pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Robust Federated Learning in a Heterogeneous Environment
Authors: Avishek Ghosh, Justin Hong, Dong Yin, Kannan Ramchandran
Date: 2019-06-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Federated Learning

We study a recently proposed large-scale distributed learning paradigm, namely Federated Learning, where the worker machines are end users' own devices. Statistical and computational challenges arise in Federated Learning particularly in the presence of heterogeneous data distribution (i.e., data points on different devices belong to different distributions signifying different clusters) and Byzantine machines (i.e., machines that may behave abnormally, or even exhibit arbitrary and potentially adversarial behavior). To address the aforementioned challenges, first we propose a general statistical model for this problem which takes both the cluster structure of the users and the Byzantine machines into account. Then, leveraging the statistical model, we solve the robust heterogeneous Federated Learning problem \emph{optimally}; in particular our algorithm matches the lower bound on the estimation error in dimension and the number of data points. Furthermore, as a by-product, we prove statistical guarantees for an outlier-robust clustering algorithm, which can be considered as the Lloyd algorithm with robust estimation. Finally, we show via synthetic as well as real data experiments that the estimation error obtained by our proposed algorithm is significantly better than the non-Byzantine-robust algorithms; in particular, we gain at least by 53\% and 33\% for synthetic and real data experiments, respectively, in typical settings.
Representation Quality Of Neural Networks Links To Adversarial Attacks and Defences
Authors: Shashank Kotyan, Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas, Moe Matsuki
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Zero-Shot Learning

Neural networks have been shown vulnerable to a variety of adversarial algorithms. A crucial step to understanding the rationale for this lack of robustness is to assess the potential of the neural networks' representation to encode the existing features. Here, we propose a method to understand the representation quality of the neural networks using a novel test based on Zero-Shot Learning, entitled Raw Zero-Shot. The principal idea is that, if an algorithm learns rich features, such features should be able to interpret "unknown" classes as an aggregate of previously learned features. This is because unknown classes usually share several regular features with recognised classes, given the features learned are general enough. We further introduce two metrics to assess these learned features to interpret unknown classes. One is based on inter-cluster validation technique (Davies-Bouldin Index), and the other is based on the distance to an approximated ground-truth. Experiments suggest that adversarial defences improve the representation of the classifiers, further suggesting that to improve the robustness of the classifiers, one has to improve the representation quality also. Experiments also reveal a strong association (a high Pearson Correlation and low p-value) between the metrics and adversarial attacks. Interestingly, the results indicate that dynamic routing networks such as CapsNet have better representation while current deeper neural networks are trading off representation quality for accuracy. Code available at http://bit.ly/RepresentationMetrics.
REMAP: Multi-layer entropy-guided pooling of dense CNN features for image retrieval
Authors: Syed Sameed Husain, Miroslaw Bober
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Triplet

This paper addresses the problem of very large-scale image retrieval, focusing on improving its accuracy and robustness. We target enhanced robustness of search to factors such as variations in illumination, object appearance and scale, partial occlusions, and cluttered backgrounds - particularly important when search is performed across very large datasets with significant variability. We propose a novel CNN-based global descriptor, called REMAP, which learns and aggregates a hierarchy of deep features from multiple CNN layers, and is trained end-to-end with a triplet loss. REMAP explicitly learns discriminative features which are mutually-supportive and complementary at various semantic levels of visual abstraction. These dense local features are max-pooled spatially at each layer, within multi-scale overlapping regions, before aggregation into a single image-level descriptor. To identify the semantically useful regions and layers for retrieval, we propose to measure the information gain of each region and layer using KL-divergence. Our system effectively learns during training how useful various regions and layers are and weights them accordingly. We show that such relative entropy-guided aggregation outperforms classical CNN-based aggregation controlled by SGD. The entire framework is trained in an end-to-end fashion, outperforming the latest state-of-the-art results. On image retrieval datasets Holidays, Oxford and MPEG, the REMAP descriptor achieves mAP of 95.5%, 91.5%, and 80.1% respectively, outperforming any results published to date. REMAP also formed the core of the winning submission to the Google Landmark Retrieval Challenge on Kaggle.
Scalable Model Compression by Entropy Penalized Reparameterization
Authors: Deniz Oktay, Johannes Ballé, Saurabh Singh, Abhinav Shrivastava
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: General Classification, model, Model Compression

