pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Using Computer Vision to enhance Safety of Workforce in Manufacturing in a Post COVID World
Authors: Prateek Khandelwal, Anuj Khandelwal, Snigdha Agarwal, Deep Thomas, Naveen Xavier, Arun Raghuraman
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00

The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments across the world to impose lockdowns to prevent virus transmissions. This resulted in the shutdown of all economic activity and accordingly the production at manufacturing plants across most sectors was halted. While there is an urgency to resume production, there is an even greater need to ensure the safety of the workforce at the plant site. Reports indicate that maintaining social distancing and wearing face masks while at work clearly reduces the risk of transmission. We decided to use computer vision on CCTV feeds to monitor worker activity and detect violations which trigger real time voice alerts on the shop floor. This paper describes an efficient and economic approach of using AI to create a safe environment in a manufacturing setup. We demonstrate our approach to build a robust social distancing measurement algorithm using a mix of modern-day deep learning and classic projective geometry techniques. We have deployed our solution at manufacturing plants across the Aditya Birla Group (ABG). We have also described our face mask detection approach which provides a high accuracy across a range of customized masks.
From industry-wide parameters to aircraft-centric on-flight inference: improving aeronautics performance prediction with machine learning
Authors: Florent Dewez, Benjamin Guedj, Vincent Vandewalle
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Aircraft performance models play a key role in airline operations, especially in planning a fuel-efficient flight. In practice, manufacturers provide guidelines which are slightly modified throughout the aircraft life cycle via the tuning of a single factor, enabling better fuel predictions. However this has limitations, in particular they do not reflect the evolution of each feature impacting the aircraft performance. Our goal here is to overcome this limitation. The key contribution of the present article is to foster the use of machine learning to leverage the massive amounts of data continuously recorded during flights performed by an aircraft and provide models reflecting its actual and individual performance. We illustrate our approach by focusing on the estimation of the drag and lift coefficients from recorded flight data. As these coefficients are not directly recorded, we resort to aerodynamics approximations. As a safety check, we provide bounds to assess the accuracy of both the aerodynamics approximation and the statistical performance of our approach. We provide numerical results on a collection of machine learning algorithms. We report excellent accuracy on real-life data and exhibit empirical evidence to support our modelling, in coherence with aerodynamics principles.
CupNet -- Pruning a network for geometric data
Authors: Raoul Heese, Lukas Morand, Dirk Helm, Michael Bortz
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00

Using data from a simulated cup drawing process, we demonstrate how the inherent geometrical structure of cup meshes can be used to effectively prune an artificial neural network in a straightforward way.
Normalized Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Dongsuk Kim, Geonhee Lee, Myungjae Lee, Shin Uk Kang, Dongmin Kim
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose Normalized Convolutional Neural Network(NCNN). NCNN is more fitted to a convolutional operator than other nomralizaiton methods. The normalized process is similar to a normalization methods, but NCNN is more adapative to sliced-inputs and corresponding the convolutional kernel. Therefor NCNN can be targeted to micro-batch training. Normalizaing of NC is conducted during convolutional process. In short, NC process is not usual normalization and can not be realized in deep learning framework optimizing standard convolution process. Hence we named this method 'Normalized Convolution'. As a result, NC process has universal property which means NC can be applied to any AI tasks involving convolution neural layer . Since NC don't need other normalization layer, NCNN looks like convolutional version of Self Normalizing Network.(SNN). Among micro-batch trainings, NCNN outperforms other batch-independent normalization methods. NCNN archives these superiority by standardizing rows of im2col matrix of inputs, which theoretically smooths the gradient of loss. The code need to manipulate standard convolution neural networks step by step. The code is available : https://github.com/kimdongsuk1/ NormalizedCNN.
Deep-Learning-based Automated Palm Tree Counting and Geolocation in Large Farms from Aerial Geotagged Images
Authors: Adel Ammar, Anis Koubaa
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a deep learning framework for the automated counting and geolocation of palm trees from aerial images using convolutional neural networks. For this purpose, we collected aerial images in a palm tree Farm in the Kharj region, in Riyadh Saudi Arabia, using DJI drones, and we built a dataset of around 10,000 instances of palms trees. Then, we developed a convolutional neural network model using the state-of-the-art, Faster R-CNN algorithm. Furthermore, using the geotagged metadata of aerial images, we used photogrammetry concepts and distance corrections to detect the geographical location of detected palms trees automatically. This geolocation technique was tested on two different types of drones (DJI Mavic Pro, and Phantom 4 Pro), and was assessed to provide an average geolocation accuracy of 2.8m. This GPS tagging allows us to uniquely identify palm trees and count their number from a series of drone images, while correctly dealing with the issue of image overlapping. Moreover, it can be generalized to the geolocation of any other objects in UAV images.
Feature Selection with Evolving, Fast and Slow Using Two Parallel Genetic Algorithms
Authors: Uzay Cetin, Yunus Emre Gundogmus
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Feature selection is one of the most challenging issues in machine learning, especially while working with high dimensional data. In this paper, we address the problem of feature selection and propose a new approach called Evolving Fast and Slow. This new approach is based on using two parallel genetic algorithms having high and low mutation rates, respectively. Evolving Fast and Slow requires a new parallel architecture combining an automatic system that evolves fast and an effortful system that evolves slow. With this architecture, exploration and exploitation can be done simultaneously and in unison. Evolving fast, with high mutation rate, can be useful to explore new unknown places in the search space with long jumps; and Evolving Slow, with low mutation rate, can be useful to exploit previously known places in the search space with short movements. Our experiments show that Evolving Fast and Slow achieves very good results in terms of both accuracy and feature elimination.
Fundus2Angio: A Conditional GAN Architecture for Generating Fluorescein Angiography Images from Retinal Fundus Photography
Authors: Sharif Amit Kamran, Khondker Fariha Hossain, Alireza Tavakkoli, Stewart Lee Zuckerbrod, Salah A. Baker, Kenton M. Sanders
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fundus to Angiography Generation, Generative Adversarial Network

