pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Controllable Length Control Neural Encoder-Decoder via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Junyi Bian, Baojun Lin, Ke Zhang, Zhaohui Yan, Hong Tang, Yonghe Zhang
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sentence, Text Generation

Controlling output length in neural language generation is valuable in many scenarios, especially for the tasks that have length constraints. A model with stronger length control capacity can produce sentences with more specific length, however, it usually sacrifices semantic accuracy of the generated sentences. Here, we denote a concept of Controllable Length Control (CLC) for the trade-off between length control capacity and semantic accuracy of the language generation model. More specifically, CLC is to alter length control capacity of the model so as to generate sentence with corresponding quality. This is meaningful in real applications when length control capacity and outputs quality are requested with different priorities, or to overcome unstability of length control during model training. In this paper, we propose two reinforcement learning (RL) methods to adjust the trade-off between length control capacity and semantic accuracy of length control models. Results show that our RL methods improve scores across a wide range of target lengths and achieve the goal of CLC. Additionally, two models LenMC and LenLInit modified on previous length-control models are proposed to obtain better performance in summarization task while still maintain the ability to control length.
What are Neural Networks made of?
Authors: Rene Schaub
Date: 2019-08-25 00:00:00

The success of Deep Learning methods is not well understood, though various attempts at explaining it have been made, typically centered on properties of stochastic gradient descent. Even less clear is why certain neural network architectures perform better than others. We provide a potential opening with the hypothesis that neural network training is a form of Genetic Programming.
Non-Bayesian Social Learning with Uncertain Models
Authors: James Z. Hare, Cesar A. Uribe, Lance Kaplan, Ali Jadbabaie
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory

Non-Bayesian social learning theory provides a framework that models distributed inference for a group of agents interacting over a social network. In this framework, each agent iteratively forms and communicates beliefs about an unknown state of the world with their neighbors using a learning rule. Existing approaches assume agents have access to precise statistical models (in the form of likelihoods) for the state of the world. However in many situations, such models must be learned from finite data. We propose a social learning rule that takes into account uncertainty in the statistical models using second-order probabilities. Therefore, beliefs derived from uncertain models are sensitive to the amount of past evidence collected for each hypothesis. We characterize how well the hypotheses can be tested on a social network, as consistent or not with the state of the world. We explicitly show the dependency of the generated beliefs with respect to the amount of prior evidence. Moreover, as the amount of prior evidence goes to infinity, learning occurs and is consistent with traditional social learning theory.
MCTS-based Automated Negotiation Agent
Authors: Cédric Buron, Zahia Guessoum, Sylvain Ductor
Date: 2019-09-12 00:00:00

This paper introduces a new negotiating agent model for automated negotiation. We focus on applications without time pressure with multidi-mensional negotiation on both continuous and discrete domains. The agent bidding strategy relies on Monte Carlo Tree Search, which is a trendy method since it has been used with success on games with high branching factor such as Go. It also exploits opponent modeling techniques thanks to Gaussian process regression and Bayesian learning. Evaluation is done by confronting the existing agents that are able to negotiate in such context: Random Walker, Tit-for-tat and Nice Tit-for-Tat. None of those agents succeeds in beating our agent. Also, the modular and adaptive nature of our approach is a huge advantage when it comes to optimize it in specific applicative contexts.
Unsupervised real-time anomaly detection for streaming data
Authors: Subutai Ahmad;Alexander Lavin;Scott Purdy; Zuha Agha
Date: 2017-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: Neurocomputing 2017 6
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We are seeing an enormous increase in the availability of streaming, time-series data. Largely driven by the rise of connected real-time data sources, this data presents technical challenges and opportunities. One fundamental capability for streaming analytics is to model each stream in an unsupervised fashion and detect unusual, anomalous behaviors in real-time. Early anomaly detection is valuable, yet it can be difficult to execute reliably in practice. Application constraints require systems to process data in real-time, not batches. Streaming data inherently exhibits concept drift, favoring algorithms that learn continuously. Furthermore, the massive number of independent streams in practice requires that anomaly detectors be fully automated. In this paper we propose a novel anomaly detection algorithm that meets these constraints. The technique is based on an online sequence memory algorithm called Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). We also present results using the Numenta Anomaly Benchmark (NAB), a benchmark containing real-world data streams with labeled anomalies. The benchmark, the first of its kind, provides a controlled open-source environment for testing anomaly detection algorithms on streaming data. We present results and analysis for a wide range of algorithms on this benchmark, and discuss future challenges for the emerging field of streaming analytics.
Robust Anomaly Detection for Multivariate Time Series through Stochastic Recurrent Neural Network
Authors: Ya Su; Youjian Zhao; Chenhao Niu; Rong Liu; Wei Sun; Dan Pei
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining 2019 7
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Anomaly Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Industry devices (i.e., entities) such as server machines, spacecrafts, engines, etc., are typically monitored with multivariate time series, whose anomaly detection is critical for an entity's service quality management. However, due to the complex temporal dependence and stochasticity of multivariate time series, their anomaly detection remains a big challenge. This paper proposes OmniAnomaly, a stochastic recurrent neural network for multivariate time series anomaly detection that works well robustly for various devices. Its core idea is to capture the normal patterns of multivariate time series by learning their robust representations with key techniques such as stochastic variable connection and planar normalizing flow, reconstruct input data by the representations, and use the reconstruction probabilities to determine anomalies. Moreover, for a detected entity anomaly, OmniAnomaly can provide interpretations based on the reconstruction probabilities of its constituent univariate time series. The evaluation experiments are conducted on two public datasets from aerospace and a new server machine dataset (collected and released by us) from an Internet company. OmniAnomaly achieves an overall F1-Score of 0.86 in three real-world datasets, signicantly outperforming the best performing baseline method by 0.09. The interpretation accuracy for OmniAnomaly is up to 0.89.
Learning Dense Representations for Entity Retrieval
Authors: Daniel Gillick, Sayali Kulkarni, Larry Lansing, Alessandro Presta, Jason Baldridge, Eugene Ie, Diego Garcia-Olano
Date: 2019-09-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CONLL 2019 11
Tasks: Entity Linking, Entity Retrieval, Retrieval

