pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning to Optimize Autonomy in Competence-Aware Systems
Authors: Connor Basich, Justin Svegliato, Kyle Hollins Wray, Stefan Witwicki, Joydeep Biswas, Shlomo Zilberstein
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

Interest in semi-autonomous systems (SAS) is growing rapidly as a paradigm to deploy autonomous systems in domains that require occasional reliance on humans. This paradigm allows service robots or autonomous vehicles to operate at varying levels of autonomy and offer safety in situations that require human judgment. We propose an introspective model of autonomy that is learned and updated online through experience and dictates the extent to which the agent can act autonomously in any given situation. We define a competence-aware system (CAS) that explicitly models its own proficiency at different levels of autonomy and the available human feedback. A CAS learns to adjust its level of autonomy based on experience to maximize overall efficiency, factoring in the cost of human assistance. We analyze the convergence properties of CAS and provide experimental results for robot delivery and autonomous driving domains that demonstrate the benefits of the approach.
Geometric Approaches to Increase the Expressivity of Deep Neural Networks for MR Reconstruction
Authors: Eunju Cha, Gyutaek Oh, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Decoder

Recently, deep learning approaches have been extensively investigated to reconstruct images from accelerated magnetic resonance image (MRI) acquisition. Although these approaches provide significant performance gain compared to compressed sensing MRI (CS-MRI), it is not clear how to choose a suitable network architecture to balance the trade-off between network complexity and performance. Recently, it was shown that an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network (CNN) can be interpreted as a piecewise linear basis-like representation, whose specific representation is determined by the ReLU activation patterns for a given input image. Thus, the expressivity or the representation power is determined by the number of piecewise linear regions. As an extension of this geometric understanding, this paper proposes a systematic geometric approach using bootstrapping and subnetwork aggregation using an attention module to increase the expressivity of the underlying neural network. Our method can be implemented in both k-space domain and image domain that can be trained in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that the proposed schemes significantly improve reconstruction performance with negligible complexity increases.
Formal Scenario-Based Testing of Autonomous Vehicles: From Simulation to the Real World
Authors: Daniel J. Fremont, Edward Kim, Yash Vardhan Pant, Sanjit A. Seshia, Atul Acharya, Xantha Bruso, Paul Wells, Steve Lemke, Qiang Lu, Shalin Mehta
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

We present a new approach to automated scenario-based testing of the safety of autonomous vehicles, especially those using advanced artificial intelligence-based components, spanning both simulation-based evaluation as well as testing in the real world. Our approach is based on formal methods, combining formal specification of scenarios and safety properties, algorithmic test case generation using formal simulation, test case selection for track testing, executing test cases on the track, and analyzing the resulting data. Experiments with a real autonomous vehicle at an industrial testing facility support our hypotheses that (i) formal simulation can be effective at identifying test cases to run on the track, and (ii) the gap between simulated and real worlds can be systematically evaluated and bridged.
A Novel Online Action Detection Framework from Untrimmed Video Streams
Authors: Da-Hye Yoon, Nam-Gyu Cho, Seong-Whan Lee
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Action Localization, Online Action Detection, Temporal Action Localization

Online temporal action localization from an untrimmed video stream is a challenging problem in computer vision. It is challenging because of i) in an untrimmed video stream, more than one action instance may appear, including background scenes, and ii) in online settings, only past and current information is available. Therefore, temporal priors, such as the average action duration of training data, which have been exploited by previous action detection methods, are not suitable for this task because of the high intra-class variation in human actions. We propose a novel online action detection framework that considers actions as a set of temporally ordered subclasses and leverages a future frame generation network to cope with the limited information issue associated with the problem outlined above. Additionally, we augment our data by varying the lengths of videos to allow the proposed method to learn about the high intra-class variation in human actions. We evaluate our method using two benchmark datasets, THUMOS'14 and ActivityNet, for an online temporal action localization scenario and demonstrate that the performance is comparable to state-of-the-art methods that have been proposed for offline settings.
Learning Meta Face Recognition in Unseen Domains
Authors: Jianzhu Guo, Xiangyu Zhu, Chenxu Zhao, Dong Cao, Zhen Lei, Stan Z. Li
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Face Recognition, Meta-Learning

