pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Neural Wireframe Renderer: Learning Wireframe to Image Translations
Authors: Yuan Xue, Zihan Zhou, Xiaolei Huang
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Image Generation, Translation

In architecture and computer-aided design, wireframes (i.e., line-based models) are widely used as basic 3D models for design evaluation and fast design iterations. However, unlike a full design file, a wireframe model lacks critical information, such as detailed shape, texture, and materials, needed by a conventional renderer to produce 2D renderings of the objects or scenes. In this paper, we bridge the information gap by generating photo-realistic rendering of indoor scenes from wireframe models in an image translation framework. While existing image synthesis methods can generate visually pleasing images for common objects such as faces and birds, these methods do not explicitly model and preserve essential structural constraints in a wireframe model, such as junctions, parallel lines, and planar surfaces. To this end, we propose a novel model based on a structure-appearance joint representation learned from both images and wireframes. In our model, structural constraints are explicitly enforced by learning a joint representation in a shared encoder network that must support the generation of both images and wireframes. Experiments on a wireframe-scene dataset show that our wireframe-to-image translation model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both visual quality and structural integrity of generated images.
Selective Synthetic Augmentation with Quality Assurance
Authors: Yuan Xue, Jiarong Ye, Rodney Long, Sameer Antani, Zhiyun Xue, Xiaolei Huang
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Analysis

Supervised training of an automated medical image analysis system often requires a large amount of expert annotations that are hard to collect. Moreover, the proportions of data available across different classes may be highly imbalanced for rare diseases. To mitigate these issues, we investigate a novel data augmentation pipeline that selectively adds new synthetic images generated by conditional Adversarial Networks (cGANs), rather than extending directly the training set with synthetic images. The selection mechanisms that we introduce to the synthetic augmentation pipeline are motivated by the observation that, although cGAN-generated images can be visually appealing, they are not guaranteed to contain essential features for classification performance improvement. By selecting synthetic images based on the confidence of their assigned labels and their feature similarity to real labeled images, our framework provides quality assurance to synthetic augmentation by ensuring that adding the selected synthetic images to the training set will improve performance. We evaluate our model on a medical histopathology dataset, and two natural image classification benchmarks, CIFAR10 and SVHN. Results on these datasets show significant and consistent improvements in classification performance (with 6.8%, 3.9%, 1.6% higher accuracy, respectively) by leveraging cGAN generated images with selective augmentation.
Effective Attention Modeling for Neural Relation Extraction
Authors: Tapas Nayak, Hwee Tou Ng
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CONLL 2019 11
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Relation extraction is the task of determining the relation between two entities in a sentence. Distantly-supervised models are popular for this task. However, sentences can be long and two entities can be located far from each other in a sentence. The pieces of evidence supporting the presence of a relation between two entities may not be very direct, since the entities may be connected via some indirect links such as a third entity or via co-reference. Relation extraction in such scenarios becomes more challenging as we need to capture the long-distance interactions among the entities and other words in the sentence. Also, the words in a sentence do not contribute equally in identifying the relation between the two entities. To address this issue, we propose a novel and effective attention model which incorporates syntactic information of the sentence and a multi-factor attention mechanism. Experiments on the New York Times corpus show that our proposed model outperforms prior state-of-the-art models.
Amora: Black-box Adversarial Morphing Attack
Authors: Run Wang, Felix Juefei-Xu, Qing Guo, Yihao Huang, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Yang Liu
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Dictionary Learning, Face Recognition, Image Generation, Optical Flow Estimation