We describe a simple and general neural network weight compression approach, in which the network parameters (weights and biases) are represented in a "latent" space, amounting to a reparameterization. This space is equipped with a learned probability model, which is used to impose an entropy penalty on the parameter representation during training, and to compress the representation using a simple arithmetic coder after training. Classification accuracy and model compressibility is maximized jointly, with the bitrate--accuracy trade-off specified by a hyperparameter. We evaluate the method on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet classification benchmarks using six distinct model architectures. Our results show that state-of-the-art model compression can be achieved in a scalable and general way without requiring complex procedures such as multi-stage training.
PET/CT Radiomic Sequencer for Prediction of EGFR and KRAS Mutation Status in NSCLC Patients
Authors: Isaac Shiri, Hassan Maleki, Ghasem Hajianfar, Hamid Abdollahi, Saeed Ashrafinia, Mathieu Hatt, Mehrdad Oveisi, Arman Rahmim
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

The aim of this study was to develop radiomic models using PET/CT radiomic features with different machine learning approaches for finding best predictive epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and Kirsten rat sarcoma viral oncogene (KRAS) mutation status. Patients images including PET and CT [diagnostic (CTD) and low dose CT (CTA)] were pre-processed using wavelet (WAV), Laplacian of Gaussian (LOG) and 64 bin discretization (BIN) (alone or in combinations) and several features from images were extracted. The prediction performance of model was checked using the area under the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Results showed a wide range of radiomic model AUC performances up to 0.75 in prediction of EGFR and KRAS mutation status. Combination of K-Best and variance threshold feature selector with logistic regression (LREG) classifier in diagnostic CT scan led to the best performance in EGFR (CTD-BIN+B-KB+LREG, AUC: mean 0.75 sd 0.10) and KRAS (CTD-BIN-LOG-WAV+B-VT+LREG, AUC: mean 0.75 sd 0.07) respectively. Additionally, incorporating PET, kept AUC values at ~0.74. When considering conventional features only, highest predictive performance was achieved by PET SUVpeak (AUC: 0.69) for EGFR and by PET MTV (AUC: 0.55) for KRAS. In comparison with conventional PET parameters such as standard uptake value, radiomic models were found as more predictive. Our findings demonstrated that non-invasive and reliable radiomics analysis can be successfully used to predict EGFR and KRAS mutation status in NSCLC patients.
Achieving Conservation of Energy in Neural Network Emulators for Climate Modeling
Authors: Tom Beucler, Stephan Rasp, Michael Pritchard, Pierre Gentine
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00

Artificial neural-networks have the potential to emulate cloud processes with higher accuracy than the semi-empirical emulators currently used in climate models. However, neural-network models do not intrinsically conserve energy and mass, which is an obstacle to using them for long-term climate predictions. Here, we propose two methods to enforce linear conservation laws in neural-network emulators of physical models: Constraining (1) the loss function or (2) the architecture of the network itself. Applied to the emulation of explicitly-resolved cloud processes in a prototype multi-scale climate model, we show that architecture constraints can enforce conservation laws to satisfactory numerical precision, while all constraints help the neural-network better generalize to conditions outside of its training set, such as global warming.
Joint Visual-Textual Embedding for Multimodal Style Search
Authors: Gil Sadeh, Lior Fritz, Gabi Shalev, Eduard Oks
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Attribute Extraction, Retrieval, Triplet

We introduce a multimodal visual-textual search refinement method for fashion garments. Existing search engines do not enable intuitive, interactive, refinement of retrieved results based on the properties of a particular product. We propose a method to retrieve similar items, based on a query item image and textual refinement properties. We believe this method can be leveraged to solve many real-life customer scenarios, in which a similar item in a different color, pattern, length or style is desired. We employ a joint embedding training scheme in which product images and their catalog textual metadata are mapped closely in a shared space. This joint visual-textual embedding space enables manipulating catalog images semantically, based on textual refinement requirements. We propose a new training objective function, Mini-Batch Match Retrieval, and demonstrate its superiority over the commonly used triplet loss. Additionally, we demonstrate the feasibility of adding an attribute extraction module, trained on the same catalog data, and demonstrate how to integrate it within the multimodal search to boost its performance. We introduce an evaluation protocol with an associated benchmark, and compare several approaches.
Generating Diverse and Informative Natural Language Fashion Feedback
Authors: Gil Sadeh, Lior Fritz, Gabi Shalev, Eduard Oks
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Captioning

Recent advances in multi-modal vision and language tasks enable a new set of applications. In this paper, we consider the task of generating natural language fashion feedback on outfit images. We collect a unique dataset, which contains outfit images and corresponding positive and constructive fashion feedback. We treat each feedback type separately, and train deep generative encoder-decoder models with visual attention, similar to the standard image captioning pipeline. Following this approach, the generated sentences tend to be too general and non-informative. We propose an alternative decoding technique based on the Maximum Mutual Information objective function, which leads to more diverse and detailed responses. We evaluate our model with common language metrics, and also show human evaluation results. This technology is applied within the ``Alexa, how do I look?'' feature, publicly available in Echo Look devices.
How To Train Your Deep Multi-Object Tracker
Authors: Yihong Xu, Aljosa Osep, Yutong Ban, Radu Horaud, Laura Leal-Taixe, Xavier Alameda-Pineda
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Multiple Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

