pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Image processing in DNA
Authors: Chao Pan, S. M. Hossein Tabatabaei Yazdi, S Kasra Tabatabaei, Alvaro G. Hernandez, Charles Schroeder, Olgica Milenkovic
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting, Quantization

The main obstacles for the practical deployment of DNA-based data storage platforms are the prohibitively high cost of synthetic DNA and the large number of errors introduced during synthesis. In particular, synthetic DNA products contain both individual oligo (fragment) symbol errors as well as missing DNA oligo errors, with rates that exceed those of modern storage systems by orders of magnitude. These errors can be corrected either through the use of a large number of redundant oligos or through cycles of writing, reading, and rewriting of information that eliminate the errors. Both approaches add to the overall storage cost and are hence undesirable. Here we propose the first method for storing quantized images in DNA that uses signal processing and machine learning techniques to deal with error and cost issues without resorting to the use of redundant oligos or rewriting. Our methods rely on decoupling the RGB channels of images, performing specialized quantization and compression on the individual color channels, and using new discoloration detection and image inpainting techniques. We demonstrate the performance of our approach experimentally on a collection of movie posters stored in DNA.
Torchreid: A Library for Deep Learning Person Re-Identification in Pytorch
Authors: Kaiyang Zhou, Tao Xiang
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification (re-ID), which aims to re-identify people across different camera views, has been significantly advanced by deep learning in recent years, particularly with convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we present Torchreid, a software library built on PyTorch that allows fast development and end-to-end training and evaluation of deep re-ID models. As a general-purpose framework for person re-ID research, Torchreid provides (1) unified data loaders that support 15 commonly used re-ID benchmark datasets covering both image and video domains, (2) streamlined pipelines for quick development and benchmarking of deep re-ID models, and (3) implementations of the latest re-ID CNN architectures along with their pre-trained models to facilitate reproducibility as well as future research. With a high-level modularity in its design, Torchreid offers a great flexibility to allow easy extension to new datasets, CNN models and loss functions.
Gaze360: Physically Unconstrained Gaze Estimation in the Wild
Authors: Petr Kellnhofer, Adria Recasens, Simon Stent, Wojciech Matusik, Antonio Torralba
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Gaze Estimation

Understanding where people are looking is an informative social cue. In this work, we present Gaze360, a large-scale gaze-tracking dataset and method for robust 3D gaze estimation in unconstrained images. Our dataset consists of 238 subjects in indoor and outdoor environments with labelled 3D gaze across a wide range of head poses and distances. It is the largest publicly available dataset of its kind by both subject and variety, made possible by a simple and efficient collection method. Our proposed 3D gaze model extends existing models to include temporal information and to directly output an estimate of gaze uncertainty. We demonstrate the benefits of our model via an ablation study, and show its generalization performance via a cross-dataset evaluation against other recent gaze benchmark datasets. We furthermore propose a simple self-supervised approach to improve cross-dataset domain adaptation. Finally, we demonstrate an application of our model for estimating customer attention in a supermarket setting. Our dataset and models are available at http://gaze360.csail.mit.edu .
Continual Learning for Infinite Hierarchical Change-Point Detection
Authors: Pablo Moreno-Muñoz, David Ramírez, Antonio Artés-Rodríguez
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Point Detection, Continual Learning

Change-point detection (CPD) aims to locate abrupt transitions in the generative model of a sequence of observations. When Bayesian methods are considered, the standard practice is to infer the posterior distribution of the change-point locations. However, for complex models (high-dimensional or heterogeneous), it is not possible to perform reliable detection. To circumvent this problem, we propose to use a hierarchical model, which yields observations that belong to a lower-dimensional manifold. Concretely, we consider a latent-class model with an unbounded number of categories, which is based on the chinese-restaurant process (CRP). For this model we derive a continual learning mechanism that is based on the sequential construction of the CRP and the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm with a stochastic maximization step. Our results show that the proposed method is able to recursively infer the number of underlying latent classes and perform CPD in a reliable manner.
Meta Matrix Factorization for Federated Rating Predictions
Authors: Yujie Lin, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Dongxiao Yu, Jun Ma, Maarten de Rijke, Xiuzhen Cheng
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Federated Learning, Recommendation Systems

