pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Deep Video Denoising
Authors: Dev Yashpal Sheth, Sreyas Mohan, Joshua L. Vincent, Ramon Manzorro, Peter A. Crozier, Mitesh M. Khapra, Eero P. Simoncelli, Carlos Fernandez-Granda
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Motion Compensation, Video Denoising

Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for video denoising are typically trained with supervision, assuming the availability of clean videos. However, in many applications, such as microscopy, noiseless videos are not available. To address this, we propose an Unsupervised Deep Video Denoiser (UDVD), a CNN architecture designed to be trained exclusively with noisy data. The performance of UDVD is comparable to the supervised state-of-the-art, even when trained only on a single short noisy video. We demonstrate the promise of our approach in real-world imaging applications by denoising raw video, fluorescence-microscopy and electron-microscopy data. In contrast to many current approaches to video denoising, UDVD does not require explicit motion compensation. This is advantageous because motion compensation is computationally expensive, and can be unreliable when the input data are noisy. A gradient-based analysis reveals that UDVD automatically adapts to local motion in the input noisy videos. Thus, the network learns to perform implicit motion compensation, even though it is only trained for denoising.
Combinatorial Learning of Graph Edit Distance via Dynamic Embedding
Authors: Runzhong Wang, Tianqi Zhang, Tianshu Yu, Junchi Yan, Xiaokang Yang
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1

Graph Edit Distance (GED) is a popular similarity measurement for pairwise graphs and it also refers to the recovery of the edit path from the source graph to the target graph. Traditional A* algorithm suffers scalability issues due to its exhaustive nature, whose search heuristics heavily rely on human prior knowledge. This paper presents a hybrid approach by combing the interpretability of traditional search-based techniques for producing the edit path, as well as the efficiency and adaptivity of deep embedding models to achieve a cost-effective GED solver. Inspired by dynamic programming, node-level embedding is designated in a dynamic reuse fashion and suboptimal branches are encouraged to be pruned. To this end, our method can be readily integrated into A* procedure in a dynamic fashion, as well as significantly reduce the computational burden with a learned heuristic. Experimental results on different graph datasets show that our approach can remarkably ease the search process of A* without sacrificing much accuracy. To our best knowledge, this work is also the first deep learning-based GED method for recovering the edit path.
A Framework for Authorial Clustering of Shorter Texts in Latent Semantic Spaces
Authors: Rafi Trad, Myra Spiliopoulou
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, feature selection

Authorial clustering involves the grouping of documents written by the same author or team of authors without any prior positive examples of an author's writing style or thematic preferences. For authorial clustering on shorter texts (paragraph-length texts that are typically shorter than conventional documents), the document representation is particularly important: very high-dimensional feature spaces lead to data sparsity and suffer from serious consequences like the curse of dimensionality, while feature selection may lead to information loss. We propose a high-level framework which utilizes a compact data representation in a latent feature space derived with non-parametric topic modeling. Authorial clusters are identified thereafter in two scenarios: (a) fully unsupervised and (b) semi-supervised where a small number of shorter texts are known to belong to the same author (must-link constraints) or not (cannot-link constraints). We report on experiments with 120 collections in three languages and two genres and show that the topic-based latent feature space provides a promising level of performance while reducing the dimensionality by a factor of 1500 compared to state-of-the-arts. We also demonstrate that, while prior knowledge on the precise number of authors (i.e. authorial clusters) does not contribute much to additional quality, little knowledge on constraints in authorial clusters memberships leads to clear performance improvements in front of this difficult task. Thorough experimentation with standard metrics indicates that there still remains an ample room for improvement for authorial clustering, especially with shorter texts
A biologically plausible neural network for local supervision in cortical microcircuits
Authors: Siavash Golkar, David Lipshutz, Yanis Bahroun, Anirvan M. Sengupta, Dmitri B. Chklovskii
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00

