pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Deep Learning Framework for Simulation and Defect Prediction Applied in Microelectronics
Authors: Nikolaos Dimitriou, Lampros Leontaris, Thanasis Vafeiadis, Dimosthenis Ioannidis, Tracy Wotherspoon, Gregory Tinker, Dimitrios Tzovaras
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

The prediction of upcoming events in industrial processes has been a long-standing research goal since it enables optimization of manufacturing parameters, planning of equipment maintenance and more importantly prediction and eventually prevention of defects. While existing approaches have accomplished substantial progress, they are mostly limited to processing of one dimensional signals or require parameter tuning to model environmental parameters. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach based on deep neural networks that simulates changes in the 3D structure of a monitored object in a batch based on previous 3D measurements. In particular, we propose an architecture based on 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3DCNN) in order to model the geometric variations in manufacturing parameters and predict upcoming events related to sub-optimal performance. We validate our framework on a microelectronics use-case using the recently published PCB scans dataset where we simulate changes on the shape and volume of glue deposited on an Liquid Crystal Polymer (LCP) substrate before the attachment of integrated circuits (IC). Experimental evaluation examines the impact of different choices in the cost function during training and shows that the proposed method can be efficiently used for defect prediction.
MagnifierNet: Towards Semantic Adversary and Fusion for Person Re-identification
Authors: Yushi Lan, Yu-An Liu, Maoqing Tian, Xinchi Zhou, Xuesen Zhang, Shuai Yi, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Person Re-Identification

Although person re-identification (ReID) has achieved significant improvement recently by enforcing part alignment, it is still a challenging task when it comes to distinguishing visually similar identities or identifying the occluded person. In these scenarios, magnifying details in each part features and selectively fusing them together may provide a feasible solution. In this work, we propose MagnifierNet, a triple-branch network which accurately mines details from whole to parts. Firstly, the holistic salient features are encoded by a global branch. Secondly, to enhance detailed representation for each semantic region, the "Semantic Adversarial Branch" is designed to learn from dynamically generated semantic-occluded samples during training. Meanwhile, we introduce "Semantic Fusion Branch" to filter out irrelevant noises by selectively fusing semantic region information sequentially. To further improve feature diversity, we introduce a novel loss function "Semantic Diversity Loss" to remove redundant overlaps across learned semantic representations. State-of-the-art performance has been achieved on three benchmarks by large margins. Specifically, the mAP score is improved by 6% and 5% on the most challenging CUHK03-L and CUHK03-D benchmarks.
Fault Diagnosis in Microelectronics Attachment via Deep Learning Analysis of 3D Laser Scans
Authors: Nikolaos Dimitriou, Lampros Leontaris, Thanasis Vafeiadis, Dimosthenis Ioannidis, Tracy Wotherspoon, Gregory Tinker, Dimitrios Tzovaras
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Diagnosis

A common source of defects in manufacturing miniature Printed Circuits Boards (PCB) is the attachment of silicon die or other wire bondable components on a Liquid Crystal Polymer (LCP) substrate. Typically, a conductive glue is dispensed prior to attachment with defects caused either by insufficient or excessive glue. The current practice in electronics industry is to examine the deposited glue by a human operator a process that is both time consuming and inefficient especially in preproduction runs where the error rate is high. In this paper we propose a system that automates fault diagnosis by accurately estimating the volume of glue deposits before and even after die attachment. To this end a modular scanning system is deployed that produces high resolution point clouds whereas the actual estimation of glue volume is performed by (R)egression-Net (RNet), a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (3DCNN). RNet outperforms other deep architectures and is able to estimate the volume either directly from the point cloud of a glue deposit or more interestingly after die attachment when only a small part of glue is visible around each die. The entire methodology is evaluated under operational conditions where the proposed system achieves accurate results without delaying the manufacturing process.
Freeze the Discriminator: a Simple Baseline for Fine-Tuning GANs
Authors: Sangwoo Mo, Minsu Cho, Jinwoo Shin
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 10-shot image generation, Image Generation, Transfer Learning

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have shown outstanding performance on a wide range of problems in computer vision, graphics, and machine learning, but often require numerous training data and heavy computational resources. To tackle this issue, several methods introduce a transfer learning technique in GAN training. They, however, are either prone to overfitting or limited to learning small distribution shifts. In this paper, we show that simple fine-tuning of GANs with frozen lower layers of the discriminator performs surprisingly well. This simple baseline, FreezeD, significantly outperforms previous techniques used in both unconditional and conditional GANs. We demonstrate the consistent effect using StyleGAN and SNGAN-projection architectures on several datasets of Animal Face, Anime Face, Oxford Flower, CUB-200-2011, and Caltech-256 datasets. The code and results are available at https://github.com/sangwoomo/FreezeD.
A more abstractive summarization model
Authors: Satyaki Chakraborty, Xinya Li, Sayak Chakraborty
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Text Summarization