Federated recommender systems have distinct advantages in terms of privacy protection over traditional recommender systems that are centralized at a data center. However, previous work on federated recommender systems does not fully consider the limitations of storage, RAM, energy and communication bandwidth in a mobile environment. The scales of the models proposed are too large to be easily run on mobile devices. And existing federated recommender systems need to fine-tune recommendation models on each device, making it hard to effectively exploit collaborative filtering information among users/devices. Our goal in this paper is to design a novel federated learning framework for rating prediction (RP) for mobile environments. We introduce a federated matrix factorization (MF) framework, named meta matrix factorization (MetaMF). Given a user, we first obtain a collaborative vector by collecting useful information with a collaborative memory module. Then, we employ a meta recommender module to generate private item embeddings and a RP model based on the collaborative vector in the server. To address the challenge of generating a large number of high-dimensional item embeddings, we devise a rise-dimensional generation strategy that first generates a low-dimensional item embedding matrix and a rise-dimensional matrix, and then multiply them to obtain high-dimensional embeddings. We use the generated model to produce private RPs for the given user on her device. MetaMF shows a high capacity even with a small RP model, which can adapt to the limitations of a mobile environment. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets to compare MetaMF with existing MF methods and find that MetaMF can achieve competitive performance. Moreover, we find MetaMF achieves higher RP performance over existing federated methods by better exploiting collaborative filtering among users/devices.
Toward estimating personal well-being using voice
Authors: Samuel Kim, Namhee Kwon, Henry O'Connell
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Sleep Quality

Estimating personal well-being draws increasing attention particularly from healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. We propose an approach to estimate personal well-being in terms of various measurements such as anxiety, sleep quality and mood using voice. With clinically validated questionnaires to score those measurements in a self-assessed way, we extract salient features from voice and train regression models with deep neural networks. Experiments with the collected database of 219 subjects show promising results in predicting the well-being related measurements; concordance correlation coefficients (CCC) between self-assessed scores and predicted scores are 0.41 for anxiety, 0.44 for sleep quality and 0.38 for mood.
Depth-Adaptive Transformer
Authors: Maha Elbayad, Jiatao Gu, Edouard Grave, Michael Auli
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, Translation

State of the art sequence-to-sequence models for large scale tasks perform a fixed number of computations for each input sequence regardless of whether it is easy or hard to process. In this paper, we train Transformer models which can make output predictions at different stages of the network and we investigate different ways to predict how much computation is required for a particular sequence. Unlike dynamic computation in Universal Transformers, which applies the same set of layers iteratively, we apply different layers at every step to adjust both the amount of computation as well as the model capacity. On IWSLT German-English translation our approach matches the accuracy of a well tuned baseline Transformer while using less than a quarter of the decoder layers.
Improving singing voice separation with the Wave-U-Net using Minimum Hyperspherical Energy
Authors: Joaquin Perez-Lapillo, Oleksandr Galkin, Tillman Weyde
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification

In recent years, deep learning has surpassed traditional approaches to the problem of singing voice separation. The Wave-U-Net is a recent deep network architecture that operates directly on the time domain. The standard Wave-U-Net is trained with data augmentation and early stopping to prevent overfitting. Minimum hyperspherical energy (MHE) regularization has recently proven to increase generalization in image classification problems by encouraging a diversified filter configuration. In this work, we apply MHE regularization to the 1D filters of the Wave-U-Net. We evaluated this approach for separating the vocal part from mixed music audio recordings on the MUSDB18 dataset. We found that adding MHE regularization to the loss function consistently improves singing voice separation, as measured in the Signal to Distortion Ratio on test recordings, leading to the current best time-domain system for singing voice extraction.
Predictive Coding Networks Meet Action Recognition
Authors: Xia Huang, Hossein Mousavi, Gemma Roig
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Optical Flow Estimation

Action recognition is a key problem in computer vision that labels videos with a set of predefined actions. Capturing both, semantic content and motion, along the video frames is key to achieve high accuracy performance on this task. Most of the state-of-the-art methods rely on RGB frames for extracting the semantics and pre-computed optical flow fields as a motion cue. Then, both are combined using deep neural networks. Yet, it has been argued that such models are not able to leverage the motion information extracted from the optical flow, but instead the optical flow allows for better recognition of people and objects in the video. This urges the need to explore different cues or models that can extract motion in a more informative fashion. To tackle this issue, we propose to explore the predictive coding network, so called PredNet, a recurrent neural network that propagates predictive coding errors across layers and time steps. We analyze whether PredNet can better capture motions in videos by estimating over time the representations extracted from pre-trained networks for action recognition. In this way, the model only relies on the video frames, and does not need pre-processed optical flows as input. We report the effectiveness of our proposed model on UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets.
Attacking Optical Flow
Authors: Anurag Ranjan, Joel Janai, Andreas Geiger, Michael J. Black
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Decoder, Optical Flow Estimation, Self-Driving Cars

