pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Where to Focus for Efficient Video Object Detection
Authors: Zhengkai Jiang, Yu Liu, Ceyuan Yang, Jihao Liu, Peng Gao, Qian Zhang, Shiming Xiang, Chunhong Pan
Date: 2019-11-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Video Object Detection

Transferring existing image-based detectors to the video is non-trivial since the quality of frames is always deteriorated by part occlusion, rare pose, and motion blur. Previous approaches exploit to propagate and aggregate features across video frames by using optical flow-warping. However, directly applying image-level optical flow onto the high-level features might not establish accurate spatial correspondences. Therefore, a novel module called Learnable Spatio-Temporal Sampling (LSTS) has been proposed to learn semantic-level correspondences among adjacent frame features accurately. The sampled locations are first randomly initialized, then updated iteratively to find better spatial correspondences guided by detection supervision progressively. Besides, Sparsely Recursive Feature Updating (SRFU) module and Dense Feature Aggregation (DFA) module are also introduced to model temporal relations and enhance per-frame features, respectively. Without bells and whistles, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ImageNet VID dataset with less computational complexity and real-time speed. Code will be made available at https://github.com/jiangzhengkai/LSTS.
Location-aware Upsampling for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Xiangyu He, Zitao Mo, Qiang Chen, Anda Cheng, Peisong Wang, Jian Cheng
Date: 2019-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Many successful learning targets such as minimizing dice loss and cross-entropy loss have enabled unprecedented breakthroughs in segmentation tasks. Beyond these semantic metrics, this paper aims to introduce location supervision into semantic segmentation. Based on this idea, we present a Location-aware Upsampling (LaU) that adaptively refines the interpolating coordinates with trainable offsets. Then, location-aware losses are established by encouraging pixels to move towards well-classified locations. An LaU is offset prediction coupled with interpolation, which is trained end-to-end to generate confidence score at each position from coarse to fine. Guided by location-aware losses, the new module can replace its plain counterpart (\textit{e.g.}, bilinear upsampling) in a plug-and-play manner to further boost the leading encoder-decoder approaches. Extensive experiments validate the consistent improvement over the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/HolmesShuan/Location-aware-Upsampling-for-Semantic-Segmentation
What Do Compressed Deep Neural Networks Forget?
Authors: Sara Hooker, Aaron Courville, Gregory Clark, Yann Dauphin, Andrea Frome
Date: 2019-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Interpretability Techniques for Deep Learning, Model Compression, Network Pruning, Outlier Detection, Quantization

Deep neural network pruning and quantization techniques have demonstrated it is possible to achieve high levels of compression with surprisingly little degradation to test set accuracy. However, this measure of performance conceals significant differences in how different classes and images are impacted by model compression techniques. We find that models with radically different numbers of weights have comparable top-line performance metrics but diverge considerably in behavior on a narrow subset of the dataset. This small subset of data points, which we term Pruning Identified Exemplars (PIEs) are systematically more impacted by the introduction of sparsity. Compression disproportionately impacts model performance on the underrepresented long-tail of the data distribution. PIEs over-index on atypical or noisy images that are far more challenging for both humans and algorithms to classify. Our work provides intuition into the role of capacity in deep neural networks and the trade-offs incurred by compression. An understanding of this disparate impact is critical given the widespread deployment of compressed models in the wild.
Automatic Frame Selection Using MLP Neural Network in Ultrasound Elastography
Authors: Abdelrahman Zayed, Hassan Rivaz
Date: 2019-11-13 00:00:00

Ultrasound elastography estimates the mechanical properties of the tissue from two Radio-Frequency (RF) frames collected before and after tissue deformation due to an external or internal force. This work focuses on strain imaging in quasi-static elastography, where the tissue undergoes slow deformations and strain images are estimated as a surrogate for elasticity modulus. The quality of the strain image depends heavily on the underlying deformation, and even the best strain estimation algorithms cannot estimate a good strain image if the underlying deformation is not suitable. Herein, we introduce a new method for tracking the RF frames and selecting automatically the best possible pair. We achieve this by decomposing the axial displacement image into a linear combination of principal components (which are calculated offline) multiplied by their corresponding weights. We then use the calculated weights as the input feature vector to a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) classifier. The output is a binary decision, either 1 which refers to good frames, or 0 which refers to bad frames. Our MLP model is trained on in-vivo dataset and tested on different datasets of both in-vivo and phantom data. Results show that by using our technique, we would be able to achieve higher quality strain images compared to the traditional methods of picking up pairs that are 1, 2 or 3 frames apart. The training phase of our algorithm is computationally expensive and takes few hours, but it is only done once. The testing phase chooses the optimal pair of frames in only 1.9 ms.
Fast Approximate Time-Delay Estimation in Ultrasound Elastography Using Principal Component Analysis
Authors: Abdelrahman Zayed, Hassan Rivaz
Date: 2019-11-13 00:00:00