Pointer-generator network is an extremely popular method of text summarization. More recent works in this domain still build on top of the baseline pointer generator by augmenting a content selection phase, or by decomposing the decoder into a contextual network and a language model. However, all such models that are based on the pointer-generator base architecture cannot generate novel words in the summary and mostly copy words from the source text. In our work, we first thoroughly investigate why the pointer-generator network is unable to generate novel words, and then address that by adding an Out-of-vocabulary (OOV) penalty. This enables us to improve the amount of novelty/abstraction significantly. We use normalized n-gram novelty scores as a metric for determining the level of abstraction. Moreover, we also report rouge scores of our model since most summarization models are evaluated with R-1, R-2, R-L scores.
Towards an Efficient and General Framework of Robust Training for Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Kaidi Xu, Sijia Liu, Pin-Yu Chen, Mengshu Sun, Caiwen Ding, Bhavya Kailkhura, Xue Lin
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have made significant advances on several fundamental inference tasks. As a result, there is a surge of interest in using these models for making potentially important decisions in high-regret applications. However, despite GNNs' impressive performance, it has been observed that carefully crafted perturbations on graph structures (or nodes attributes) lead them to make wrong predictions. Presence of these adversarial examples raises serious security concerns. Most of the existing robust GNN design/training methods are only applicable to white-box settings where model parameters are known and gradient based methods can be used by performing convex relaxation of the discrete graph domain. More importantly, these methods are not efficient and scalable which make them infeasible in time sensitive tasks and massive graph datasets. To overcome these limitations, we propose a general framework which leverages the greedy search algorithms and zeroth-order methods to obtain robust GNNs in a generic and an efficient manner. On several applications, we show that the proposed techniques are significantly less computationally expensive and, in some cases, more robust than the state-of-the-art methods making them suitable to large-scale problems which were out of the reach of traditional robust training methods.
Stochastic-Sign SGD for Federated Learning with Theoretical Guarantees
Authors: Richeng Jin, Yufan Huang, Xiaofan He, Huaiyu Dai, Tianfu Wu
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, parameter estimation, Quantization

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a prominent distributed learning paradigm. FL entails some pressing needs for developing novel parameter estimation approaches with theoretical guarantees of convergence, which are also communication efficient, differentially private and Byzantine resilient in the heterogeneous data distribution settings. Quantization-based SGD solvers have been widely adopted in FL and the recently proposed SIGNSGD with majority vote shows a promising direction. However, no existing methods enjoy all the aforementioned properties. In this paper, we propose an intuitively-simple yet theoretically-sound method based on SIGNSGD to bridge the gap. We present Stochastic-Sign SGD which utilizes novel stochastic-sign based gradient compressors enabling the aforementioned properties in a unified framework. We also present an error-feedback variant of the proposed Stochastic-Sign SGD which further improves the learning performance in FL. We test the proposed method with extensive experiments using deep neural networks on the MNIST dataset and the CIFAR-10 dataset. The experimental results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Diversity-Based Generalization for Unsupervised Text Classification under Domain Shift
Authors: Jitin Krishnan, Hemant Purohit, Huzefa Rangwala
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Diversity, Domain Adaptation, General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Text Classification

Domain adaptation approaches seek to learn from a source domain and generalize it to an unseen target domain. At present, the state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation approaches for subjective text classification problems leverage unlabeled target data along with labeled source data. In this paper, we propose a novel method for domain adaptation of single-task text classification problems based on a simple but effective idea of diversity-based generalization that does not require unlabeled target data but still matches the state-of-the-art in performance. Diversity plays the role of promoting the model to better generalize and be indiscriminate towards domain shift by forcing the model not to rely on same features for prediction. We apply this concept on the most explainable component of neural networks, the attention layer. To generate sufficient diversity, we create a multi-head attention model and infuse a diversity constraint between the attention heads such that each head will learn differently. We further expand upon our model by tri-training and designing a procedure with an additional diversity constraint between the attention heads of the tri-trained classifiers. Extensive evaluation using the standard benchmark dataset of Amazon reviews and a newly constructed dataset of Crisis events shows that our fully unsupervised method matches with the competing baselines that uses unlabeled target data. Our results demonstrate that machine learning architectures that ensure sufficient diversity can generalize better; encouraging future research to design ubiquitously usable learning models without using unlabeled target data.
Stochastic encoding of graphs in deep learning allows for complex analysis of gender classification in resting-state and task functional brain networks from the UK Biobank
Authors: Matthew Leming, John Suckling
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Functional Connectivity, Gender Classification, General Classification

