pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Motion Guided Attention for Video Salient Object Detection
Authors: Haofeng Li, Guanqi Chen, Guanbin Li, Yizhou Yu
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Flow Estimation, RGB Salient Object Detection, Saliency Detection, Salient Object Detection, Video Salient Object Detection

Video salient object detection aims at discovering the most visually distinctive objects in a video. How to effectively take object motion into consideration during video salient object detection is a critical issue. Existing state-of-the-art methods either do not explicitly model and harvest motion cues or ignore spatial contexts within optical flow images. In this paper, we develop a multi-task motion guided video salient object detection network, which learns to accomplish two sub-tasks using two sub-networks, one sub-network for salient object detection in still images and the other for motion saliency detection in optical flow images. We further introduce a series of novel motion guided attention modules, which utilize the motion saliency sub-network to attend and enhance the sub-network for still images. These two sub-networks learn to adapt to each other by end-to-end training. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms on a wide range of benchmarks. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in video salient object detection. Code and models will be made available.
Learning Spatial Awareness to Improve Crowd Counting
Authors: Zhi-Qi Cheng, Jun-Xiu Li, Qi Dai, Xiao Wu, Alexander Hauptmann
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Weakly-supervised Learning

The aim of crowd counting is to estimate the number of people in images by leveraging the annotation of center positions for pedestrians' heads. Promising progresses have been made with the prevalence of deep Convolutional Neural Networks. Existing methods widely employ the Euclidean distance (i.e., $L_2$ loss) to optimize the model, which, however, has two main drawbacks: (1) the loss has difficulty in learning the spatial awareness (i.e., the position of head) since it struggles to retain the high-frequency variation in the density map, and (2) the loss is highly sensitive to various noises in crowd counting, such as the zero-mean noise, head size changes, and occlusions. Although the Maximum Excess over SubArrays (MESA) loss has been previously proposed to address the above issues by finding the rectangular subregion whose predicted density map has the maximum difference from the ground truth, it cannot be solved by gradient descent, thus can hardly be integrated into the deep learning framework. In this paper, we present a novel architecture called SPatial Awareness Network (SPANet) to incorporate spatial context for crowd counting. The Maximum Excess over Pixels (MEP) loss is proposed to achieve this by finding the pixel-level subregion with high discrepancy to the ground truth. To this end, we devise a weakly supervised learning scheme to generate such region with a multi-branch architecture. The proposed framework can be integrated into existing deep crowd counting methods and is end-to-end trainable. Extensive experiments on four challenging benchmarks show that our method can significantly improve the performance of baselines. More remarkably, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on all benchmark datasets.
Automatic detection of surgical site infections from a clinical data warehouse
Authors: Marine Quéroué, Agnès Lashéras-Bauduin, Vianney Jouhet, Frantz Thiessard, Jean-Marc Vital, Anne-Marie Rogues, Sébastien Cossin
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00

Reducing the incidence of surgical site infections (SSIs) is one of the objectives of the French nosocomial infection control program. Manual monitoring of SSIs is carried out each year by the hospital hygiene team and surgeons at the University Hospital of Bordeaux. Our goal was to develop an automatic detection algorithm based on hospital information system data. Three years (2015, 2016 and 2017) of manual spine surgery monitoring have been used as a gold standard to extract features and train machine learning algorithms. The dataset contained 22 SSIs out of 2133 spine surgeries. Two different approaches were compared. The first used several data sources and achieved the best performance but is difficult to generalize to other institutions. The second was based on free text only with semiautomatic extraction of discriminant terms. The algorithms managed to identify all the SSIs with 20 and 26 false positives respectively on the dataset. Another evaluation is underway. These results are encouraging for the development of semi-automated surveillance methods.
Transfer learning for Remaining Useful Life Prediction Based on Consensus Self-Organizing Models
Authors: Yuantao Fan, Sławomir Nowaczyk, Thorsteinn Rögnvaldsson
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

