pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Texture Superpixel Clustering from Patch-based Nearest Neighbor Matching
Authors: Rémi Giraud, Yannick Berthoumieu
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Computational Efficiency, Superpixels

Superpixels are widely used in computer vision applications. Nevertheless, decomposition methods may still fail to efficiently cluster image pixels according to their local texture. In this paper, we propose a new Nearest Neighbor-based Superpixel Clustering (NNSC) method to generate texture-aware superpixels in a limited computational time compared to previous approaches. We introduce a new clustering framework using patch-based nearest neighbor matching, while most existing methods are based on a pixel-wise K-means clustering. Therefore, we directly group pixels in the patch space enabling to capture texture information. We demonstrate the efficiency of our method with favorable comparison in terms of segmentation performances on both standard color and texture datasets. We also show the computational efficiency of NNSC compared to recent texture-aware superpixel methods.
Containment of Simple Regular Path Queries
Authors: Diego Figueira, Adwait Godbole, S. Krishna, Wim Martens, Matthias Niewerth, Tina Trautner
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00

Testing containment of queries is a fundamental reasoning task in knowledge representation. We study here the containment problem for Conjunctive Regular Path Queries (CRPQs), a navigational query language extensively used in ontology and graph database querying. While it is known that containment of CRPQs is expspace-complete in general, we focus here on severely restricted fragments, which are known to be highly relevant in practice according to several recent studies. We obtain a detailed overview of the complexity of the containment problem, depending on the features used in the regular expressions of the queries, with completeness results for np, pitwo, pspace or expspace.
Advancing Renewable Electricity Consumption With Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Filip Tolovski
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

As the share of renewable energy sources in the present electric energy mix rises, their intermittence proves to be the biggest challenge to carbon free electricity generation. To address this challenge, we propose an electricity pricing agent, which sends price signals to the customers and contributes to shifting the customer demand to periods of high renewable energy generation. We propose an implementation of a pricing agent with a reinforcement learning approach where the environment is represented by the customers, the electricity generation utilities and the weather conditions.
Quality Diversity for Multi-task Optimization
Authors: Jean-Baptiste Mouret, Glenn Maguire
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms are a recent family of optimization algorithms that search for a large set of diverse but high-performing solutions. In some specific situations, they can solve multiple tasks at once. For instance, they can find the joint positions required for a robotic arm to reach a set of points, which can also be solved by running a classic optimizer for each target point. However, they cannot solve multiple tasks when the fitness needs to be evaluated independently for each task (e.g., optimizing policies to grasp many different objects). In this paper, we propose an extension of the MAP-Elites algorithm, called Multi-task MAP-Elites, that solves multiple tasks when the fitness function depends on the task. We evaluate it on a simulated parameterized planar arm (10-dimensional search space; 5000 tasks) and on a simulated 6-legged robot with legs of different lengths (36-dimensional search space; 2000 tasks). The results show that in both cases our algorithm outperforms the optimization of each task separately with the CMA-ES algorithm.
FusionLane: Multi-Sensor Fusion for Lane Marking Semantic Segmentation Using Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Ruochen Yin, Biao Yu, Huapeng Wu, Yutao Song, Runxin Niu
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Sensor Fusion, Time Series Analysis

It is a crucial step to achieve effective semantic segmentation of lane marking during the construction of the lane level high-precision map. In recent years, many image semantic segmentation methods have been proposed. These methods mainly focus on the image from camera, due to the limitation of the sensor itself, the accurate three-dimensional spatial position of the lane marking cannot be obtained, so the demand for the lane level high-precision map construction cannot be met. This paper proposes a lane marking semantic segmentation method based on LIDAR and camera fusion deep neural network. Different from other methods, in order to obtain accurate position information of the segmentation results, the semantic segmentation object of this paper is a bird's eye view converted from a LIDAR points cloud instead of an image captured by a camera. This method first uses the deeplabv3+ [\ref{ref:1}] network to segment the image captured by the camera, and the segmentation result is merged with the point clouds collected by the LIDAR as the input of the proposed network. In this neural network, we also add a long short-term memory (LSTM) structure to assist the network for semantic segmentation of lane markings by using the the time series information. The experiments on more than 14,000 image datasets which we have manually labeled and expanded have shown the proposed method has better performance on the semantic segmentation of the points cloud bird's eye view. Therefore, the automation of high-precision map construction can be significantly improved. Our code is available at https://github.com/rolandying/FusionLane.
UPR: A Model-Driven Architecture for Deep Phase Retrieval
Authors: Naveed Naimipour, Shahin Khobahi, Mojtaba Soltanalian
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