Deep neural nets achieve state-of-the-art performance on the problem of optical flow estimation. Since optical flow is used in several safety-critical applications like self-driving cars, it is important to gain insights into the robustness of those techniques. Recently, it has been shown that adversarial attacks easily fool deep neural networks to misclassify objects. The robustness of optical flow networks to adversarial attacks, however, has not been studied so far. In this paper, we extend adversarial patch attacks to optical flow networks and show that such attacks can compromise their performance. We show that corrupting a small patch of less than 1% of the image size can significantly affect optical flow estimates. Our attacks lead to noisy flow estimates that extend significantly beyond the region of the attack, in many cases even completely erasing the motion of objects in the scene. While networks using an encoder-decoder architecture are very sensitive to these attacks, we found that networks using a spatial pyramid architecture are less affected. We analyse the success and failure of attacking both architectures by visualizing their feature maps and comparing them to classical optical flow techniques which are robust to these attacks. We also demonstrate that such attacks are practical by placing a printed pattern into real scenes.
Unsupervised particle sorting for high-resolution single-particle cryo-EM
Authors: Ye Zhou, Amit Moscovich, Tamir Bendory, Alberto Bartesaghi
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Single-particle cryo-Electron Microscopy (EM) has become a popular technique for determining the structure of challenging biomolecules that are inaccessible to other technologies. Recent advances in automation, both in data collection and data processing, have significantly lowered the barrier for non-expert users to successfully execute the structure determination workflow. Many critical data processing steps, however, still require expert user intervention in order to converge to the correct high-resolution structure. In particular, strategies to identify homogeneous populations of particles rely heavily on subjective criteria that are not always consistent or reproducible among different users. Here, we explore the use of unsupervised strategies for particle sorting that are compatible with the autonomous operation of the image processing pipeline. More specifically, we show that particles can be successfully sorted based on a simple statistical model for the distribution of scores assigned during refinement. This represents an important step towards the development of automated workflows for protein structure determination using single-particle cryo-EM.
Uncertainty Quantification with Generative Models
Authors: Vanessa Böhm, François Lanusse, Uroš Seljak
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Uncertainty Quantification

We develop a generative model-based approach to Bayesian inverse problems, such as image reconstruction from noisy and incomplete images. Our framework addresses two common challenges of Bayesian reconstructions: 1) It makes use of complex, data-driven priors that comprise all available information about the uncorrupted data distribution. 2) It enables computationally tractable uncertainty quantification in the form of posterior analysis in latent and data space. The method is very efficient in that the generative model only has to be trained once on an uncorrupted data set, after that, the procedure can be used for arbitrary corruption types.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI): Concepts, Taxonomies, Opportunities and Challenges toward Responsible AI
Authors: Alejandro Barredo Arrieta, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, Javier Del Ser, Adrien Bennetot, Siham Tabik, Alberto Barbado, Salvador García, Sergio Gil-López, Daniel Molina, Richard Benjamins, Raja Chatila, Francisco Herrera
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Fairness

In the last years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has achieved a notable momentum that may deliver the best of expectations over many application sectors across the field. For this to occur, the entire community stands in front of the barrier of explainability, an inherent problem of AI techniques brought by sub-symbolism (e.g. ensembles or Deep Neural Networks) that were not present in the last hype of AI. Paradigms underlying this problem fall within the so-called eXplainable AI (XAI) field, which is acknowledged as a crucial feature for the practical deployment of AI models. This overview examines the existing literature in the field of XAI, including a prospect toward what is yet to be reached. We summarize previous efforts to define explainability in Machine Learning, establishing a novel definition that covers prior conceptual propositions with a major focus on the audience for which explainability is sought. We then propose and discuss about a taxonomy of recent contributions related to the explainability of different Machine Learning models, including those aimed at Deep Learning methods for which a second taxonomy is built. This literature analysis serves as the background for a series of challenges faced by XAI, such as the crossroads between data fusion and explainability. Our prospects lead toward the concept of Responsible Artificial Intelligence, namely, a methodology for the large-scale implementation of AI methods in real organizations with fairness, model explainability and accountability at its core. Our ultimate goal is to provide newcomers to XAI with a reference material in order to stimulate future research advances, but also to encourage experts and professionals from other disciplines to embrace the benefits of AI in their activity sectors, without any prior bias for its lack of interpretability.
One-Shot Template Matching for Automatic Document Data Capture
Authors: Pranjal Dhakal, Manish Munikar, Bikram Dahal
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Template Matching

