pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Adversarially Robust Neural Architectures
Authors: Minjing Dong, Yanxi Li, Yunhe Wang, Chang Xu
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Robustness

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing methods are devoted to developing various robust training strategies or regularizations to update the weights of the neural network. But beyond the weights, the overall structure and information flow in the network are explicitly determined by the neural architecture, which remains unexplored. This paper thus aims to improve the adversarial robustness of the network from the architecture perspective. We explore the relationship among adversarial robustness, Lipschitz constant, and architecture parameters and show that an appropriate constraint on architecture parameters could reduce the Lipschitz constant to further improve the robustness. The importance of architecture parameters could vary from operation to operation or connection to connection. We approximate the Lipschitz constant of the entire network through a univariate log-normal distribution, whose mean and variance are related to architecture parameters. The confidence can be fulfilled through formulating a constraint on the distribution parameters based on the cumulative function. Compared with adversarially trained neural architectures searched by various NAS algorithms as well as efficient human-designed models, our algorithm empirically achieves the best performance among all the models under various attacks on different datasets.
A Practical Chinese Dependency Parser Based on A Large-scale Dataset
Authors: Shuai Zhang, Lijie Wang, Ke Sun, Xinyan Xiao
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Dependency Parsing

Dependency parsing is a longstanding natural language processing task, with its outputs crucial to various downstream tasks. Recently, neural network based (NN-based) dependency parsing has achieved significant progress and obtained the state-of-the-art results. As we all know, NN-based approaches require massive amounts of labeled training data, which is very expensive because it requires human annotation by experts. Thus few industrial-oriented dependency parser tools are publicly available. In this report, we present Baidu Dependency Parser (DDParser), a new Chinese dependency parser trained on a large-scale manually labeled dataset called Baidu Chinese Treebank (DuCTB). DuCTB consists of about one million annotated sentences from multiple sources including search logs, Chinese newswire, various forum discourses, and conversation programs. DDParser is extended on the graph-based biaffine parser to accommodate to the characteristics of Chinese dataset. We conduct experiments on two test sets: the standard test set with the same distribution as the training set and the random test set sampled from other sources, and the labeled attachment scores (LAS) of them are 92.9% and 86.9% respectively. DDParser achieves the state-of-the-art results, and is released at https://github.com/baidu/DDParser.
PCPL: Predicate-Correlation Perception Learning for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation
Authors: Shaotian Yan, Chen Shen, Zhongming Jin, Jianqiang Huang, Rongxin Jiang, Yaowu Chen, Xian-Sheng Hua
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Scene Graph Generation, Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Today, scene graph generation(SGG) task is largely limited in realistic scenarios, mainly due to the extremely long-tailed bias of predicate annotation distribution. Thus, tackling the class imbalance trouble of SGG is critical and challenging. In this paper, we first discover that when predicate labels have strong correlation with each other, prevalent re-balancing strategies(e.g., re-sampling and re-weighting) will give rise to either over-fitting the tail data(e.g., bench sitting on sidewalk rather than on), or still suffering the adverse effect from the original uneven distribution(e.g., aggregating varied parked on/standing on/sitting on into on). We argue the principal reason is that re-balancing strategies are sensitive to the frequencies of predicates yet blind to their relatedness, which may play a more important role to promote the learning of predicate features. Therefore, we propose a novel Predicate-Correlation Perception Learning(PCPL for short) scheme to adaptively seek out appropriate loss weights by directly perceiving and utilizing the correlation among predicate classes. Moreover, our PCPL framework is further equipped with a graph encoder module to better extract context features. Extensive experiments on the benchmark VG150 dataset show that the proposed PCPL performs markedly better on tail classes while well-preserving the performance on head ones, which significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
MultiSegVA: Using Visual Analytics to Segment Biologging Time Series on Multiple Scales
Authors: Philipp Meschenmoser, Juri F. Buchmüller, Daniel Seebacher, Martin Wikelski, Daniel A. Keim
Date: 2020-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Segmentation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Segmenting biologging time series of animals on multiple temporal scales is an essential step that requires complex techniques with careful parameterization and possibly cross-domain expertise. Yet, there is a lack of visual-interactive tools that strongly support such multi-scale segmentation. To close this gap, we present our MultiSegVA platform for interactively defining segmentation techniques and parameters on multiple temporal scales. MultiSegVA primarily contributes tailored, visual-interactive means and visual analytics paradigms for segmenting unlabeled time series on multiple scales. Further, to flexibly compose the multi-scale segmentation, the platform contributes a new visual query language that links a variety of segmentation techniques. To illustrate our approach, we present a domain-oriented set of segmentation techniques derived in collaboration with movement ecologists. We demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of MultiSegVA in two real-world use cases from movement ecology, related to behavior analysis after environment-aware segmentation, and after progressive clustering. Expert feedback from movement ecologists shows the effectiveness of tailored visual-interactive means and visual analytics paradigms at segmenting multi-scale data, enabling them to perform semantically meaningful analyses. A third use case demonstrates that MultiSegVA is generalizable to other domains.
GAIT: Gradient Adjusted Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Ibrahim Batuhan Akkaya, Ugur Halici
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation, Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation

