pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Hierarchical Severity Staging of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injuries using Deep Learning with MRI Images
Authors: Nikan K. Namiri, Io Flament, Bruno Astuto, Rutwik Shah, Radhika Tibrewala, Francesco Caliva, Thomas M. Link, Valentina Pedoia, Sharmila Majumdar
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, General Classification, Lesion Classification, Sensitivity, Specificity

Purpose: To evaluate the diagnostic utility of two convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for severity staging of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries. Materials and Methods: This retrospective analysis was conducted on 1243 knee MR images (1008 intact, 18 partially torn, 77 fully torn, and 140 reconstructed ACLs) from 224 patients (age 47 +/- 14 years, 54% women) acquired between 2011 and 2014. The radiologists used a modified scoring metric. To classify ACL injuries with deep learning, two types of CNNs were used, one with three-dimensional (3D) and the other with two-dimensional (2D) convolutional kernels. Performance metrics included sensitivity, specificity, weighted Cohen's kappa, and overall accuracy, followed by McNemar's test to compare the CNNs performance. Results: The overall accuracy and weighted Cohen's kappa reported for ACL injury classification were higher using the 2D CNN (accuracy: 92% (233/254) and kappa: 0.83) than the 3D CNN (accuracy: 89% (225/254) and kappa: 0.83) (P = .27). The 2D CNN and 3D CNN performed similarly in classifying intact ACLs (2D CNN: 93% (188/203) sensitivity and 90% (46/51) specificity; 3D CNN: 89% (180/203) sensitivity and 88% (45/51) specificity). Classification of full tears by both networks were also comparable (2D CNN: 82% (14/17) sensitivity and 94% (222/237) specificity; 3D CNN: 76% (13/17) sensitivity and 100% (236/237) specificity). The 2D CNN classified all reconstructed ACLs correctly. Conclusion: 2D and 3D CNNs applied to ACL lesion classification had high sensitivity and specificity, suggesting that these networks could be used to help grade ACL injuries by non-experts.
Data-Free Knowledge Amalgamation via Group-Stack Dual-GAN
Authors: Jingwen Ye, Yixin Ji, Xinchao Wang, Xin Gao, Mingli Song
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Recent advances in deep learning have provided procedures for learning one network to amalgamate multiple streams of knowledge from the pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models, thus reduce the annotation cost. However, almost all existing methods demand massive training data, which may be unavailable due to privacy or transmission issues. In this paper, we propose a data-free knowledge amalgamate strategy to craft a well-behaved multi-task student network from multiple single/multi-task teachers. The main idea is to construct the group-stack generative adversarial networks (GANs) which have two dual generators. First one generator is trained to collect the knowledge by reconstructing the images approximating the original dataset utilized for pre-training the teachers. Then a dual generator is trained by taking the output from the former generator as input. Finally we treat the dual part generator as the target network and regroup it. As demonstrated on several benchmarks of multi-label classification, the proposed method without any training data achieves the surprisingly competitive results, even compared with some full-supervised methods.
Fully Automated Hand Hygiene Monitoring\\in Operating Room using 3D Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Minjee Kim, Joonmyeong Choi, Namkug Kim
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Transfer Learning, Video Understanding

Hand hygiene is one of the most significant factors in preventing hospital acquired infections (HAI) which often be transmitted by medical staffs in contact with patients in the operating room (OR). Hand hygiene monitoring could be important to investigate and reduce the outbreak of infections within the OR. However, an effective monitoring tool for hand hygiene compliance is difficult to develop due to the visual complexity of the OR scene. Recent progress in video understanding with convolutional neural net (CNN) has increased the application of recognition and detection of human actions. Leveraging this progress, we proposed a fully automated hand hygiene monitoring tool of the alcohol-based hand rubbing action of anesthesiologists on OR video using spatio-temporal features with 3D CNN. First, the region of interest (ROI) of anesthesiologists' upper body were detected and cropped. A temporal smoothing filter was applied to the ROIs. Then, the ROIs were given to a 3D CNN and classified into two classes: rubbing hands or other actions. We observed that a transfer learning from Kinetics-400 is beneficial and the optical flow stream was not helpful in our dataset. The final accuracy, precision, recall and F1 score in testing is 0.76, 0.85, 0.65 and 0.74, respectively.
A^2-GCN: An Attribute-aware Attentive GCN Model for Recommendation
Authors: Fan Liu, Zhiyong Cheng, Lei Zhu, Chenghao Liu, Liqiang Nie
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Recommendation Systems