We show that it is feasible to perform entity linking by training a dual encoder (two-tower) model that encodes mentions and entities in the same dense vector space, where candidate entities are retrieved by approximate nearest neighbor search. Unlike prior work, this setup does not rely on an alias table followed by a re-ranker, and is thus the first fully learned entity retrieval model. We show that our dual encoder, trained using only anchor-text links in Wikipedia, outperforms discrete alias table and BM25 baselines, and is competitive with the best comparable results on the standard TACKBP-2010 dataset. In addition, it can retrieve candidates extremely fast, and generalizes well to a new dataset derived from Wikinews. On the modeling side, we demonstrate the dramatic value of an unsupervised negative mining algorithm for this task.
Cross-Dataset Person Re-Identification via Unsupervised Pose Disentanglement and Adaptation
Authors: Yu-Jhe Li, Ci-Siang Lin, Yan-Bo Lin, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Disentanglement, Person Re-Identification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Person re-identification (re-ID) aims at recognizing the same person from images taken across different cameras. To address this challenging task, existing re-ID models typically rely on a large amount of labeled training data, which is not practical for real-world applications. To alleviate this limitation, researchers now targets at cross-dataset re-ID which focuses on generalizing the discriminative ability to the unlabeled target domain when given a labeled source domain dataset. To achieve this goal, our proposed Pose Disentanglement and Adaptation Network (PDA-Net) aims at learning deep image representation with pose and domain information properly disentangled. With the learned cross-domain pose invariant feature space, our proposed PDA-Net is able to perform pose disentanglement across domains without supervision in identities, and the resulting features can be applied to cross-dataset re-ID. Both of our qualitative and quantitative results on two benchmark datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach and its superiority over the state-of-the-art cross-dataset Re-ID approaches.
Gradual Network for Single Image De-raining
Authors: Zhe Huang, Weijiang Yu, Wayne Zhang, Litong Feng, Nong Xiao
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Rain Removal

