pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Cut-and-Paste Dataset Generation for Balancing Domain Gaps in Object Instance Detection
Authors: Woo-han Yun, Taewoo Kim, Jaeyeon Lee, Jaehong Kim, Junmo Kim
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation, Domain Adaptation, Generative Adversarial Network, Object, Object Detection

Training an object instance detector where only a few training object images are available is a challenging task. One solution is a cut-and-paste method that generates a training dataset by cutting object areas out of training images and pasting them onto other background images. A detector trained on a dataset generated with a cut-and-paste method suffers from the conventional domain shift problem, which stems from a discrepancy between the source domain (generated training dataset) and the target domain (real test dataset). Though state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods are able to reduce this gap, it is limited because they do not consider the difference of domain gaps of foreground and background. In this study, we present that the conventional domain gap can be divided into two sub-domain gaps for foreground and background. Then, we show that the original cut-and-paste approach suffers from a new domain gap problem, an unbalanced domain gaps, because it has two separate source domains for foreground and background, unlike the conventional domain shift problem. Then, we introduce an advanced cut-and-paste method to balance the unbalanced domain gaps by diversifying the foreground with GAN (generative adversarial network)-generated seed images and simplifying the background using image processing techniques. Experimental results show that our method is effective for balancing domain gaps and improving the accuracy of object instance detection in a cluttered indoor environment using only a few seed images. Furthermore, we show that balancing domain gaps can improve the detection accuracy of state-of-the-art domain adaptation methods.
Low-Resource Response Generation with Template Prior
Authors: Ze Yang, Wei Wu, Jian Yang, Can Xu, Zhoujun Li
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Decoder, Response Generation

We study open domain response generation with limited message-response pairs. The problem exists in real-world applications but is less explored by the existing work. Since the paired data now is no longer enough to train a neural generation model, we consider leveraging the large scale of unpaired data that are much easier to obtain, and propose response generation with both paired and unpaired data. The generation model is defined by an encoder-decoder architecture with templates as prior, where the templates are estimated from the unpaired data as a neural hidden semi-markov model. By this means, response generation learned from the small paired data can be aided by the semantic and syntactic knowledge in the large unpaired data. To balance the effect of the prior and the input message to response generation, we propose learning the whole generation model with an adversarial approach. Empirical studies on question response generation and sentiment response generation indicate that when only a few pairs are available, our model can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art response generation models in terms of both automatic and human evaluation.
Dual-Stream Pyramid Registration Network
Authors: Miao Kang, Xiaojun Hu, Weilin Huang, Matthew R. Scott, Mauricio Reyes
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

We propose a Dual-Stream Pyramid Registration Network (referred as Dual-PRNet) for unsupervised 3D medical image registration. Unlike recent CNN-based registration approaches, such as VoxelMorph, which explores a single-stream encoder-decoder network to compute a registration fields from a pair of 3D volumes, we design a two-stream architecture able to compute multi-scale registration fields from convolutional feature pyramids. Our contributions are two-fold: (i) we design a two-stream 3D encoder-decoder network which computes two convolutional feature pyramids separately for a pair of input volumes, resulting in strong deep representations that are meaningful for deformation estimation; (ii) we propose a pyramid registration module able to predict multi-scale registration fields directly from the decoding feature pyramids. This allows it to refine the registration fields gradually in a coarse-to-fine manner via sequential warping, and enable the model with the capability for handling significant deformations between two volumes, such as large displacements in spatial domain or slice space. The proposed Dual-PRNet is evaluated on two standard benchmarks for brain MRI registration, where it outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin, e.g., having improvements over recent VoxelMorph [2] with 0.683->0.778 on the LPBA40, and 0.511->0.631 on the Mindboggle101, in term of average Dice score. Code is available at: https://github.com/kangmiao15/Dual-Stream-PRNet-Plus.
Drawing Early-Bird Tickets: Towards More Efficient Training of Deep Networks
Authors: Haoran You, Chaojian Li, Pengfei Xu, Yonggan Fu, Yue Wang, Xiaohan Chen, Richard G. Baraniuk, Zhangyang Wang, Yingyan Lin
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00

