pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PUGeo-Net: A Geometry-centric Network for 3D Point Cloud Upsampling
Authors: Yue Qian, Junhui Hou, Sam Kwong, Ying He
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Point Cloud Super Resolution, point cloud upsampling, Super-Resolution, Surface Reconstruction

This paper addresses the problem of generating uniform dense point clouds to describe the underlying geometric structures from given sparse point clouds. Due to the irregular and unordered nature, point cloud densification as a generative task is challenging. To tackle the challenge, we propose a novel deep neural network based method, called PUGeo-Net, that learns a $3\times 3$ linear transformation matrix $\bf T$ for each input point. Matrix $\mathbf T$ approximates the augmented Jacobian matrix of a local parameterization and builds a one-to-one correspondence between the 2D parametric domain and the 3D tangent plane so that we can lift the adaptively distributed 2D samples (which are also learned from data) to 3D space. After that, we project the samples to the curved surface by computing a displacement along the normal of the tangent plane. PUGeo-Net is fundamentally different from the existing deep learning methods that are largely motivated by the image super-resolution techniques and generate new points in the abstract feature space. Thanks to its geometry-centric nature, PUGeo-Net works well for both CAD models with sharp features and scanned models with rich geometric details. Moreover, PUGeo-Net can compute the normal for the original and generated points, which is highly desired by the surface reconstruction algorithms. Computational results show that PUGeo-Net, the first neural network that can jointly generate vertex coordinates and normals, consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy and efficiency for upsampling factor $4\sim 16$.
Testing Goodness of Fit of Conditional Density Models with Kernels
Authors: Wittawat Jitkrittum, Heishiro Kanagawa, Bernhard Schölkopf
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Two-sample testing

We propose two nonparametric statistical tests of goodness of fit for conditional distributions: given a conditional probability density function $p(y|x)$ and a joint sample, decide whether the sample is drawn from $p(y|x)r_x(x)$ for some density $r_x$. Our tests, formulated with a Stein operator, can be applied to any differentiable conditional density model, and require no knowledge of the normalizing constant. We show that 1) our tests are consistent against any fixed alternative conditional model; 2) the statistics can be estimated easily, requiring no density estimation as an intermediate step; and 3) our second test offers an interpretable test result providing insight on where the conditional model does not fit well in the domain of the covariate. We demonstrate the interpretability of our test on a task of modeling the distribution of New York City's taxi drop-off location given a pick-up point. To our knowledge, our work is the first to propose such conditional goodness-of-fit tests that simultaneously have all these desirable properties.
Learning from Positive and Unlabeled Data with Arbitrary Positive Shift
Authors: Zayd Hammoudeh, Daniel Lowd
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

Positive-unlabeled (PU) learning trains a binary classifier using only positive and unlabeled data. A common simplifying assumption is that the positive data is representative of the target positive class. This assumption rarely holds in practice due to temporal drift, domain shift, and/or adversarial manipulation. This paper shows that PU learning is possible even with arbitrarily non-representative positive data given unlabeled data from the source and target distributions. Our key insight is that only the negative class's distribution need be fixed. We integrate this into two statistically consistent methods to address arbitrary positive bias - one approach combines negative-unlabeled learning with unlabeled-unlabeled learning while the other uses a novel, recursive risk estimator. Experimental results demonstrate our methods' effectiveness across numerous real-world datasets and forms of positive bias, including disjoint positive class-conditional supports. Additionally, we propose a general, simplified approach to address PU risk estimation overfitting.
Fixed Encoder Self-Attention Patterns in Transformer-Based Machine Translation
Authors: Alessandro Raganato, Yves Scherrer, Jörg Tiedemann
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Machine Translation, Position, Translation

Transformer-based models have brought a radical change to neural machine translation. A key feature of the Transformer architecture is the so-called multi-head attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus simultaneously on different parts of the input. However, recent works have shown that most attention heads learn simple, and often redundant, positional patterns. In this paper, we propose to replace all but one attention head of each encoder layer with simple fixed -- non-learnable -- attentive patterns that are solely based on position and do not require any external knowledge. Our experiments with different data sizes and multiple language pairs show that fixing the attention heads on the encoder side of the Transformer at training time does not impact the translation quality and even increases BLEU scores by up to 3 points in low-resource scenarios.
Complex Markov Logic Networks: Expressivity and Liftability
Authors: Ondrej Kuzelka
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00