The backpropagation algorithm is an invaluable tool for training artificial neural networks; however, because of a weight sharing requirement, it does not provide a plausible model of brain function. Here, in the context of a two-layer network, we derive an algorithm for training a neural network which avoids this problem by not requiring explicit error computation and backpropagation. Furthermore, our algorithm maps onto a neural network that bears a remarkable resemblance to the connectivity structure and learning rules of the cortex. We find that our algorithm empirically performs comparably to backprop on a number of datasets.
Transformer-Transducers for Code-Switched Speech Recognition
Authors: Siddharth Dalmia, Yuzong Liu, Srikanth Ronanki, Katrin Kirchhoff
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We live in a world where 60% of the population can speak two or more languages fluently. Members of these communities constantly switch between languages when having a conversation. As automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are being deployed to the real-world, there is a need for practical systems that can handle multiple languages both within an utterance or across utterances. In this paper, we present an end-to-end ASR system using a transformer-transducer model architecture for code-switched speech recognition. We propose three modifications over the vanilla model in order to handle various aspects of code-switching. First, we introduce two auxiliary loss functions to handle the low-resource scenario of code-switching. Second, we propose a novel mask-based training strategy with language ID information to improve the label encoder training towards intra-sentential code-switching. Finally, we propose a multi-label/multi-audio encoder structure to leverage the vast monolingual speech corpora towards code-switching. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approaches on the SEAME dataset, a public Mandarin-English code-switching corpus, achieving a mixed error rate of 18.5% and 26.3% on test_man and test_sge sets respectively.
Learning from Human Directional Corrections
Authors: Wanxin Jin, Todd D. Murphey, Zehui Lu, Shaoshuai Mou
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning

This paper proposes a novel approach that enables a robot to learn an objective function incrementally from human directional corrections. Existing methods learn from human magnitude corrections; since a human needs to carefully choose the magnitude of each correction, those methods can easily lead to over-corrections and learning inefficiency. The proposed method only requires human directional corrections -- corrections that only indicate the direction of an input change without indicating its magnitude. We only assume that each correction, regardless of its magnitude, points in a direction that improves the robot's current motion relative to an unknown objective function. The allowable corrections satisfying this assumption account for half of the input space, as opposed to the magnitude corrections which have to lie in a shrinking level set. For each directional correction, the proposed method updates the estimate of the objective function based on a cutting plane method, which has a geometric interpretation. We have established theoretical results to show the convergence of the learning process. The proposed method has been tested in numerical examples, a user study on two human-robot games, and a real-world quadrotor experiment. The results confirm the convergence of the proposed method and further show that the method is significantly more effective (higher success rate), efficient/effortless (less human corrections needed), and potentially more accessible (fewer early wasted trials) than the state-of-the-art robot learning frameworks.
RealCause: Realistic Causal Inference Benchmarking
Authors: Brady Neal, Chin-wei Huang, Sunand Raghupathi
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Causal Inference

There are many different causal effect estimators in causal inference. However, it is unclear how to choose between these estimators because there is no ground-truth for causal effects. A commonly used option is to simulate synthetic data, where the ground-truth is known. However, the best causal estimators on synthetic data are unlikely to be the best causal estimators on real data. An ideal benchmark for causal estimators would both (a) yield ground-truth values of the causal effects and (b) be representative of real data. Using flexible generative models, we provide a benchmark that both yields ground-truth and is realistic. Using this benchmark, we evaluate over 1500 different causal estimators and provide evidence that it is rational to choose hyperparameters for causal estimators using predictive metrics.
Image Quality Assessment for Perceptual Image Restoration: A New Dataset, Benchmark and Metric
Authors: Jinjin Gu, Haoming Cai, Haoyu Chen, Xiaoxing Ye, Jimmy Ren, Chao Dong
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, Image Restoration

Image quality assessment (IQA) is the key factor for the fast development of image restoration (IR) algorithms. The most recent perceptual IR algorithms based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) have brought in significant improvement on visual performance, but also pose great challenges for quantitative evaluation. Notably, we observe an increasing inconsistency between perceptual quality and the evaluation results. We present two questions: Can existing IQA methods objectively evaluate recent IR algorithms? With the focus on beating current benchmarks, are we getting better IR algorithms? To answer the questions and promote the development of IQA methods, we contribute a large-scale IQA dataset, called Perceptual Image Processing ALgorithms (PIPAL) dataset. Especially, this dataset includes the results of GAN-based IR algorithms, which are missing in previous datasets. We collect more than 1.13 million human judgments to assign subjective scores for PIPAL images using the more reliable Elo system. Based on PIPAL, we present new benchmarks for both IQA and SR methods. Our results indicate that existing IQA methods cannot fairly evaluate GAN-based IR algorithms. While using appropriate evaluation methods is important, IQA methods should also be updated along with the development of IR algorithms. At last, we shed light on how to improve the IQA performance on GAN-based distortion. Inspired by the find that the existing IQA methods have an unsatisfactory performance on the GAN-based distortion partially because of their low tolerance to spatial misalignment, we propose to improve the performance of an IQA network on GAN-based distortion by explicitly considering this misalignment. We propose the Space Warping Difference Network, which includes the novel l_2 pooling layers and Space Warping Difference layers. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Variance based sensitivity analysis for Monte Carlo and importance sampling reliability assessment with Gaussian processes
Authors: Morgane Menz, Sylvain Dubreuil, Jérôme Morio, Christian Gogu, Nathalie Bartoli, Marie Chiron
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Gaussian Processes, Sensitivity