The traditional paradigm for developing machine prognostics usually relies on generalization from data acquired in experiments under controlled conditions prior to deployment of the equipment. Detecting or predicting failures and estimating machine health in this way assumes that future field data will have a very similar distribution to the experiment data. However, many complex machines operate under dynamic environmental conditions and are used in many different ways. This makes collecting comprehensive data very challenging, and the assumption that pre-deployment data and post-deployment data follow very similar distributions is unlikely to hold. Transfer Learning (TL) refers to methods for transferring knowledge learned in one setting (the source domain) to another setting (the target domain). In this work, we present a TL method for predicting Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of equipment, under the assumption that labels are available only for the source domain and not the target domain. This setting corresponds to generalizing from a limited number of run-to-failure experiments performed prior to deployment into making prognostics with data coming from deployed equipment that is being used under multiple new operating conditions and experiencing previously unseen faults. We employ a deviation detection method, Consensus Self-Organizing Models (COSMO), to create transferable features for building the RUL regression model. These features capture how different target equipment is in comparison to its peers. The efficiency of the proposed TL method is demonstrated using the NASA Turbofan Engine Degradation Simulation Data Set. Models using the COSMO transferable features show better performance than other methods on predicting RUL when the target domain is more complex than the source domain.
A Single Multi-Task Deep Neural Network with Post-Processing for Object Detection with Reasoning and Robotic Grasp Detection
Authors: Dongwon Park, Yonghyeok Seo, Dongju Shin, Jaesik Choi, Se Young Chun
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Recently, robotic grasp detection (GD) and object detection (OD) with reasoning have been investigated using deep neural networks (DNNs). There have been works to combine these multi-tasks using separate networks so that robots can deal with situations of grasping specific target objects in the cluttered, stacked, complex piles of novel objects from a single RGB-D camera. We propose a single multi-task DNN that yields the information on GD, OD and relationship reasoning among objects with a simple post-processing. Our proposed methods yielded state-of-the-art performance with the accuracy of 98.6% and 74.2% and the computation speed of 33 and 62 frame per second on VMRD and Cornell datasets, respectively. Our methods also yielded 95.3% grasp success rate for single novel object grasping with a 4-axis robot arm and 86.7% grasp success rate in cluttered novel objects with a Baxter robot.
Identifying Pediatric Vascular Anomalies With Deep Learning
Authors: Justin Chan, Sharat Raju, Randall Bly, Jonathan A. Perkins, Shyamnath Gollakota
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Diagnostic, Management

Vascular anomalies, more colloquially known as birthmarks, affect up to 1 in 10 infants. Though many of these lesions self-resolve, some types can result in medical complications or disfigurement without proper diagnosis or management. Accurately diagnosing vascular anomalies is challenging for pediatricians and primary care physicians due to subtle visual differences and similarity to other pediatric dermatologic conditions. This can result in delayed or incorrect referrals for treatment. To address this problem, we developed a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically classify images of vascular anomalies and other pediatric skin conditions to aid physicians with diagnosis. We constructed a dataset of 21,681 clinical images, including data collected between 2002-2018 at Seattle Children's hospital as well as five dermatologist-curated online repositories, and built a taxonomy over vascular anomalies and other common pediatric skin lesions. The CNN achieved an average AUC of 0.9731 when ten-fold cross-validation was performed across a taxonomy of 12 classes. The classifier's average AUC and weighted F1 score was 0.9889 and 0.9732 respectively when evaluated on a previously unseen test set of six of these classes. Further, when used as an aid by pediatricians (n = 7), the classifier increased their average visual diagnostic accuracy from 73.10% to 91.67%. The classifier runs in real-time on a smartphone and has the potential to improve diagnosis of these conditions, particularly in resource-limited areas.
$360^o$ Surface Regression with a Hyper-Sphere Loss
Authors: Antonis Karakottas, Nikolaos Zioulis, Stamatis Samaras, Dimitrios Ataloglou, Vasileios Gkitsas, Dimitrios Zarpalas, Petros Daras
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Surface Normals Estimation

Omnidirectional vision is becoming increasingly relevant as more efficient $360^o$ image acquisition is now possible. However, the lack of annotated $360^o$ datasets has hindered the application of deep learning techniques on spherical content. This is further exaggerated on tasks where ground truth acquisition is difficult, such as monocular surface estimation. While recent research approaches on the 2D domain overcome this challenge by relying on generating normals from depth cues using RGB-D sensors, this is very difficult to apply on the spherical domain. In this work, we address the unavailability of sufficient $360^o$ ground truth normal data, by leveraging existing 3D datasets and remodelling them via rendering. We present a dataset of $360^o$ images of indoor spaces with their corresponding ground truth surface normal, and train a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) on the task of monocular 360 surface estimation. We achieve this by minimizing a novel angular loss function defined on the hyper-sphere using simple quaternion algebra. We put an effort to appropriately compare with other state of the art methods trained on planar datasets and finally, present the practical applicability of our trained model on a spherical image re-lighting task using completely unseen data by qualitatively showing the promising generalization ability of our dataset and model. The dataset is available at: vcl3d.github.io/HyperSphereSurfaceRegression.
Bayesian Optimization under Heavy-tailed Payoffs
Authors: Sayak Ray Chowdhury, Aditya Gopalan
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