We study expressivity of Markov logic networks (MLNs). We introduce complex MLNs, which use complex-valued weights, and we show that, unlike standard MLNs with real-valued weights, complex MLNs are fully expressive. We then observe that discrete Fourier transform can be computed using weighted first order model counting (WFOMC) with complex weights and use this observation to design an algorithm for computing relational marginal polytopes which needs substantially less calls to a WFOMC oracle than a recent algorithm.
Using Wavelets to Analyze Similarities in Image-Classification Datasets
Authors: Roozbeh Yousefzadeh
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Deep learning image classifiers usually rely on huge training sets and their training process can be described as learning the similarities and differences among training images. But, images in large training sets are not usually studied from this perspective and fine-level similarities and differences among images is usually overlooked. This is due to lack of fast and efficient computational methods to analyze the contents of these datasets. Some studies aim to identify the influential and redundant training images, but such methods require a model that is already trained on the entire training set. Here, using image processing and numerical analysis tools we develop a practical and fast method to analyze the similarities in image classification datasets. We show that such analysis can provide valuable insights about the datasets and the classification task at hand, prior to training a model. Our method uses wavelet decomposition of images and other numerical analysis tools, with no need for a pre-trained model. Interestingly, the results we obtain corroborate the previous results in the literature that analyzed the similarities using pre-trained CNNs. We show that similar images in standard datasets (such as CIFAR) can be identified in a few seconds, a significant speed-up compared to alternative methods in the literature. By removing the computational speed obstacle, it becomes practical to gain new insights about the contents of datasets and the models trained on them. We show that similarities between training and testing images may provide insights about the generalization of models. Finally, we investigate the similarities between images in relation to decision boundaries of a trained model.
Informative Bayesian Neural Network Priors for Weak Signals
Authors: Tianyu Cui, Aki Havulinna, Pekka Marttinen, Samuel Kaski
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00

Encoding domain knowledge into the prior over the high-dimensional weight space of a neural network is challenging but essential in applications with limited data and weak signals. Two types of domain knowledge are commonly available in scientific applications: 1. feature sparsity (fraction of features deemed relevant); 2. signal-to-noise ratio, quantified, for instance, as the proportion of variance explained (PVE). We show how to encode both types of domain knowledge into the widely used Gaussian scale mixture priors with Automatic Relevance Determination. Specifically, we propose a new joint prior over the local (i.e., feature-specific) scale parameters that encodes knowledge about feature sparsity, and a Stein gradient optimization to tune the hyperparameters in such a way that the distribution induced on the model's PVE matches the prior distribution. We show empirically that the new prior improves prediction accuracy, compared to existing neural network priors, on several publicly available datasets and in a genetics application where signals are weak and sparse, often outperforming even computationally intensive cross-validation for hyperparameter tuning.
Recurrent Dirichlet Belief Networks for Interpretable Dynamic Relational Data Modelling
Authors: Yaqiong Li, Xuhui Fan, Ling Chen, Bin Li, Zheng Yu, Scott A. Sisson
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction

The Dirichlet Belief Network~(DirBN) has been recently proposed as a promising approach in learning interpretable deep latent representations for objects. In this work, we leverage its interpretable modelling architecture and propose a deep dynamic probabilistic framework -- the Recurrent Dirichlet Belief Network~(Recurrent-DBN) -- to study interpretable hidden structures from dynamic relational data. The proposed Recurrent-DBN has the following merits: (1) it infers interpretable and organised hierarchical latent structures for objects within and across time steps; (2) it enables recurrent long-term temporal dependence modelling, which outperforms the one-order Markov descriptions in most of the dynamic probabilistic frameworks. In addition, we develop a new inference strategy, which first upward-and-backward propagates latent counts and then downward-and-forward samples variables, to enable efficient Gibbs sampling for the Recurrent-DBN. We apply the Recurrent-DBN to dynamic relational data problems. The extensive experiment results on real-world data validate the advantages of the Recurrent-DBN over the state-of-the-art models in interpretable latent structure discovery and improved link prediction performance.
FR-Train: A Mutual Information-Based Approach to Fair and Robust Training
Authors: Yuji Roh, Kangwook Lee, Steven Euijong Whang, Changho Suh
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Data Poisoning, Fairness

Trustworthy AI is a critical issue in machine learning where, in addition to training a model that is accurate, one must consider both fair and robust training in the presence of data bias and poisoning. However, the existing model fairness techniques mistakenly view poisoned data as an additional bias to be fixed, resulting in severe performance degradation. To address this problem, we propose FR-Train, which holistically performs fair and robust model training. We provide a mutual information-based interpretation of an existing adversarial training-based fairness-only method, and apply this idea to architect an additional discriminator that can identify poisoned data using a clean validation set and reduce its influence. In our experiments, FR-Train shows almost no decrease in fairness and accuracy in the presence of data poisoning by both mitigating the bias and defending against poisoning. We also demonstrate how to construct clean validation sets using crowdsourcing, and release new benchmark datasets.
Baryon acoustic oscillations reconstruction using convolutional neural networks
Authors: Tian-Xiang Mao, Jie Wang, Baojiu Li, Yan-Chuan Cai, Bridget Falck, Mark Neyrinck, Alex Szalay
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00