Running a reliability analysis on engineering problems involving complex numerical models can be computationally very expensive, requiring advanced simulation methods to reduce the overall numerical cost. Gaussian process based active learning methods for reliability analysis have emerged as a promising way for reducing this computational cost. The learning phase of these methods consists in building a Gaussian process surrogate model of the performance function and using the uncertainty structure of the Gaussian process to enrich iteratively this surrogate model. For that purpose a learning criterion has to be defined. Then, the estimation of the probability of failure is typically obtained by a classification of a population evaluated on the final surrogate model. Hence, the estimator of the probability of failure holds two different uncertainty sources related to the surrogate model approximation and to the sampling based integration technique. In this paper, we propose a methodology to quantify the sensitivity of the probability of failure estimator to both uncertainty sources. This analysis also enables to control the whole error associated to the failure probability estimate and thus provides an accuracy criterion on the estimation. Thus, an active learning approach integrating this analysis to reduce the main source of error and stopping when the global variability is sufficiently low is introduced. The approach is proposed for both a Monte Carlo based method as well as an importance sampling based method, seeking to improve the estimation of rare event probabilities. Performance of the proposed strategy is then assessed on several examples.
Fast, Self Supervised, Fully Convolutional Color Normalization of H&E Stained Images
Authors: Abhijeet Patil, Mohd. Talha, Aniket Bhatia, Nikhil Cherian Kurian, Sammed Mangale, Sunil Patel, Amit Sethi
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Color Normalization, Deep Learning

Performance of deep learning algorithms decreases drastically if the data distributions of the training and testing sets are different. Due to variations in staining protocols, reagent brands, and habits of technicians, color variation in digital histopathology images is quite common. Color variation causes problems for the deployment of deep learning-based solutions for automatic diagnosis system in histopathology. Previously proposed color normalization methods consider a small patch as a reference for normalization, which creates artifacts on out-of-distribution source images. These methods are also slow as most of the computation is performed on CPUs instead of the GPUs. We propose a color normalization technique, which is fast during its self-supervised training as well as inference. Our method is based on a lightweight fully-convolutional neural network and can be easily attached to a deep learning-based pipeline as a pre-processing block. For classification and segmentation tasks on CAMELYON17 and MoNuSeg datasets respectively, the proposed method is faster and gives a greater increase in accuracy than the state of the art methods.
MAVIDH Score: A COVID-19 Severity Scoring using Chest X-Ray Pathology Features
Authors: Douglas P. S. Gomes, Michael J. Horry, Anwaar Ulhaq, Manoranjan Paul, Subrata Chakraborty, Manash Saha, Tanmoy Debnath, D. M. Motiur Rahaman
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: COVID-19 Diagnosis, Prognosis

The application of computer vision for COVID-19 diagnosis is complex and challenging, given the risks associated with patient misclassifications. Arguably, the primary value of medical imaging for COVID-19 lies rather on patient prognosis. Radiological images can guide physicians assessing the severity of the disease, and a series of images from the same patient at different stages can help to gauge disease progression. Hence, a simple method based on lung-pathology interpretable features for scoring disease severity from Chest X-rays is proposed here. As the primary contribution, this method correlates well to patient severity in different stages of disease progression with competitive results compared to other existing, more complex methods. An original data selection approach is also proposed, allowing the simple model to learn the severity-related features. It is hypothesized that the resulting competitive performance presented here is related to the method being feature-based rather than reliant on lung involvement or opacity as others in the literature. A second contribution comes from the validation of the results, conceptualized as the scoring of patients groups from different stages of the disease. Besides performing such validation on an independent data set, the results were also compared with other proposed scoring methods in the literature. The results show that there is a significant correlation between the scoring system (MAVIDH) and patient outcome, which could potentially help physicians rating and following disease progression in COVID-19 patients.
Machine Translation of Novels in the Age of Transformer
Authors: Antonio Toral, Antoni Oliver, Pau Ribas Ballestín
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