We consider black box optimization of an unknown function in the nonparametric Gaussian process setting when the noise in the observed function values can be heavy tailed. This is in contrast to existing literature that typically assumes sub-Gaussian noise distributions for queries. Under the assumption that the unknown function belongs to the Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) induced by a kernel, we first show that an adaptation of the well-known GP-UCB algorithm with reward truncation enjoys sublinear $\tilde{O}(T^{\frac{2 + \alpha}{2(1+\alpha)}})$ regret even with only the $(1+\alpha)$-th moments, $\alpha \in (0,1]$, of the reward distribution being bounded ($\tilde{O}$ hides logarithmic factors). However, for the common squared exponential (SE) and Mat\'{e}rn kernels, this is seen to be significantly larger than a fundamental $\Omega(T^{\frac{1}{1+\alpha}})$ lower bound on regret. We resolve this gap by developing novel Bayesian optimization algorithms, based on kernel approximation techniques, with regret bounds matching the lower bound in order for the SE kernel. We numerically benchmark the algorithms on environments based on both synthetic models and real-world data sets.
Boosting Real-Time Driving Scene Parsing with Shared Semantics
Authors: Zhenzhen Xiang, Anbo Bao, Jie Li, Jianbo Su
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Scene Parsing, Semantic Segmentation

Real-time scene parsing is a fundamental feature for autonomous driving vehicles with multiple cameras. In this letter we demonstrate that sharing semantics between cameras with different perspectives and overlapped views can boost the parsing performance when compared with traditional methods, which individually process the frames from each camera. Our framework is based on a deep neural network for semantic segmentation but with two kinds of additional modules for sharing and fusing semantics. On the one hand, a semantics sharing module is designed to establish the pixel-wise mapping between the input images. Features as well as semantics are shared by the map to reduce duplicated workload which leads to more efficient computation. On the other hand, feature fusion modules are designed to combine different modal of semantic features, which leverage the information from both inputs for better accuracy. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we have applied our network to a dual-camera vision system for driving scene parsing. Experimental results show that our network outperforms the baseline method on the parsing accuracy with comparable computations.
Towards Distributed Logic Programming based on Computability Logic
Authors: Keehang Kwon
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00

{\em Computability logic} (CoL) is a powerful computational model which views computational problems as games played by a machine and its environment. In this paper, we show that CoL naturally supports multiagent programming models with distributed control. To be specific, we discuss a distributed logic programming model based on CoL (CL1 to be exact), which we call CL1^{\Omega}. The key feature of this model is that it supports $dynamic/evolving$ knowledgebase of an agent. This model turns out to be a promising approach to reaching both general AI and future computing model.
Multi-person Pose Tracking using Sequential Monte Carlo with Probabilistic Neural Pose Predictor
Authors: Masashi Okada, Shinji Takenaka, Tadahiro Taniguchi
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Tracking, Prediction