Face recognition systems are usually faced with unseen domains in real-world applications and show unsatisfactory performance due to their poor generalization. For example, a well-trained model on webface data cannot deal with the ID vs. Spot task in surveillance scenario. In this paper, we aim to learn a generalized model that can directly handle new unseen domains without any model updating. To this end, we propose a novel face recognition method via meta-learning named Meta Face Recognition (MFR). MFR synthesizes the source/target domain shift with a meta-optimization objective, which requires the model to learn effective representations not only on synthesized source domains but also on synthesized target domains. Specifically, we build domain-shift batches through a domain-level sampling strategy and get back-propagated gradients/meta-gradients on synthesized source/target domains by optimizing multi-domain distributions. The gradients and meta-gradients are further combined to update the model to improve generalization. Besides, we propose two benchmarks for generalized face recognition evaluation. Experiments on our benchmarks validate the generalization of our method compared to several baselines and other state-of-the-arts. The proposed benchmarks will be available at https://github.com/cleardusk/MFR.
PO-EMO: Conceptualization, Annotation, and Modeling of Aesthetic Emotions in German and English Poetry
Authors: Thomas Haider, Steffen Eger, Evgeny Kim, Roman Klinger, Winfried Menninghaus
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition

Most approaches to emotion analysis of social media, literature, news, and other domains focus exclusively on basic emotion categories as defined by Ekman or Plutchik. However, art (such as literature) enables engagement in a broader range of more complex and subtle emotions. These have been shown to also include mixed emotional responses. We consider emotions in poetry as they are elicited in the reader, rather than what is expressed in the text or intended by the author. Thus, we conceptualize a set of aesthetic emotions that are predictive of aesthetic appreciation in the reader, and allow the annotation of multiple labels per line to capture mixed emotions within their context. We evaluate this novel setting in an annotation experiment both with carefully trained experts and via crowdsourcing. Our annotation with experts leads to an acceptable agreement of kappa = .70, resulting in a consistent dataset for future large scale analysis. Finally, we conduct first emotion classification experiments based on BERT, showing that identifying aesthetic emotions is challenging in our data, with up to .52 F1-micro on the German subset. Data and resources are available at https://github.com/tnhaider/poetry-emotion
Nonparametric Deconvolution Models
Authors: Allison J. B. Chaney, Archit Verma, Young-suk Lee, Barbara E. Engelhardt
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

We describe nonparametric deconvolution models (NDMs), a family of Bayesian nonparametric models for collections of data in which each observation is the average over the features from heterogeneous particles. For example, these types of data are found in elections, where we observe precinct-level vote tallies (observations) of individual citizens' votes (particles) across each of the candidates or ballot measures (features), where each voter is part of a specific voter cohort or demographic (factor). Like the hierarchical Dirichlet process, NDMs rely on two tiers of Dirichlet processes to explain the data with an unknown number of latent factors; each observation is modeled as a weighted average of these latent factors. Unlike existing models, NDMs recover how factor distributions vary locally for each observation. This uniquely allows NDMs both to deconvolve each observation into its constituent factors, and also to describe how the factor distributions specific to each observation vary across observations and deviate from the corresponding global factors. We present variational inference techniques for this family of models and study its performance on simulated data and voting data from California. We show that including local factors improves estimates of global factors and provides a novel scaffold for exploring data.
Multimodal Shape Completion via Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Rundi Wu, Xuelin Chen, Yixin Zhuang, Baoquan Chen
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Diversity

Several deep learning methods have been proposed for completing partial data from shape acquisition setups, i.e., filling the regions that were missing in the shape. These methods, however, only complete the partial shape with a single output, ignoring the ambiguity when reasoning the missing geometry. Hence, we pose a multi-modal shape completion problem, in which we seek to complete the partial shape with multiple outputs by learning a one-to-many mapping. We develop the first multimodal shape completion method that completes the partial shape via conditional generative modeling, without requiring paired training data. Our approach distills the ambiguity by conditioning the completion on a learned multimodal distribution of possible results. We extensively evaluate the approach on several datasets that contain varying forms of shape incompleteness, and compare among several baseline methods and variants of our methods qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrating the merit of our method in completing partial shapes with both diversity and quality.
$F$, $B$, Alpha Matting
Authors: Marco Forte, François Pitié
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Matting