Nowadays, digital facial content manipulation has become ubiquitous and realistic with the success of generative adversarial networks (GANs), making face recognition (FR) systems suffer from unprecedented security concerns. In this paper, we investigate and introduce a new type of adversarial attack to evade FR systems by manipulating facial content, called \textbf{\underline{a}dversarial \underline{mor}phing \underline{a}ttack} (a.k.a. Amora). In contrast to adversarial noise attack that perturbs pixel intensity values by adding human-imperceptible noise, our proposed adversarial morphing attack works at the semantic level that perturbs pixels spatially in a coherent manner. To tackle the black-box attack problem, we devise a simple yet effective joint dictionary learning pipeline to obtain a proprietary optical flow field for each attack. Our extensive evaluation on two popular FR systems demonstrates the effectiveness of our adversarial morphing attack at various levels of morphing intensity with smiling facial expression manipulations. Both open-set and closed-set experimental results indicate that a novel black-box adversarial attack based on local deformation is possible, and is vastly different from additive noise attacks. The findings of this work potentially pave a new research direction towards a more thorough understanding and investigation of image-based adversarial attacks and defenses.
Decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Networked Agents: Recent Advances
Authors: Kaiqing Zhang, Zhuoran Yang, Tamer Başar
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has long been a significant and everlasting research topic in both machine learning and control. With the recent development of (single-agent) deep RL, there is a resurgence of interests in developing new MARL algorithms, especially those that are backed by theoretical analysis. In this paper, we review some recent advances a sub-area of this topic: decentralized MARL with networked agents. Specifically, multiple agents perform sequential decision-making in a common environment, without the coordination of any central controller. Instead, the agents are allowed to exchange information with their neighbors over a communication network. Such a setting finds broad applications in the control and operation of robots, unmanned vehicles, mobile sensor networks, and smart grid. This review is built upon several our research endeavors in this direction, together with some progresses made by other researchers along the line. We hope this review to inspire the devotion of more research efforts to this exciting yet challenging area.
Meta-Learning without Memorization
Authors: Mingzhang Yin, George Tucker, Mingyuan Zhou, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Memorization, Meta-Learning

The ability to learn new concepts with small amounts of data is a critical aspect of intelligence that has proven challenging for deep learning methods. Meta-learning has emerged as a promising technique for leveraging data from previous tasks to enable efficient learning of new tasks. However, most meta-learning algorithms implicitly require that the meta-training tasks be mutually-exclusive, such that no single model can solve all of the tasks at once. For example, when creating tasks for few-shot image classification, prior work uses a per-task random assignment of image classes to N-way classification labels. If this is not done, the meta-learner can ignore the task training data and learn a single model that performs all of the meta-training tasks zero-shot, but does not adapt effectively to new image classes. This requirement means that the user must take great care in designing the tasks, for example by shuffling labels or removing task identifying information from the inputs. In some domains, this makes meta-learning entirely inapplicable. In this paper, we address this challenge by designing a meta-regularization objective using information theory that places precedence on data-driven adaptation. This causes the meta-learner to decide what must be learned from the task training data and what should be inferred from the task testing input. By doing so, our algorithm can successfully use data from non-mutually-exclusive tasks to efficiently adapt to novel tasks. We demonstrate its applicability to both contextual and gradient-based meta-learning algorithms, and apply it in practical settings where applying standard meta-learning has been difficult. Our approach substantially outperforms standard meta-learning algorithms in these settings.
Patch Aggregator for Scene Text Script Identification
Authors: Changxu Cheng, Qiuhui Huang, Xiang Bai, Bin Feng, Wenyu Liu
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Script identification in the wild is of great importance in a multi-lingual robust-reading system. The scripts deriving from the same language family share a large set of characters, which makes script identification a fine-grained classification problem. Most existing methods make efforts to learn a single representation that combines the local features by making a weighted average or other clustering methods, which may reduce the discriminatory power of some important parts in each script for the interference of redundant features. In this paper, we present a novel module named Patch Aggregator (PA), which learns a more discriminative representation for script identification by taking into account the prediction scores of local patches. Specifically, we design a CNN-based method consisting of a standard CNN classifier and a PA module. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed PA module brings significant performance improvements over the baseline CNN model, achieving the state-of-the-art results on three benchmark datasets for script identification: SIW-13, CVSI 2015 and RRC-MLT 2017.
Machine Unlearning
Authors: Lucas Bourtoule, Varun Chandrasekaran, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Hengrui Jia, Adelin Travers, Baiwu Zhang, David Lie, Nicolas Papernot
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Unlearning, Transfer Learning

Once users have shared their data online, it is generally difficult for them to revoke access and ask for the data to be deleted. Machine learning (ML) exacerbates this problem because any model trained with said data may have memorized it, putting users at risk of a successful privacy attack exposing their information. Yet, having models unlearn is notoriously difficult. We introduce SISA training, a framework that expedites the unlearning process by strategically limiting the influence of a data point in the training procedure. While our framework is applicable to any learning algorithm, it is designed to achieve the largest improvements for stateful algorithms like stochastic gradient descent for deep neural networks. SISA training reduces the computational overhead associated with unlearning, even in the worst-case setting where unlearning requests are made uniformly across the training set. In some cases, the service provider may have a prior on the distribution of unlearning requests that will be issued by users. We may take this prior into account to partition and order data accordingly, and further decrease overhead from unlearning. Our evaluation spans several datasets from different domains, with corresponding motivations for unlearning. Under no distributional assumptions, for simple learning tasks, we observe that SISA training improves time to unlearn points from the Purchase dataset by 4.63x, and 2.45x for the SVHN dataset, over retraining from scratch. SISA training also provides a speed-up of 1.36x in retraining for complex learning tasks such as ImageNet classification; aided by transfer learning, this results in a small degradation in accuracy. Our work contributes to practical data governance in machine unlearning.
Logistic regression models for aggregated data
Authors: Tom Whitaker, Boris Beranger, Scott A. Sisson
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Crop Classification, General Classification, regression

