pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Imagined Value Gradients: Model-Based Policy Optimization with Transferable Latent Dynamics Models
Authors: Arunkumar Byravan, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Abbas Abdolmaleki, Roland Hafner, Michael Neunert, Thomas Lampe, Noah Siegel, Nicolas Heess, Martin Riedmiller
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Manipulation, Transfer Learning

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper, we explore how model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) can facilitate transfer to new tasks. We develop an algorithm that learns an action-conditional, predictive model of expected future observations, rewards and values from which a policy can be derived by following the gradient of the estimated value along imagined trajectories. We show how robust policy optimization can be achieved in robot manipulation tasks even with approximate models that are learned directly from vision and proprioception. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach in a transfer learning scenario, re-using previously learned models on tasks with different reward structures and visual distractors, and show a significant improvement in learning speed compared to strong off-policy baselines. Videos with results can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/ivg-corl19
Active Ordinal Querying for Tuplewise Similarity Learning
Authors: Gregory Canal, Stefano Fenu, Christopher Rozell
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Triplet

Many machine learning tasks such as clustering, classification, and dataset search benefit from embedding data points in a space where distances reflect notions of relative similarity as perceived by humans. A common way to construct such an embedding is to request triplet similarity queries to an oracle, comparing two objects with respect to a reference. This work generalizes triplet queries to tuple queries of arbitrary size that ask an oracle to rank multiple objects against a reference, and introduces an efficient and robust adaptive selection method called InfoTuple that uses a novel approach to mutual information maximization. We show that the performance of InfoTuple at various tuple sizes exceeds that of the state-of-the-art adaptive triplet selection method on synthetic tests and new human response datasets, and empirically demonstrate the significant gains in efficiency and query consistency achieved by querying larger tuples instead of triplets.
Continual Learning Using Bayesian Neural Networks
Authors: Honglin Li, Payam Barnaghi, Shirin Enshaeifar, Frieder Ganz
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Time Series Analysis

Continual learning models allow to learn and adapt to new changes and tasks over time. However, in continual and sequential learning scenarios in which the models are trained using different data with various distributions, neural networks tend to forget the previously learned knowledge. This phenomenon is often referred to as catastrophic forgetting. The catastrophic forgetting is an inevitable problem in continual learning models for dynamic environments. To address this issue, we propose a method, called Continual Bayesian Learning Networks (CBLN), which enables the networks to allocate additional resources to adapt to new tasks without forgetting the previously learned tasks. Using a Bayesian Neural Network, CBLN maintains a mixture of Gaussian posterior distributions that are associated with different tasks. The proposed method tries to optimise the number of resources that are needed to learn each task and avoids an exponential increase in the number of resources that are involved in learning multiple tasks. The proposed method does not need to access the past training data and can choose suitable weights to classify the data points during the test time automatically based on an uncertainty criterion. We have evaluated our method on the MNIST and UCR time-series datasets. The evaluation results show that our method can address the catastrophic forgetting problem at a promising rate compared to the state-of-the-art models.
Optimal Training of Fair Predictive Models
Authors: Razieh Nabi, Daniel Malinsky, Ilya Shpitser
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Recently there has been sustained interest in modifying prediction algorithms to satisfy fairness constraints. These constraints are typically complex nonlinear functionals of the observed data distribution. Focusing on the path-specific causal constraints proposed by Nabi and Shpitser (2018), we introduce new theoretical results and optimization techniques to make model training easier and more accurate. Specifically, we show how to reparameterize the observed data likelihood such that fairness constraints correspond directly to parameters that appear in the likelihood, transforming a complex constrained optimization objective into a simple optimization problem with box constraints. We also exploit methods from empirical likelihood theory in statistics to improve predictive performance by constraining baseline covariates, without requiring parametric models. We combine the merits of both proposals to optimize a hybrid reparameterized likelihood. The techniques presented here should be applicable more broadly to fair prediction proposals that impose constraints on predictive models.
Next integrated result modelling for stopping the text field recognition process in a video using a result model with per-character alternatives
Authors: Konstantin Bulatov, Boris Savelyev, Vladimir V. Arlazarov
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Object Recognition