(Frankle & Carbin, 2019) shows that there exist winning tickets (small but critical subnetworks) for dense, randomly initialized networks, that can be trained alone to achieve comparable accuracies to the latter in a similar number of iterations. However, the identification of these winning tickets still requires the costly train-prune-retrain process, limiting their practical benefits. In this paper, we discover for the first time that the winning tickets can be identified at the very early training stage, which we term as early-bird (EB) tickets, via low-cost training schemes (e.g., early stopping and low-precision training) at large learning rates. Our finding of EB tickets is consistent with recently reported observations that the key connectivity patterns of neural networks emerge early. Furthermore, we propose a mask distance metric that can be used to identify EB tickets with low computational overhead, without needing to know the true winning tickets that emerge after the full training. Finally, we leverage the existence of EB tickets and the proposed mask distance to develop efficient training methods, which are achieved by first identifying EB tickets via low-cost schemes, and then continuing to train merely the EB tickets towards the target accuracy. Experiments based on various deep networks and datasets validate: 1) the existence of EB tickets, and the effectiveness of mask distance in efficiently identifying them; and 2) that the proposed efficient training via EB tickets can achieve up to 4.7x energy savings while maintaining comparable or even better accuracy, demonstrating a promising and easily adopted method for tackling cost-prohibitive deep network training. Code available at https://github.com/RICE-EIC/Early-Bird-Tickets.
Explainable Deep Learning for Augmentation of sRNA Expression Profiles
Authors: Jelena Fiosina, Maksims Fiosins, Stefan Bonn
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, Feature Importance, Prediction

The lack of well-structured metadata annotations complicates there-usability and interpretation of the growing amount of publicly available RNA expression data. The machine learning-based prediction of metadata(data augmentation) can considerably improve the quality of expression data annotation. In this study,we systematically benchmark deep learning (DL) and random forest (RF)-based metadata augmentation of tissue, age, and sex using small RNA (sRNA) expression profiles. We use 4243 annotated sRNA-Seq samples from the small RNA expression atlas (SEA) database to train and test the augmentation performance. In general, the DL machine learner outperforms the RF method in almost all tested cases. The average cross-validated prediction accuracy of the DL algorithm for tissues is 96.5%, for sex is 77%, and for age is 77.2%. The average tissue prediction accuracy for a completely new dataset is 83.1% (DL) and 80.8% (RF). To understand which sRNAs influence DL predictions, we employ backpropagation-based feature importance scores using the DeepLIFT method, which enable us to obtain information on biological relevance of sRNAs.
Hyperspectral Image Classification With Context-Aware Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network
Authors: Sheng Wan, Chen Gong, Ping Zhong, Shirui Pan, Guangyu Li, Jian Yang
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

In hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, spatial context has demonstrated its significance in achieving promising performance. However, conventional spatial context-based methods simply assume that spatially neighboring pixels should correspond to the same land-cover class, so they often fail to correctly discover the contextual relations among pixels in complex situations, and thus leading to imperfect classification results on some irregular or inhomogeneous regions such as class boundaries. To address this deficiency, we develop a new HSI classification method based on the recently proposed Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), as it can flexibly encode the relations among arbitrarily structured non-Euclidean data. Different from traditional GCN, there are two novel strategies adopted by our method to further exploit the contextual relations for accurate HSI classification. First, since the receptive field of traditional GCN is often limited to fairly small neighborhood, we proposed to capture long range contextual relations in HSI by performing successive graph convolutions on a learned region-induced graph which is transformed from the original 2D image grids. Second, we refine the graph edge weight and the connective relationships among image regions by learning the improved adjacency matrix and the 'edge filter', so that the graph can be gradually refined to adapt to the representations generated by each graph convolutional layer. Such updated graph will in turn result in accurate region representations, and vice versa. The experiments carried out on three real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method yields significant improvement in the classification performance when compared with some state-of-the-art approaches.
Multi-scale Dynamic Feature Encoding Network for Image Demoireing
Authors: Xi Cheng, Zhen-Yong Fu, Jian Yang
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

The prevalence of digital sensors, such as digital cameras and mobile phones, simplifies the acquisition of photos. Digital sensors, however, suffer from producing Moire when photographing objects having complex textures, which deteriorates the quality of photos. Moire spreads across various frequency bands of images and is a dynamic texture with varying colors and shapes, which pose two main challenges in demoireing---an important task in image restoration. In this paper, towards addressing the first challenge, we design a multi-scale network to process images at different spatial resolutions, obtaining features in different frequency bands, and thus our method can jointly remove moire in different frequency bands. Towards solving the second challenge, we propose a dynamic feature encoding module (DFE), embedded in each scale, for dynamic texture. Moire pattern can be eliminated more effectively via DFE.Our proposed method, termed Multi-scale convolutional network with Dynamic feature encoding for image DeMoireing (MDDM), can outperform the state of the arts in fidelity as well as perceptual on benchmarks.
FoodAI: Food Image Recognition via Deep Learning for Smart Food Logging
Authors: Doyen Sahoo, Wang Hao, Shu Ke, Wu Xiongwei, Hung Le, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee-Peng Lim, Steven C. H. Hoi
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

