pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Quick Learning Mechanism with Cross-Domain Adaptation for Intelligent Fault Diagnosis
Authors: Arun K. Sharma, Nishchal K. Verma
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Domain Adaptation, Fault Diagnosis

The fault diagnostic model trained for a laboratory case machine fails to perform well on the industrial machines running under variable operating conditions. For every new operating condition of such machines, a new diagnostic model has to be trained which is a time-consuming and uneconomical process. Therefore, we propose a quick learning mechanism that can transform the existing diagnostic model into a new model suitable for industrial machines operating in different conditions. The proposed method uses the Net2Net transformation followed by a fine-tuning to cancel/minimize the maximum mean discrepancy between the new data and the previous one. The fine-tuning of the model requires a very less amount of labelled target samples and very few iterations of training. Therefore, the proposed method is capable of learning the new target data pattern quickly. The effectiveness of the proposed fault diagnosis method has been demonstrated on the Case Western Reserve University dataset, Intelligent Maintenance Systems bearing dataset, and Paderborn university dataset under the wide variations of the operating conditions. It has been validated that the diagnostic model trained on artificially damaged fault datasets can be used to quickly train another model for a real damage dataset.
Automatic Intent-Slot Induction for Dialogue Systems
Authors: Zengfeng Zeng, Dan Ma, Haiqin Yang, Zhen Gou, Jianping Shen
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Intent Detection, slot-filling, Slot Filling

Automatically and accurately identifying user intents and filling the associated slots from their spoken language are critical to the success of dialogue systems. Traditional methods require manually defining the DOMAIN-INTENT-SLOT schema and asking many domain experts to annotate the corresponding utterances, upon which neural models are trained. This procedure brings the challenges of information sharing hindering, out-of-schema, or data sparsity in open-domain dialogue systems. To tackle these challenges, we explore a new task of {\em automatic intent-slot induction} and propose a novel domain-independent tool. That is, we design a coarse-to-fine three-step procedure including Role-labeling, Concept-mining, And Pattern-mining (RCAP): (1) role-labeling: extracting keyphrases from users' utterances and classifying them into a quadruple of coarsely-defined intent-roles via sequence labeling; (2) concept-mining: clustering the extracted intent-role mentions and naming them into abstract fine-grained concepts; (3) pattern-mining: applying the Apriori algorithm to mine intent-role patterns and automatically inferring the intent-slot using these coarse-grained intent-role labels and fine-grained concepts. Empirical evaluations on both real-world in-domain and out-of-domain datasets show that: (1) our RCAP can generate satisfactory SLU schema and outperforms the state-of-the-art supervised learning method; (2) our RCAP can be directly applied to out-of-domain datasets and gain at least 76\% improvement of F1-score on intent detection and 41\% improvement of F1-score on slot filling; (3) our RCAP exhibits its power in generic intent-slot extractions with less manual effort, which opens pathways for schema induction on new domains and unseen intent-slot discovery for generalizable dialogue systems.
Learning without gradient descent encoded by the dynamics of a neurobiological model
Authors: Vivek Kurien George, Vikash Morar, Weiwei Yang, Jonathan Larson, Bryan Tower, Shweti Mahajan, Arkin Gupta, Christopher White, Gabriel A. Silva
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The success of state-of-the-art machine learning is essentially all based on different variations of gradient descent algorithms that minimize some version of a cost or loss function. A fundamental limitation, however, is the need to train these systems in either supervised or unsupervised ways by exposing them to typically large numbers of training examples. Here, we introduce a fundamentally novel conceptual approach to machine learning that takes advantage of a neurobiologically derived model of dynamic signaling, constrained by the geometric structure of a network. We show that MNIST images can be uniquely encoded and classified by the dynamics of geometric networks with nearly state-of-the-art accuracy in an unsupervised way, and without the need for any training.
Spatial Dependency Networks: Neural Layers for Improved Generative Image Modeling
Authors: Đorđe Miladinović, Aleksandar Stanić, Stefan Bauer, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Joachim M. Buhmann
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Decoder, Density Estimation

How to improve generative modeling by better exploiting spatial regularities and coherence in images? We introduce a novel neural network for building image generators (decoders) and apply it to variational autoencoders (VAEs). In our spatial dependency networks (SDNs), feature maps at each level of a deep neural net are computed in a spatially coherent way, using a sequential gating-based mechanism that distributes contextual information across 2-D space. We show that augmenting the decoder of a hierarchical VAE by spatial dependency layers considerably improves density estimation over baseline convolutional architectures and the state-of-the-art among the models within the same class. Furthermore, we demonstrate that SDN can be applied to large images by synthesizing samples of high quality and coherence. In a vanilla VAE setting, we find that a powerful SDN decoder also improves learning disentangled representations, indicating that neural architectures play an important role in this task. Our results suggest favoring spatial dependency over convolutional layers in various VAE settings. The accompanying source code is given at https://github.com/djordjemila/sdn.
Learned Gradient Compression for Distributed Deep Learning
Authors: Lusine Abrahamyan, Yiming Chen, Giannis Bekoulis, Nikos Deligiannis
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Quantization, Semantic Segmentation