Time delay estimation (TDE) is a critical and challenging step in all ultrasound elastography methods. A growing number of TDE techniques require an approximate but robust and fast method to initialize solving for TDE. Herein, we present a fast method for calculating an approximate TDE between two radio frequency (RF) frames of ultrasound. Although this approximate TDE can be useful for several algorithms, we focus on GLobal Ultrasound Elastography (GLUE), which currently relies on Dynamic Programming (DP) to provide this approximate TDE. We exploit Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to find the general modes of deformation in quasi-static elastography, and therefore call our method PCA-GLUE. PCA-GLUE is a data-driven approach that learns a set of TDE principal components from a training database in real experiments. In the test phase, TDE is approximated as a weighted sum of these principal components. Our algorithm robustly estimates the weights from sparse feature matches, then passes the resulting displacement field to GLUE as initial estimates to perform a more accurate displacement estimation. PCA-GLUE is more than ten times faster than DP in estimation of the initial displacement field and yields similar results.
Robustness to Capitalization Errors in Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Sravan Bodapati, Hyokun Yun, Yaser Al-Onaizan
Date: 2019-11-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 11
Tasks: Data Augmentation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER)

Robustness to capitalization errors is a highly desirable characteristic of named entity recognizers, yet we find standard models for the task are surprisingly brittle to such noise. Existing methods to improve robustness to the noise completely discard given orthographic information, mwhich significantly degrades their performance on well-formed text. We propose a simple alternative approach based on data augmentation, which allows the model to \emph{learn} to utilize or ignore orthographic information depending on its usefulness in the context. It achieves competitive robustness to capitalization errors while making negligible compromise to its performance on well-formed text and significantly improving generalization power on noisy user-generated text. Our experiments clearly and consistently validate our claim across different types of machine learning models, languages, and dataset sizes.
AMPL: A Data-Driven Modeling Pipeline for Drug Discovery
Authors: Amanda J. Minnich, Kevin McLoughlin, Margaret Tse, Jason Deng, Andrew Weber, Neha Murad, Benjamin D. Madej, Bharath Ramsundar, Tom Rush, Stacie Calad-Thomson, Jim Brase, Jonathan E. Allen
Date: 2019-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Drug Discovery, Transfer Learning, Uncertainty Quantification

One of the key requirements for incorporating machine learning into the drug discovery process is complete reproducibility and traceability of the model building and evaluation process. With this in mind, we have developed an end-to-end modular and extensible software pipeline for building and sharing machine learning models that predict key pharma-relevant parameters. The ATOM Modeling PipeLine, or AMPL, extends the functionality of the open source library DeepChem and supports an array of machine learning and molecular featurization tools. We have benchmarked AMPL on a large collection of pharmaceutical datasets covering a wide range of parameters. As a result of these comprehensive experiments, we have found that physicochemical descriptors and deep learning-based graph representations significantly outperform traditional fingerprints in the characterization of molecular features. We have also found that dataset size is directly correlated to prediction performance, and that single-task deep learning models only outperform shallow learners if there is sufficient data. Likewise, dataset size has a direct impact on model predictivity, independent of comprehensive hyperparameter model tuning. Our findings point to the need for public dataset integration or multi-task/transfer learning approaches. Lastly, we found that uncertainty quantification (UQ) analysis may help identify model error; however, efficacy of UQ to filter predictions varies considerably between datasets and featurization/model types. AMPL is open source and available for download at http://github.com/ATOMconsortium/AMPL.
Double cycle-consistent generative adversarial network for unsupervised conditional generation
Authors: Fei Ding, Feng Luo, Yin Yang
Date: 2019-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Disentanglement, Diversity, Generative Adversarial Network

Conditional generative models have achieved considerable success in the past few years, but usually require a lot of labeled data. Recently, ClusterGAN combines GAN with an encoder to achieve remarkable clustering performance via unsupervised conditional generation. However, it ignores the real conditional distribution of data, which leads to generating less diverse samples for each class and makes the encoder only achieve sub-optimal clustering performance. Here, we propose a new unsupervised conditional generation framework, Double Cycle-Consistent Conditional GAN (DC3-GAN), which can generate diverse class-conditioned samples. We enforce the encoder and the generator of GAN to form an encoder-generator pair in addition to the generator-encoder pair, which enables us to avoid the low-diversity generation and the triviality of latent features. We train the encoder-generator pair using real data, which can indirectly estimate the real conditional distribution. Meanwhile, this framework enforces the outputs of the encoder to match the inputs of GAN and the prior noise distribution, which disentangles latent space into two parts: one-hot discrete and continuous latent variables. The former can be directly expressed as clusters and the latter represents remaining unspecified factors. This work demonstrates that enhancing the diversity of unsupervised conditional generated samples can improve the clustering performance. Experiments on different benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms existing generative model-based clustering methods, and also achieves the optimal disentanglement performance.
Shadowing Properties of Optimization Algorithms
Authors: Antonio Orvieto, Aurelien Lucchi
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