Most advances in single image de-raining meet a key challenge, which is removing rain streaks with different scales and shapes while preserving image details. Existing single image de-raining approaches treat rain-streak removal as a process of pixel-wise regression directly. However, they are lacking in mining the balance between over-de-raining (e.g. removing texture details in rain-free regions) and under-de-raining (e.g. leaving rain streaks). In this paper, we firstly propose a coarse-to-fine network called Gradual Network (GraNet) consisting of coarse stage and fine stage for delving into single image de-raining with different granularities. Specifically, to reveal coarse-grained rain-streak characteristics (e.g. long and thick rain streaks/raindrops), we propose a coarse stage by utilizing local-global spatial dependencies via a local-global subnetwork composed of region-aware blocks. Taking the residual result (the coarse de-rained result) between the rainy image sample (i.e. the input data) and the output of coarse stage (i.e. the learnt rain mask) as input, the fine stage continues to de-rain by removing the fine-grained rain streaks (e.g. light rain streaks and water mist) to get a rain-free and well-reconstructed output image via a unified contextual merging sub-network with dense blocks and a merging block. Solid and comprehensive experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate that our GraNet can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods by removing rain streaks with various densities, scales and shapes while keeping the image details of rain-free regions well-preserved.
SkyNet: a Hardware-Efficient Method for Object Detection and Tracking on Embedded Systems
Authors: Xiaofan Zhang, Haoming Lu, Cong Hao, Jiachen Li, Bowen Cheng, Yuhong Li, Kyle Rupnow, JinJun Xiong, Thomas Huang, Honghui Shi, Wen-mei Hwu, Deming Chen
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Efficient Neural Network, GPU, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking

Object detection and tracking are challenging tasks for resource-constrained embedded systems. While these tasks are among the most compute-intensive tasks from the artificial intelligence domain, they are only allowed to use limited computation and memory resources on embedded devices. In the meanwhile, such resource-constrained implementations are often required to satisfy additional demanding requirements such as real-time response, high-throughput performance, and reliable inference accuracy. To overcome these challenges, we propose SkyNet, a hardware-efficient neural network to deliver the state-of-the-art detection accuracy and speed for embedded systems. Instead of following the common top-down flow for compact DNN (Deep Neural Network) design, SkyNet provides a bottom-up DNN design approach with comprehensive understanding of the hardware constraints at the very beginning to deliver hardware-efficient DNNs. The effectiveness of SkyNet is demonstrated by winning the competitive System Design Contest for low power object detection in the 56th IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC-SDC), where our SkyNet significantly outperforms all other 100+ competitors: it delivers 0.731 Intersection over Union (IoU) and 67.33 frames per second (FPS) on a TX2 embedded GPU; and 0.716 IoU and 25.05 FPS on an Ultra96 embedded FPGA. The evaluation of SkyNet is also extended to GOT-10K, a recent large-scale high-diversity benchmark for generic object tracking in the wild. For state-of-the-art object trackers SiamRPN++ and SiamMask, where ResNet-50 is employed as the backbone, implementations using our SkyNet as the backbone DNN are 1.60X and 1.73X faster with better or similar accuracy when running on a 1080Ti GPU, and 37.20X smaller in terms of parameter size for significantly better memory and storage footprint.
Neural Style Transfer Improves 3D Cardiovascular MR Image Segmentation on Inconsistent Data
Authors: Chunwei Ma, Zhanghexuan Ji, Mingchen Gao
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Ensemble Learning, Heart Segmentation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Style Transfer

Three-dimensional medical image segmentation is one of the most important problems in medical image analysis and plays a key role in downstream diagnosis and treatment. Recent years, deep neural networks have made groundbreaking success in medical image segmentation problem. However, due to the high variance in instrumental parameters, experimental protocols, and subject appearances, the generalization of deep learning models is often hindered by the inconsistency in medical images generated by different machines and hospitals. In this work, we present StyleSegor, an efficient and easy-to-use strategy to alleviate this inconsistency issue. Specifically, neural style transfer algorithm is applied to unlabeled data in order to minimize the differences in image properties including brightness, contrast, texture, etc. between the labeled and unlabeled data. We also apply probabilistic adjustment on the network output and integrate multiple predictions through ensemble learning. On a publicly available whole heart segmentation benchmarking dataset from MICCAI HVSMR 2016 challenge, we have demonstrated an elevated dice accuracy surpassing current state-of-the-art method and notably, an improvement of the total score by 29.91\%. StyleSegor is thus corroborated to be an accurate tool for 3D whole heart segmentation especially on highly inconsistent data, and is available at https://github.com/horsepurve/StyleSegor.
Persian Signature Verification using Fully Convolutional Networks
Authors: Mohammad Rezaei, Nader Naderi
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Fully convolutional networks (FCNs) have been recently used for feature extraction and classification in image and speech recognition, where their inputs have been raw signal or other complicated features. Persian signature verification is done using conventional convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this paper, we propose to use FCN for learning a robust feature extraction from the raw signature images. FCN can be considered as a variant of CNN where its fully connected layers are replaced with a global pooling layer. In the proposed manner, FCN inputs are raw signature images and convolution filter size is fixed. Recognition accuracy on UTSig database, shows that FCN with a global average pooling outperforms CNN.
Content-based image retrieval using Mix histogram
Authors: Mohammad Rezaei, Ali Ahmadi, Navid Naderi
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Content-Based Image Retrieval, Image Retrieval, Retrieval

