pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PolarMask: Single Shot Instance Segmentation with Polar Representation
Authors: Enze Xie, Peize Sun, Xiaoge Song, Wenhai Wang, Ding Liang, Chunhua Shen, Ping Luo
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Distance regression, Instance Segmentation, Object Detection, regression, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce an anchor-box free and single shot instance segmentation method, which is conceptually simple, fully convolutional and can be used as a mask prediction module for instance segmentation, by easily embedding it into most off-the-shelf detection methods. Our method, termed PolarMask, formulates the instance segmentation problem as instance center classification and dense distance regression in a polar coordinate. Moreover, we propose two effective approaches to deal with sampling high-quality center examples and optimization for dense distance regression, respectively, which can significantly improve the performance and simplify the training process. Without any bells and whistles, PolarMask achieves 32.9% in mask mAP with single-model and single-scale training/testing on challenging COCO dataset. For the first time, we demonstrate a much simpler and flexible instance segmentation framework achieving competitive accuracy. We hope that the proposed PolarMask framework can serve as a fundamental and strong baseline for single shot instance segmentation tasks. Code is available at: github.com/xieenze/PolarMask.
Optimal Delivery with Budget Constraint in E-Commerce Advertising
Authors: Chao Wei, Weiru Zhang, Shengjie Sun, Fei Li, Xiaonan Meng, Yi Hu, Hao Wang
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00

Online advertising in E-commerce platforms provides sellers an opportunity to achieve potential audiences with different target goals. Ad serving systems (like display and search advertising systems) that assign ads to pages should satisfy objectives such as plenty of audience for branding advertisers, clicks or conversions for performance-based advertisers, at the same time try to maximize overall revenue of the platform. In this paper, we propose an approach based on linear programming subjects to constraints in order to optimize the revenue and improve different performance goals simultaneously. We have validated our algorithm by implementing an offline simulation system in Alibaba E-commerce platform and running the auctions from online requests which takes system performance, ranking and pricing schemas into account. We have also compared our algorithm with related work, and the results show that our algorithm can effectively improve campaign performance and revenue of the platform.
Learning transport cost from subset correspondence
Authors: Ruishan Liu, Akshay Balsubramani, James Zou
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1

Learning to align multiple datasets is an important problem with many applications, and it is especially useful when we need to integrate multiple experiments or correct for confounding. Optimal transport (OT) is a principled approach to align datasets, but a key challenge in applying OT is that we need to specify a transport cost function that accurately captures how the two datasets are related. Reliable cost functions are typically not available and practitioners often resort to using hand-crafted or Euclidean cost even if it may not be appropriate. In this work, we investigate how to learn the cost function using a small amount of side information which is often available. The side information we consider captures subset correspondence -- i.e. certain subsets of points in the two data sets are known to be related. For example, we may have some images labeled as cars in both datasets; or we may have a common annotated cell type in single-cell data from two batches. We develop an end-to-end optimizer (OT-SI) that differentiates through the Sinkhorn algorithm and effectively learns the suitable cost function from side information. On systematic experiments in images, marriage-matching and single-cell RNA-seq, our method substantially outperform state-of-the-art benchmarks.
Policy Message Passing: A New Algorithm for Probabilistic Graph Inference
Authors: Zhiwei Deng, Greg Mori
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1

A general graph-structured neural network architecture operates on graphs through two core components: (1) complex enough message functions; (2) a fixed information aggregation process. In this paper, we present the Policy Message Passing algorithm, which takes a probabilistic perspective and reformulates the whole information aggregation as stochastic sequential processes. The algorithm works on a much larger search space, utilizes reasoning history to perform inference, and is robust to noisy edges. We apply our algorithm to multiple complex graph reasoning and prediction tasks and show that our algorithm consistently outperforms state-of-the-art graph-structured models by a significant margin.
Gated Task Interaction Framework for Multi-task Sequence Tagging
Authors: Isaac K. E. Ampomah, Sally McClean, Zhiwei Lin, Glenn Hawe
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Chunking, Multi-Task Learning, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, POS

