pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Domain-specific loss design for unsupervised physical training: A new approach to modeling medical ML solutions
Authors: Hendrik Burwinkel, Holger Matz, Stefan Saur, Christoph Hauger, Ayse Mine Evren, Nino Hirnschall, Oliver Findl, Nassir Navab, Seyed-Ahmad Ahmadi
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Today, cataract surgery is the most frequently performed ophthalmic surgery in the world. The cataract, a developing opacity of the human eye lens, constitutes the world's most frequent cause for blindness. During surgery, the lens is removed and replaced by an artificial intraocular lens (IOL). To prevent patients from needing strong visual aids after surgery, a precise prediction of the optical properties of the inserted IOL is crucial. There has been lots of activity towards developing methods to predict these properties from biometric eye data obtained by OCT devices, recently also by employing machine learning. They consider either only biometric data or physical models, but rarely both, and often neglect the IOL geometry. In this work, we propose OpticNet, a novel optical refraction network, loss function, and training scheme which is unsupervised, domain-specific, and physically motivated. We derive a precise light propagation eye model using single-ray raytracing and formulate a differentiable loss function that back-propagates physical gradients into the network. Further, we propose a new transfer learning procedure, which allows unsupervised training on the physical model and fine-tuning of the network on a cohort of real IOL patient cases. We show that our network is not only superior to systems trained with standard procedures but also that our method outperforms the current state of the art in IOL calculation when compared on two biometric data sets.
Natural evolution strategies and variational Monte Carlo
Authors: Tianchen Zhao, Giuseppe Carleo, James Stokes, Shravan Veerapaneni
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Variational Monte Carlo

A notion of quantum natural evolution strategies is introduced, which provides a geometric synthesis of a number of known quantum/classical algorithms for performing classical black-box optimization. Recent work of Gomes et al. [2019] on heuristic combinatorial optimization using neural quantum states is pedagogically reviewed in this context, emphasizing the connection with natural evolution strategies. The algorithmic framework is illustrated for approximate combinatorial optimization problems, and a systematic strategy is found for improving the approximation ratios. In particular it is found that natural evolution strategies can achieve approximation ratios competitive with widely used heuristic algorithms for Max-Cut, at the expense of increased computation time.
Reinforcement Learning for Thermostatically Controlled Loads Control using Modelica and Python
Authors: Oleh Lukianykhin, Tetiana Bogodorova
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The aim of the project is to investigate and assess opportunities for applying reinforcement learning (RL) for power system control. As a proof of concept (PoC), voltage control of thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) for power consumption regulation was developed using Modelica-based pipeline. The Q-learning RL algorithm has been validated for deterministic and stochastic initialization of TCLs. The latter modelling is closer to real grid behaviour, which challenges the control development, considering the stochastic nature of load switching. In addition, the paper shows the influence of Q-learning parameters, including discretization of state-action space, on the controller performance.
Understanding Dynamic Scenes using Graph Convolution Networks
Authors: Sravan Mylavarapu, Mahtab Sandhu, Priyesh Vijayan, K. Madhava Krishna, Balaraman Ravindran, Anoop Namboodiri
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, State Estimation, Transfer Learning

We present a novel Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Network (MRGCN) based framework to model on-road vehicle behaviors from a sequence of temporally ordered frames as grabbed by a moving monocular camera. The input to MRGCN is a multi-relational graph where the graph's nodes represent the active and passive agents/objects in the scene, and the bidirectional edges that connect every pair of nodes are encodings of their Spatio-temporal relations. We show that this proposed explicit encoding and usage of an intermediate spatio-temporal interaction graph to be well suited for our tasks over learning end-end directly on a set of temporally ordered spatial relations. We also propose an attention mechanism for MRGCNs that conditioned on the scene dynamically scores the importance of information from different interaction types. The proposed framework achieves significant performance gain over prior methods on vehicle-behavior classification tasks on four datasets. We also show a seamless transfer of learning to multiple datasets without resorting to fine-tuning. Such behavior prediction methods find immediate relevance in a variety of navigation tasks such as behavior planning, state estimation, and applications relating to the detection of traffic violations over videos.
Building a Manga Dataset "Manga109" with Annotations for Multimedia Applications
Authors: Kiyoharu Aizawa, Azuma Fujimoto, Atsushi Otsubo, Toru Ogawa, Yusuke Matsui, Koki Tsubota, Hikaru Ikuta
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Manga, or comics, which are a type of multimodal artwork, have been left behind in the recent trend of deep learning applications because of the lack of a proper dataset. Hence, we built Manga109, a dataset consisting of a variety of 109 Japanese comic books (94 authors and 21,142 pages) and made it publicly available by obtaining author permissions for academic use. We carefully annotated the frames, speech texts, character faces, and character bodies; the total number of annotations exceeds 500k. This dataset provides numerous manga images and annotations, which will be beneficial for use in machine learning algorithms and their evaluation. In addition to academic use, we obtained further permission for a subset of the dataset for industrial use. In this article, we describe the details of the dataset and present a few examples of multimedia processing applications (detection, retrieval, and generation) that apply existing deep learning methods and are made possible by the dataset.
The Structured Weighted Violations MIRA
Authors: Dor Ringel, Rotem Dror, Roi Reichart
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Prediction, Structured Prediction