Training deep neural networks on large datasets containing high-dimensional data requires a large amount of computation. A solution to this problem is data-parallel distributed training, where a model is replicated into several computational nodes that have access to different chunks of the data. This approach, however, entails high communication rates and latency because of the computed gradients that need to be shared among nodes at every iteration. The problem becomes more pronounced in the case that there is wireless communication between the nodes (i.e. due to the limited network bandwidth). To address this problem, various compression methods have been proposed including sparsification, quantization, and entropy encoding of the gradients. Existing methods leverage the intra-node information redundancy, that is, they compress gradients at each node independently. In contrast, we advocate that the gradients across the nodes are correlated and propose methods to leverage this inter-node redundancy to improve compression efficiency. Depending on the node communication protocol (parameter server or ring-allreduce), we propose two instances of the LGC approach that we coin Learned Gradient Compression (LGC). Our methods exploit an autoencoder (i.e. trained during the first stages of the distributed training) to capture the common information that exists in the gradients of the distributed nodes. We have tested our LGC methods on the image classification and semantic segmentation tasks using different convolutional neural networks (ResNet50, ResNet101, PSPNet) and multiple datasets (ImageNet, Cifar10, CamVid). The ResNet101 model trained for image classification on Cifar10 achieved an accuracy of 93.57%, which is lower than the baseline distributed training with uncompressed gradients only by 0.18%.
Super-Resolving Cross-Domain Face Miniatures by Peeking at One-Shot Exemplar
Authors: Peike Li, Xin Yu, Yi Yang
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Decoder, Super-Resolution

Conventional face super-resolution methods usually assume testing low-resolution (LR) images lie in the same domain as the training ones. Due to different lighting conditions and imaging hardware, domain gaps between training and testing images inevitably occur in many real-world scenarios. Neglecting those domain gaps would lead to inferior face super-resolution (FSR) performance. However, how to transfer a trained FSR model to a target domain efficiently and effectively has not been investigated. To tackle this problem, we develop a Domain-Aware Pyramid-based Face Super-Resolution network, named DAP-FSR network. Our DAP-FSR is the first attempt to super-resolve LR faces from a target domain by exploiting only a pair of high-resolution (HR) and LR exemplar in the target domain. To be specific, our DAP-FSR firstly employs its encoder to extract the multi-scale latent representations of the input LR face. Considering only one target domain example is available, we propose to augment the target domain data by mixing the latent representations of the target domain face and source domain ones, and then feed the mixed representations to the decoder of our DAP-FSR. The decoder will generate new face images resembling the target domain image style. The generated HR faces in turn are used to optimize our decoder to reduce the domain gap. By iteratively updating the latent representations and our decoder, our DAP-FSR will be adapted to the target domain, thus achieving authentic and high-quality upsampled HR faces. Extensive experiments on three newly constructed benchmarks validate the effectiveness and superior performance of our DAP-FSR compared to the state-of-the-art.
Gumbel-Attention for Multi-modal Machine Translation
Authors: Pengbo Liu, Hailong Cao, Tiejun Zhao
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Multimodal Machine Translation, Translation

Multi-modal machine translation (MMT) improves translation quality by introducing visual information. However, the existing MMT model ignores the problem that the image will bring information irrelevant to the text, causing much noise to the model and affecting the translation quality. This paper proposes a novel Gumbel-Attention for multi-modal machine translation, which selects the text-related parts of the image features. Specifically, different from the previous attention-based method, we first use a differentiable method to select the image information and automatically remove the useless parts of the image features. Experiments prove that our method retains the image features related to the text, and the remaining parts help the MMT model generates better translations.
Adversarial YOLO: Defense Human Detection Patch Attacks via Detecting Adversarial Patches
Authors: Nan Ji, YanFei Feng, Haidong Xie, Xueshuang Xiang, Naijin Liu
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection, image-classification, Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection

The security of object detection systems has attracted increasing attention, especially when facing adversarial patch attacks. Since patch attacks change the pixels in a restricted area on objects, they are easy to implement in the physical world, especially for attacking human detection systems. The existing defenses against patch attacks are mostly applied for image classification problems and have difficulty resisting human detection attacks. Towards this critical issue, we propose an efficient and effective plug-in defense component on the YOLO detection system, which we name Ad-YOLO. The main idea is to add a patch class on the YOLO architecture, which has a negligible inference increment. Thus, Ad-YOLO is expected to directly detect both the objects of interest and adversarial patches. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first defense strategy against human detection attacks. We investigate Ad-YOLO's performance on the YOLOv2 baseline. To improve the ability of Ad-YOLO to detect variety patches, we first use an adversarial training process to develop a patch dataset based on the Inria dataset, which we name Inria-Patch. Then, we train Ad-YOLO by a combination of Pascal VOC, Inria, and Inria-Patch datasets. With a slight drop of $0.70\%$ mAP on VOC 2007 test set, Ad-YOLO achieves $80.31\%$ AP of persons, which highly outperforms $33.93\%$ AP for YOLOv2 when facing white-box patch attacks. Furthermore, compared with YOLOv2, the results facing a physical-world attack are also included to demonstrate Ad-YOLO's excellent generalization ability.
Lite-HDSeg: LiDAR Semantic Segmentation Using Lite Harmonic Dense Convolutions
Authors: Ryan Razani, Ran Cheng, Ehsan Taghavi, Liu Bingbing
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decoder, LIDAR Semantic Segmentation, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Autonomous driving vehicles and robotic systems rely on accurate perception of their surroundings. Scene understanding is one of the crucial components of perception modules. Among all available sensors, LiDARs are one of the essential sensing modalities of autonomous driving systems due to their active sensing nature with high resolution of sensor readings. Accurate and fast semantic segmentation methods are needed to fully utilize LiDAR sensors for scene understanding. In this paper, we present Lite-HDSeg, a novel real-time convolutional neural network for semantic segmentation of full $3$D LiDAR point clouds. Lite-HDSeg can achieve the best accuracy vs. computational complexity trade-off in SemanticKitti benchmark and is designed on the basis of a new encoder-decoder architecture with light-weight harmonic dense convolutions as its core. Moreover, we introduce ICM, an improved global contextual module to capture multi-scale contextual features, and MCSPN, a multi-class Spatial Propagation Network to further refine the semantic boundaries. Our experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art semantic segmentation approaches which can run real-time, thus is suitable for robotic and autonomous driving applications.
Multilingual Multimodal Pre-training for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer of Vision-Language Models
Authors: Po-Yao Huang, Mandela Patrick, Junjie Hu, Graham Neubig, Florian Metze, Alexander Hauptmann
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Image Retrieval, Text-to-video search, Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

This paper studies zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of vision-language models. Specifically, we focus on multilingual text-to-video search and propose a Transformer-based model that learns contextualized multilingual multimodal embeddings. Under a zero-shot setting, we empirically demonstrate that performance degrades significantly when we query the multilingual text-video model with non-English sentences. To address this problem, we introduce a multilingual multimodal pre-training strategy, and collect a new multilingual instructional video dataset (MultiHowTo100M) for pre-training. Experiments on VTT show that our method significantly improves video search in non-English languages without additional annotations. Furthermore, when multilingual annotations are available, our method outperforms recent baselines by a large margin in multilingual text-to-video search on VTT and VATEX; as well as in multilingual text-to-image search on Multi30K. Our model and Multi-HowTo100M is available at http://github.com/berniebear/Multi-HT100M.
Multi-Robot Routing with Time Windows: A Column Generation Approach
Authors: Naveed Haghani, Jiaoyang Li, Sven Koenig, Gautam Kunapuli, Claudio Contardo, Amelia Regan, Julian Yarkony
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

Robots performing tasks in warehouses provide the first example of wide-spread adoption of autonomous vehicles in transportation and logistics. The efficiency of these operations, which can vary widely in practice, are a key factor in the success of supply chains. In this work we consider the problem of coordinating a fleet of robots performing picking operations in a warehouse so as to maximize the net profit achieved within a time period while respecting problem- and robot-specific constraints. We formulate the problem as a weighted set packing problem where the elements in consideration are items on the warehouse floor that can be picked up and delivered within specified time windows. We enforce the constraint that robots must not collide, that each item is picked up and delivered by at most one robot, and that the number of robots active at any time does not exceed the total number available. Since the set of routes is exponential in the size of the input, we attack optimization of the resulting integer linear program using column generation, where pricing amounts to solving an elementary resource-constrained shortest-path problem. We propose an efficient optimization scheme that avoids consideration of every increment within the time windows. We also propose a heuristic pricing algorithm that can efficiently solve the pricing subproblem. While this itself is an important problem, the insights gained from solving these problems effectively can lead to new advances in other time-widow constrained vehicle routing problems.
GSVNet: Guided Spatially-Varying Convolution for Fast Semantic Segmentation on Video
Authors: Shih-Po Lee, Si-Cun Chen, Wen-Hsiao Peng
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