As important side information, attributes have been widely exploited in the existing recommender system for better performance. In the real-world scenarios, it is common that some attributes of items/users are missing (e.g., some movies miss the genre data). Prior studies usually use a default value (i.e., "other") to represent the missing attribute, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address this problem, in this paper, we present an attribute-aware attentive graph convolution network (A${^2}$-GCN). In particular, we first construct a graph, whereby users, items, and attributes are three types of nodes and their associations are edges. Thereafter, we leverage the graph convolution network to characterize the complicated interactions among <users, items, attributes>. To learn the node representation, we turn to the message-passing strategy to aggregate the message passed from the other directly linked types of nodes (e.g., a user or an attribute). To this end, we are capable of incorporating associate attributes to strengthen the user and item representations, and thus naturally solve the attribute missing problem. Considering the fact that for different users, the attributes of an item have different influence on their preference for this item, we design a novel attention mechanism to filter the message passed from an item to a target user by considering the attribute information. Extensive experiments have been conducted on several publicly accessible datasets to justify our model. Results show that our model outperforms several state-of-the-art methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of our attention method.
Small-Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images with End-to-End Edge-Enhanced GAN and Object Detector Network
Authors: Jakaria Rabbi, Nilanjan Ray, Matthias Schubert, Subir Chowdhury, Dennis Chao
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Enhancement, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Remote Sensing Image Classification, satellite image super-resolution, Small Object Detection, Super-Resolution

The detection performance of small objects in remote sensing images is not satisfactory compared to large objects, especially in low-resolution and noisy images. A generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model called enhanced super-resolution GAN (ESRGAN) shows remarkable image enhancement performance, but reconstructed images miss high-frequency edge information. Therefore, object detection performance degrades for small objects on recovered noisy and low-resolution remote sensing images. Inspired by the success of edge enhanced GAN (EEGAN) and ESRGAN, we apply a new edge-enhanced super-resolution GAN (EESRGAN) to improve the image quality of remote sensing images and use different detector networks in an end-to-end manner where detector loss is backpropagated into the EESRGAN to improve the detection performance. We propose an architecture with three components: ESRGAN, Edge Enhancement Network (EEN), and Detection network. We use residual-in-residual dense blocks (RRDB) for both the ESRGAN and EEN, and for the detector network, we use the faster region-based convolutional network (FRCNN) (two-stage detector) and single-shot multi-box detector (SSD) (one stage detector). Extensive experiments on a public (car overhead with context) and a self-assembled (oil and gas storage tank) satellite dataset show superior performance of our method compared to the standalone state-of-the-art object detectors.
A Graduated Filter Method for Large Scale Robust Estimation
Authors: Huu Le, Christopher Zach
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: parameter estimation

Due to the highly non-convex nature of large-scale robust parameter estimation, avoiding poor local minima is challenging in real-world applications where input data is contaminated by a large or unknown fraction of outliers. In this paper, we introduce a novel solver for robust estimation that possesses a strong ability to escape poor local minima. Our algorithm is built upon the class of traditional graduated optimization techniques, which are considered state-of-the-art local methods to solve problems having many poor minima. The novelty of our work lies in the introduction of an adaptive kernel (or residual) scaling scheme, which allows us to achieve faster convergence rates. Like other existing methods that aim to return good local minima for robust estimation tasks, our method relaxes the original robust problem but adapts a filter framework from non-linear constrained optimization to automatically choose the level of relaxation. Experimental results on real large-scale datasets such as bundle adjustment instances demonstrate that our proposed method achieves competitive results.
Reducing the Sim-to-Real Gap for Event Cameras
Authors: Timo Stoffregen, Cedric Scheerlinck, Davide Scaramuzza, Tom Drummond, Nick Barnes, Lindsay Kleeman, Robert Mahony
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Event-Based Video Reconstruction, Video Reconstruction

