier which computes a novel sequence identity value based on initial samples of a sequence, and detects the sequence identity based on proper fuzzy rules, and 2-sequence locator, which locates the input sample in the sequence. Therefore, by integrating outputs of these two parts in fuzzy rules, the network is able to produce the proper output based on current state of the sequence. To learn the proposed structure, a gradual learning procedure is proposed. First, learning is performed by adding new fuzzy rules, based on coverage measure, using available correct data. Next, the initialized parameters are fine-tuned, by gradient descent algorithm, based on fed back approximated network output as the next input. The proposed method has a dynamic structure which is able to learn new sequences online. The proposed method is used to learn and reproduce different sequences simultaneously which is the novelty of this method.
Improving localization-based approaches for breast cancer screening exam classification
Authors: Thibault Févry, Jason Phang, Nan Wu, S. Gene Kim, Linda Moy, Kyunghyun Cho, Krzysztof J. Geras
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

We trained and evaluated a localization-based deep CNN for breast cancer screening exam classification on over 200,000 exams (over 1,000,000 images). Our model achieves an AUC of 0.919 in predicting malignancy in patients undergoing breast cancer screening, reducing the error rate of the baseline (Wu et al., 2019a) by 23%. In addition, the models generates bounding boxes for benign and malignant findings, providing interpretable predictions.
Sampling-free Epistemic Uncertainty Estimation Using Approximated Variance Propagation
Authors: Janis Postels, Francesco Ferroni, Huseyin Coskun, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

We present a sampling-free approach for computing the epistemic uncertainty of a neural network. Epistemic uncertainty is an important quantity for the deployment of deep neural networks in safety-critical applications, since it represents how much one can trust predictions on new data. Recently promising works were proposed using noise injection combined with Monte-Carlo sampling at inference time to estimate this quantity (e.g. Monte-Carlo dropout). Our main contribution is an approximation of the epistemic uncertainty estimated by these methods that does not require sampling, thus notably reducing the computational overhead. We apply our approach to large-scale visual tasks (i.e., semantic segmentation and depth regression) to demonstrate the advantages of our method compared to sampling-based approaches in terms of quality of the uncertainty estimates as well as of computational overhead.
Visualizing RNN States with Predictive Semantic Encodings
Authors: Lindsey Sawatzky, Steven Bergner, Fred Popowich
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling

Recurrent Neural Networks are an effective and prevalent tool used to model sequential data such as natural language text. However, their deep nature and massive number of parameters pose a challenge for those intending to study precisely how they work. We present a visual technique that gives a high level intuition behind the semantics of the hidden states within Recurrent Neural Networks. This semantic encoding allows for hidden states to be compared throughout the model independent of their internal details. The proposed technique is displayed in a proof of concept visualization tool which is demonstrated to visualize the natural language processing task of language modelling.
StructureNet: Hierarchical Graph Networks for 3D Shape Generation
Authors: Kaichun Mo, Paul Guerrero, Li Yi, Hao Su, Peter Wonka, Niloy Mitra, Leonidas J. Guibas
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Shape Generation

The ability to generate novel, diverse, and realistic 3D shapes along with associated part semantics and structure is central to many applications requiring high-quality 3D assets or large volumes of realistic training data. A key challenge towards this goal is how to accommodate diverse shape variations, including both continuous deformations of parts as well as structural or discrete alterations which add to, remove from, or modify the shape constituents and compositional structure. Such object structure can typically be organized into a hierarchy of constituent object parts and relationships, represented as a hierarchy of n-ary graphs. We introduce StructureNet, a hierarchical graph network which (i) can directly encode shapes represented as such n-ary graphs; (ii) can be robustly trained on large and complex shape families; and (iii) can be used to generate a great diversity of realistic structured shape geometries. Technically, we accomplish this by drawing inspiration from recent advances in graph neural networks to propose an order-invariant encoding of n-ary graphs, considering jointly both part geometry and inter-part relations during network training. We extensively evaluate the quality of the learned latent spaces for various shape families and show significant advantages over baseline and competing methods. The learned latent spaces enable several structure-aware geometry processing applications, including shape generation and interpolation, shape editing, or shape structure discovery directly from un-annotated images, point clouds, or partial scans.
ConCORDe-Net: Cell Count Regularized Convolutional Neural Network for Cell Detection in Multiplex Immunohistochemistry Images
Authors: Yeman Brhane Hagos, Priya Lakshmi Narayanan, Ayse U. Akarca, Teresa Marafioti, Yinyin Yuan
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Detection, General Classification