We propose a new scheme to reconstruct the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) signal, which contains key cosmological information, based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). Trained with almost no fine-tuning, the network can recover large-scale modes accurately in the test set: the correlation coefficient between the true and reconstructed initial conditions reaches $90\%$ at $k\leq 0.2 h\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$, which can lead to significant improvements of the BAO signal-to-noise ratio down to $k\simeq0.4h\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$. Since this new scheme is based on the configuration-space density field in sub-boxes, it is local and less affected by survey boundaries than the standard reconstruction method, as our tests confirm. We find that the network trained in one cosmology is able to reconstruct BAO peaks in the others, i.e. recovering information lost to non-linearity independent of cosmology. The accuracy of recovered BAO peak positions is far less than that caused by the difference in the cosmology models for training and testing, suggesting that different models can be distinguished efficiently in our scheme. It is very promising that Our scheme provides a different new way to extract the cosmological information from the ongoing and future large galaxy surveys.
Automatic Estimation of Sphere Centers from Images of Calibrated Cameras
Authors: Levente Hajder, Tekla Tóth, Zoltán Pusztai
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Calibration of devices with different modalities is a key problem in robotic vision. Regular spatial objects, such as planes, are frequently used for this task. This paper deals with the automatic detection of ellipses in camera images, as well as to estimate the 3D position of the spheres corresponding to the detected 2D ellipses. We propose two novel methods to (i) detect an ellipse in camera images and (ii) estimate the spatial location of the corresponding sphere if its size is known. The algorithms are tested both quantitatively and qualitatively. They are applied for calibrating the sensor system of autonomous cars equipped with digital cameras, depth sensors and LiDAR devices.
On the General Value of Evidence, and Bilingual Scene-Text Visual Question Answering
Authors: Xinyu Wang, Yuliang Liu, Chunhua Shen, Chun Chet Ng, Canjie Luo, Lianwen Jin, Chee Seng Chan, Anton Van Den Hengel, Liangwei Wang
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Question Answering, Referring Expression, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Visual Question Answering (VQA) methods have made incredible progress, but suffer from a failure to generalize. This is visible in the fact that they are vulnerable to learning coincidental correlations in the data rather than deeper relations between image content and ideas expressed in language. We present a dataset that takes a step towards addressing this problem in that it contains questions expressed in two languages, and an evaluation process that co-opts a well understood image-based metric to reflect the method's ability to reason. Measuring reasoning directly encourages generalization by penalizing answers that are coincidentally correct. The dataset reflects the scene-text version of the VQA problem, and the reasoning evaluation can be seen as a text-based version of a referring expression challenge. Experiments and analysis are provided that show the value of the dataset.
Injective Domain Knowledge in Neural Networks for Transprecision Computing
Authors: Andrea Borghesi, Federico Baldo, Michele Lombardi, Michela Milano
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00

Machine Learning (ML) models are very effective in many learning tasks, due to the capability to extract meaningful information from large data sets. Nevertheless, there are learning problems that cannot be easily solved relying on pure data, e.g. scarce data or very complex functions to be approximated. Fortunately, in many contexts domain knowledge is explicitly available and can be used to train better ML models. This paper studies the improvements that can be obtained by integrating prior knowledge when dealing with a non-trivial learning task, namely precision tuning of transprecision computing applications. The domain information is injected in the ML models in different ways: I) additional features, II) ad-hoc graph-based network topology, III) regularization schemes. The results clearly show that ML models exploiting problem-specific information outperform the purely data-driven ones, with an average accuracy improvement around 38%.
Mnemonics Training: Multi-Class Incremental Learning without Forgetting
Authors: Yaoyao Liu, Yu-Ting Su, An-An Liu, Bernt Schiele, Qianru Sun
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Continual Learning, Incremental Learning