An important aspect of health monitoring is effective logging of food consumption. This can help management of diet-related diseases like obesity, diabetes, and even cardiovascular diseases. Moreover, food logging can help fitness enthusiasts, and people who wanting to achieve a target weight. However, food-logging is cumbersome, and requires not only taking additional effort to note down the food item consumed regularly, but also sufficient knowledge of the food item consumed (which is difficult due to the availability of a wide variety of cuisines). With increasing reliance on smart devices, we exploit the convenience offered through the use of smart phones and propose a smart-food logging system: FoodAI, which offers state-of-the-art deep-learning based image recognition capabilities. FoodAI has been developed in Singapore and is particularly focused on food items commonly consumed in Singapore. FoodAI models were trained on a corpus of 400,000 food images from 756 different classes. In this paper we present extensive analysis and insights into the development of this system. FoodAI has been deployed as an API service and is one of the components powering Healthy 365, a mobile app developed by Singapore's Heath Promotion Board. We have over 100 registered organizations (universities, companies, start-ups) subscribing to this service and actively receive several API requests a day. FoodAI has made food logging convenient, aiding smart consumption and a healthy lifestyle.
Multiple Object Forecasting: Predicting Future Object Locations in Diverse Environments
Authors: Olly Styles, Tanaya Guha, Victor Sanchez
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Multiple Object Forecasting, Object, Trajectory Forecasting

This paper introduces the problem of multiple object forecasting (MOF), in which the goal is to predict future bounding boxes of tracked objects. In contrast to existing works on object trajectory forecasting which primarily consider the problem from a birds-eye perspective, we formulate the problem from an object-level perspective and call for the prediction of full object bounding boxes, rather than trajectories alone. Towards solving this task, we introduce the Citywalks dataset, which consists of over 200k high-resolution video frames. Citywalks comprises of footage recorded in 21 cities from 10 European countries in a variety of weather conditions and over 3.5k unique pedestrian trajectories. For evaluation, we adapt existing trajectory forecasting methods for MOF and confirm cross-dataset generalizability on the MOT-17 dataset without fine-tuning. Finally, we present STED, a novel encoder-decoder architecture for MOF. STED combines visual and temporal features to model both object-motion and ego-motion, and outperforms existing approaches for MOF. Code & dataset link: https://github.com/olly-styles/Multiple-Object-Forecasting
Deep Learning and Random Forest-Based Augmentation of sRNA Expression Profiles
Authors: Jelena Fiosina, Maksims Fiosins, Stefan Bonn
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, General Classification

The lack of well-structured annotations in a growing amount of RNA expression data complicates data interoperability and reusability. Commonly - used text mining methods extract annotations from existing unstructured data descriptions and often provide inaccurate output that requires manual curation. Automatic data-based augmentation (generation of annotations on the base of expression data) can considerably improve the annotation quality and has not been well-studied. We formulate an automatic augmentation of small RNA-seq expression data as a classification problem and investigate deep learning (DL) and random forest (RF) approaches to solve it. We generate tissue and sex annotations from small RNA-seq expression data for tissues and cell lines of homo sapiens. We validate our approach on 4243 annotated small RNA-seq samples from the Small RNA Expression Atlas (SEA) database. The average prediction accuracy for tissue groups is 98% (DL), for tissues - 96.5% (DL), and for sex - 77% (DL). The "one dataset out" average accuracy for tissue group prediction is 83% (DL) and 59% (RF). On average, DL provides better results as compared to RF, and considerably improves classification performance for 'unseen' datasets.
ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations
Authors: Zhenzhong Lan, Mingda Chen, Sebastian Goodman, Kevin Gimpel, Piyush Sharma, Radu Soricut
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, GPU, Linguistic Acceptability, Multimodal Intent Recognition, Multi-task Language Understanding, Natural Language Inference, Question Answering, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence

Increasing model size when pretraining natural language representations often results in improved performance on downstream tasks. However, at some point further model increases become harder due to GPU/TPU memory limitations and longer training times. To address these problems, we present two parameter-reduction techniques to lower memory consumption and increase the training speed of BERT. Comprehensive empirical evidence shows that our proposed methods lead to models that scale much better compared to the original BERT. We also use a self-supervised loss that focuses on modeling inter-sentence coherence, and show it consistently helps downstream tasks with multi-sentence inputs. As a result, our best model establishes new state-of-the-art results on the GLUE, RACE, and \squad benchmarks while having fewer parameters compared to BERT-large. The code and the pretrained models are available at https://github.com/google-research/ALBERT.
MERL: Multi-Head Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Yannis Flet-Berliac, Philippe Preux
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Transfer Learning