Classification of whole-brain functional connectivity MRI data with convolutional neural networks (CNNs) has shown promise, but the complexity of these models impedes understanding of which aspects of brain activity contribute to classification. While visualization techniques have been developed to interpret CNNs, bias inherent in the method of encoding abstract input data, as well as the natural variance of deep learning models, detract from the accuracy of these techniques. We introduce a stochastic encoding method in an ensemble of CNNs to classify functional connectomes by gender. We applied our method to resting-state and task data from the UK BioBank, using two visualization techniques to measure the salience of three brain networks involved in task- and resting-states, and their interaction. To regress confounding factors such as head motion, age, and intracranial volume, we introduced a multivariate balancing algorithm to ensure equal distributions of such covariates between classes in our data. We achieved a final AUROC of 0.8459. We found that resting-state data classifies more accurately than task data, with the inner salience network playing the most important role of the three networks overall in classification of resting-state data and connections to the central executive network in task data.
Detecting Asks in SE attacks: Impact of Linguistic and Structural Knowledge
Authors: Bonnie J. Dorr, Archna Bhatia, Adam Dalton, Brodie Mather, Bryanna Hebenstreit, Sashank Santhanam, Zhuo Cheng, Samira Shaikh, Alan Zemel, Tomek Strzalkowski
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00

Social engineers attempt to manipulate users into undertaking actions such as downloading malware by clicking links or providing access to money or sensitive information. Natural language processing, computational sociolinguistics, and media-specific structural clues provide a means for detecting both the ask (e.g., buy gift card) and the risk/reward implied by the ask, which we call framing (e.g., lose your job, get a raise). We apply linguistic resources such as Lexical Conceptual Structure to tackle ask detection and also leverage structural clues such as links and their proximity to identified asks to improve confidence in our results. Our experiments indicate that the performance of ask detection, framing detection, and identification of the top ask is improved by linguistically motivated classes coupled with structural clues such as links. Our approach is implemented in a system that informs users about social engineering risk situations.
General Framework for Binary Classification on Top Samples
Authors: Lukáš Adam, Václav Mácha, Václav Šmídl, Tomáš Pevný
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification, General Classification, Two-sample testing

Many binary classification problems minimize misclassification above (or below) a threshold. We show that instances of ranking problems, accuracy at the top or hypothesis testing may be written in this form. We propose a general framework to handle these classes of problems and show which known methods (both known and newly proposed) fall into this framework. We provide a theoretical analysis of this framework and mention selected possible pitfalls the methods may encounter. We suggest several numerical improvements including the implicit derivative and stochastic gradient descent. We provide an extensive numerical study. Based both on the theoretical properties and numerical experiments, we conclude the paper by suggesting which method should be used in which situation.
Multifold Acceleration of Diffusion MRI via Slice-Interleaved Diffusion Encoding (SIDE)
Authors: Yoonmi Hong, Wei-Tang Chang, Geng Chen, Ye Wu, Weili Lin, Dinggang Shen, Pew-Thian Yap
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Diffusion  MRI

Diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a unique imaging technique for in vivo characterization of tissue microstructure and white matter pathways. However, its relatively long acquisition time implies greater motion artifacts when imaging, for example, infants and Parkinson's disease patients. To accelerate dMRI acquisition, we propose in this paper (i) a diffusion encoding scheme, called Slice-Interleaved Diffusion Encoding (SIDE), that interleaves each diffusion-weighted (DW) image volume with slices that are encoded with different diffusion gradients, essentially allowing the slice-undersampling of image volume associated with each diffusion gradient to significantly reduce acquisition time, and (ii) a method based on deep learning for effective reconstruction of DW images from the highly slice-undersampled data. Evaluation based on the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset indicates that our method can achieve a high acceleration factor of up to 6 with minimal information loss. Evaluation using dMRI data acquired with SIDE acquisition demonstrates that it is possible to accelerate the acquisition by as much as 50 folds when combined with multi-band imaging.
Reward Shaping for Human Learning via Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Mark A. Rucker, Layne T. Watson, Matthew S. Gerber, Laura E. Barnes
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Humans are spectacular reinforcement learners, constantly learning from and adjusting to experience and feedback. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily mean humans are fast learners. When tasks are challenging, learning can become unacceptably slow. Fortunately, humans do not have to learn tabula rasa, and learning speed can be greatly increased with learning aids. In this work we validate a new type of learning aid -- reward shaping for humans via inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). The goal of this aid is to increase the speed with which humans can learn good policies for specific tasks. Furthermore this approach compliments alternative machine learning techniques such as safety features that try to prevent individuals from making poor decisions. To achieve our results we first extend a well known IRL algorithm via kernel methods. Afterwards we conduct two human subjects experiments using an online game where players have limited time to learn a good policy. We show with statistical significance that players who receive our learning aid are able to approach desired policies more quickly than the control group.
KEML: A Knowledge-Enriched Meta-Learning Framework for Lexical Relation Classification
Authors: Chengyu Wang, Minghui Qiu, Jun Huang, Xiaofeng He
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Meta-Learning, Relation, Relation Classification