Logistic regression models are a popular and effective method to predict the probability of categorical response data. However inference for these models can become computationally prohibitive for large datasets. Here we adapt ideas from symbolic data analysis to summarise the collection of predictor variables into histogram form, and perform inference on this summary dataset. We develop ideas based on composite likelihoods to derive an efficient one-versus-rest approximate composite likelihood model for histogram-based random variables, constructed from low-dimensional marginal histograms obtained from the full histogram. We demonstrate that this procedure can achieve comparable classification rates compared to the standard full data multinomial analysis and against state-of-the-art subsampling algorithms for logistic regression, but at a substantially lower computational cost. Performance is explored through simulated examples, and analyses of large supersymmetry and satellite crop classification datasets.
Women in ISIS Propaganda: A Natural Language Processing Analysis of Topics and Emotions in a Comparison with Mainstream Religious Group
Authors: Mojtaba Heidarysafa, Kamran Kowsari, Tolu Odukoya, Philip Potter, Laura E. Barnes, Donald E. Brown
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Emotion Recognition

Online propaganda is central to the recruitment strategies of extremist groups and in recent years these efforts have increasingly extended to women. To investigate ISIS' approach to targeting women in their online propaganda and uncover implications for counterterrorism, we rely on text mining and natural language processing (NLP). Specifically, we extract articles published in Dabiq and Rumiyah (ISIS's online English language publications) to identify prominent topics. To identify similarities or differences between these texts and those produced by non-violent religious groups, we extend the analysis to articles from a Catholic forum dedicated to women. We also perform an emotional analysis of both of these resources to better understand the emotional components of propaganda. We rely on Depechemood (a lexical-base emotion analysis method) to detect emotions most likely to be evoked in readers of these materials. The findings indicate that the emotional appeal of ISIS and Catholic materials are similar
Group Fairness in Bandit Arm Selection
Authors: Candice Schumann, Zhi Lang, Nicholas Mattei, John P. Dickerson
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

We propose a novel formulation of group fairness with biased feedback in the contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) setting. In the CMAB setting, a sequential decision maker must, at each time step, choose an arm to pull from a finite set of arms after observing some context for each of the potential arm pulls. In our model, arms are partitioned into two or more sensitive groups based on some protected feature(s) (e.g., age, race, or socio-economic status). Initial rewards received from pulling an arm may be distorted due to some unknown societal or measurement bias. We assume that in reality these groups are equal despite the biased feedback received by the agent. To alleviate this, we learn a societal bias term which can be used to both find the source of bias and to potentially fix the problem outside of the algorithm. We provide a novel algorithm that can accommodate this notion of fairness for an arbitrary number of groups, and provide a theoretical bound on the regret for our algorithm. We validate our algorithm using synthetic data and two real-world datasets for intervention settings wherein we want to allocate resources fairly across groups.
Decision Support System for Detection and Classification of Skin Cancer using CNN
Authors: Rishu Garg, Saumil Maheshwari, Anupam Shukla
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Image Augmentation, Transfer Learning

Skin Cancer is one of the most deathful of all the cancers. It is bound to spread to different parts of the body on the off chance that it is not analyzed and treated at the beginning time. It is mostly because of the abnormal growth of skin cells, often develops when the body is exposed to sunlight. The Detection Furthermore, the characterization of skin malignant growth in the beginning time is a costly and challenging procedure. It is classified where it develops and its cell type. High Precision and recall are required for the classification of lesions. The paper aims to use MNIST HAM-10000 dataset containing dermoscopy images. The objective is to propose a system that detects skin cancer and classifies it in different classes by using the Convolution Neural Network. The diagnosing methodology uses Image processing and deep learning model. The dermoscopy image of skin cancer taken, undergone various techniques to remove the noise and picture resolution. The image count is also increased by using various image augmentation techniques. In the end, the Transfer Learning method is used to increase the classification accuracy of the images further. Our CNN model gave a weighted average Precision of 0.88, a weighted Recall average of 0.74, and a weighted f1-score of 0.77. The transfer learning approach applied using ResNet model yielded an accuracy of 90.51%
Hardening Random Forest Cyber Detectors Against Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Giovanni Apruzzese, Mauro Andreolini, Michele Colajanni, Mirco Marchetti
Date: 2019-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Intrusion Detection