In this paper, we propose a novel one-shot template-matching algorithm to automatically capture data from business documents with an aim to minimize manual data entry. Given one annotated document, our algorithm can automatically extract similar data from other documents having the same format. Based on a set of engineered visual and textual features, our method is invariant to changes in position and value. Experiments on a dataset of 595 real invoices demonstrate 86.4% accuracy.
Scanner Invariant Multiple Sclerosis Lesion Segmentation from MRI
Authors: Shahab Aslani, Vittorio Murino, Michael Dayan, Roger Tam, Diego Sona, Ghassan Hamarneh
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Lesion Segmentation, MRI segmentation, Segmentation

This paper presents a simple and effective generalization method for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) segmentation when data is collected from multiple MRI scanning sites and as a consequence is affected by (site-)domain shifts. We propose to integrate a traditional encoder-decoder network with a regularization network. This added network includes an auxiliary loss term which is responsible for the reduction of the domain shift problem and for the resulting improved generalization. The proposed method was evaluated on multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation from MRI data. We tested the proposed model on an in-house clinical dataset including 117 patients from 56 different scanning sites. In the experiments, our method showed better generalization performance than other baseline networks.
Language-guided Semantic Mapping and Mobile Manipulation in Partially Observable Environments
Authors: Siddharth Patki, Ethan Fahnestock, Thomas M. Howard, Matthew R. Walter
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Recent advances in data-driven models for grounded language understanding have enabled robots to interpret increasingly complex instructions. Two fundamental limitations of these methods are that most require a full model of the environment to be known a priori, and they attempt to reason over a world representation that is flat and unnecessarily detailed, which limits scalability. Recent semantic mapping methods address partial observability by exploiting language as a sensor to infer a distribution over topological, metric and semantic properties of the environment. However, maintaining a distribution over highly detailed maps that can support grounding of diverse instructions is computationally expensive and hinders real-time human-robot collaboration. We propose a novel framework that learns to adapt perception according to the task in order to maintain compact distributions over semantic maps. Experiments with a mobile manipulator demonstrate more efficient instruction following in a priori unknown environments.
GPU-Accelerated Viterbi Exact Lattice Decoder for Batched Online and Offline Speech Recognition
Authors: Hugo Braun, Justin Luitjens, Ryan Leary, Tim Kaldewey, Daniel Povey
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Decoder, GPU, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We present an optimized weighted finite-state transducer (WFST) decoder capable of online streaming and offline batch processing of audio using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). The decoder is efficient in memory utilization, input/output (I/O) bandwidth, and uses a novel Viterbi implementation designed to maximize parallelism. The reduced memory footprint allows the decoder to process significantly larger graphs than previously possible, while optimizing I/O increases the number of simultaneous streams supported. GPU preprocessing of lattice segments enables intermediate lattice results to be returned to the requestor during streaming inference. Collectively, the proposed algorithm yields up to a 240x speedup over single core CPU decoding, and up to 40x faster decoding than the current state-of-the-art GPU decoder, while returning equivalent results. This decoder design enables deployment of production-grade ASR models on a large spectrum of systems, ranging from large data center servers to low-power edge devices.
Human Action Recognition in Drone Videos using a Few Aerial Training Examples
Authors: Waqas Sultani, Mubarak Shah
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Drones are enabling new forms of human actions surveillance due to their low cost and fast mobility. However, using deep neural networks for automatic aerial action recognition is difficult due to the need for a large number of training aerial human action videos. Collecting a large number of human action aerial videos is costly, time-consuming, and difficult. In this paper, we explore two alternative data sources to improve aerial action classification when only a few training aerial examples are available. As a first data source, we resort to video games. We collect plenty of aerial game action videos using two gaming engines. For the second data source, we leverage conditional Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks to generate aerial features from ground videos. Given that both data sources have some limitations, e.g. game videos are biased towards specific actions categories (fighting, shooting, etc.,), and it is not easy to generate good discriminative GAN-generated features for all types of actions, we need to efficiently integrate two dataset sources with few available real aerial training videos. To address this challenge of the heterogeneous nature of the data, we propose to use a disjoint multitask learning framework. We feed the network with real and game, or real and GAN-generated data in an alternating fashion to obtain an improved action classifier. We validate the proposed approach on two aerial action datasets and demonstrate that features from aerial game videos and those generated from GAN can be extremely useful for an improved action recognition in real aerial videos when only a few real aerial training examples are available.