Recent studies have shown that neural models can achieve high performance on several sequence labelling/tagging problems without the explicit use of linguistic features such as part-of-speech (POS) tags. These models are trained only using the character-level and the word embedding vectors as inputs. Others have shown that linguistic features can improve the performance of neural models on tasks such as chunking and named entity recognition (NER). However, the change in performance depends on the degree of semantic relatedness between the linguistic features and the target task; in some instances, linguistic features can have a negative impact on performance. This paper presents an approach to jointly learn these linguistic features along with the target sequence labelling tasks with a new multi-task learning (MTL) framework called Gated Tasks Interaction (GTI) network for solving multiple sequence tagging tasks. The GTI network exploits the relations between the multiple tasks via neural gate modules. These gate modules control the flow of information between the different tasks. Experiments on benchmark datasets for chunking and NER show that our framework outperforms other competitive baselines trained with and without external training resources.
Learning Sparse Nonparametric DAGs
Authors: Xun Zheng, Chen Dan, Bryon Aragam, Pradeep Ravikumar, Eric P. Xing
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery

We develop a framework for learning sparse nonparametric directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) from data. Our approach is based on a recent algebraic characterization of DAGs that led to a fully continuous program for score-based learning of DAG models parametrized by a linear structural equation model (SEM). We extend this algebraic characterization to nonparametric SEM by leveraging nonparametric sparsity based on partial derivatives, resulting in a continuous optimization problem that can be applied to a variety of nonparametric and semiparametric models including GLMs, additive noise models, and index models as special cases. Unlike existing approaches that require specific modeling choices, loss functions, or algorithms, we present a completely general framework that can be applied to general nonlinear models (e.g. without additive noise), general differentiable loss functions, and generic black-box optimization routines. The code is available at https://github.com/xunzheng/notears.
Understanding and Stabilizing GANs' Training Dynamics with Control Theory
Authors: Kun Xu, Chongxuan Li, Jun Zhu, Bo Zhang
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, L2 Regularization

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are effective in generating realistic images but the training is often unstable. There are existing efforts that model the training dynamics of GANs in the parameter space but the analysis cannot directly motivate practically effective stabilizing methods. To this end, we present a conceptually novel perspective from control theory to directly model the dynamics of GANs in the function space and provide simple yet effective methods to stabilize GANs' training. We first analyze the training dynamic of a prototypical Dirac GAN and adopt the widely-used closed-loop control (CLC) to improve its stability. We then extend CLC to stabilize the training dynamic of normal GANs, where CLC is implemented as a squared $L2$ regularizer on the output of the discriminator. Empirical results show that our method can effectively stabilize the training and obtain state-of-the-art performance on data generation tasks.
Towards Automatic Bot Detection in Twitter for Health-related Tasks
Authors: Anahita Davoudi, Ari Z. Klein, Abeed Sarker, Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00

With the increasing use of social media data for health-related research, the credibility of the information from this source has been questioned as the posts may originate from automated accounts or "bots". While automatic bot detection approaches have been proposed, there are none that have been evaluated on users posting health-related information. In this paper, we extend an existing bot detection system and customize it for health-related research. Using a dataset of Twitter users, we first show that the system, which was designed for political bot detection, underperforms when applied to health-related Twitter users. We then incorporate additional features and a statistical machine learning classifier to significantly improve bot detection performance. Our approach obtains F_1 scores of 0.7 for the "bot" class, representing improvements of 0.339. Our approach is customizable and generalizable for bot detection in other health-related social media cohorts.
Query-Specific Knowledge Summarization with Entity Evolutionary Networks
Authors: Carl Yang, Lingrui Gan, Zongyi Wang, Jiaming Shen, Jinfeng Xiao, Jiawei Han
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00

Given a query, unlike traditional IR that finds relevant documents or entities, in this work, we focus on retrieving both entities and their connections for insightful knowledge summarization. For example, given a query "computer vision" on a CS literature corpus, rather than returning a list of relevant entities like "cnn", "imagenet" and "svm", we are interested in the connections among them, and furthermore, the evolution patterns of such connections along particular ordinal dimensions such as time. Particularly, we hope to provide structural knowledge relevant to the query, such as "svm" is related to "imagenet" but not "cnn". Moreover, we aim to model the changing trends of the connections, such as "cnn" becomes highly related to "imagenet" after 2010, which enables the tracking of knowledge evolutions. In this work, to facilitate such a novel insightful search system, we propose \textsc{SetEvolve}, which is a unified framework based on nonparanomal graphical models for evolutionary network construction from large text corpora. Systematic experiments on synthetic data and insightful case studies on real-world corpora demonstrate the utility of \textsc{SetEvolve}.
Towards Zero-resource Cross-lingual Entity Linking
Authors: Shuyan Zhou, Shruti Rijhwani, Graham Neubig
Date: 2019-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 11
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Entity Linking, Entity Linking