In the field of document analysis and recognition using mobile devices for capturing, and the field of object recognition in a video stream, an important problem is determining the time when the capturing process should be stopped. Efficient stopping influences not only the total time spent for performing recognition and data entry, but the expected accuracy of the result as well. This paper is directed on extending the stopping method based on next integrated recognition result modelling, in order for it to be used within a string result recognition model with per-character alternatives. The stopping method and notes on its extension are described, and experimental evaluation is performed on an open dataset MIDV-500. The method was compares with previously published methods based on input observations clustering. The obtained results indicate that the stopping method based on the next integrated result modelling allows to achieve higher accuracy, even when compared with the best achievable configuration of the competing methods.
Vehicle Re-identification with Viewpoint-aware Metric Learning
Authors: Ruihang Chu, Yifan Sun, Yadong Li, Zheng Liu, Chi Zhang, Yichen Wei
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Metric Learning, Vehicle Re-Identification

This paper considers vehicle re-identification (re-ID) problem. The extreme viewpoint variation (up to 180 degrees) poses great challenges for existing approaches. Inspired by the behavior in human's recognition process, we propose a novel viewpoint-aware metric learning approach. It learns two metrics for similar viewpoints and different viewpoints in two feature spaces, respectively, giving rise to viewpoint-aware network (VANet). During training, two types of constraints are applied jointly. During inference, viewpoint is firstly estimated and the corresponding metric is used. Experimental results confirm that VANet significantly improves re-ID accuracy, especially when the pair is observed from different viewpoints. Our method establishes the new state-of-the-art on two benchmarks.
Validated Variational Inference via Practical Posterior Error Bounds
Authors: Jonathan H. Huggins, Mikołaj Kasprzak, Trevor Campbell, Tamara Broderick
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Variational Inference

Variational inference has become an increasingly attractive fast alternative to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for approximate Bayesian inference. However, a major obstacle to the widespread use of variational methods is the lack of post-hoc accuracy measures that are both theoretically justified and computationally efficient. In this paper, we provide rigorous bounds on the error of posterior mean and uncertainty estimates that arise from full-distribution approximations, as in variational inference. Our bounds are widely applicable, as they require only that the approximating and exact posteriors have polynomial moments. Our bounds are also computationally efficient for variational inference because they require only standard values from variational objectives, straightforward analytic calculations, and simple Monte Carlo estimates. We show that our analysis naturally leads to a new and improved workflow for validated variational inference. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our proposed workflow and error bounds on a robust regression problem and on a real-data example with a widely used multilevel hierarchical model.
Manhattan Room Layout Reconstruction from a Single 360 image: A Comparative Study of State-of-the-art Methods
Authors: Chuhang Zou, Jheng-Wei Su, Chi-Han Peng, Alex Colburn, Qi Shan, Peter Wonka, Hung-Kuo Chu, Derek Hoiem
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Recent approaches for predicting layouts from 360 panoramas produce excellent results. These approaches build on a common framework consisting of three steps: a pre-processing step based on edge-based alignment, prediction of layout elements, and a post-processing step by fitting a 3D layout to the layout elements. Until now, it has been difficult to compare the methods due to multiple different design decisions, such as the encoding network (e.g. SegNet or ResNet), type of elements predicted (e.g. corners, wall/floor boundaries, or semantic segmentation), or method of fitting the 3D layout. To address this challenge, we summarize and describe the common framework, the variants, and the impact of the design decisions. For a complete evaluation, we also propose extended annotations for the Matterport3D dataset [3], and introduce two depth-based evaluation metrics.
Improving Generalization in Meta Reinforcement Learning using Learned Objectives
Authors: Louis Kirsch, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Jürgen Schmidhuber
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Meta Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Biological evolution has distilled the experiences of many learners into the general learning algorithms of humans. Our novel meta reinforcement learning algorithm MetaGenRL is inspired by this process. MetaGenRL distills the experiences of many complex agents to meta-learn a low-complexity neural objective function that decides how future individuals will learn. Unlike recent meta-RL algorithms, MetaGenRL can generalize to new environments that are entirely different from those used for meta-training. In some cases, it even outperforms human-engineered RL algorithms. MetaGenRL uses off-policy second-order gradients during meta-training that greatly increase its sample efficiency.
Patch Refinement -- Localized 3D Object Detection
Authors: Johannes Lehner, Andreas Mitterecker, Thomas Adler, Markus Hofmarcher, Bernhard Nessler, Sepp Hochreiter
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Region Proposal