The recent trend in vision-based multi-object tracking (MOT) is heading towards leveraging the representational power of deep learning to jointly learn to detect and track objects. However, existing methods train only certain sub-modules using loss functions that often do not correlate with established tracking evaluation measures such as Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy (MOTA) and Precision (MOTP). As these measures are not differentiable, the choice of appropriate loss functions for end-to-end training of multi-object tracking methods is still an open research problem. In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing a differentiable proxy of MOTA and MOTP, which we combine in a loss function suitable for end-to-end training of deep multi-object trackers. As a key ingredient, we propose a Deep Hungarian Net (DHN) module that approximates the Hungarian matching algorithm. DHN allows estimating the correspondence between object tracks and ground truth objects to compute differentiable proxies of MOTA and MOTP, which are in turn used to optimize deep trackers directly. We experimentally demonstrate that the proposed differentiable framework improves the performance of existing multi-object trackers, and we establish a new state of the art on the MOTChallenge benchmark. Our code is publicly available from https://github.com/yihongXU/deepMOT.
The Price of Local Fairness in Multistage Selection
Authors: Vitalii Emelianov, George Arvanitakis, Nicolas Gast, Krishna Gummadi, Patrick Loiseau
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Decision Making, Fairness

The rise of algorithmic decision making led to active researches on how to define and guarantee fairness, mostly focusing on one-shot decision making. In several important applications such as hiring, however, decisions are made in multiple stage with additional information at each stage. In such cases, fairness issues remain poorly understood. In this paper we study fairness in $k$-stage selection problems where additional features are observed at every stage. We first introduce two fairness notions, local (per stage) and global (final stage) fairness, that extend the classical fairness notions to the $k$-stage setting. We propose a simple model based on a probabilistic formulation and show that the locally and globally fair selections that maximize precision can be computed via a linear program. We then define the price of local fairness to measure the loss of precision induced by local constraints; and investigate theoretically and empirically this quantity. In particular, our experiments show that the price of local fairness is generally smaller when the sensitive attribute is observed at the first stage; but globally fair selections are more locally fair when the sensitive attribute is observed at the second stage---hence in both cases it is often possible to have a selection that has a small price of local fairness and is close to locally fair.
Multi-Hop Paragraph Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering
Authors: Yair Feldman, Ran El-Yaniv
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering, Retrieval, Sentence

This paper is concerned with the task of multi-hop open-domain Question Answering (QA). This task is particularly challenging since it requires the simultaneous performance of textual reasoning and efficient searching. We present a method for retrieving multiple supporting paragraphs, nested amidst a large knowledge base, which contain the necessary evidence to answer a given question. Our method iteratively retrieves supporting paragraphs by forming a joint vector representation of both a question and a paragraph. The retrieval is performed by considering contextualized sentence-level representations of the paragraphs in the knowledge source. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance over two well-known datasets, SQuAD-Open and HotpotQA, which serve as our single- and multi-hop open-domain QA benchmarks, respectively.
An Overview of In-memory Processing with Emerging Non-volatile Memory for Data-intensive Applications
Authors: Bing Li, Bonan Yan, Hai, Li
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00

The conventional von Neumann architecture has been revealed as a major performance and energy bottleneck for rising data-intensive applications. %, due to the intensive data movements. The decade-old idea of leveraging in-memory processing to eliminate substantial data movements has returned and led extensive research activities. The effectiveness of in-memory processing heavily relies on memory scalability, which cannot be satisfied by traditional memory technologies. Emerging non-volatile memories (eNVMs) that pose appealing qualities such as excellent scaling and low energy consumption, on the other hand, have been heavily investigated and explored for realizing in-memory processing architecture. In this paper, we summarize the recent research progress in eNVM-based in-memory processing from various aspects, including the adopted memory technologies, locations of the in-memory processing in the system, supported arithmetics, as well as applied applications.
4D X-Ray CT Reconstruction using Multi-Slice Fusion
Authors: Soumendu Majee, Thilo Balke, Craig A. J. Kemp, Gregery T. Buzzard, Charles A. Bouman
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 4D reconstruction, CT Reconstruction, Denoising, Low-Dose X-Ray Ct Reconstruction