It is an effective strategy for the multi-person pose tracking task in videos to employ prediction and pose matching in a frame-by-frame manner. For this type of approach, uncertainty-aware modeling is essential because precise prediction is impossible. However, previous studies have relied on only a single prediction without incorporating uncertainty, which can cause critical tracking errors if the prediction is unreliable. This paper proposes an extension to this approach with Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). This naturally reformulates the tracking scheme to handle multiple predictions (or hypotheses) of poses, thereby mitigating the negative effect of prediction errors. An important component of SMC, i.e., a proposal distribution, is designed as a probabilistic neural pose predictor, which can propose diverse and plausible hypotheses by incorporating epistemic uncertainty and heteroscedastic aleatoric uncertainty. In addition, a recurrent architecture is introduced to our neural modeling to utilize time-sequence information of poses to manage difficult situations, such as the frequent disappearance and reappearances of poses. Compared to existing baselines, the proposed method achieves a state-of-the-art MOTA score on the PoseTrack2018 validation dataset by reducing approximately 50% of tracking errors from a state-of-the art baseline method.
Gumbel-softmax Optimization: A Simple General Framework for Combinatorial Optimization Problems on Graphs
Authors: Jing Liu, Fei Gao, Jiang Zhang
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Many problems in real life can be converted to combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) on graphs, that is to find a best node state configuration or a network structure such that the designed objective function is optimized under some constraints. However, these problems are notorious for their hardness to solve because most of them are NP-hard or NP-complete. Although traditional general methods such as simulated annealing (SA), genetic algorithms (GA) and so forth have been devised to these hard problems, their accuracy and time consumption are not satisfying in practice. In this work, we proposed a simple, fast, and general algorithm framework called Gumbel-softmax Optimization (GSO) for COPs. By introducing Gumbel-softmax technique which is developed in machine learning community, we can optimize the objective function directly by gradient descent algorithm regardless of the discrete nature of variables. We test our algorithm on four different problems including Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model, maximum independent set (MIS) problem, modularity optimization, and structural optimization problem. High-quality solutions can be obtained with much less time consuming compared to traditional approaches.
Bridging the domain gap in cross-lingual document classification
Authors: Guokun Lai, Barlas Oguz, Yiming Yang, Veselin Stoyanov
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Cross-Domain Document Classification, Cross-Lingual Document Classification, Cross-Lingual Sentiment Classification, Data Augmentation, Document Classification, General Classification, Unsupervised Pre-training, Weakly-supervised Learning

The scarcity of labeled training data often prohibits the internationalization of NLP models to multiple languages. Recent developments in cross-lingual understanding (XLU) has made progress in this area, trying to bridge the language barrier using language universal representations. However, even if the language problem was resolved, models trained in one language would not transfer to another language perfectly due to the natural domain drift across languages and cultures. We consider the setting of semi-supervised cross-lingual understanding, where labeled data is available in a source language (English), but only unlabeled data is available in the target language. We combine state-of-the-art cross-lingual methods with recently proposed methods for weakly supervised learning such as unsupervised pre-training and unsupervised data augmentation to simultaneously close both the language gap and the domain gap in XLU. We show that addressing the domain gap is crucial. We improve over strong baselines and achieve a new state-of-the-art for cross-lingual document classification.
KorQuAD1.0: Korean QA Dataset for Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Seungyoung Lim, Myungji Kim, Jooyoul Lee
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Machine Reading Comprehension, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is a task that requires machine to understand natural language and answer questions by reading a document. It is the core of automatic response technology such as chatbots and automatized customer supporting systems. We present Korean Question Answering Dataset(KorQuAD), a large-scale Korean dataset for extractive machine reading comprehension task. It consists of 70,000+ human generated question-answer pairs on Korean Wikipedia articles. We release KorQuAD1.0 and launch a challenge at https://KorQuAD.github.io to encourage the development of multilingual natural language processing research.
Learning Residual Flow as Dynamic Motion from Stereo Videos
Authors: Seokju Lee, Sunghoon Im, Stephen Lin, In So Kweon
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth And Camera Motion, Motion Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation, Stereo Matching, Stereo Matching Hand, Visual Odometry

We present a method for decomposing the 3D scene flow observed from a moving stereo rig into stationary scene elements and dynamic object motion. Our unsupervised learning framework jointly reasons about the camera motion, optical flow, and 3D motion of moving objects. Three cooperating networks predict stereo matching, camera motion, and residual flow, which represents the flow component due to object motion and not from camera motion. Based on rigid projective geometry, the estimated stereo depth is used to guide the camera motion estimation, and the depth and camera motion are used to guide the residual flow estimation. We also explicitly estimate the 3D scene flow of dynamic objects based on the residual flow and scene depth. Experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms on the optical flow and visual odometry tasks.
Real-time 3-D Mapping with Estimating Acoustic Materials
Authors: Tae-Young Kim, Youngsun Kwon, Sung-Eui Yoon
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, Sound Source Localization

This paper proposes a real-time system integrating an acoustic material estimation from visual appearance and an on-the-fly mapping in the 3-dimension. The proposed method estimates the acoustic materials of surroundings in indoor scenes and incorporates them to a 3-D occupancy map, as a robot moves around the environment. To estimate the acoustic material from the visual cue, we apply the state-of-the-art semantic segmentation CNN network based on the assumption that the visual appearance and the acoustic materials have a strong association. Furthermore, we introduce an update policy to handle the material estimations during the online mapping process. As a result, our environment map with acoustic material can be used for sound-related robotics applications, such as sound source localization taking into account various acoustic propagation (e.g., reflection).