We introduce Patch Refinement a two-stage model for accurate 3D object detection and localization from point cloud data. Patch Refinement is composed of two independently trained Voxelnet-based networks, a Region Proposal Network (RPN) and a Local Refinement Network (LRN). We decompose the detection task into a preliminary Bird's Eye View (BEV) detection step and a local 3D detection step. Based on the proposed BEV locations by the RPN, we extract small point cloud subsets ("patches"), which are then processed by the LRN, which is less limited by memory constraints due to the small area of each patch. Therefore, we can apply encoding with a higher voxel resolution locally. The independence of the LRN enables the use of additional augmentation techniques and allows for an efficient, regression focused training as it uses only a small fraction of each scene. Evaluated on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark, our submission from January 28, 2019, outperformed all previous entries on all three difficulties of the class car, using only 50 % of the available training data and only LiDAR information.
Learning with minibatch Wasserstein : asymptotic and gradient properties
Authors: Kilian Fatras, Younes Zine, Rémi Flamary, Rémi Gribonval, Nicolas Courty
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00

Optimal transport distances are powerful tools to compare probability distributions and have found many applications in machine learning. Yet their algorithmic complexity prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. To overcome this challenge, practitioners compute these distances on minibatches {\em i.e.} they average the outcome of several smaller optimal transport problems. We propose in this paper an analysis of this practice, which effects are not well understood so far. We notably argue that it is equivalent to an implicit regularization of the original problem, with appealing properties such as unbiased estimators, gradients and a concentration bound around the expectation, but also with defects such as loss of distance property. Along with this theoretical analysis, we also conduct empirical experiments on gradient flows, GANs or color transfer that highlight the practical interest of this strategy.
Kernels over Sets of Finite Sets using RKHS Embeddings, with Application to Bayesian (Combinatorial) Optimization
Authors: Poompol Buathong, David Ginsbourger, Tipaluck Krityakierne
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

We focus on kernel methods for set-valued inputs and their application to Bayesian set optimization, notably combinatorial optimization. We investigate two classes of set kernels that both rely on Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space embeddings, namely the ``Double Sum'' (DS) kernels recently considered in Bayesian set optimization, and a class introduced here called ``Deep Embedding'' (DE) kernels that essentially consists in applying a radial kernel on Hilbert space on top of the canonical distance induced by another kernel such as a DS kernel. We establish in particular that while DS kernels typically suffer from a lack of strict positive definiteness, vast subclasses of DE kernels built upon DS kernels do possess this property, enabling in turn combinatorial optimization without requiring to introduce a jitter parameter. Proofs of theoretical results about considered kernels are complemented by a few practicalities regarding hyperparameter fitting. We furthermore demonstrate the applicability of our approach in prediction and optimization tasks, relying both on toy examples and on two test cases from mechanical engineering and hydrogeology, respectively. Experimental results highlight the applicability and compared merits of the considered approaches while opening new perspectives in prediction and sequential design with set inputs.
The Area of the Convex Hull of Sampled Curves: a Robust Functional Statistical Depth Measure
Authors: Guillaume Staerman, Pavlo Mozharovskyi, Stephan Clémençon
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Fraud Detection, Management, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