Event cameras are paradigm-shifting novel sensors that report asynchronous, per-pixel brightness changes called 'events' with unparalleled low latency. This makes them ideal for high speed, high dynamic range scenes where conventional cameras would fail. Recent work has demonstrated impressive results using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for video reconstruction and optic flow with events. We present strategies for improving training data for event based CNNs that result in 20-40% boost in performance of existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) video reconstruction networks retrained with our method, and up to 15% for optic flow networks. A challenge in evaluating event based video reconstruction is lack of quality ground truth images in existing datasets. To address this, we present a new High Quality Frames (HQF) dataset, containing events and ground truth frames from a DAVIS240C that are well-exposed and minimally motion-blurred. We evaluate our method on HQF + several existing major event camera datasets.
Inverse Problems, Deep Learning, and Symmetry Breaking
Authors: Kshitij Tayal, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Vipin Kumar, Ju Sun
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Retrieval

In many physical systems, inputs related by intrinsic system symmetries are mapped to the same output. When inverting such systems, i.e., solving the associated inverse problems, there is no unique solution. This causes fundamental difficulties for deploying the emerging end-to-end deep learning approach. Using the generalized phase retrieval problem as an illustrative example, we show that careful symmetry breaking on the training data can help get rid of the difficulties and significantly improve the learning performance. We also extract and highlight the underlying mathematical principle of the proposed solution, which is directly applicable to other inverse problems.
Kidney segmentation using 3D U-Net localized with Expectation Maximization
Authors: Omid Bazgir, Kai Barck, Richard A. D. Carano, Robby M. Weimer, Luke Xie
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Kidney volume is greatly affected in several renal diseases. Precise and automatic segmentation of the kidney can help determine kidney size and evaluate renal function. Fully convolutional neural networks have been used to segment organs from large biomedical 3D images. While these networks demonstrate state-of-the-art segmentation performances, they do not immediately translate to small foreground objects, small sample sizes, and anisotropic resolution in MRI datasets. In this paper we propose a new framework to address some of the challenges for segmenting 3D MRI. These methods were implemented on preclinical MRI for segmenting kidneys in an animal model of lupus nephritis. Our implementation strategy is twofold: 1) to utilize additional MRI diffusion images to detect the general kidney area, and 2) to reduce the 3D U-Net kernels to handle small sample sizes. Using this approach, a Dice similarity coefficient of 0.88 was achieved with a limited dataset of n=196. This segmentation strategy with careful optimization can be applied to various renal injuries or other organ systems.
Weakly Supervised Context Encoder using DICOM metadata in Ultrasound Imaging
Authors: Szu-Yeu Hu, Shuhang Wang, Wei-Hung Weng, JingChao Wang, XiaoHong Wang, Arinc Ozturk, Qian Li, Viksit Kumar, Anthony E. Samir
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00