In digital pathology, cell detection and classification are often prerequisites to quantify cell abundance and explore tissue spatial heterogeneity. However, these tasks are particularly challenging for multiplex immunohistochemistry (mIHC) images due to high levels of variability in staining, expression intensity, and inherent noise as a result of preprocessing artefacts. We proposed a deep learning method to detect and classify cells in mIHC whole-tumour slide images of breast cancer. Inspired by inception-v3, we developed Cell COunt RegularizeD Convolutional neural Network (ConCORDe-Net) which integrates conventional dice overlap and a new cell count loss function for optimizing cell detection, followed by a multi-stage convolutional neural network for cell classification. In total, 20447 cells, belonging to five cell classes were annotated by experts from 175 patches extracted from 6 whole-tumour mIHC images. These patches were randomly split into training, validation and testing sets. Using ConCORDe-Net, we obtained a cell detection F1 score of 0.873, which is the best score compared to three state of the art methods. In particular, ConCORDe-Net excels at detecting closely located and weakly stained cells compared to other methods. Incorporating cell count loss in the objective function regularizes the network to learn weak gradient boundaries and separate weakly stained cells from background artefacts. Moreover, cell classification accuracy of 96.5% was achieved. These results support that incorporating problem-specific knowledge such as cell count into deep learning-based cell detection architectures improve the robustness of the algorithm.
Multi-Scale Learned Iterative Reconstruction
Authors: Andreas Hauptmann, Jonas Adler, Simon Arridge, Ozan Öktem
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

Model-based learned iterative reconstruction methods have recently been shown to outperform classical reconstruction algorithms. Applicability of these methods to large scale inverse problems is however limited by the available memory for training and extensive training times, the latter due to computationally expensive forward models. As a possible solution to these restrictions we propose a multi-scale learned iterative reconstruction scheme that computes iterates on discretisations of increasing resolution. This procedure does not only reduce memory requirements, it also considerably speeds up reconstruction and training times, but most importantly is scalable to large scale inverse problems with non-trivial forward operators, such as those that arise in many 3D tomographic applications. In particular, we propose a hybrid network that combines the multi-scale iterative approach with a particularly expressive network architecture which in combination exhibits excellent scalability in 3D. Applicability of the algorithm is demonstrated for 3D cone beam computed tomography from real measurement data of an organic phantom. Additionally, we examine scalability and reconstruction quality in comparison to established learned reconstruction methods in two dimensions for low dose computed tomography on human phantoms.
Soccer Team Vectors
Authors: Robert Müller, Stefan Langer, Fabian Ritz, Christoph Roch, Steffen Illium, Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Date: 2019-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In this work we present STEVE - Soccer TEam VEctors, a principled approach for learning real valued vectors for soccer teams where similar teams are close to each other in the resulting vector space. STEVE only relies on freely available information about the matches teams played in the past. These vectors can serve as input to various machine learning tasks. Evaluating on the task of team market value estimation, STEVE outperforms all its competitors. Moreover, we use STEVE for similarity search and to rank soccer teams.
Learning about spatial inequalities: Capturing the heterogeneity in the urban environment
Authors: J. Siqueira-Gay, M. A. Giannotti, M. Sester
Date: 2019-07-24 00:00:00