Carrying out clinical diagnosis of retinal vascular degeneration using Fluorescein Angiography (FA) is a time consuming process and can pose significant adverse effects on the patient. Angiography requires insertion of a dye that may cause severe adverse effects and can even be fatal. Currently, there are no non-invasive systems capable of generating Fluorescein Angiography images. However, retinal fundus photography is a non-invasive imaging technique that can be completed in a few seconds. In order to eliminate the need for FA, we propose a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) to translate fundus images to FA images. The proposed GAN consists of a novel residual block capable of generating high quality FA images. These images are important tools in the differential diagnosis of retinal diseases without the need for invasive procedure with possible side effects. Our experiments show that the proposed architecture outperforms other state-of-the-art generative networks. Furthermore, our proposed model achieves better qualitative results indistinguishable from real angiograms.
Multidirectional Associative Optimization of Function-Specific Word Representations
Authors: Daniela Gerz, Ivan Vulić, Marek Rei, Roi Reichart, Anna Korhonen
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6

We present a neural framework for learning associations between interrelated groups of words such as the ones found in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structures. Our model induces a joint function-specific word vector space, where vectors of e.g. plausible SVO compositions lie close together. The model retains information about word group membership even in the joint space, and can thereby effectively be applied to a number of tasks reasoning over the SVO structure. We show the robustness and versatility of the proposed framework by reporting state-of-the-art results on the tasks of estimating selectional preference and event similarity. The results indicate that the combinations of representations learned with our task-independent model outperform task-specific architectures from prior work, while reducing the number of parameters by up to 95%.
A Dataset for Statutory Reasoning in Tax Law Entailment and Question Answering
Authors: Nils Holzenberger, Andrew Blair-Stanek, Benjamin Van Durme
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

Legislation can be viewed as a body of prescriptive rules expressed in natural language. The application of legislation to facts of a case we refer to as statutory reasoning, where those facts are also expressed in natural language. Computational statutory reasoning is distinct from most existing work in machine reading, in that much of the information needed for deciding a case is declared exactly once (a law), while the information needed in much of machine reading tends to be learned through distributional language statistics. To investigate the performance of natural language understanding approaches on statutory reasoning, we introduce a dataset, together with a legal-domain text corpus. Straightforward application of machine reading models exhibits low out-of-the-box performance on our questions, whether or not they have been fine-tuned to the legal domain. We contrast this with a hand-constructed Prolog-based system, designed to fully solve the task. These experiments support a discussion of the challenges facing statutory reasoning moving forward, which we argue is an interesting real-world task that can motivate the development of models able to utilize prescriptive rules specified in natural language.
Reinforced Rewards Framework for Text Style Transfer
Authors: Abhilasha Sancheti, Kundan Krishna, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, Anandhavelu Natarajan
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer, Text Generation, Text Style Transfer