The problem of phase retrieval has been intriguing researchers for decades due to its appearance in a wide range of applications. The task of a phase retrieval algorithm is typically to recover a signal from linear phase-less measurements. In this paper, we approach the problem by proposing a hybrid model-based data-driven deep architecture, referred to as the Unfolded Phase Retrieval (UPR), that shows potential in improving the performance of the state-of-the-art phase retrieval algorithms. Specifically, the proposed method benefits from versatility and interpretability of well established model-based algorithms, while simultaneously benefiting from the expressive power of deep neural networks. Our numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of such hybrid deep architectures and showcase the untapped potential of data-aided methodologies to enhance the existing phase retrieval algorithms.
Meta-Baseline: Exploring Simple Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Yinbo Chen, Zhuang Liu, Huijuan Xu, Trevor Darrell, Xiaolong Wang
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, General Classification, Meta-Learning

Meta-learning has been the most common framework for few-shot learning in recent years. It learns the model from collections of few-shot classification tasks, which is believed to have a key advantage of making the training objective consistent with the testing objective. However, some recent works report that by training for whole-classification, i.e. classification on the whole label-set, it can get comparable or even better embedding than many meta-learning algorithms. The edge between these two lines of works has yet been underexplored, and the effectiveness of meta-learning in few-shot learning remains unclear. In this paper, we explore a simple process: meta-learning over a whole-classification pre-trained model on its evaluation metric. We observe this simple method achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks. Our further analysis shed some light on understanding the trade-offs between the meta-learning objective and the whole-classification objective in few-shot learning.
Discovering Representations for Black-box Optimization
Authors: Adam Gaier, Alexander Asteroth, Jean-Baptiste Mouret
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

The encoding of solutions in black-box optimization is a delicate, handcrafted balance between expressiveness and domain knowledge -- between exploring a wide variety of solutions, and ensuring that those solutions are useful. Our main insight is that this process can be automated by generating a dataset of high-performing solutions with a quality diversity algorithm (here, MAP-Elites), then learning a representation with a generative model (here, a Variational Autoencoder) from that dataset. Our second insight is that this representation can be used to scale quality diversity optimization to higher dimensions -- but only if we carefully mix solutions generated with the learned representation and those generated with traditional variation operators. We demonstrate these capabilities by learning an low-dimensional encoding for the inverse kinematics of a thousand joint planar arm. The results show that learned representations make it possible to solve high-dimensional problems with orders of magnitude fewer evaluations than the standard MAP-Elites, and that, once solved, the produced encoding can be used for rapid optimization of novel, but similar, tasks. The presented techniques not only scale up quality diversity algorithms to high dimensions, but show that black-box optimization encodings can be automatically learned, rather than hand designed.
Spine intervertebral disc labeling using a fully convolutional redundant counting model
Authors: Lucas Rouhier, Francisco Perdigon Romero, Joseph Paul Cohen, Julien Cohen-Adad
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: MIDL 2019 7

Labeling intervertebral discs is relevant as it notably enables clinicians to understand the relationship between a patient's symptoms (pain, paralysis) and the exact level of spinal cord injury. However manually labeling those discs is a tedious and user-biased task which would benefit from automated methods. While some automated methods already exist for MRI and CT-scan, they are either not publicly available, or fail to generalize across various imaging contrasts. In this paper we combine a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) with inception modules to localize and label intervertebral discs. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept application in a publicly-available multi-center and multi-contrast MRI database (n=235 subjects). The code is publicly available at https://github.com/neuropoly/vertebral-labeling-deep-learning.
Continuous Domain Adaptation with Variational Domain-Agnostic Feature Replay
Authors: Qicheng Lao, Xiang Jiang, Mohammad Havaei, Yoshua Bengio
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Transfer Learning