There is an increasing need to reconstruct objects in four or more dimensions corresponding to space, time and other independent parameters. The best 4D reconstruction algorithms use regularized iterative reconstruction approaches such as model based iterative reconstruction (MBIR), which depends critically on the quality of the prior modeling. Recently, Plug-and-Play methods have been shown to be an effective way to incorporate advanced prior models using state-of-the-art denoising algorithms designed to remove additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). However, state-of-the-art denoising algorithms such as BM4D and deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are primarily available for 2D and sometimes 3D images. In particular, CNNs are difficult and computationally expensive to implement in four or more dimensions, and training may be impossible if there is no associated high-dimensional training data. In this paper, we present Multi-Slice Fusion, a novel algorithm for 4D and higher-dimensional reconstruction, based on the fusion of multiple low-dimensional denoisers. Our approach uses multi-agent consensus equilibrium (MACE), an extension of Plug-and-Play, as a framework for integrating the multiple lower-dimensional prior models. We apply our method to the problem of 4D cone-beam X-ray CT reconstruction for Non Destructive Evaluation (NDE) of moving parts. This is done by solving the MACE equations using lower-dimensional CNN denoisers implemented in parallel on a heterogeneous cluster. Results on experimental CT data demonstrate that Multi-Slice Fusion can substantially improve the quality of reconstructions relative to traditional 4D priors, while also being practical to implement and train.
A Statistical View on Synthetic Aperture Imaging for Occlusion Removal
Authors: Indrajit Kurmi, David C. Schedl, Oliver Bimber
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning

Synthetic apertures find applications in many fields, such as radar, radio telescopes, microscopy, sonar, ultrasound, LiDAR, and optical imaging. They approximate the signal of a single hypothetical wide aperture sensor with either an array of static small aperture sensors or a single moving small aperture sensor. Common sense in synthetic aperture sampling is that a dense sampling pattern within a wide aperture is required to reconstruct a clear signal. In this article we show that there exists practical limits to both, synthetic aperture size and number of samples for the application of occlusion removal. This leads to an understanding on how to design synthetic aperture sampling patterns and sensors in a most optimal and practically efficient way. We apply our findings to airborne optical sectioning which uses camera drones and synthetic aperture imaging to computationally remove occluding vegetation or trees for inspecting ground surfaces.
IMP: Instance Mask Projection for High Accuracy Semantic Segmentation of Things
Authors: Cheng-Yang Fu, Tamara L. Berg, Alexander C. Berg
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Scene Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In this work, we present a new operator, called Instance Mask Projection (IMP), which projects a predicted Instance Segmentation as a new feature for semantic segmentation. It also supports back propagation so is trainable end-to-end. Our experiments show the effectiveness of IMP on both Clothing Parsing (with complex layering, large deformations, and non-convex objects), and on Street Scene Segmentation (with many overlapping instances and small objects). On the Varied Clothing Parsing dataset (VCP), we show instance mask projection can improve 3 points on mIOU from a state-of-the-art Panoptic FPN segmentation approach. On the ModaNet clothing parsing dataset, we show a dramatic improvement of 20.4% absolutely compared to existing baseline semantic segmentation results. In addition, the instance mask projection operator works well on other (non-clothing) datasets, providing an improvement of 3 points in mIOU on Thing classes of Cityscapes, a self-driving dataset, on top of a state-of-the-art approach.
Learning Restricted Boltzmann Machines with Arbitrary External Fields
Authors: Surbhi Goel
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00

We study the problem of learning graphical models with latent variables. We give the first algorithm for learning locally consistent (ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic) Restricted Boltzmann Machines (or RBMs) with {\em arbitrary} external fields. Our algorithm has optimal dependence on dimension in the sample complexity and run time however it suffers from a sub-optimal dependency on the underlying parameters of the RBM. Prior results have been established only for {\em ferromagnetic} RBMs with {\em consistent} external fields (signs must be same)\cite{bresler2018learning}. The proposed algorithm strongly relies on the concavity of magnetization which does not hold in our setting. We show the following key structural property: even in the presence of arbitrary external field, for any two observed nodes that share a common latent neighbor, the covariance is high. This enables us to design a simple greedy algorithm that maximizes covariance to iteratively build the neighborhood of each vertex.
The True Sample Complexity of Identifying Good Arms
Authors: Julian Katz-Samuels, Kevin Jamieson
Date: 2019-06-15 00:00:00

We consider two multi-armed bandit problems with $n$ arms: (i) given an $\epsilon > 0$, identify an arm with mean that is within $\epsilon$ of the largest mean and (ii) given a threshold $\mu_0$ and integer $k$, identify $k$ arms with means larger than $\mu_0$. Existing lower bounds and algorithms for the PAC framework suggest that both of these problems require $\Omega(n)$ samples. However, we argue that these definitions not only conflict with how these algorithms are used in practice, but also that these results disagree with intuition that says (i) requires only $\Theta(\frac{n}{m})$ samples where $m = |\{ i : \mu_i > \max_{i \in [n]} \mu_i - \epsilon\}|$ and (ii) requires $\Theta(\frac{n}{m}k)$ samples where $m = |\{ i : \mu_i > \mu_0 \}|$. We provide definitions that formalize these intuitions, obtain lower bounds that match the above sample complexities, and develop explicit, practical algorithms that achieve nearly matching upper bounds.