We present the Structured Weighted Violation MIRA (SWVM), a new structured prediction algorithm that is based on an hybridization between MIRA (Crammer and Singer, 2003) and the structured weighted violations perceptron (SWVP) (Dror and Reichart, 2016). We demonstrate that the concepts developed in (Dror and Reichart, 2016) combined with a powerful structured prediction algorithm can improve performance on sequence labeling tasks. In experiments with syntactic chunking and named entity recognition (NER), the new algorithm substantially outperforms the original MIRA as well as the original structured perceptron and SWVP. Our code is available at https://github.com/dorringel/SWVM.
Memory-Augmented Relation Network for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Jun He, Richang Hong, Xueliang Liu, Mingliang Xu, Zheng-Jun Zha, Meng Wang
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Metric Learning, Relation, Relation Network

Metric-based few-shot learning methods concentrate on learning transferable feature embedding that generalizes well from seen categories to unseen categories under the supervision of limited number of labelled instances. However, most of them treat each individual instance in the working context separately without considering its relationships with the others. In this work, we investigate a new metric-learning method, Memory-Augmented Relation Network (MRN), to explicitly exploit these relationships. In particular, for an instance, we choose the samples that are visually similar from the working context, and perform weighted information propagation to attentively aggregate helpful information from the chosen ones to enhance its representation. In MRN, we also formulate the distance metric as a learnable relation module which learns to compare for similarity measurement, and augment the working context with memory slots, both contributing to its generality. We empirically demonstrate that MRN yields significant improvement over its ancestor and achieves competitive or even better performance when compared with other few-shot learning approaches on the two major benchmark datasets, i.e. miniImagenet and tieredImagenet.
High Resolution Face Age Editing
Authors: Xu Yao, Gilles Puy, Alasdair Newson, Yann Gousseau, Pierre Hellier
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Face Age Editing, Image Manipulation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Face age editing has become a crucial task in film post-production, and is also becoming popular for general purpose photography. Recently, adversarial training has produced some of the most visually impressive results for image manipulation, including the face aging/de-aging task. In spite of considerable progress, current methods often present visual artifacts and can only deal with low-resolution images. In order to achieve aging/de-aging with the high quality and robustness necessary for wider use, these problems need to be addressed. This is the goal of the present work. We present an encoder-decoder architecture for face age editing. The core idea of our network is to create both a latent space containing the face identity, and a feature modulation layer corresponding to the age of the individual. We then combine these two elements to produce an output image of the person with a desired target age. Our architecture is greatly simplified with respect to other approaches, and allows for continuous age editing on high resolution images in a single unified model.
Photo style transfer with consistency losses
Authors: Xu Yao, Gilles Puy, Patrick Pérez
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

We address the problem of style transfer between two photos and propose a new way to preserve photorealism. Using the single pair of photos available as input, we train a pair of deep convolution networks (convnets), each of which transfers the style of one photo to the other. To enforce photorealism, we introduce a content preserving mechanism by combining a cycle-consistency loss with a self-consistency loss. Experimental results show that this method does not suffer from typical artifacts observed in methods working in the same settings. We then further analyze some properties of these trained convnets. First, we notice that they can be used to stylize other unseen images with same known style. Second, we show that retraining only a small subset of the network parameters can be sufficient to adapt these convnets to new styles.
A Weighted Difference of Anisotropic and Isotropic Total Variation for Relaxed Mumford-Shah Color and Multiphase Image Segmentation
Authors: Kevin Bui, Fredrick Park, Yifei Lou, Jack Xin
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In a class of piecewise-constant image segmentation models, we propose to incorporate a weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation (AITV) to regularize the partition boundaries in an image. In particular, we replace the total variation regularization in the Chan-Vese segmentation model and a fuzzy region competition model by the proposed AITV. To deal with the nonconvex nature of AITV, we apply the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA), in which the subproblems can be minimized by the primal-dual hybrid gradient method with linesearch. The convergence of the DCA scheme is analyzed. In addition, a generalization to color image segmentation is discussed. In the numerical experiments, we compare the proposed models with the classic convex approaches and the two-stage segmentation methods (smoothing and then thresholding) on various images, showing that our models are effective in image segmentation and robust with respect to impulsive noises.
Comment on "No-Reference Video Quality Assessment Based on the Temporal Pooling of Deep Features"
Authors: Franz Götz-Hahn, Vlad Hosu, Dietmar Saupe
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Quality Assessment