Cross-lingual entity linking (XEL) grounds named entities in a source language to an English Knowledge Base (KB), such as Wikipedia. XEL is challenging for most languages because of limited availability of requisite resources. However, much previous work on XEL has been on simulated settings that actually use significant resources (e.g. source language Wikipedia, bilingual entity maps, multilingual embeddings) that are unavailable in truly low-resource languages. In this work, we first examine the effect of these resource assumptions and quantify how much the availability of these resource affects overall quality of existing XEL systems. Next, we propose three improvements to both entity candidate generation and disambiguation that make better use of the limited data we do have in resource-scarce scenarios. With experiments on four extremely low-resource languages, we show that our model results in gains of 6-23% in end-to-end linking accuracy.
Optimizing Design Verification using Machine Learning: Doing better than Random
Authors: William Hughes, Sandeep Srinivasan, Rohit Suvarna, Maithilee Kulkarni
Date: 2019-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning

As integrated circuits have become progressively more complex, constrained random stimulus has become ubiquitous as a means of stimulating a designs functionality and ensuring it fully meets expectations. In theory, random stimulus allows all possible combinations to be exercised given enough time, but in practice with highly complex designs a purely random approach will have difficulty in exercising all possible combinations in a timely fashion. As a result it is often necessary to steer the Design Verification (DV) environment to generate hard to hit combinations. The resulting constrained-random approach is powerful but often relies on extensive human expertise to guide the DV environment in order to fully exercise the design. As designs become more complex, the guidance aspect becomes progressively more challenging and time consuming often resulting in design schedules in which the verification time to hit all possible design coverage points is the dominant schedule limitation. This paper describes an approach which leverages existing constrained-random DV environment tools but which further enhances them using supervised learning and reinforcement learning techniques. This approach provides better than random results in a highly automated fashion thereby ensuring DV objectives of full design coverage can be achieved on an accelerated timescale and with fewer resources. Two hardware verification examples are presented, one of a Cache Controller design and one using the open-source RISCV-Ariane design and Google's RISCV Random Instruction Generator. We demonstrate that a machine-learning based approach can perform significantly better on functional coverage and reaching complex hard-to-hit states than a random or constrained-random approach.
Relational Graph Learning for Crowd Navigation
Authors: Changan Chen, Sha Hu, Payam Nikdel, Greg Mori, Manolis Savva
Date: 2019-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Graph Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present a relational graph learning approach for robotic crowd navigation using model-based deep reinforcement learning that plans actions by looking into the future. Our approach reasons about the relations between all agents based on their latent features and uses a Graph Convolutional Network to encode higher-order interactions in each agent's state representation, which is subsequently leveraged for state prediction and value estimation. The ability to predict human motion allows us to perform multi-step lookahead planning, taking into account the temporal evolution of human crowds. We evaluate our approach against a state-of-the-art baseline for crowd navigation and ablations of our model to demonstrate that navigation with our approach is more efficient, results in fewer collisions, and avoids failure cases involving oscillatory and freezing behaviors.
Deep K-SVD Denoising
Authors: Meyer Scetbon, Michael Elad, Peyman Milanfar
Date: 2019-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Denoising

This work considers noise removal from images, focusing on the well known K-SVD denoising algorithm. This sparsity-based method was proposed in 2006, and for a short while it was considered as state-of-the-art. However, over the years it has been surpassed by other methods, including the recent deep-learning-based newcomers. The question we address in this paper is whether K-SVD was brought to its peak in its original conception, or whether it can be made competitive again. The approach we take in answering this question is to redesign the algorithm to operate in a supervised manner. More specifically, we propose an end-to-end deep architecture with the exact K-SVD computational path, and train it for optimized denoising. Our work shows how to overcome difficulties arising in turning the K-SVD scheme into a differentiable, and thus learnable, machine. With a small number of parameters to learn and while preserving the original K-SVD essence, the proposed architecture is shown to outperform the classical K-SVD algorithm substantially, and getting closer to recent state-of-the-art learning-based denoising methods. Adopting a broader context, this work touches on themes around the design of deep-learning solutions for image processing tasks, while paving a bridge between classic methods and novel deep-learning-based ones.
Self-Supervised Learning of Depth and Ego-motion with Differentiable Bundle Adjustment
Authors: Yunxiao Shi, Jing Zhu, Yi Fang, KuoChin Lien, Junli Gu
Date: 2019-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth And Camera Motion, Self-Supervised Learning