With the ubiquity of sensors in the IoT era, statistical observations are becoming increasingly available in the form of massive (multivariate) time-series. Formulated as unsupervised anomaly detection tasks, an abundance of applications like aviation safety management, the health monitoring of complex infrastructures or fraud detection can now rely on such functional data, acquired and stored with an ever finer granularity. The concept of statistical depth, which reflects centrality of an arbitrary observation w.r.t. a statistical population may play a crucial role in this regard, anomalies corresponding to observations with 'small' depth. Supported by sound theoretical and computational developments in the recent decades, it has proven to be extremely useful, in particular in functional spaces. However, most approaches documented in the literature consist in evaluating independently the centrality of each point forming the time series and consequently exhibit a certain insensitivity to possible shape changes. In this paper, we propose a novel notion of functional depth based on the area of the convex hull of sampled curves, capturing gradual departures from centrality, even beyond the envelope of the data, in a natural fashion. We discuss practical relevance of commonly imposed axioms on functional depths and investigate which of them are satisfied by the notion of depth we promote here. Estimation and computational issues are also addressed and various numerical experiments provide empirical evidence of the relevance of the approach proposed.
Deep Learning Accelerated Light Source Experiments
Authors: Zhengchun Liu, Tekin Bicer, Rajkumar Kettimuthu, Ian Foster
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Experimental protocols at synchrotron light sources typically process and validate data only after an experiment has completed, which can lead to undetected errors and cannot enable online steering. Real-time data analysis can enable both detection of, and recovery from, errors, and optimization of data acquisition. However, modern scientific instruments, such as detectors at synchrotron light sources, can generate data at GBs/sec rates. Data processing methods such as the widely used computational tomography usually require considerable computational resources, and yield poor quality reconstructions in the early stages of data acquisition when available views are sparse. We describe here how a deep convolutional neural network can be integrated into the real-time streaming tomography pipeline to enable better-quality images in the early stages of data acquisition. Compared with conventional streaming tomography processing, our method can significantly improve tomography image quality, deliver comparable images using only 32% of the data needed for conventional streaming processing, and save 68% experiment time for data acquisition.
Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Exploiting State-Action Equivalence
Authors: Mahsa Asadi, Mohammad Sadegh Talebi, Hippolyte Bourel, Odalric-Ambrym Maillard
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Leveraging an equivalence property in the state-space of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) has been investigated in several studies. This paper studies equivalence structure in the reinforcement learning (RL) setup, where transition distributions are no longer assumed to be known. We present a notion of similarity between transition probabilities of various state-action pairs of an MDP, which naturally defines an equivalence structure in the state-action space. We present equivalence-aware confidence sets for the case where the learner knows the underlying structure in advance. These sets are provably smaller than their corresponding equivalence-oblivious counterparts. In the more challenging case of an unknown equivalence structure, we present an algorithm called ApproxEquivalence that seeks to find an (approximate) equivalence structure, and define confidence sets using the approximate equivalence. To illustrate the efficacy of the presented confidence sets, we present C-UCRL, as a natural modification of UCRL2 for RL in undiscounted MDPs. In the case of a known equivalence structure, we show that C-UCRL improves over UCRL2 in terms of regret by a factor of $\sqrt{SA/C}$, in any communicating MDP with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and $C$ classes, which corresponds to a massive improvement when $C \ll SA$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work providing regret bounds for RL when an equivalence structure in the MDP is efficiently exploited. In the case of an unknown equivalence structure, we show through numerical experiments that C-UCRL combined with ApproxEquivalence outperforms UCRL2 in ergodic MDPs.
Wavelet Domain Style Transfer for an Effective Perception-distortion Tradeoff in Single Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Xin Deng, Ren Yang, Mai Xu, Pier Luigi Dragotti
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Super-Resolution, Style Transfer, Super-Resolution

In single image super-resolution (SISR), given a low-resolution (LR) image, one wishes to find a high-resolution (HR) version of it which is both accurate and photo-realistic. Recently, it has been shown that there exists a fundamental tradeoff between low distortion and high perceptual quality, and the generative adversarial network (GAN) is demonstrated to approach the perception-distortion (PD) bound effectively. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on wavelet domain style transfer (WDST), which achieves a better PD tradeoff than the GAN based methods. Specifically, we propose to use 2D stationary wavelet transform (SWT) to decompose one image into low-frequency and high-frequency sub-bands. For the low-frequency sub-band, we improve its objective quality through an enhancement network. For the high-frequency sub-band, we propose to use WDST to effectively improve its perceptual quality. By feat of the perfect reconstruction property of wavelets, these sub-bands can be re-combined to obtain an image which has simultaneously high objective and perceptual quality. The numerical results on various datasets show that our method achieves the best trade-off between the distortion and perceptual quality among the existing state-of-the-art SISR methods.
BHAAV- A Text Corpus for Emotion Analysis from Hindi Stories
Authors: Yaman Kumar, Debanjan Mahata, Sagar Aggarwal, Anmol Chugh, Rajat Maheshwari, Rajiv Ratn Shah
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Sentence

In this paper, we introduce the first and largest Hindi text corpus, named BHAAV, which means emotions in Hindi, for analyzing emotions that a writer expresses through his characters in a story, as perceived by a narrator/reader. The corpus consists of 20,304 sentences collected from 230 different short stories spanning across 18 genres such as Inspirational and Mystery. Each sentence has been annotated into one of the five emotion categories - anger, joy, suspense, sad, and neutral, by three native Hindi speakers with at least ten years of formal education in Hindi. We also discuss challenges in the annotation of low resource languages such as Hindi, and discuss the scope of the proposed corpus along with its possible uses. We also provide a detailed analysis of the dataset and train strong baseline classifiers reporting their performances.