In Neural Processing Letters 50,3 (2019) a machine learning approach to blind video quality assessment was proposed. It is based on temporal pooling of features of video frames, taken from the last pooling layer of deep convolutional neural networks. The method was validated on two established benchmark datasets and gave results far better than the previous state-of-the-art. In this letter we report the results from our careful reimplementations. The performance results, claimed in the paper, cannot be reached, and are even below the state-of-the-art by a large margin. We show that the originally reported wrong performance results are a consequence of two cases of data leakage. Information from outside the training dataset was used in the fine-tuning stage and in the model evaluation.
Estimating g-Leakage via Machine Learning
Authors: Marco Romanelli, Konstantinos Chatzikokolakis, Catuscia Palamidessi, Pablo Piantanida
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This paper considers the problem of estimating the information leakage of a system in the black-box scenario. It is assumed that the system's internals are unknown to the learner, or anyway too complicated to analyze, and the only available information are pairs of input-output data samples, possibly obtained by submitting queries to the system or provided by a third party. Previous research has mainly focused on counting the frequencies to estimate the input-output conditional probabilities (referred to as frequentist approach), however this method is not accurate when the domain of possible outputs is large. To overcome this difficulty, the estimation of the Bayes error of the ideal classifier was recently investigated using Machine Learning (ML) models and it has been shown to be more accurate thanks to the ability of those models to learn the input-output correspondence. However, the Bayes vulnerability is only suitable to describe one-try attacks. A more general and flexible measure of leakage is the g-vulnerability, which encompasses several different types of adversaries, with different goals and capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to perform black-box estimation of the g-vulnerability using ML. A feature of our approach is that it does not require to estimate the conditional probabilities, and that it is suitable for a large class of ML algorithms. First, we formally show the learnability for all data distributions. Then, we evaluate the performance via various experiments using k-Nearest Neighbors and Neural Networks. Our results outperform the frequentist approach when the observables domain is large.
Enhancing LGMD's Looming Selectivity for UAV with Spatial-temporal Distributed Presynaptic Connections
Authors: Jiannan Zhao, Hongxin Wang, Shigang Yue
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Collision detection is one of the most challenging tasks for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This is especially true for small or micro UAVs, due to their limited computational power. In nature, flying insects with compact and simple visual systems demonstrate their remarkable ability to navigate and avoid collision in complex environments. A good example of this is provided by locusts. They can avoid collisions in a dense swarm through the activity of a motion based visual neuron called the Lobula Giant Movement Detector (LGMD). The defining feature of the LGMD neuron is its preference for looming. As a flying insect's visual neuron, LGMD is considered to be an ideal basis for building UAV's collision detecting system. However, existing LGMD models cannot distinguish looming clearly from other visual cues such as complex background movements caused by UAV agile flights. To address this issue, we proposed a new model implementing distributed spatial-temporal synaptic interactions, which is inspired by recent findings in locusts' synaptic morphology. We first introduced the locally distributed excitation to enhance the excitation caused by visual motion with preferred velocities. Then radially extending temporal latency for inhibition is incorporated to compete with the distributed excitation and selectively suppress the non-preferred visual motions. Systematic experiments have been conducted to verify the performance of the proposed model for UAV agile flights. The results have demonstrated that this new model enhances the looming selectivity in complex flying scenes considerably, and has potential to be implemented on embedded collision detection systems for small or micro UAVs.
Generating Pertinent and Diversified Comments with Topic-aware Pointer-Generator Networks
Authors: Junheng Huang, Lu Pan, Kang Xu, Weihua Peng, Fayuan Li
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Comment Generation, Diversity, Text Generation

