pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Semi-supervised Stacked Label Consistent Autoencoder for Reconstruction and Analysis of Biomedical Signals
Authors: Anupriya Gogna, Angshul Majumdar, Rabab Ward
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, compressed sensing, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), General Classification, Representation Learning

In this work we propose an autoencoder based framework for simultaneous reconstruction and classification of biomedical signals. Previously these two tasks, reconstruction and classification were treated as separate problems. This is the first work to propose a combined framework to address the issue in a holistic fashion. Reconstruction techniques for biomedical signals for tele-monitoring are largely based on compressed sensing (CS) based method, these are designed techniques where the reconstruction formulation is based on some assumption regarding the signal. In this work, we propose a new paradigm for reconstruction we learn to reconstruct. An autoencoder can be trained for the same. But since the final goal is to analyze classify the signal we learn a linear classification map inside the autoencoder. The ensuing optimization problem is solved using the Split Bregman technique. Experiments have been carried out on reconstruction and classification of ECG arrhythmia classification and EEG seizure classification signals. Our proposed tool is capable of operating in a semi-supervised fashion. We show that our proposed method is better and more than an order magnitude faster in reconstruction than CS based methods; it is capable of real-time operation. Our method is also better than recently proposed classification methods. Significance: This is the first work offering an alternative to CS based reconstruction. It also shows that representation learning can yield better results than hand-crafted features for signal analysis.
Deep Sparse Coding for Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring
Authors: Shikha Singh, Angshul Majumdar
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: blind source separation, Dictionary Learning, Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring

Energy disaggregation is the task of segregating the aggregate energy of the entire building (as logged by the smartmeter) into the energy consumed by individual appliances. This is a single channel (the only channel being the smart-meter) blind source (different electrical appliances) separation problem. The traditional way to address this is via stochastic finite state machines (e.g. Factorial Hidden Markov Model). In recent times dictionary learning based approaches have shown promise in addressing the disaggregation problem. The usual technique is to learn a dictionary for every device and use the learnt dictionaries as basis for blind source separation during disaggregation. Prior studies in this area are shallow learning techniques, i.e. they learn a single layer of dictionary for every device. In this work, we propose a deep learning approach, instead of learning one level of dictionary, we learn multiple layers of dictionaries for each device. These multi-level dictionaries are used as a basis for source separation during disaggregation. Results on two benchmark datasets and one actual implementation show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques.
Kernel Transform Learning
Authors: Jyoti Maggu, Angshul Majumdar
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dictionary Learning, Representation Learning

This work proposes kernel transform learning. The idea of dictionary learning is well known; it is a synthesis formulation where a basis is learnt along with the coefficients so as to generate or synthesize the data. Transform learning is its analysis equivalent; the transforms operates or analyses on the data to generate the coefficients. The concept of kernel dictionary learning has been introduced in the recent past, where the dictionary is represented as a linear combination of non-linear version of the data. Its success has been showcased in feature extraction. In this work we propose to kernelize transform learning on line similar to kernel dictionary learning. An efficient solution for kernel transform learning has been proposed especially for problems where the number of samples is much larger than the dimensionality of the input samples making the kernel matrix very high dimensional. Kernel transform learning has been compared with other representation learning tools like autoencoder, restricted Boltzmann machine as well as with dictionary learning (and its kernelized version). Our proposed kernel transform learning yields better results than all the aforesaid techniques; experiments have been carried out on benchmark databases.
Analysis Co-Sparse Coding for Energy Disaggregation
Authors: Shikha Singh, Angshul Majumdar
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: blind source separation, Dictionary Learning

Energy disaggregation is the task of segregating the aggregate energy of the entire building (as logged by the smartmeter) into the energy consumed by individual appliances. This is a single channel (the only channel being the smart-meter) blind source (different electrical appliances) separation problem. In recent times dictionary learning based approaches have shown promise in addressing the disaggregation problem. The usual technique is to learn a dictionary for every device and use the learnt dictionaries as basis for blind source separation during disaggregation. Dictionary learning is a synthesis formulation; in this work, we propose an analysis approach. The advantage of our proposed approach is that, the requirement of training volume drastically reduces compared to state-of-the-art techniques. This means that, we require fewer instrumented homes, or fewer days of instrumentation per home; in either case this drastically reduces the sensing cost. Results on two benchmark datasets show that our method produces the same level of disaggregation accuracy as state-of-the-art methods but with only a fraction of the training data.
Discriminative Autoencoder for Feature Extraction: Application to Character Recognition
Authors: Anupriya Gogna, Angshul Majumdar
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Representation Learning