Modern deep learning algorithms geared towards clinical adaption rely on a significant amount of high fidelity labeled data. Low-resource settings pose challenges like acquiring high fidelity data and becomes the bottleneck for developing artificial intelligence applications. Ultrasound images, stored in Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) format, have additional metadata data corresponding to ultrasound image parameters and medical exams. In this work, we leverage DICOM metadata from ultrasound images to help learn representations of the ultrasound image. We demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the non-metadata based approaches across different downstream tasks.
Cross-Shape Attention for Part Segmentation of 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Marios Loizou, Siddhant Garg, Dmitry Petrov, Melinos Averkiou, Evangelos Kalogerakis
Date: 2020-03-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Retrieval, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We present a deep learning method that propagates point-wise feature representations across shapes within a collection for the purpose of 3D shape segmentation. We propose a cross-shape attention mechanism to enable interactions between a shape's point-wise features and those of other shapes. The mechanism assesses both the degree of interaction between points and also mediates feature propagation across shapes, improving the accuracy and consistency of the resulting point-wise feature representations for shape segmentation. Our method also proposes a shape retrieval measure to select suitable shapes for cross-shape attention operations for each test shape. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach yields state-of-the-art results in the popular PartNet dataset.
Affinity Graph Supervision for Visual Recognition
Authors: Chu Wang, Babak Samari, Vladimir G. Kim, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Kaleem Siddiqi
Date: 2020-03-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Affinity graphs are widely used in deep architectures, including graph convolutional neural networks and attention networks. Thus far, the literature has focused on abstracting features from such graphs, while the learning of the affinities themselves has been overlooked. Here we propose a principled method to directly supervise the learning of weights in affinity graphs, to exploit meaningful connections between entities in the data source. Applied to a visual attention network, our affinity supervision improves relationship recovery between objects, even without the use of manually annotated relationship labels. We further show that affinity learning between objects boosts scene categorization performance and that the supervision of affinity can also be applied to graphs built from mini-batches, for neural network training. In an image classification task we demonstrate consistent improvement over the baseline, with diverse network architectures and datasets.
VisuoSpatial Foresight for Multi-Step, Multi-Task Fabric Manipulation
Authors: Ryan Hoque, Daniel Seita, Ashwin Balakrishna, Aditya Ganapathi, Ajay Kumar Tanwani, Nawid Jamali, Katsu Yamane, Soshi Iba, Ken Goldberg
Date: 2020-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Prediction

Robotic fabric manipulation has applications in home robotics, textiles, senior care and surgery. Existing fabric manipulation techniques, however, are designed for specific tasks, making it difficult to generalize across different but related tasks. We extend the Visual Foresight framework to learn fabric dynamics that can be efficiently reused to accomplish different fabric manipulation tasks with a single goal-conditioned policy. We introduce VisuoSpatial Foresight (VSF), which builds on prior work by learning visual dynamics on domain randomized RGB images and depth maps simultaneously and completely in simulation. We experimentally evaluate VSF on multi-step fabric smoothing and folding tasks against 5 baseline methods in simulation and on the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) surgical robot without any demonstrations at train or test time. Furthermore, we find that leveraging depth significantly improves performance. RGBD data yields an 80% improvement in fabric folding success rate over pure RGB data. Code, data, videos, and supplementary material are available at https://sites.google.com/view/fabric-vsf/.
TF-Coder: Program Synthesis for Tensor Manipulations
Authors: Kensen Shi, David Bieber, Rishabh Singh
Date: 2020-03-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop CAP 2020 12
Tasks: Deep Learning, Enumerative Search, Program Synthesis