Machine learning algorithms are effective in several applications, but they are not as much successful when applied to intrusion detection in cyber security. Due to the high sensitivity to their training data, cyber detectors based on machine learning are vulnerable to targeted adversarial attacks that involve the perturbation of initial samples. Existing defenses assume unrealistic scenarios; their results are underwhelming in non-adversarial settings; or they can be applied only to machine learning algorithms that perform poorly for cyber security. We present an original methodology for countering adversarial perturbations targeting intrusion detection systems based on random forests. As a practical application, we integrate the proposed defense method in a cyber detector analyzing network traffic. The experimental results on millions of labelled network flows show that the new detector has a twofold value: it outperforms state-of-the-art detectors that are subject to adversarial attacks; it exhibits robust results both in adversarial and non-adversarial scenarios.
Feature Engineering Combined with 1 D Convolutional Neural Network for Improved Mortality Prediction
Authors: Saumil Maheshwari, Rohit Verma, Anupam Shukla, Ritu Tiwari, Rishu Garg
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Missing Values, Mortality Prediction, Prediction

The intensive care units (ICUs) are responsible for generating a wealth of useful data in the form of Electronic Health Record (EHR). This data allows for the development of a prediction tool with perfect knowledge backing. We aimed to build a mortality prediction model on 2012 Physionet Challenge mortality prediction database of 4000 patients admitted in ICU. The challenges in the dataset, such as high dimensionality, imbalanced distribution, and missing values were tackled with analytical methods and tools via feature engineering and new variable construction. The objective of the research is to utilize the relations among the clinical variables and construct new variables which would establish the effectiveness of 1-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (1- D CNN) with constructed features. Its performance with the traditional machine learning algorithms like XGBoost classifier, Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-Neighbours Classifier (K-NN), and Random Forest Classifier (RF) is compared for Area Under Curve (AUC). The investigation reveals the best AUC of 0.848 using 1-D CNN model.
Getting Topology and Point Cloud Generation to Mesh
Authors: Austin Dill, Chun-Liang Li, Songwei Ge, Eunsu Kang
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Generation

In this work, we explore the idea that effective generative models for point clouds under the autoencoding framework must acknowledge the relationship between a continuous surface, a discretized mesh, and a set of points sampled from the surface. This view motivates a generative model that works by progressively deforming a uniform sphere until it approximates the goal point cloud. We review the underlying concepts leading to this conclusion from computer graphics and topology in differential geometry, and model the generation process as deformation via deep neural network parameterization. Finally, we show that this view of the problem produces a model that can generate quality meshes efficiently.
Contrast Trees and Distribution Boosting
Authors: Jerome H. Friedman
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Often machine learning methods are applied and results reported in cases where there is little to no information concerning accuracy of the output. Simply because a computer program returns a result does not insure its validity. If decisions are to be made based on such results it is important to have some notion of their veracity. Contrast trees represent a new approach for assessing the accuracy of many types of machine learning estimates that are not amenable to standard (cross) validation methods. In situations where inaccuracies are detected boosted contrast trees can often improve performance. A special case, distribution boosting, provides an assumption free method for estimating the full probability distribution of an outcome variable given any set of joint input predictor variable values.
A kernel log-rank test of independence for right-censored data
Authors: Tamara Fernandez, Arthur Gretton, David Rindt, Dino Sejdinovic
Date: 2019-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis

We introduce a general non-parametric independence test between right-censored survival times and covariates, which may be multivariate. Our test statistic has a dual interpretation, first in terms of the supremum of a potentially infinite collection of weight-indexed log-rank tests, with weight functions belonging to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) of functions; and second, as the norm of the difference of embeddings of certain finite measures into the RKHS, similar to the Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) test-statistic. We study the asymptotic properties of the test, finding sufficient conditions to ensure our test correctly rejects the null hypothesis under any alternative. The test statistic can be computed straightforwardly, and the rejection threshold is obtained via an asymptotically consistent Wild Bootstrap procedure. Extensive investigations on both simulated and real data suggest that our testing procedure generally performs better than competing approaches in detecting complex non-linear dependence.