Style transfer deals with the algorithms to transfer the stylistic properties of a piece of text into that of another while ensuring that the core content is preserved. There has been a lot of interest in the field of text style transfer due to its wide application to tailored text generation. Existing works evaluate the style transfer models based on content preservation and transfer strength. In this work, we propose a reinforcement learning based framework that directly rewards the framework on these target metrics yielding a better transfer of the target style. We show the improved performance of our proposed framework based on automatic and human evaluation on three independent tasks: wherein we transfer the style of text from formal to informal, high excitement to low excitement, modern English to Shakespearean English, and vice-versa in all the three cases. Improved performance of the proposed framework over existing state-of-the-art frameworks indicates the viability of the approach.
Toward Better Storylines with Sentence-Level Language Models
Authors: Daphne Ippolito, David Grangier, Douglas Eck, Chris Callison-Burch
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Word Embeddings

We propose a sentence-level language model which selects the next sentence in a story from a finite set of fluent alternatives. Since it does not need to model fluency, the sentence-level language model can focus on longer range dependencies, which are crucial for multi-sentence coherence. Rather than dealing with individual words, our method treats the story so far as a list of pre-trained sentence embeddings and predicts an embedding for the next sentence, which is more efficient than predicting word embeddings. Notably this allows us to consider a large number of candidates for the next sentence during training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with state-of-the-art accuracy on the unsupervised Story Cloze task and with promising results on larger-scale next sentence prediction tasks.
Commonsense Evidence Generation and Injection in Reading Comprehension
Authors: Ye Liu, Tao Yang, Zeyu You, Wei Fan, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: SIGDIAL (ACL) 2020 7
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Reading Comprehension

Human tackle reading comprehension not only based on the given context itself but often rely on the commonsense beyond. To empower the machine with commonsense reasoning, in this paper, we propose a Commonsense Evidence Generation and Injection framework in reading comprehension, named CEGI. The framework injects two kinds of auxiliary commonsense evidence into comprehensive reading to equip the machine with the ability of rational thinking. Specifically, we build two evidence generators: the first generator aims to generate textual evidence via a language model; the other generator aims to extract factual evidence (automatically aligned text-triples) from a commonsense knowledge graph after graph completion. Those evidences incorporate contextual commonsense and serve as the additional inputs to the model. Thereafter, we propose a deep contextual encoder to extract semantic relationships among the paragraph, question, option, and evidence. Finally, we employ a capsule network to extract different linguistic units (word and phrase) from the relations, and dynamically predict the optimal option based on the extracted units. Experiments on the CosmosQA dataset demonstrate that the proposed CEGI model outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches and achieves the accuracy (83.6%) on the leaderboard.
System-Level Predictive Maintenance: Review of Research Literature and Gap Analysis
Authors: Kyle Miller, Artur Dubrawski
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00

This paper reviews current literature in the field of predictive maintenance from the system point of view. We differentiate the existing capabilities of condition estimation and failure risk forecasting as currently applied to simple components, from the capabilities needed to solve the same tasks for complex assets. System-level analysis faces more complex latent degradation states, it has to comprehensively account for active maintenance programs at each component level and consider coupling between different maintenance actions, while reflecting increased monetary and safety costs for system failures. As a result, methods that are effective for forecasting risk and informing maintenance decisions regarding individual components do not readily scale to provide reliable sub-system or system level insights. A novel holistic modeling approach is needed to incorporate available structural and physical knowledge and naturally handle the complexities of actively fielded and maintained assets.
FedSplit: An algorithmic framework for fast federated optimization
Authors: Reese Pathak, Martin J. Wainwright
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Distributed Optimization, Federated Learning