The success and popularity of deep learning is on the rise, partially due to powerful deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch that make it easier to develop deep learning models. However, these libraries also come with steep learning curves, since programming in these frameworks is quite different from traditional imperative programming with explicit loops and conditionals. In this work, we present a tool called TF-Coder for programming by example in TensorFlow. TF-Coder uses a bottom-up weighted enumerative search, with value-based pruning of equivalent expressions and flexible type- and value-based filtering to ensure that expressions adhere to various requirements imposed by the TensorFlow library. We train models to predict TensorFlow operations from features of the input and output tensors and natural language descriptions of tasks, to prioritize relevant operations during search. TF-Coder solves 63 of 70 real-world tasks within 5 minutes, sometimes finding simpler solutions in less time compared to experienced human programmers.
Microvasculature Segmentation and Inter-capillary Area Quantification of the Deep Vascular Complex using Transfer Learning
Authors: Julian Lo, Morgan Heisler, Vinicius Vanzan, Sonja Karst, Ivana Zadro Matovinovic, Sven Loncaric, Eduardo V. Navajas, Mirza Faisal Beg, Marinko V. Sarunic
Date: 2020-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Purpose: Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography (OCT-A) permits visualization of the changes to the retinal circulation due to diabetic retinopathy (DR), a microvascular complication of diabetes. We demonstrate accurate segmentation of the vascular morphology for the superficial capillary plexus and deep vascular complex (SCP and DVC) using a convolutional neural network (CNN) for quantitative analysis. Methods: Retinal OCT-A with a 6x6mm field of view (FOV) were acquired using a Zeiss PlexElite. Multiple-volume acquisition and averaging enhanced the vessel network contrast used for training the CNN. We used transfer learning from a CNN trained on 76 images from smaller FOVs of the SCP acquired using different OCT systems. Quantitative analysis of perfusion was performed on the automated vessel segmentations in representative patients with DR. Results: The automated segmentations of the OCT-A images maintained the hierarchical branching and lobular morphologies of the SCP and DVC, respectively. The network segmented the SCP with an accuracy of 0.8599, and a Dice index of 0.8618. For the DVC, the accuracy was 0.7986, and the Dice index was 0.8139. The inter-rater comparisons for the SCP had an accuracy and Dice index of 0.8300 and 0.6700, respectively, and 0.6874 and 0.7416 for the DVC. Conclusions: Transfer learning reduces the amount of manually-annotated images required, while producing high quality automatic segmentations of the SCP and DVC. Using high quality training data preserves the characteristic appearance of the capillary networks in each layer. Translational Relevance: Accurate retinal microvasculature segmentation with the CNN results in improved perfusion analysis in diabetic retinopathy.
NSURL-2019 Task 7: Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Farsi
Authors: Nasrin Taghizadeh, Zeinab Borhanifard, Melika GolestaniPour, Heshaam Faili
Date: 2020-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

NSURL-2019 Task 7 focuses on Named Entity Recognition (NER) in Farsi. This task was chosen to compare different approaches to find phrases that specify Named Entities in Farsi texts, and to establish a standard testbed for future researches on this task in Farsi. This paper describes the process of making training and test data, a list of participating teams (6 teams), and evaluation results of their systems. The best system obtained 85.4% of F1 score based on phrase-level evaluation on seven classes of NEs including person, organization, location, date, time, money and percent.
Techniques for Vocabulary Expansion in Hybrid Speech Recognition Systems
Authors: Nikolay Malkovsky, Vladimir Bataev, Dmitrii Sviridkin, Natalia Kizhaeva, Aleksandr Laptev, Ildar Valiev, Oleg Petrov
Date: 2020-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The problem of out of vocabulary words (OOV) is typical for any speech recognition system, hybrid systems are usually constructed to recognize a fixed set of words and rarely can include all the words that will be encountered during exploitation of the system. One of the popular approach to cover OOVs is to use subword units rather then words. Such system can potentially recognize any previously unseen word if the word can be constructed from present subword units, but also non-existing words can be recognized. The other popular approach is to modify HMM part of the system so that it can be easily and effectively expanded with custom set of words we want to add to the system. In this paper we explore different existing methods of this solution on both graph construction and search method levels. We also present a novel vocabulary expansion techniques which solve some common internal subroutine problems regarding recognition graph processing.
Exchangeable Input Representations for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: John Mern, Dorsa Sadigh, Mykel J. Kochenderfer
Date: 2020-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Policy Gradient Methods, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Poor sample efficiency is a major limitation of deep reinforcement learning in many domains. This work presents an attention-based method to project neural network inputs into an efficient representation space that is invariant under changes to input ordering. We show that our proposed representation results in an input space that is a factor of $m!$ smaller for inputs of $m$ objects. We also show that our method is able to represent inputs over variable numbers of objects. Our experiments demonstrate improvements in sample efficiency for policy gradient methods on a variety of tasks. We show that our representation allows us to solve problems that are otherwise intractable when using na\"ive approaches.