Ordinary differential equation (ODE) models of gradient-based optimization methods can provide insights into the dynamics of learning and inspire the design of new algorithms. Unfortunately, this thought-provoking perspective is weakened by the fact that, in the worst case, the error between the algorithm steps and its ODE approximation grows exponentially with the number of iterations. In an attempt to encourage the use of continuous-time methods in optimization, we show that, if some additional regularity on the objective is assumed, the ODE representations of Gradient Descent and Heavy-ball do not suffer from the aforementioned problem, once we allow for a small perturbation on the algorithm initial condition. In the dynamical systems literature, this phenomenon is called shadowing. Our analysis relies on the concept of hyperbolicity, as well as on tools from numerical analysis.
Creating Auxiliary Representations from Charge Definitions for Criminal Charge Prediction
Authors: Liangyi Kang, Jie Liu, Lingqiao Liu, Qinfeng Shi, Dan Ye
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Sentence

Charge prediction, determining charges for criminal cases by analyzing the textual fact descriptions, is a promising technology in legal assistant systems. In practice, the fact descriptions could exhibit a significant intra-class variation due to factors like non-normative use of language, which makes the prediction task very challenging, especially for charge classes with too few samples to cover the expression variation. In this work, we explore to use the charge definitions from criminal law to alleviate this issue. The key idea is that the expressions in a fact description should have corresponding formal terms in charge definitions, and those terms are shared across classes and could account for the diversity in the fact descriptions. Thus, we propose to create auxiliary fact representations from charge definitions to augment fact descriptions representation. The generated auxiliary representations are created through the interaction of fact description with the relevant charge definitions and terms in those definitions by integrated sentence- and word-level attention scheme. Experimental results on two datasets show that our model achieves significant improvement than baselines, especially for classes with few samples.
Pose estimation and bin picking for deformable products
Authors: Benjamin Joffe, Tevon Walker. Remi Gourdon, Konrad Ahlin
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Pose Estimation

Robotic systems in manufacturing applications commonly assume known object geometry and appearance. This simplifies the task for the 3D perception algorithms and allows the manipulation to be more deterministic. However, those approaches are not easily transferable to the agricultural and food domains due to the variability and deformability of natural food. We demonstrate an approach applied to poultry products that allows picking up a whole chicken from an unordered bin using a suction cup gripper, estimating its pose using a Deep Learning approach, and placing it in a canonical orientation where it can be further processed. Our robotic system was experimentally evaluated and is able to generalize to object variations and achieves high accuracy on bin picking and pose estimation tasks in a real-world environment.
CHEETAH: An Ultra-Fast, Approximation-Free, and Privacy-Preserved Neural Network Framework based on Joint Obscure Linear and Nonlinear Computations
Authors: Qiao Zhang, Cong Wang, Chunsheng Xin, Hongyi Wu
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00

Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) is enabling a wide range of smart applications on end devices. However, such convenience comes with a cost of privacy because users have to upload their private data to the cloud. This research aims to provide effective and efficient MLaaS such that the cloud server learns nothing about user data and the users cannot infer the proprietary model parameters owned by the server. This work makes the following contributions. First, it unveils the fundamental performance bottleneck of existing schemes due to the heavy permutations in computing linear transformation and the use of communication intensive Garbled Circuits for nonlinear transformation. Second, it introduces an ultra-fast secure MLaaS framework, CHEETAH, which features a carefully crafted secret sharing scheme that runs significantly faster than existing schemes without accuracy loss. Third, CHEETAH is evaluated on the benchmark of well-known, practical deep networks such as AlexNet and VGG-16 on the MNIST and ImageNet datasets. The results demonstrate more than 100x speedup over the fastest GAZELLE (Usenix Security'18), 2000x speedup over MiniONN (ACM CCS'17) and five orders of magnitude speedup over CryptoNets (ICML'16). This significant speedup enables a wide range of practical applications based on privacy-preserved deep neural networks.
92c/MFlops/s, Ultra-Large-Scale Neural-Network Training on a PIII Cluster
Authors: Douglas Aberdeen, Jonathan Baxter, Robert Edwards
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Artificial neural networks with millions of adjustable parameters and a similar number of training examples are a potential solution for difficult, large-scale pattern recognition problems in areas such as speech and face recognition, classification of large volumes of web data, and finance. The bottleneck is that neural network training involves iterative gradient descent and is extremely computationally intensive. In this paper we present a technique for distributed training of Ultra Large Scale Neural Networks (ULSNN) on Bunyip, a Linux-based cluster of 196 Pentium III processors. To illustrate ULSNN training we describe an experiment in which a neural network with 1.73 million adjustable parameters was trained to recognize machine-printed Japanese characters from a database containing 9 million training patterns. The training runs with a average performance of 163.3 GFlops/s (single precision). With a machine cost of \$150,913, this yields a price/performance ratio of 92.4c/MFlops/s (single precision). For comparison purposes, training using double precision and the ATLAS DGEMM produces a sustained performance of 70 MFlops/s or \$2.16 / MFlop/s (double precision).
Nonconvex Stochastic Nested Optimization via Stochastic ADMM
Authors: Zhongruo Wang
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00