This paper presents a new method to extract image low-level features, namely mix histogram (MH), for content-based image retrieval. Since color and edge orientation features are important visual information which help the human visual system percept and discriminate different images, this method extracts and integrates color and edge orientation information in order to measure similarity between different images. Traditional color histograms merely focus on the global distribution of color in the image and therefore fail to extract other visual features. The MH is attempting to overcome this problem by extracting edge orientations as well as color feature. The unique characteristic of the MH is that it takes into consideration both color and edge orientation information in an effective manner. Experimental results show that it outperforms many existing methods which were originally developed for image retrieval purposes.
Context-Aware Image Matting for Simultaneous Foreground and Alpha Estimation
Authors: Qiqi Hou, Feng Liu
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decoder, Image Matting

Natural image matting is an important problem in computer vision and graphics. It is an ill-posed problem when only an input image is available without any external information. While the recent deep learning approaches have shown promising results, they only estimate the alpha matte. This paper presents a context-aware natural image matting method for simultaneous foreground and alpha matte estimation. Our method employs two encoder networks to extract essential information for matting. Particularly, we use a matting encoder to learn local features and a context encoder to obtain more global context information. We concatenate the outputs from these two encoders and feed them into decoder networks to simultaneously estimate the foreground and alpha matte. To train this whole deep neural network, we employ both the standard Laplacian loss and the feature loss: the former helps to achieve high numerical performance while the latter leads to more perceptually plausible results. We also report several data augmentation strategies that greatly improve the network's generalization performance. Our qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our method enables high-quality matting for a single natural image. Our inference codes and models have been made publicly available at https://github.com/hqqxyy/Context-Aware-Matting.
Deep Generative Models for Library Augmentation in Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analysis
Authors: Ricardo Augusto Borsoi, Tales Imbiriba, José Carlos Moreira Bermudez, Cédric Richard
Date: 2019-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Multiple Endmember Spectral Mixture Analysis (MESMA) is one of the leading approaches to perform spectral unmixing (SU) considering variability of the endmembers (EMs). It represents each EM in the image using libraries of spectral signatures acquired a priori. However, existing spectral libraries are often small and unable to properly capture the variability of each EM in practical scenes, which compromises the performance of MESMA. In this paper, we propose a library augmentation strategy to increase the diversity of existing spectral libraries, thus improving their ability to represent the materials in real images. First, we leverage the power of deep generative models to learn the statistical distribution of the EMs based on the spectral signatures available in the existing libraries. Afterwards, new samples can be drawn from the learned EM distributions and used to augment the spectral libraries, improving the overall quality of the SU process. Experimental results using synthetic and real data attest the superior performance of the proposed method even under library mismatch conditions.
IntersectGAN: Learning Domain Intersection for Generating Images with Multiple Attributes
Authors: Zehui Yao, Boyan Zhang, Zhiyong Wang, Wanli Ouyang, Dong Xu, Dagan Feng
Date: 2019-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have demonstrated great success in generating various visual content. However, images generated by existing GANs are often of attributes (e.g., smiling expression) learned from one image domain. As a result, generating images of multiple attributes requires many real samples possessing multiple attributes which are very resource expensive to be collected. In this paper, we propose a novel GAN, namely IntersectGAN, to learn multiple attributes from different image domains through an intersecting architecture. For example, given two image domains $X_1$ and $X_2$ with certain attributes, the intersection $X_1 \cap X_2$ denotes a new domain where images possess the attributes from both $X_1$ and $X_2$ domains. The proposed IntersectGAN consists of two discriminators $D_1$ and $D_2$ to distinguish between generated and real samples of different domains, and three generators where the intersection generator is trained against both discriminators. And an overall adversarial loss function is defined over three generators. As a result, our proposed IntersectGAN can be trained on multiple domains of which each presents one specific attribute, and eventually eliminates the need of real sample images simultaneously possessing multiple attributes. By using the CelebFaces Attributes dataset, our proposed IntersectGAN is able to produce high quality face images possessing multiple attributes (e.g., a face with black hair and a smiling expression). Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations are conducted to compare our proposed IntersectGAN with other baseline methods. Besides, several different applications of IntersectGAN have been explored with promising results.