Learning to predict scene depth and camera motion from RGB inputs only is a challenging task. Most existing learning based methods deal with this task in a supervised manner which require ground-truth data that is expensive to acquire. More recent approaches explore the possibility of estimating scene depth and camera pose in a self-supervised learning framework. Despite encouraging results are shown, current methods either learn from monocular videos for depth and pose and typically do so without enforcing multi-view geometry constraints between scene structure and camera motion, or require stereo sequences as input where the ground-truth between-frame motion parameters need to be known. In this paper we propose to jointly optimize the scene depth and camera motion via incorporating differentiable Bundle Adjustment (BA) layer by minimizing the feature-metric error, and then form the photometric consistency loss with view synthesis as the final supervisory signal. The proposed approach only needs unlabeled monocular videos as input, and extensive experiments on the KITTI and Cityscapes dataset show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results in self-supervised approaches using monocular videos as input, and even gains advantage to the line of methods that learns from calibrated stereo sequences (i.e. with pose supervision).
Translation, Sentiment and Voices: A Computational Model to Translate and Analyse Voices from Real-Time Video Calling
Authors: Aneek Barman Roy
Date: 2019-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Translation

With internet quickly becoming an easy access to many, voice calling over internet is slowly gaining momentum. Individuals has been engaging in video communication across the world in different languages. The decade saw the emergence of language translation using neural networks as well. With more data being generated in audio and visual forms, there has become a need and a challenge to analyse such information for many researchers from academia and industry. The availability of video chat corpora is limited as organizations protect user privacy and ensure data security. For this reason, an audio-visual communication system (VidALL) has been developed and audio-speeches were extracted. To understand human nature while answering a video call, an analysis was conducted where polarity and vocal intensity were considered as parameters. Simultaneously, a translation model using a neural approach was developed to translate English sentences to French. Simple RNN-based and Embedded-RNN based models were used for the translation model. BLEU score and target sentence comparators were used to check sentence correctness. Embedded-RNN showed an accuracy of 88.71 percentage and predicted correct sentences. A key finding suggest that polarity is a good estimator to understand human emotion.
Accelerating the Computation of UCB and Related Indices for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Wesley Cowan, Michael N. Katehakis, Daniel Pirutinsky
Date: 2019-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper we derive an efficient method for computing the indices associated with an asymptotically optimal upper confidence bound algorithm (MDP-UCB) of Burnetas and Katehakis (1997) that only requires solving a system of two non-linear equations with two unknowns, irrespective of the cardinality of the state space of the Markovian decision process (MDP). In addition, we develop a similar acceleration for computing the indices for the MDP-Deterministic Minimum Empirical Divergence (MDP-DMED) algorithm developed in Cowan et al. (2019), based on ideas from Honda and Takemura (2011), that involves solving a single equation of one variable. We provide experimental results demonstrating the computational time savings and regret performance of these algorithms. In these comparison we also consider the Optimistic Linear Programming (OLP) algorithm (Tewari and Bartlett, 2008) and a method based on Posterior sampling (MDP-PS).
Weakly Supervised Energy-Based Learning for Action Segmentation
Authors: Jun Li, Peng Lei, Sinisa Todorovic
Date: 2019-09-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Action Segmentation, Segmentation, valid, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation, Weakly Supervised Action Segmentation (Transcript)

This paper is about labeling video frames with action classes under weak supervision in training, where we have access to a temporal ordering of actions, but their start and end frames in training videos are unknown. Following prior work, we use an HMM grounded on a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for frame labeling. Our key contribution is a new constrained discriminative forward loss (CDFL) that we use for training the HMM and GRU under weak supervision. While prior work typically estimates the loss on a single, inferred video segmentation, our CDFL discriminates between the energy of all valid and invalid frame labelings of a training video. A valid frame labeling satisfies the ground-truth temporal ordering of actions, whereas an invalid one violates the ground truth. We specify an efficient recursive algorithm for computing the CDFL in terms of the logadd function of the segmentation energy. Our evaluation on action segmentation and alignment gives superior results to those of the state of the art on the benchmark Breakfast Action, Hollywood Extended, and 50Salads datasets.