Learning in non-stationary environments is one of the biggest challenges in machine learning. Non-stationarity can be caused by either task drift, i.e., the drift in the conditional distribution of labels given the input data, or the domain drift, i.e., the drift in the marginal distribution of the input data. This paper aims to tackle this challenge in the context of continuous domain adaptation, where the model is required to learn new tasks adapted to new domains in a non-stationary environment while maintaining previously learned knowledge. To deal with both drifts, we propose variational domain-agnostic feature replay, an approach that is composed of three components: an inference module that filters the input data into domain-agnostic representations, a generative module that facilitates knowledge transfer, and a solver module that applies the filtered and transferable knowledge to solve the queries. We address the two fundamental scenarios in continuous domain adaptation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed approach for practical usage.
Automatic segmentation of spinal multiple sclerosis lesions: How to generalize across MRI contrasts?
Authors: Olivier Vincent, Charley Gros, Joseph Paul Cohen, Julien Cohen-Adad
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Despite recent improvements in medical image segmentation, the ability to generalize across imaging contrasts remains an open issue. To tackle this challenge, we implement Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) to leverage physics knowledge within the segmentation model and learn the characteristics of each contrast. Interestingly, a well-optimised U-Net reached the same performance as our FiLMed-Unet on a multi-contrast dataset (0.72 of Dice score), which suggests that there is a bottleneck in spinal MS lesion segmentation different from the generalization across varying contrasts. This bottleneck likely stems from inter-rater variability, which is estimated at 0.61 of Dice score in our dataset.
Probabilistic Partitive Partitioning (PPP)
Authors: Mujahid Sultan
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Clustering is a NP-hard problem. Thus, no optimal algorithm exists, heuristics are applied to cluster the data. Heuristics can be very resource-intensive, if not applied properly. For substantially large data sets computational efficiencies can be achieved by reducing the input space if a minimal loss of information can be achieved. Clustering algorithms, in general, face two common problems: 1) these converge to different settings with different initial conditions and; 2) the number of clusters has to be arbitrarily decided beforehand. This problem has become critical in the realm of big data. Recently, clustering algorithms have emerged which can speedup computations using parallel processing over the grid but face the aforementioned problems. Goals: Our goals are to find methods to cluster data which: 1) guarantee convergence to the same settings irrespective of the initial conditions; 2) eliminate the need to establish the number of clusters beforehand, and 3) can be applied to cluster large datasets. Methods: We introduce a method that combines probabilistic and combinatorial clustering methods to produce repeatable and compact clusters that are not sensitive to initial conditions. This method harnesses the power of k-means (a combinatorial clustering method) to cluster/partition very large dimensional datasets and uses the Gaussian Mixture Model (a probabilistic clustering method) to validate the k-means partitions. Results: We show that this method produces very compact clusters that are not sensitive to initial conditions. This method can be used to identify the most 'separable' set in a dataset which increases the 'clusterability' of a dataset. This method also eliminates the need to specify the number of clusters in advance.
A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach For Safe and Efficient Behavior Planning Of Connected Autonomous Vehicles
Authors: Songyang Han, Shanglin Zhou, Jiangwei Wang, Lynn Pepin, Caiwen Ding, Jie Fu, Fei Miao
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning

The recent advancements in wireless technology enable connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to gather information about their environment by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. In this work, we design an information-sharing-based multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for CAVs, to take advantage of the extra information when making decisions to improve traffic efficiency and safety. The safe actor-critic algorithm we propose has two new techniques: the truncated Q-function and safe action mapping. The truncated Q-function utilizes the shared information from neighboring CAVs such that the joint state and action spaces of the Q-function do not grow in our algorithm for a large-scale CAV system. We prove the bound of the approximation error between the truncated-Q and global Q-functions. The safe action mapping provides a provable safety guarantee for both the training and execution based on control barrier functions. Using the CARLA simulator for experiments, we show that our approach can improve the CAV system's efficiency in terms of average velocity and comfort under different CAV ratios and different traffic densities. We also show that our approach avoids the execution of unsafe actions and always maintains a safe distance from other vehicles. We construct an obstacle-at-corner scenario to show that the shared vision can help CAVs to observe obstacles earlier and take action to avoid traffic jams.
Cross modal video representations for weakly supervised active speaker localization
Authors: Rahul Sharma, Krishna Somandepalli, Shrikanth Narayanan
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Active Speaker Localization, Activity Detection, Event Detection