Multi-Class Incremental Learning (MCIL) aims to learn new concepts by incrementally updating a model trained on previous concepts. However, there is an inherent trade-off to effectively learning new concepts without catastrophic forgetting of previous ones. To alleviate this issue, it has been proposed to keep around a few examples of the previous concepts but the effectiveness of this approach heavily depends on the representativeness of these examples. This paper proposes a novel and automatic framework we call mnemonics, where we parameterize exemplars and make them optimizable in an end-to-end manner. We train the framework through bilevel optimizations, i.e., model-level and exemplar-level. We conduct extensive experiments on three MCIL benchmarks, CIFAR-100, ImageNet-Subset and ImageNet, and show that using mnemonics exemplars can surpass the state-of-the-art by a large margin. Interestingly and quite intriguingly, the mnemonics exemplars tend to be on the boundaries between different classes.
Learning to Select Bi-Aspect Information for Document-Scale Text Content Manipulation
Authors: Xiaocheng Feng, Yawei Sun, Bing Qin, Heng Gong, Yibo Sun, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, Ting Liu
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Style Transfer, Text Style Transfer, Translation

In this paper, we focus on a new practical task, document-scale text content manipulation, which is the opposite of text style transfer and aims to preserve text styles while altering the content. In detail, the input is a set of structured records and a reference text for describing another recordset. The output is a summary that accurately describes the partial content in the source recordset with the same writing style of the reference. The task is unsupervised due to lack of parallel data, and is challenging to select suitable records and style words from bi-aspect inputs respectively and generate a high-fidelity long document. To tackle those problems, we first build a dataset based on a basketball game report corpus as our testbed, and present an unsupervised neural model with interactive attention mechanism, which is used for learning the semantic relationship between records and reference texts to achieve better content transfer and better style preservation. In addition, we also explore the effectiveness of the back-translation in our task for constructing some pseudo-training pairs. Empirical results show superiority of our approaches over competitive methods, and the models also yield a new state-of-the-art result on a sentence-level dataset.
Inverse learning in Hilbert scales
Authors: Abhishake Rastogi, Peter Mathé
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We study the linear ill-posed inverse problem with noisy data in the statistical learning setting. Approximate reconstructions from random noisy data are sought with general regularization schemes in Hilbert scale. We discuss the rates of convergence for the regularized solution under the prior assumptions and a certain link condition. We express the error in terms of certain distance functions. For regression functions with smoothness given in terms of source conditions the error bound can then be explicitly established.
Beyond Camera Motion Blur Removing: How to Handle Outliers in Deblurring
Authors: Meng Chang, Chenwei Yang, Huajun Feng, Zhihai Xu, Qi Li
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Edge Detection

Camera motion deblurring is an important low-level vision task for achieving better imaging quality. When a scene has outliers such as saturated pixels, the captured blurred image becomes more difficult to restore. In this paper, we propose a novel method to handle camera motion blur with outliers. We first propose an edge-aware scale-recurrent network (EASRN) to conduct deblurring. EASRN has a separate deblurring module that removes blur at multiple scales and an upsampling module that fuses different input scales. Then a salient edge detection network is proposed to supervise the training process and constraint the edges restoration. By simulating camera motion and adding various light sources, we can generate blurred images with saturation cutoff. Using the proposed data generation method, our network can learn to deal with outliers effectively. We evaluate our method on public test datasets including the GoPro dataset, Kohler's dataset and Lai's dataset. Both objective evaluation indexes and subjective visualization show that our method results in better deblurring quality than other state-of-the-art approaches.
ABCNet: Real-time Scene Text Spotting with Adaptive Bezier-Curve Network
Authors: Yuliang Liu, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen, Tong He, Lianwen Jin, Liangwei Wang
Date: 2020-02-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Scene Text Detection, Text Detection, Text Spotting

Scene text detection and recognition has received increasing research attention. Existing methods can be roughly categorized into two groups: character-based and segmentation-based. These methods either are costly for character annotation or need to maintain a complex pipeline, which is often not suitable for real-time applications. Here we address the problem by proposing the Adaptive Bezier-Curve Network (ABCNet). Our contributions are three-fold: 1) For the first time, we adaptively fit arbitrarily-shaped text by a parameterized Bezier curve. 2) We design a novel BezierAlign layer for extracting accurate convolution features of a text instance with arbitrary shapes, significantly improving the precision compared with previous methods. 3) Compared with standard bounding box detection, our Bezier curve detection introduces negligible computation overhead, resulting in superiority of our method in both efficiency and accuracy. Experiments on arbitrarily-shaped benchmark datasets, namely Total-Text and CTW1500, demonstrate that ABCNet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, meanwhile significantly improving the speed. In particular, on Total-Text, our realtime version is over 10 times faster than recent state-of-the-art methods with a competitive recognition accuracy. Code is available at https://tinyurl.com/AdelaiDet