Cutting out an object and estimating its opacity mask, known as image matting, is a key task in many image editing applications. Deep learning approaches have made significant progress by adapting the encoder-decoder architecture of segmentation networks. However, most of the existing networks only predict the alpha matte and post-processing methods must then be used to recover the original foreground and background colours in the transparent regions. Recently, two methods have shown improved results by also estimating the foreground colours, but at a significant computational and memory cost. In this paper, we propose a low-cost modification to alpha matting networks to also predict the foreground and background colours. We study variations of the training regime and explore a wide range of existing and novel loss functions for the joint prediction. Our method achieves the state of the art performance on the Adobe Composition-1k dataset for alpha matte and composite colour quality. It is also the current best performing method on the alphamatting.com online evaluation.
Linear Regression without Correspondences via Concave Minimization
Authors: Liangzu Peng, Manolis C. Tsakiris
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Linear regression without correspondences concerns the recovery of a signal in the linear regression setting, where the correspondences between the observations and the linear functionals are unknown. The associated maximum likelihood function is NP-hard to compute when the signal has dimension larger than one. To optimize this objective function we reformulate it as a concave minimization problem, which we solve via branch-and-bound. This is supported by a computable search space to branch, an effective lower bounding scheme via convex envelope minimization and a refined upper bound, all naturally arising from the concave minimization reformulation. The resulting algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods for fully shuffled data and remains tractable for up to $8$-dimensional signals, an untouched regime in prior work.
Parameter-Free Style Projection for Arbitrary Style Transfer
Authors: Siyu Huang, Haoyi Xiong, Tianyang Wang, Bihan Wen, Qingzhong Wang, Zeyu Chen, Jun Huan, Dejing Dou
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

Arbitrary image style transfer is a challenging task which aims to stylize a content image conditioned on arbitrary style images. In this task the feature-level content-style transformation plays a vital role for proper fusion of features. Existing feature transformation algorithms often suffer from loss of content or style details, non-natural stroke patterns, and unstable training. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes a new feature-level style transformation technique, named Style Projection, for parameter-free, fast, and effective content-style transformation. This paper further presents a real-time feed-forward model to leverage Style Projection for arbitrary image style transfer, which includes a regularization term for matching the semantics between input contents and stylized outputs. Extensive qualitative analysis, quantitative evaluation, and user study have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.
Weakly-Supervised Salient Object Detection via Scribble Annotations
Authors: Jing Zhang, Xin Yu, Aixuan Li, Peipei Song, Bowen Liu, Yuchao Dai
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Edge Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Compared with laborious pixel-wise dense labeling, it is much easier to label data by scribbles, which only costs 1$\sim$2 seconds to label one image. However, using scribble labels to learn salient object detection has not been explored. In this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised salient object detection model to learn saliency from such annotations. In doing so, we first relabel an existing large-scale salient object detection dataset with scribbles, namely S-DUTS dataset. Since object structure and detail information is not identified by scribbles, directly training with scribble labels will lead to saliency maps of poor boundary localization. To mitigate this problem, we propose an auxiliary edge detection task to localize object edges explicitly, and a gated structure-aware loss to place constraints on the scope of structure to be recovered. Moreover, we design a scribble boosting scheme to iteratively consolidate our scribble annotations, which are then employed as supervision to learn high-quality saliency maps. As existing saliency evaluation metrics neglect to measure structure alignment of the predictions, the saliency map ranking metric may not comply with human perception. We present a new metric, termed saliency structure measure, to measure the structure alignment of the predicted saliency maps, which is more consistent with human perception. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing weakly-supervised/unsupervised methods, but also is on par with several fully-supervised state-of-the-art models. Our code and data is publicly available at https://github.com/JingZhang617/Scribble_Saliency.
Inverse Design of Potential Singlet Fission Molecules using a Transfer Learning Based Approach
Authors: Akshay Subramanian, Utkarsh Saha, Tejasvini Sharma, Naveen K. Tailor, Soumitra Satapathi
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Singlet fission has emerged as one of the most exciting phenomena known to improve the efficiencies of different types of solar cells and has found uses in diverse optoelectronic applications. The range of available singlet fission molecules is, however, limited as to undergo singlet fission, molecules have to satisfy certain energy conditions. Recent advances in material search using inverse design has enabled the prediction of materials for a wide range of applications and has emerged as one of the most efficient methods in the discovery of suitable materials. It is particularly helpful in manipulating large datasets, uncovering hidden information from the molecular dataset and generating new structures. However, we seldom encounter large datasets in structure prediction problems in material science. In our work, we put forward inverse design of possible singlet fission molecules using a transfer learning based approach where we make use of a much larger ChEMBL dataset of structurally similar molecules to transfer the learned characteristics to the singlet fission dataset.
Pool-Based Unsupervised Active Learning for Regression Using Iterative Representativeness-Diversity Maximization (iRDM)
Authors: Ziang Liu, Xue Jiang, Hanbin Luo, Weili Fang, Jiajing Liu, Dongrui Wu
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Diversity, regression