Motivated by federated learning, we consider the hub-and-spoke model of distributed optimization in which a central authority coordinates the computation of a solution among many agents while limiting communication. We first study some past procedures for federated optimization, and show that their fixed points need not correspond to stationary points of the original optimization problem, even in simple convex settings with deterministic updates. In order to remedy these issues, we introduce FedSplit, a class of algorithms based on operator splitting procedures for solving distributed convex minimization with additive structure. We prove that these procedures have the correct fixed points, corresponding to optima of the original optimization problem, and we characterize their convergence rates under different settings. Our theory shows that these methods are provably robust to inexact computation of intermediate local quantities. We complement our theory with some simple experiments that demonstrate the benefits of our methods in practice.
ECG-DelNet: Delineation of Ambulatory Electrocardiograms with Mixed Quality Labeling Using Neural Networks
Authors: Guillermo Jimenez-Perez, Alejandro Alcaine, Oscar Camara
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Electrocardiogram (ECG) detection and delineation are key steps for numerous tasks in clinical practice, as ECG is the most performed non-invasive test for assessing cardiac condition. State-of-the-art algorithms employ digital signal processing (DSP), which require laborious rule adaptation to new morphologies. In contrast, deep learning (DL) algorithms, especially for classification, are gaining weight in academic and industrial settings. However, the lack of model explainability and small databases hinder their applicability. We demonstrate DL can be successfully applied to low interpretative tasks by embedding ECG detection and delineation onto a segmentation framework. For this purpose, we adapted and validated the most used neural network architecture for image segmentation, the U-Net, to one-dimensional data. The model was trained using PhysioNet's QT database, comprised of 105 ambulatory ECG recordings, for single- and multi-lead scenarios. To alleviate data scarcity, data regularization techniques such as pre-training with low-quality data labels, performing ECG-based data augmentation and applying strong model regularizers to the architecture were attempted. Other variations in the model's capacity (U-Net's depth and width), alongside the application of state-of-the-art additions, were evaluated. These variations were exhaustively validated in a 5-fold cross-validation manner. The best performing configuration reached precisions of 90.12%, 99.14% and 98.25% and recalls of 98.73%, 99.94% and 99.88% for the P, QRS and T waves, respectively, on par with DSP-based approaches. Despite being a data-hungry technique trained on a small dataset, DL-based approaches demonstrate to be a viable alternative to traditional DSP-based ECG processing techniques.
On the Transferability of Winning Tickets in Non-Natural Image Datasets
Authors: Matthia Sabatelli, Mike Kestemont, Pierre Geurts
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00

We study the generalization properties of pruned neural networks that are the winners of the lottery ticket hypothesis on datasets of natural images. We analyse their potential under conditions in which training data is scarce and comes from a non-natural domain. Specifically, we investigate whether pruned models that are found on the popular CIFAR-10/100 and Fashion-MNIST datasets, generalize to seven different datasets that come from the fields of digital pathology and digital heritage. Our results show that there are significant benefits in transferring and training sparse architectures over larger parametrized models, since in all of our experiments pruned networks, winners of the lottery ticket hypothesis, significantly outperform their larger unpruned counterparts. These results suggest that winning initializations do contain inductive biases that are generic to some extent, although, as reported by our experiments on the biomedical datasets, their generalization properties can be more limiting than what has been so far observed in the literature.
A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to Efficient Drone Mobility Support
Authors: Yun Chen, Xingqin Lin, Talha Ahmed Khan, Mohammad Mozaffari
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The growing deployment of drones in a myriad of applications relies on seamless and reliable wireless connectivity for safe control and operation of drones. Cellular technology is a key enabler for providing essential wireless services to flying drones in the sky. Existing cellular networks targeting terrestrial usage can support the initial deployment of low-altitude drone users, but there are challenges such as mobility support. In this paper, we propose a novel handover framework for providing efficient mobility support and reliable wireless connectivity to drones served by a terrestrial cellular network. Using tools from deep reinforcement learning, we develop a deep Q-learning algorithm to dynamically optimize handover decisions to ensure robust connectivity for drone users. Simulation results show that the proposed framework significantly reduces the number of handovers at the expense of a small loss in signal strength relative to the baseline case where a drone always connect to a base station that provides the strongest received signal strength.
iUNets: Fully invertible U-Nets with Learnable Up- and Downsampling
Authors: Christian Etmann, Rihuan Ke, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

U-Nets have been established as a standard architecture for image-to-image learning problems such as segmentation and inverse problems in imaging. For large-scale data, as it for example appears in 3D medical imaging, the U-Net however has prohibitive memory requirements. Here, we present a new fully-invertible U-Net-based architecture called the iUNet, which employs novel learnable and invertible up- and downsampling operations, thereby making the use of memory-efficient backpropagation possible. This allows us to train deeper and larger networks in practice, under the same GPU memory restrictions. Due to its invertibility, the iUNet can furthermore be used for constructing normalizing flows.