Conventionally, autoencoders are unsupervised representation learning tools. In this work, we propose a novel discriminative autoencoder. Use of supervised discriminative learning ensures that the learned representation is robust to variations commonly encountered in image datasets. Using the basic discriminating autoencoder as a unit, we build a stacked architecture aimed at extracting relevant representation from the training data. The efficiency of our feature extraction algorithm ensures a high classification accuracy with even simple classification schemes like KNN (K-nearest neighbor). We demonstrate the superiority of our model for representation learning by conducting experiments on standard datasets for character/image recognition and subsequent comparison with existing supervised deep architectures like class sparse stacked autoencoder and discriminative deep belief network.
Bitopological Duality for Algebras of Fittings logic and Natural Duality extension
Authors: Litan Kumar Das, Kumar Sankar Ray
Date: 2019-12-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we investigate a bitopological duality for algebras of Fitting's multi-valued logic. We also extend the natural duality theory for $\mathbb{ISP_I}(\mathcal{L})$ by developing a duality for $\mathbb{ISP}(\mathcal{L})$, where $\mathcal{L}$ is a finite algebra in which underlying lattice is bounded distributive.
Bias Remediation in Driver Drowsiness Detection systems using Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Mkhuseli Ngxande, Jules-Raymond Tapamo, Michael Burke
Date: 2019-12-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Datasets are crucial when training a deep neural network. When datasets are unrepresentative, trained models are prone to bias because they are unable to generalise to real world settings. This is particularly problematic for models trained in specific cultural contexts, which may not represent a wide range of races, and thus fail to generalise. This is a particular challenge for Driver drowsiness detection, where many publicly available datasets are unrepresentative as they cover only certain ethnicity groups. Traditional augmentation methods are unable to improve a model's performance when tested on other groups with different facial attributes, and it is often challenging to build new, more representative datasets. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework that boosts the performance of detection of drowsiness for different ethnicity groups. Our framework improves Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained for prediction by using Generative Adversarial networks (GAN) for targeted data augmentation based on a population bias visualisation strategy that groups faces with similar facial attributes and highlights where the model is failing. A sampling method selects faces where the model is not performing well, which are used to fine-tune the CNN. Experiments show the efficacy of our approach in improving driver drowsiness detection for under represented ethnicity groups. Here, models trained on publicly available datasets are compared with a model trained using the proposed data augmentation strategy. Although developed in the context of driver drowsiness detection, the proposed framework is not limited to the driver drowsiness detection task, but can be applied to other applications.
Large-scale 6D Object Pose Estimation Dataset for Industrial Bin-Picking
Authors: Kilian Kleeberger, Christian Landgraf, Marco F. Huber
Date: 2019-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Instance Segmentation, Object, Pose Estimation, Position, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce a new public dataset for 6D object pose estimation and instance segmentation for industrial bin-picking. The dataset comprises both synthetic and real-world scenes. For both, point clouds, depth images, and annotations comprising the 6D pose (position and orientation), a visibility score, and a segmentation mask for each object are provided. Along with the raw data, a method for precisely annotating real-world scenes is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first public dataset for 6D object pose estimation and instance segmentation for bin-picking containing sufficiently annotated data for learning-based approaches. Furthermore, it is one of the largest public datasets for object pose estimation in general. The dataset is publicly available at http://www.bin-picking.ai/en/dataset.html.
Approximating Human Judgment of Generated Image Quality
Authors: Y. Alex Kolchinski, Sharon Zhou, Shengjia Zhao, Mitchell Gordon, Stefano Ermon
Date: 2019-11-30 00:00:00

Generative models have made immense progress in recent years, particularly in their ability to generate high quality images. However, that quality has been difficult to evaluate rigorously, with evaluation dominated by heuristic approaches that do not correlate well with human judgment, such as the Inception Score and Fr\'echet Inception Distance. Real human labels have also been used in evaluation, but are inefficient and expensive to collect for each image. Here, we present a novel method to automatically evaluate images based on their quality as perceived by humans. By not only generating image embeddings from Inception network activations and comparing them to the activations for real images, of which other methods perform a variant, but also regressing the activation statistics to match gold standard human labels, we demonstrate 66% accuracy in predicting human scores of image realism, matching the human inter-rater agreement rate. Our approach also generalizes across generative models, suggesting the potential for capturing a model-agnostic measure of image quality. We open source our dataset of human labels for the advancement of research and techniques in this area.
Warped Mixtures for Nonparametric Cluster Shapes
Authors: Tomoharu Iwata, David Duvenaud, Zoubin Ghahramani
Date: 2012-06-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