Active learning (AL) selects the most beneficial unlabeled samples to label, and hence a better machine learning model can be trained from the same number of labeled samples. Most existing active learning for regression (ALR) approaches are supervised, which means the sampling process must use some label information, or an existing regression model. This paper considers completely unsupervised ALR, i.e., how to select the samples to label without knowing any true label information. We propose a novel unsupervised ALR approach, iterative representativeness-diversity maximization (iRDM), to optimally balance the representativeness and the diversity of the selected samples. Experiments on 12 datasets from various domains demonstrated its effectiveness. Our iRDM can be applied to both linear regression and kernel regression, and it even significantly outperforms supervised ALR when the number of labeled samples is small.
M$^5$L: Multi-Modal Multi-Margin Metric Learning for RGBT Tracking
Authors: Zhengzheng Tu, Chun Lin, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang, Bin Luo
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning

Classifying the confusing samples in the course of RGBT tracking is a quite challenging problem, which hasn't got satisfied solution. Existing methods only focus on enlarging the boundary between positive and negative samples, however, the structured information of samples might be harmed, e.g., confusing positive samples are closer to the anchor than normal positive samples.To handle this problem, we propose a novel Multi-Modal Multi-Margin Metric Learning framework, named M$^5$L for RGBT tracking in this paper. In particular, we design a multi-margin structured loss to distinguish the confusing samples which play a most critical role in tracking performance boosting. To alleviate this problem, we additionally enlarge the boundaries between confusing positive samples and normal ones, between confusing negative samples and normal ones with predefined margins, by exploiting the structured information of all samples in each modality.Moreover, a cross-modality constraint is employed to reduce the difference between modalities and push positive samples closer to the anchor than negative ones from two modalities.In addition, to achieve quality-aware RGB and thermal feature fusion, we introduce the modality attentions and learn them using a feature fusion module in our network. Extensive experiments on large-scale datasets testify that our framework clearly improves the tracking performance and outperforms the state-of-the-art RGBT trackers.
Semi-Supervised Learning on Graphs with Feature-Augmented Graph Basis Functions
Authors: Wolfgang Erb
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00

For semi-supervised learning on graphs, we study how initial kernels in a supervised learning regime can be augmented with additional information from known priors or from unsupervised learning outputs. These augmented kernels are constructed in a simple update scheme based on the Schur-Hadamard product of the kernel with additional feature kernels. As generators of the positive definite kernels we will focus on graph basis functions (GBF) that allow to include geometric information of the graph via the graph Fourier transform. Using a regularized least squares (RLS) approach for machine learning, we will test the derived augmented kernels for the classification of data on graphs.
EventSR: From Asynchronous Events to Image Reconstruction, Restoration, and Super-Resolution via End-to-End Adversarial Learning
Authors: Lin Wang, Tae-Kyun Kim, Kuk-Jin Yoon
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Super-Resolution

Event cameras sense intensity changes and have many advantages over conventional cameras. To take advantage of event cameras, some methods have been proposed to reconstruct intensity images from event streams. However, the outputs are still in low resolution (LR), noisy, and unrealistic. The low-quality outputs stem broader applications of event cameras, where high spatial resolution (HR) is needed as well as high temporal resolution, dynamic range, and no motion blur. We consider the problem of reconstructing and super-resolving intensity images from LR events, when no ground truth (GT) HR images and down-sampling kernels are available. To tackle the challenges, we propose a novel end-to-end pipeline that reconstructs LR images from event streams, enhances the image qualities and upsamples the enhanced images, called EventSR. For the absence of real GT images, our method is primarily unsupervised, deploying adversarial learning. To train EventSR, we create an open dataset including both real-world and simulated scenes. The use of both datasets boosts up the network performance, and the network architectures and various loss functions in each phase help improve the image qualities. The whole pipeline is trained in three phases. While each phase is mainly for one of the three tasks, the networks in earlier phases are fine-tuned by respective loss functions in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that EventSR reconstructs high-quality SR images from events for both simulated and real-world data.
Motion-Excited Sampler: Video Adversarial Attack with Sparked Prior
Authors: Hu Zhang, Linchao Zhu, Yi Zhu, Yi Yang
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Video Classification

Deep neural networks are known to be susceptible to adversarial noise, which are tiny and imperceptible perturbations. Most of previous work on adversarial attack mainly focus on image models, while the vulnerability of video models is less explored. In this paper, we aim to attack video models by utilizing intrinsic movement pattern and regional relative motion among video frames. We propose an effective motion-excited sampler to obtain motion-aware noise prior, which we term as sparked prior. Our sparked prior underlines frame correlations and utilizes video dynamics via relative motion. By using the sparked prior in gradient estimation, we can successfully attack a variety of video classification models with fewer number of queries. Extensive experimental results on four benchmark datasets validate the efficacy of our proposed method.