An objective understanding of media depictions, such as inclusive portrayals of how much someone is heard and seen on screen such as in film and television, requires the machines to discern automatically who, when, how, and where someone is talking, and not. Speaker activity can be automatically discerned from the rich multimodal information present in the media content. This is however a challenging problem due to the vast variety and contextual variability in the media content, and the lack of labeled data. In this work, we present a cross-modal neural network for learning visual representations, which have implicit information pertaining to the spatial location of a speaker in the visual frames. Avoiding the need for manual annotations for active speakers in visual frames, acquiring of which is very expensive, we present a weakly supervised system for the task of localizing active speakers in movie content. We use the learned cross-modal visual representations, and provide weak supervision from movie subtitles acting as a proxy for voice activity, thus requiring no manual annotations. We evaluate the performance of the proposed system on the AVA active speaker dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of the cross-modal embeddings for localizing active speakers in comparison to fully supervised systems. We also demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for the task of voice activity detection in an audio-visual framework, especially when speech is accompanied by noise and music.
Revisiting SGD with Increasingly Weighted Averaging: Optimization and Generalization Perspectives
Authors: Zhishuai Guo, Yan Yan, Tianbao Yang
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely studied in the literature from different angles, and is commonly employed for solving many big data machine learning problems. However, the averaging technique, which combines all iterative solutions into a single solution, is still under-explored. While some increasingly weighted averaging schemes have been considered in the literature, existing works are mostly restricted to strongly convex objective functions and the convergence of optimization error. It remains unclear how these averaging schemes affect the convergence of {\it both optimization error and generalization error} (two equally important components of testing error) for {\bf non-strongly convex objectives, including non-convex problems}. In this paper, we {\it fill the gap} by comprehensively analyzing the increasingly weighted averaging on convex, strongly convex and non-convex objective functions in terms of both optimization error and generalization error. In particular, we analyze a family of increasingly weighted averaging, where the weight for the solution at iteration $t$ is proportional to $t^{\alpha}$ ($\alpha > 0$). We show how $\alpha$ affects the optimization error and the generalization error, and exhibit the trade-off caused by $\alpha$. Experiments have demonstrated this trade-off and the effectiveness of polynomially increased weighted averaging compared with other averaging schemes for a wide range of problems including deep learning.
LIMEADE: From AI Explanations to Advice Taking
Authors: Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Doug Downey, Kyle Lo, Daniel S. Weld
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Recommendation Systems

Research in human-centered AI has shown the benefits of systems that can explain their predictions. Methods that allow an AI to take advice from humans in response to explanations are similarly useful. While both capabilities are well-developed for transparent learning models (e.g., linear models and GA$^2$Ms), and recent techniques (e.g., LIME and SHAP) can generate explanations for opaque models, little attention has been given to advice methods for opaque models. This paper introduces LIMEADE, the first general framework that translates both positive and negative advice (expressed using high-level vocabulary such as that employed by post-hoc explanations) into an update to an arbitrary, underlying opaque model. We demonstrate the generality of our approach with case studies on seventy real-world models across two broad domains: image classification and text recommendation. We show our method improves accuracy compared to a rigorous baseline on the image classification domains. For the text modality, we apply our framework to a neural recommender system for scientific papers on a public website; our user study shows that our framework leads to significantly higher perceived user control, trust, and satisfaction.
Restore from Restored: Single Image Denoising with Pseudo Clean Image
Authors: Seunghwan Lee, Dongkyu Lee, Donghyeon Cho, Jiwon Kim, Tae Hyun Kim
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

In this study, we propose a simple and effective fine-tuning algorithm called "restore-from-restored", which can greatly enhance the performance of fully pre-trained image denoising networks. Many supervised denoising approaches can produce satisfactory results using large external training datasets. However, these methods have limitations in using internal information available in a given test image. By contrast, recent self-supervised approaches can remove noise in the input image by utilizing information from the specific test input. However, such methods show relatively lower performance on known noise types such as Gaussian noise compared to supervised methods. Thus, to combine external and internal information, we fine-tune the fully pre-trained denoiser using pseudo training set at test time. By exploiting internal self-similar patches (i.e., patch-recurrence), the baseline network can be adapted to the given specific input image. We demonstrate that our method can be easily employed on top of the state-of-the-art denoising networks and further improve the performance on numerous denoising benchmark datasets including real noisy images.