We consider the stochastic nested composition optimization problem where the objective is a composition of two expected-value functions. We proposed the stochastic ADMM to solve this complicated objective. In order to find an $\epsilon$ stationary point where the expected norm of the subgradient of corresponding augmented Lagrangian is smaller than $\epsilon$, the total sample complexity of our method is $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$ for the online case and $\mathcal{O} \Bigl((2N_1 + N_2) + (2N_1 + N_2)^{1/2}\epsilon^{-2}\Bigr)$ for the finite sum case. The computational complexity is consistent with proximal version proposed in \cite{zhang2019multi}, but our algorithm can solve more general problem when the proximal mapping of the penalty is not easy to compute.
Negative sampling in semi-supervised learning
Authors: John Chen, Vatsal Shah, Anastasios Kyrillidis
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

We introduce Negative Sampling in Semi-Supervised Learning (NS3L), a simple, fast, easy to tune algorithm for semi-supervised learning (SSL). NS3L is motivated by the success of negative sampling/contrastive estimation. We demonstrate that adding the NS3L loss to state-of-the-art SSL algorithms, such as the Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT), significantly improves upon vanilla VAT and its variant, VAT with Entropy Minimization. By adding the NS3L loss to MixMatch, the current state-of-the-art approach on semi-supervised tasks, we observe significant improvements over vanilla MixMatch. We conduct extensive experiments on the CIFAR10, CIFAR100, SVHN and STL10 benchmark datasets.
All It Takes is 20 Questions!: A Knowledge Graph Based Approach
Authors: Alvin Dey, Harsh Kumar Jain, Vikash Kumar Pandey, Tanmoy Chakraborty
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Recommendation Systems

20 Questions (20Q) is a two-player game. One player is the answerer, and the other is a questioner. The answerer chooses an entity from a specified domain and does not reveal this to the other player. The questioner can ask at most 20 questions to the answerer to guess the entity. The answerer can reply to the questions asked by saying yes/no/maybe. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on the knowledge graph for designing the 20Q game on Bollywood movies. The system assumes the role of the questioner and asks questions to predict the movie thought by the answerer. It uses a probabilistic learning model for template-based question generation and answers prediction. A dataset of interrelated entities is represented as a weighted knowledge graph, which updates as the game progresses by asking questions. An evolutionary approach helps the model to gain a better understanding of user choices and predicts the answer in fewer questions over time. Experimental results show that our model was able to predict the correct movie in less than 10 questions for more than half of the times the game was played. This kind of model can be used to design applications that can detect diseases by asking questions based on symptoms, improving recommendation systems, etc.
Coordination Group Formation for OnLine Coordinated Routing Mechanisms
Authors: Wang Peng, Lili Du
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This study considers that the collective route choices of travelers en route represent a resolution of their competition on network routes. Well understanding this competition and coordinating their route choices help mitigate urban traffic congestion. Even though existing studies have developed such mechanisms (e.g., the CRM [1]), we still lack the quantitative method to evaluate the coordination penitential and identify proper coordination groups (CG) to implement the CRM. Thus, they hit prohibitive computing difficulty when implemented with many opt-in travelers. Motived by this view, this study develops mathematical approaches to quantify the coordination potential between two and among multiple travelers. Next, we develop the adaptive centroid-based clustering algorithm (ACCA), which splits travelers en route in a local network into CGs, each with proper size and strong coordination potential. Moreover, the ACCA is statistically secured to stop at a local optimal clustering solution, which balances the inner-cluster and inter-cluster coordination potential. It can be implemented by parallel computation to accelerate its computing efficiency. Furthermore, we propose a clustering based coordinated routing mechanism (CB-CRM), which implements a CRM on each individual CG. The numerical experiments built upon both Sioux Falls and Hardee city networks show that the ACCA works efficiently to form proper coordination groups so that as compared to the CRM, the CB-CRM significantly improves computation efficiency with minor system performance loss in a large network. This merit becomes more apparent under high penetration and congested traffic condition. Last, the experiments validate the good features of the ACCA as well as the value of implementing parallel computation.