This paper addresses fast semantic segmentation on video.Video segmentation often calls for real-time, or even fasterthan real-time, processing. One common recipe for conserving computation arising from feature extraction is to propagate features of few selected keyframes. However, recent advances in fast image segmentation make these solutions less attractive. To leverage fast image segmentation for furthering video segmentation, we propose a simple yet efficient propagation framework. Specifically, we perform lightweight flow estimation in 1/8-downscaled image space for temporal warping in segmentation outpace space. Moreover, we introduce a guided spatially-varying convolution for fusing segmentations derived from the previous and current frames, to mitigate propagation error and enable lightweight feature extraction on non-keyframes. Experimental results on Cityscapes and CamVid show that our scheme achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy-throughput trade-off on video segmentation.
Towards Indirect Top-Down Road Transport Emissions Estimation
Authors: Ryan Mukherjee, Derek Rollend, Gordon Christie, Armin Hadzic, Sally Matson, Anshu Saksena, Marisa Hughes
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00

Road transportation is one of the largest sectors of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions affecting climate change. Tackling climate change as a global community will require new capabilities to measure and inventory road transport emissions. However, the large scale and distributed nature of vehicle emissions make this sector especially challenging for existing inventory methods. In this work, we develop machine learning models that use satellite imagery to perform indirect top-down estimation of road transport emissions. Our initial experiments focus on the United States, where a bottom-up inventory was available for training our models. We achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 39.5 kg CO$_{2}$ of annual road transport emissions, calculated on a pixel-by-pixel (100 m$^{2}$) basis in Sentinel-2 imagery. We also discuss key model assumptions and challenges that need to be addressed to develop models capable of generalizing to global geography. We believe this work is the first published approach for automated indirect top-down estimation of road transport sector emissions using visual imagery and represents a critical step towards scalable, global, near-real-time road transportation emissions inventories that are measured both independently and objectively.
Semi-Supervised Graph-to-Graph Translation
Authors: Tianxiang Zhao, Xianfeng Tang, Xiang Zhang, Suhang Wang
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph-To-Graph Translation, Translation

Graph translation is very promising research direction and has a wide range of potential real-world applications. Graph is a natural structure for representing relationship and interactions, and its translation can encode the intrinsic semantic changes of relationships in different scenarios. However, despite its seemingly wide possibilities, usage of graph translation so far is still quite limited. One important reason is the lack of high-quality paired dataset. For example, we can easily build graphs representing peoples' shared music tastes and those representing co-purchase behavior, but a well paired dataset is much more expensive to obtain. Therefore, in this work, we seek to provide a graph translation model in the semi-supervised scenario. This task is non-trivial, because graph translation involves changing the semantics in the form of link topology and node attributes, which is difficult to capture due to the combinatory nature and inter-dependencies. Furthermore, due to the high order of freedom in graph's composition, it is difficult to assure the generalization ability of trained models. These difficulties impose a tighter requirement for the exploitation of unpaired samples. Addressing them, we propose to construct a dual representation space, where transformation is performed explicitly to model the semantic transitions. Special encoder/decoder structures are designed, and auxiliary mutual information loss is also adopted to enforce the alignment of unpaired/paired examples. We evaluate the proposed method in three different datasets.
GraphSMOTE: Imbalanced Node Classification on Graphs with Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Tianxiang Zhao, Xiang Zhang, Suhang Wang
Date: 2021-03-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Graph Learning, Node Classification

Node classification is an important research topic in graph learning. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance of node classification. However, existing GNNs address the problem where node samples for different classes are balanced; while for many real-world scenarios, some classes may have much fewer instances than others. Directly training a GNN classifier in this case would under-represent samples from those minority classes and result in sub-optimal performance. Therefore, it is very important to develop GNNs for imbalanced node classification. However, the work on this is rather limited. Hence, we seek to extend previous imbalanced learning techniques for i.i.d data to the imbalanced node classification task to facilitate GNN classifiers. In particular, we choose to adopt synthetic minority over-sampling algorithms, as they are found to be the most effective and stable. This task is non-trivial, as previous synthetic minority over-sampling algorithms fail to provide relation information for newly synthesized samples, which is vital for learning on graphs. Moreover, node attributes are high-dimensional. Directly over-sampling in the original input domain could generates out-of-domain samples, which may impair the accuracy of the classifier. We propose a novel framework, GraphSMOTE, in which an embedding space is constructed to encode the similarity among the nodes. New samples are synthesize in this space to assure genuineness. In addition, an edge generator is trained simultaneously to model the relation information, and provide it for those new samples. This framework is general and can be easily extended into different variations. The proposed framework is evaluated using three different datasets, and it outperforms all baselines with a large margin.