A mixture of Gaussians fit to a single curved or heavy-tailed cluster will report that the data contains many clusters. To produce more appropriate clusterings, we introduce a model which warps a latent mixture of Gaussians to produce nonparametric cluster shapes. The possibly low-dimensional latent mixture model allows us to summarize the properties of the high-dimensional clusters (or density manifolds) describing the data. The number of manifolds, as well as the shape and dimension of each manifold is automatically inferred. We derive a simple inference scheme for this model which analytically integrates out both the mixture parameters and the warping function. We show that our model is effective for density estimation, performs better than infinite Gaussian mixture models at recovering the true number of clusters, and produces interpretable summaries of high-dimensional datasets.
Deep learning for monaural speech separation
Authors: Po-Sen Huang, Minje Kim, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Paris Smaragdis
Date: 2014-05-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICASSP 2014 5
Tasks: Deep Learning, Multi-Speaker Source Separation, Speech Separation

Monaural source separation is useful for many real-world applications though it is a challenging problem. In this paper, we study deep learning for monaural speech separation. We propose the joint optimization of the deep learning models (deep neural networks and recurrent neural networks) with an extra masking layer, which enforces a reconstruction constraint. Moreover, we explore a discriminative training criterion for the neural networks to further enhance the separation performance. We evaluate our approaches using the TIMIT speech corpus for a monaural speech separation task. Our proposed models achieve about 3.8~4.9 dB SIR gain compared to NMF models, while maintaining better SDRs and SARs.
Unsupervised Adaptation for Deep Stereo
Authors: Alessio Tonioni, Matteo Poggi, Stefano Mattoccia, Luigi Di Stefano
Date: 2017-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2017 10

Recent ground-breaking works have shown that deep neural networks can be trained end-to-end to regress dense disparity maps directly from image pairs. Computer generated imagery is deployed to gather the large data corpus required to train such networks, an additional fine-tuning allowing to adapt the model to work well also on real and possibly diverse environments. Yet, besides a few public datasets such as Kitti, the ground-truth needed to adapt the network to a new scenario is hardly available in practice. In this paper we propose a novel unsupervised adaptation approach that enables to fine-tune a deep learning stereo model without any ground-truth information. We rely on off-the-shelf stereo algorithms together with state-of-the-art confidence measures, the latter able to ascertain upon correctness of the measurements yielded by former. Thus, we train the network based on a novel loss-function that penalizes predictions disagreeing with the highly confident disparities provided by the algorithm and enforces a smoothness constraint. Experiments on popular datasets (KITTI 2012, KITTI 2015 and Middlebury 2014) and other challenging test images demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.
Neural network based spectral mask estimation for acoustic beamforming
Authors: Jahn Heymann, Lukas Drude, Reinhold Haeb-Umbach
Date: 2016-03-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICASSP 2016 3
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We present a neural network based approach to acoustic beamforming. The network is used to estimate spectral masks from which the Cross-Power Spectral Density matrices of speech and noise are estimated, which in turn are used to compute the beamformer coefficients. The network training is independent of the number and the geometric configuration of the microphones. We further show that it is possible to train the network on clean speech only, avoiding the need for stereo data with separated speech and noise. Two types of networks are evaluated. One small feed-forward network with only one hidden layer and one more elaborated bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory network. We compare our system with different parametric approaches to mask estimation and using different beamforming algorithms. We show that our system yields superior results, both in terms of perceptual speech quality and with respect to speech recognition error rate. The results for the simple feed-forward network are especially encouraging considering its low computational requirements.
A Convolutional Neural Network Smartphone App for Real-Time Voice Activity Detection
Authors: Abhishek Sehgal, Nasser Kehtarnavaz
Date: 2018-02-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Access 2018 2
Tasks: Action Detection, Activity Detection, Audio Signal Recognition, Noise Estimation

This paper presents a smartphone app that performs real-time voice activity detection based on convolutional neural network. Real-time implementation issues are discussed showing how the slow inference time associated with convolutional neural networks is addressed. The developed smartphone app is meant to act as a switch for noise reduction in the signal processing pipelines of hearing devices, enabling noise estimation or classification to be conducted in noise-only parts of noisy speech signals. The developed smartphone app is compared with a previously developed voice activity detection app as well as with two highly cited voice activity detection algorithms. The experimental results indicate that the developed app using convolutional neural network outperforms the previously developed smartphone app.
Stochastic Recursive Variance Reduction for Efficient Smooth Non-Convex Compositional Optimization
Authors: Huizhuo Yuan, Xiangru Lian, Ji Liu
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Reinforcement Learning, Stochastic Optimization