In this chapter we build a machine translation (MT) system tailored to the literary domain, specifically to novels, based on the state-of-the-art architecture in neural MT (NMT), the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017), for the translation direction English-to-Catalan. Subsequently, we assess to what extent such a system can be useful by evaluating its translations, by comparing this MT system against three other systems (two domain-specific systems under the recurrent and phrase-based paradigms and a popular generic on-line system) on three evaluations. The first evaluation is automatic and uses the most-widely used automatic evaluation metric, BLEU. The two remaining evaluations are manual and they assess, respectively, preference and amount of post-editing required to make the translation error-free. As expected, the domain-specific Transformer-based system outperformed the three other systems in all the three evaluations conducted, in all cases by a large margin.
Guided Adversarial Attack for Evaluating and Enhancing Adversarial Defenses
Authors: Gaurang Sriramanan, Sravanti Addepalli, Arya Baburaj, R. Venkatesh Babu
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Defense

Advances in the development of adversarial attacks have been fundamental to the progress of adversarial defense research. Efficient and effective attacks are crucial for reliable evaluation of defenses, and also for developing robust models. Adversarial attacks are often generated by maximizing standard losses such as the cross-entropy loss or maximum-margin loss within a constraint set using Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). In this work, we introduce a relaxation term to the standard loss, that finds more suitable gradient-directions, increases attack efficacy and leads to more efficient adversarial training. We propose Guided Adversarial Margin Attack (GAMA), which utilizes function mapping of the clean image to guide the generation of adversaries, thereby resulting in stronger attacks. We evaluate our attack against multiple defenses and show improved performance when compared to existing attacks. Further, we propose Guided Adversarial Training (GAT), which achieves state-of-the-art performance amongst single-step defenses by utilizing the proposed relaxation term for both attack generation and training.
Depression Status Estimation by Deep Learning based Hybrid Multi-Modal Fusion Model
Authors: Hrithwik Shalu, Harikrishnan P, Hari Sankar CN, Akash Das, Saptarshi Majumder, Arnhav Datar, Subin Mathew MS, Anugyan Das, Juned Kadiwala
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Misconceptions, One-Shot Learning

Preliminary detection of mild depression could immensely help in effective treatment of the common mental health disorder. Due to the lack of proper awareness and the ample mix of stigmas and misconceptions present within the society, mental health status estimation has become a truly difficult task. Due to the immense variations in character level traits from person to person, traditional deep learning methods fail to generalize in a real world setting. In our study we aim to create a human allied AI workflow which could efficiently adapt to specific users and effectively perform in real world scenarios. We propose a Hybrid deep learning approach that combines the essence of one shot learning, classical supervised deep learning methods and human allied interactions for adaptation. In order to capture maximum information and make efficient diagnosis video, audio, and text modalities are utilized. Our Hybrid Fusion model achieved a high accuracy of 96.3% on the Dataset; and attained an AUC of 0.9682 which proves its robustness in discriminating classes in complex real-world scenarios making sure that no cases of mild depression are missed during diagnosis. The proposed method is deployed in a cloud-based smartphone application for robust testing. With user-specific adaptations and state of the art methodologies, we present a state-of-the-art model with user friendly experience.
A Deep Learning Approach for Predicting Spatiotemporal Dynamics From Sparsely Observed Data
Authors: Priyabrata Saha, Saibal Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning prediction models for spatiotemporal physical processes driven by unknown partial differential equations (PDEs). We propose a deep learning framework that learns the underlying dynamics and predicts its evolution using sparsely distributed data sites. Deep learning has shown promising results in modeling physical dynamics in recent years. However, most of the existing deep learning methods for modeling physical dynamics either focus on solving known PDEs or require data in a dense grid when the governing PDEs are unknown. In contrast, our method focuses on learning prediction models for unknown PDE-driven dynamics only from sparsely observed data. The proposed method is spatial dimension-independent and geometrically flexible. We demonstrate our method in the forecasting task for the two-dimensional wave equation and the Burgers-Fisher equation in multiple geometries with different boundary conditions, and the ten-dimensional heat equation.