Comment generation, a new and challenging task in Natural Language Generation (NLG), attracts a lot of attention in recent years. However, comments generated by previous work tend to lack pertinence and diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel generation model based on Topic-aware Pointer-Generator Networks (TPGN), which can utilize the topic information hidden in the articles to guide the generation of pertinent and diversified comments. Firstly, we design a keyword-level and topic-level encoder attention mechanism to capture topic information in the articles. Next, we integrate the topic information into pointer-generator networks to guide comment generation. Experiments on a large scale of comment generation dataset show that our model produces the valuable comments and outperforms competitive baseline models significantly.
A Compressive Classification Framework for High-Dimensional Data
Authors: Muhammad Naveed Tabassum, Esa Ollila
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, feature selection, General Classification, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We propose a compressive classification framework for settings where the data dimensionality is significantly higher than the sample size. The proposed method, referred to as compressive regularized discriminant analysis (CRDA) is based on linear discriminant analysis and has the ability to select significant features by using joint-sparsity promoting hard thresholding in the discriminant rule. Since the number of features is larger than the sample size, the method also uses state-of-the-art regularized sample covariance matrix estimators. Several analysis examples on real data sets, including image, speech signal and gene expression data illustrate the promising improvements offered by the proposed CRDA classifier in practise. Overall, the proposed method gives fewer misclassification errors than its competitors, while at the same time achieving accurate feature selection results. The open-source R package and MATLAB toolbox of the proposed method (named compressiveRDA) is freely available.
Semi-Supervised Dialogue Policy Learning via Stochastic Reward Estimation
Authors: Xinting Huang, Jianzhong Qi, Yu Sun, Rui Zhang
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Dialogue policy optimization often obtains feedback until task completion in task-oriented dialogue systems. This is insufficient for training intermediate dialogue turns since supervision signals (or rewards) are only provided at the end of dialogues. To address this issue, reward learning has been introduced to learn from state-action pairs of an optimal policy to provide turn-by-turn rewards. This approach requires complete state-action annotations of human-to-human dialogues (i.e., expert demonstrations), which is labor intensive. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel reward learning approach for semi-supervised policy learning. The proposed approach learns a dynamics model as the reward function which models dialogue progress (i.e., state-action sequences) based on expert demonstrations, either with or without annotations. The dynamics model computes rewards by predicting whether the dialogue progress is consistent with expert demonstrations. We further propose to learn action embeddings for a better generalization of the reward function. The proposed approach outperforms competitive policy learning baselines on MultiWOZ, a benchmark multi-domain dataset.
Chance-Constrained Trajectory Optimization for Safe Exploration and Learning of Nonlinear Systems
Authors: Yashwanth Kumar Nakka, Anqi Liu, Guanya Shi, Anima Anandkumar, Yisong Yue, Soon-Jo Chung
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning, Optimal Motion Planning, Safe Exploration

Learning-based control algorithms require data collection with abundant supervision for training. Safe exploration algorithms ensure the safety of this data collection process even when only partial knowledge is available. We present a new approach for optimal motion planning with safe exploration that integrates chance-constrained stochastic optimal control with dynamics learning and feedback control. We derive an iterative convex optimization algorithm that solves an \underline{Info}rmation-cost \underline{S}tochastic \underline{N}onlinear \underline{O}ptimal \underline{C}ontrol problem (Info-SNOC). The optimization objective encodes control cost for performance and exploration cost for learning, and the safety is incorporated as distributionally robust chance constraints. The dynamics are predicted from a robust regression model that is learned from data. The Info-SNOC algorithm is used to compute a sub-optimal pool of safe motion plans that aid in exploration for learning unknown residual dynamics under safety constraints. A stable feedback controller is used to execute the motion plan and collect data for model learning. We prove the safety of rollout from our exploration method and reduction in uncertainty over epochs, thereby guaranteeing the consistency of our learning method. We validate the effectiveness of Info-SNOC by designing and implementing a pool of safe trajectories for a planar robot. We demonstrate that our approach has higher success rate in ensuring safety when compared to a deterministic trajectory optimization approach.
AutoCLINT: The Winning Method in AutoCV Challenge 2019
Authors: Woonhyuk Baek, Ildoo Kim, Sungwoong Kim, Sungbin Lim
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Data Augmentation

NeurIPS 2019 AutoDL challenge is a series of six automated machine learning competitions. Particularly, AutoCV challenges mainly focused on classification tasks on visual domain. In this paper, we introduce the winning method in the competition, AutoCLINT. The proposed method implements an autonomous training strategy, including efficient code optimization, and applies an automated data augmentation to achieve the fast adaptation of pretrained networks. We implement a light version of Fast AutoAugment to search for data augmentation policies efficiently for the arbitrarily given image domains. We also empirically analyze the components of the proposed method and provide ablation studies focusing on AutoCV datasets.