Stochastic compositional optimization arises in many important machine learning tasks such as value function evaluation in reinforcement learning and portfolio management. The objective function is the composition of two expectations of stochastic functions, and is more challenging to optimize than vanilla stochastic optimization problems. In this paper, we investigate the stochastic compositional optimization in the general smooth non-convex setting. We employ a recently developed idea of \textit{Stochastic Recursive Gradient Descent} to design a novel algorithm named SARAH-Compositional, and prove a sharp Incremental First-order Oracle (IFO) complexity upper bound for stochastic compositional optimization: $\mathcal{O}((n+m)^{1/2} \varepsilon^{-2})$ in the finite-sum case and $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ in the online case. Such a complexity is known to be the best one among IFO complexity results for non-convex stochastic compositional optimization, and is believed to be optimal. Our experiments validate the theoretical performance of our algorithm.
Side-Tuning: A Baseline for Network Adaptation via Additive Side Networks
Authors: Jeffrey O. Zhang, Alexander Sax, Amir Zamir, Leonidas Guibas, Jitendra Malik
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Incremental Learning, Question Answering, Reinforcement Learning, Transfer Learning, Visual Navigation

When training a neural network for a desired task, one may prefer to adapt a pre-trained network rather than starting from randomly initialized weights. Adaptation can be useful in cases when training data is scarce, when a single learner needs to perform multiple tasks, or when one wishes to encode priors in the network. The most commonly employed approaches for network adaptation are fine-tuning and using the pre-trained network as a fixed feature extractor, among others. In this paper, we propose a straightforward alternative: side-tuning. Side-tuning adapts a pre-trained network by training a lightweight "side" network that is fused with the (unchanged) pre-trained network via summation. This simple method works as well as or better than existing solutions and it resolves some of the basic issues with fine-tuning, fixed features, and other common approaches. In particular, side-tuning is less prone to overfitting, is asymptotically consistent, and does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting in incremental learning. We demonstrate the performance of side-tuning under a diverse set of scenarios, including incremental learning (iCIFAR, iTaskonomy), reinforcement learning, imitation learning (visual navigation in Habitat), NLP question-answering (SQuAD v2), and single-task transfer learning (Taskonomy), with consistently promising results.
A frequency-domain analysis of inexact gradient methods
Authors: Oran Gannot
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00

We study robustness properties of some iterative gradient-based methods for strongly convex functions, as well as for the larger class of functions with sector-bounded gradients, under a relative error model. Proofs of the corresponding convergence rates are based on frequency-domain criteria for the stability of nonlinear systems. Applications are given to inexact versions of gradient descent and the Triple Momentum Method. To further emphasize the usefulness of frequency-domain methods, we derive improved analytic bounds for the convergence rate of Nesterov's accelerated method (in the exact setting) on strongly convex functions.
A Neurocomputational Account of Flexible Goal-directed Cognition and Consciousness: The Goal-Aligning Representation Internal Manipulation Theory (GARIM)
Authors: Giovanni Granato, Gianluca Baldassarre
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00

Goal-directed manipulation of representations is a key element of human flexible behaviour, while consciousness is often related to several aspects of higher-order cognition and human flexibility. Currently these two phenomena are only partially integrated (e.g., see Neurorepresentationalism) and this (a) limits our understanding of neuro-computational processes that lead conscious states to produce flexible goal-directed behaviours, (b) prevents a computational formalisation of conscious goal-directed manipulations of representations occurring in the brain, and (c) inhibits the exploitation of this knowledge for modelling and technological purposes. Addressing these issues, here we extend our `three-component theory of flexible cognition' by proposing the `Goal-Aligning Representations Internal Manipulation' (GARIM) theory of conscious and flexible goal-directed cognition. The central idea of the theory is that conscious states support the active manipulation of goal-relevant internal representations (e.g., of world states, objects, and action sequences) to make them more aligned with the pursued goals. This leads to the generation of the knowledge which is necessary to face novel situations/goals, thus increasing the flexibility of goal-directed behaviours. The GARIM theory integrates key aspects of the main theories of consciousness into the functional neuro-computational framework of goal-directed behaviour. Moreover, it takes into account the subjective sensation of agency that accompanies conscious goal-directed processes (`GARIM agency'). The proposal has also implications for experimental studies on consciousness and clinical aspects of conscious goal-directed behaviour. Finally, the GARIM theory benefit technological fields such as autonomous robotics and machine learning (e.g., the manipulation process may describe the operations performed by systems based on transformers).