A common challenge in reinforcement learning is how to convert the agent's interactions with an environment into fast and robust learning. For instance, earlier work makes use of domain knowledge to improve existing reinforcement learning algorithms in complex tasks. While promising, previously acquired knowledge is often costly and challenging to scale up. Instead, we decide to consider problem knowledge with signals from quantities relevant to solve any task, e.g., self-performance assessment and accurate expectations. $\mathcal{V}^{ex}$ is such a quantity. It is the fraction of variance explained by the value function $V$ and measures the discrepancy between $V$ and the returns. Taking advantage of $\mathcal{V}^{ex}$, we propose MERL, a general framework for structuring reinforcement learning by injecting problem knowledge into policy gradient updates. As a result, the agent is not only optimized for a reward but learns using problem-focused quantities provided by MERL, applicable out-of-the-box to any task. In this paper: (a) We introduce and define MERL, the multi-head reinforcement learning framework we use throughout this work. (b) We conduct experiments across a variety of standard benchmark environments, including 9 continuous control tasks, where results show improved performance. (c) We demonstrate that MERL also improves transfer learning on a set of challenging pixel-based tasks. (d) We ponder how MERL tackles the problem of reward sparsity and better conditions the feature space of reinforcement learning agents.
Multi-grained Attention Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Huapeng Wu, Zhengxia Zou, Jie Gui, Wen-Jun Zeng, Jieping Ye, Jun Zhang, Hongyi Liu, Zhihui Wei
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have drawn great attention in image super-resolution (SR). Recently, visual attention mechanism, which exploits both of the feature importance and contextual cues, has been introduced to image SR and proves to be effective to improve CNN-based SR performance. In this paper, we make a thorough investigation on the attention mechanisms in a SR model and shed light on how simple and effective improvements on these ideas improve the state-of-the-arts. We further propose a unified approach called "multi-grained attention networks (MGAN)" which fully exploits the advantages of multi-scale and attention mechanisms in SR tasks. In our method, the importance of each neuron is computed according to its surrounding regions in a multi-grained fashion and then is used to adaptively re-scale the feature responses. More importantly, the "channel attention" and "spatial attention" strategies in previous methods can be essentially considered as two special cases of our method. We also introduce multi-scale dense connections to extract the image features at multiple scales and capture the features of different layers through dense skip connections. Ablation studies on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In comparison with other state-of-the-art SR methods, our method shows the superiority in terms of both accuracy and model size.
A Refined Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Network for Retinal Vessel Segmentation
Authors: Yukun Zhou, Zailiang Chen, Hailan Shen, Xianxian Zheng, Rongchang Zhao, Xuanchu Duan
Date: 2019-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Generative Adversarial Network, Retinal Vessel Segmentation, Segmentation

Objective: Recognizing retinal vessel abnormity is vital to early diagnosis of ophthalmological diseases and cardiovascular events. However, segmentation results are highly influenced by elusive vessels, especially in low-contrast background and lesion region. In this work, we present an end-to-end synthetic neural network, containing a symmetric equilibrium generative adversarial network (SEGAN), multi-scale features refine blocks (MSFRB), and attention mechanism (AM) to enhance the performance on vessel segmentation. Method: The proposed network is granted powerful multi-scale representation capability to extract detail information. First, SEGAN constructs a symmetric adversarial architecture, which forces generator to produce more realistic images with local details. Second, MSFRB are devised to prevent high-resolution features from being obscured, thereby merging multi-scale features better. Finally, the AM is employed to encourage the network to concentrate on discriminative features. Results: On public dataset DRIVE, STARE, CHASEDB1, and HRF, we evaluate our network quantitatively and compare it with state-of-the-art works. The ablation experiment shows that SEGAN, MSFRB, and AM both contribute to the desirable performance. Conclusion: The proposed network outperforms the mature methods and effectively functions in elusive vessels segmentation, achieving highest scores in Sensitivity, G-Mean, Precision, and F1-Score while maintaining the top level in other metrics. Significance: The appreciable performance and computational efficiency offer great potential in clinical retinal vessel segmentation application. Meanwhile, the network could be utilized to extract detail information in other biomedical issues