Lexical relations describe how concepts are semantically related, in the form of relation triples. The accurate prediction of lexical relations between concepts is challenging, due to the sparsity of patterns indicating the existence of such relations. We propose the Knowledge-Enriched Meta-Learning (KEML) framework to address the task of lexical relation classification. In KEML, the LKB-BERT (Lexical Knowledge Base-BERT) model is presented to learn concept representations from massive text corpora, with rich lexical knowledge injected by distant supervision. A probabilistic distribution of auxiliary tasks is defined to increase the model's ability to recognize different types of lexical relations. We further combine a meta-learning process over the auxiliary task distribution and supervised learning to train the neural lexical relation classifier. Experiments over multiple datasets show that KEML outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
3D-MiniNet: Learning a 2D Representation from Point Clouds for Fast and Efficient 3D LIDAR Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Iñigo Alonso, Luis Riazuelo, Luis Montesano, Ana C. Murillo
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Semantic Segmentation, 3D Semantic Segmentation, Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, LIDAR Semantic Segmentation, Real-Time 3D Semantic Segmentation, Real-Time Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

LIDAR semantic segmentation, which assigns a semantic label to each 3D point measured by the LIDAR, is becoming an essential task for many robotic applications such as autonomous driving. Fast and efficient semantic segmentation methods are needed to match the strong computational and temporal restrictions of many of these real-world applications. This work presents 3D-MiniNet, a novel approach for LIDAR semantic segmentation that combines 3D and 2D learning layers. It first learns a 2D representation from the raw points through a novel projection which extracts local and global information from the 3D data. This representation is fed to an efficient 2D Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCNN) that produces a 2D semantic segmentation. These 2D semantic labels are re-projected back to the 3D space and enhanced through a post-processing module. The main novelty in our strategy relies on the projection learning module. Our detailed ablation study shows how each component contributes to the final performance of 3D-MiniNet. We validate our approach on well known public benchmarks (SemanticKITTI and KITTI), where 3D-MiniNet gets state-of-the-art results while being faster and more parameter-efficient than previous methods.
PointAugment: an Auto-Augmentation Framework for Point Cloud Classification
Authors: Ruihui Li, Xianzhi Li, Pheng-Ann Heng, Chi-Wing Fu
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 3D Point Cloud Data Augmentation, Classification, Diversity, General Classification, Point Cloud Classification, Retrieval

We present PointAugment, a new auto-augmentation framework that automatically optimizes and augments point cloud samples to enrich the data diversity when we train a classification network. Different from existing auto-augmentation methods for 2D images, PointAugment is sample-aware and takes an adversarial learning strategy to jointly optimize an augmentor network and a classifier network, such that the augmentor can learn to produce augmented samples that best fit the classifier. Moreover, we formulate a learnable point augmentation function with a shape-wise transformation and a point-wise displacement, and carefully design loss functions to adopt the augmented samples based on the learning progress of the classifier. Extensive experiments also confirm PointAugment's effectiveness and robustness to improve the performance of various networks on shape classification and retrieval.
Cross-layer Feature Pyramid Network for Salient Object Detection
Authors: Zun Li, Congyan Lang, Junhao Liew, Qibin Hou, Yidong Li, Jiashi Feng
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Feature pyramid network (FPN) based models, which fuse the semantics and salient details in a progressive manner, have been proven highly effective in salient object detection. However, it is observed that these models often generate saliency maps with incomplete object structures or unclear object boundaries, due to the \emph{indirect} information propagation among distant layers that makes such fusion structure less effective. In this work, we propose a novel Cross-layer Feature Pyramid Network (CFPN), in which direct cross-layer communication is enabled to improve the progressive fusion in salient object detection. Specifically, the proposed network first aggregates multi-scale features from different layers into feature maps that have access to both the high- and low-level information. Then, it distributes the aggregated features to all the involved layers to gain access to richer context. In this way, the distributed features per layer own both semantics and salient details from all other layers simultaneously, and suffer reduced loss of important information. Extensive experimental results over six widely used salient object detection benchmarks and with three popular backbones clearly demonstrate that CFPN can accurately locate fairly complete salient regions and effectively segment the object boundaries.