Transportation systems can be conceptualized as an instrument of spreading people and resources over the territory, playing an important role in developing sustainable cities. The current rationale of transport provision is based on population demand, disregarding land use and socioeconomic information. To meet the challenge to promote a more equitable resource distribution, this work aims at identifying and describing patterns of urban services supply, their accessibility, and household income. By using a multidimensional approach, the spatial inequalities of a large city of the global south reveal that the low-income population has low access mainly to hospitals and cultural centers. A low-income group presents an intermediate level of accessibility to public schools and sports centers, evidencing the diverse condition of citizens in the peripheries. These complex outcomes generated by the interaction of land use and public transportation emphasize the importance of comprehensive methodological approaches to support decisions of urban projects, plans and programs. Reducing spatial inequalities, especially providing services for deprived groups, is fundamental to promote the sustainable use of resources and optimize the daily commuting.
Deep Learning Based Energy Disaggregation and On/Off Detection of Household Appliances
Authors: Jie Jiang, Qiuqiang Kong, Mark Plumbley, Nigel Gilbert
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Energy disaggregation, a.k.a. Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, aims to separate the energy consumption of individual appliances from the readings of a mains power meter measuring the total energy consumption of, e.g. a whole house. Energy consumption of individual appliances can be useful in many applications, e.g., providing appliance-level feedback to the end users to help them understand their energy consumption and ultimately save energy. Recently, with the availability of large-scale energy consumption datasets, various neural network models such as convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks have been investigated to solve the energy disaggregation problem. Neural network models can learn complex patterns from large amounts of data and have been shown to outperform the traditional machine learning methods such as variants of hidden Markov models. However, current neural network methods for energy disaggregation are either computational expensive or are not capable of handling long-term dependencies. In this paper, we investigate the application of the recently developed WaveNet models for the task of energy disaggregation. Based on a real-world energy dataset collected from 20 households over two years, we show that WaveNet models outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning methods proposed in the literature for energy disaggregation in terms of both error measures and computational cost. On the basis of energy disaggregation, we then investigate the performance of two deep-learning based frameworks for the task of on/off detection which aims at estimating whether an appliance is in operation or not. Based on the same dataset, we show that for the task of on/off detection the second framework, i.e., directly training a binary classifier, achieves better performance in terms of F1 score.
Engineering a direct k-way Hypergraph Partitioning Algorithm
Authors: Yaroslav Akhremtsev, Tobias Heuer, Peter Sanders, Sebastian Schlag
Date: 2017-01-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ALENEX 2017 2017 1
Tasks: graph partitioning, hypergraph partitioning

We develop a fast and high quality multilevel algorithm that directly partitions hypergraphs into k balanced blocks – without the detour over recursive bipartitioning. In particular, our algorithm efficiently implements the powerful FM local search heuristics for the complicated k-way case. This is important for objective functions which depend on the number of blocks connected by a hyperedge. We also remove several further bottlenecks in processing large hyperedges, develop a faster contraction algorithm, and a new adaptive stopping rule for local search. To further reduce the size of hyperedges, we develop a pin-sparsifier based on the min-hashing technique that clusters vertices with similar neighborhood. Extensive experiments indicate that our KaHyPar-partitioner compares favorably with the best previous systems. KaHyPar is faster than hMetis and computes better solutions. KaHyPar's results are considerably better than the (faster) PaToH partitioner.
Improving Coarsening Schemes for Hypergraph Partitioning by Exploiting Community Structure
Authors: Tobias Heuer, Sebastian Schlag
Date: 2017-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEA 2017 2017 1
Tasks: Community Detection, graph partitioning, hypergraph partitioning

We present an improved coarsening process for multilevel hypergraph partitioning that incorporates global information about the community structure. Community detection is performed via modularity maximization on a bipartite graph representation. The approach is made suitable for different classes of hypergraphs by defining weights for the graph edges that express structural properties of the hypergraph. We integrate our approach into a leading multilevel hypergraph partitioner with strong local search algorithms and perform extensive experiments on a large benchmark set of hypergraphs stemming from application areas such as VLSI design, SAT solving, and scientific computing. Our results indicate that respecting community structure during coarsening not only significantly improves the solutions found by the initial partitioning algorithm, but also consistently improves overall solution quality.