Image-to-image translation (IIT) has made much progress recently with the development of adversarial learning. In most of the recent work, an adversarial loss is utilized to match the distributions of the translated and target image sets. However, this may create artifacts if two domains have different marginal distributions, for example, in uniform areas. In this work, we propose an unsupervised IIT method that preserves the uniform regions after the translation. The gradient adjustment loss, which is the L2 norm between the Sobel response of the target image and the adjusted Sobel response of the source images, is utilized. The proposed method is validated on the jellyfish-to-Haeckel dataset, which is prepared to demonstrate the mentioned problem, which contains images with different background distributions. We demonstrate that our method obtained a performance gain compared to the baseline method qualitatively and quantitatively, showing the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Efficient, high-performance pancreatic segmentation using multi-scale feature extraction
Authors: Moritz Knolle, Georgios Kaissis, Friederike Jungmann, Sebastian Ziegelmayer, Daniel Sasse, Marcus Makowski, Daniel Rueckert, Rickmer Braren
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

For artificial intelligence-based image analysis methods to reach clinical applicability, the development of high-performance algorithms is crucial. For example, existent segmentation algorithms based on natural images are neither efficient in their parameter use nor optimized for medical imaging. Here we present MoNet, a highly optimized neural-network-based pancreatic segmentation algorithm focused on achieving high performance by efficient multi-scale image feature utilization.
ALEX: Active Learning based Enhancement of a Model's Explainability
Authors: Ishani Mondal, Debasis Ganguly
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

An active learning (AL) algorithm seeks to construct an effective classifier with a minimal number of labeled examples in a bootstrapping manner. While standard AL heuristics, such as selecting those points for annotation for which a classification model yields least confident predictions, there has been no empirical investigation to see if these heuristics lead to models that are more interpretable to humans. In the era of data-driven learning, this is an important research direction to pursue. This paper describes our work-in-progress towards developing an AL selection function that in addition to model effectiveness also seeks to improve on the interpretability of a model during the bootstrapping steps. Concretely speaking, our proposed selection function trains an `explainer' model in addition to the classifier model, and favours those instances where a different part of the data is used, on an average, to explain the predicted class. Initial experiments exhibited encouraging trends in showing that such a heuristic can lead to developing more effective and more explainable end-to-end data-driven classifiers.
Breast mass detection in digital mammography based on anchor-free architecture
Authors: Haichao Cao
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Transfer Learning

Background and Objective: Accurate detection of breast masses in mammography images is critical to diagnose early breast cancer, which can greatly improve the patients survival rate. However, it is still a big challenge due to the heterogeneity of breast masses and the complexity of their surrounding environment.Methods: To address these problems, we propose a one-stage object detection architecture, called Breast Mass Detection Network (BMassDNet), based on anchor-free and feature pyramid which makes the detection of breast masses of different sizes well adapted. We introduce a truncation normalization method and combine it with adaptive histogram equalization to enhance the contrast between the breast mass and the surrounding environment. Meanwhile, to solve the overfitting problem caused by small data size, we propose a natural deformation data augmentation method and mend the train data dynamic updating method based on the data complexity to effectively utilize the limited data. Finally, we use transfer learning to assist the training process and to improve the robustness of the model ulteriorly.Results: On the INbreast dataset, each image has an average of 0.495 false positives whilst the recall rate is 0.930; On the DDSM dataset, when each image has 0.599 false positives, the recall rate reaches 0.943.Conclusions: The experimental results on datasets INbreast and DDSM show that the proposed BMassDNet can obtain competitive detection performance over the current top ranked methods.
e-TLD: Event-based Framework for Dynamic Object Tracking
Authors: Bharath Ramesh, Shihao Zhang, Hong Yang, Andres Ussa, Matthew Ong, Garrick Orchard, Cheng Xiang
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking

This paper presents a long-term object tracking framework with a moving event camera under general tracking conditions. A first of its kind for these revolutionary cameras, the tracking framework uses a discriminative representation for the object with online learning, and detects and re-tracks the object when it comes back into the field-of-view. One of the key novelties is the use of an event-based local sliding window technique that tracks reliably in scenes with cluttered and textured background. In addition, Bayesian bootstrapping is used to assist real-time processing and boost the discriminative power of the object representation. On the other hand, when the object re-enters the field-of-view of the camera, a data-driven, global sliding window detector locates the object for subsequent tracking. Extensive experiments demonstrate the ability of the proposed framework to track and detect arbitrary objects of various shapes and sizes, including dynamic objects such as a human. This is a significant improvement compared to earlier works that simply track objects as long as they are visible under simpler background settings. Using the ground truth locations for five different objects under three motion settings, namely translation, rotation and 6-DOF, quantitative measurement is reported for the event-based tracking framework with critical insights on various performance issues. Finally, real-time implementation in C++ highlights tracking ability under scale, rotation, view-point and occlusion scenarios in a lab setting.
Online system identification in a Duffing oscillator by free energy minimisation
Authors: Wouter M. Kouw
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction

Online system identification is the estimation of parameters of a dynamical system, such as mass or friction coefficients, for each measurement of the input and output signals. Here, the nonlinear stochastic differential equation of a Duffing oscillator is cast to a generative model and dynamical parameters are inferred using variational message passing on a factor graph of the model. The approach is validated with an experiment on data from an electronic implementation of a Duffing oscillator. The proposed inference procedure performs as well as offline prediction error minimisation in a state-of-the-art nonlinear model.
Retaining Image Feature Matching Performance Under Low Light Conditions
Authors: Pranjay Shyam, Antyanta Bangunharcana, Kyung-Soo Kim
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Low-Light Image Enhancement

Poor image quality in low light images may result in a reduced number of feature matching between images. In this paper, we investigate the performance of feature extraction algorithms in low light environments. To find an optimal setting to retain feature matching performance in low light images, we look into the effect of changing feature acceptance threshold for feature detector and adding pre-processing in the form of Low Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) prior to feature detection. We observe that even in low light images, feature matching using traditional hand-crafted feature detectors still performs reasonably well by lowering the threshold parameter. We also show that applying Low Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) algorithms can improve feature matching even more when paired with the right feature extraction algorithm.
Application of LSTM architectures for next frame forecasting in Sentinel-1 images time series
Authors: Waytehad Moskolaï, Wahabou Abdou, Albert Dipanda, Dina Taiwe Kolyang
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: SSIM, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

L'analyse pr{\'e}dictive permet d'estimer les tendances des {\'e}v{\`e}nements futurs. De nos jours, les algorithmes Deep Learning permettent de faire de bonnes pr{\'e}dictions. Cependant, pour chaque type de probl{\`e}me donn{\'e}, il est n{\'e}cessaire de choisir l'architecture optimale. Dans cet article, les mod{\`e}les Stack-LSTM, CNN-LSTM et ConvLSTM sont appliqu{\'e}s {\`a} une s{\'e}rie temporelle d'images radar sentinel-1, le but {\'e}tant de pr{\'e}dire la prochaine occurrence dans une s{\'e}quence. Les r{\'e}sultats exp{\'e}rimentaux {\'e}valu{\'e}s {\`a} l'aide des indicateurs de performance tels que le RMSE et le MAE, le temps de traitement et l'index de similarit{\'e} SSIM, montrent que chacune des trois architectures peut produire de bons r{\'e}sultats en fonction des param{\`e}tres utilis{\'e}s.
Intrinsic Relationship Reasoning for Small Object Detection
Authors: Kui Fu, Jia Li, Lin Ma, Kai Mu, Yonghong Tian
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection

The small objects in images and videos are usually not independent individuals. Instead, they more or less present some semantic and spatial layout relationships with each other. Modeling and inferring such intrinsic relationships can thereby be beneficial for small object detection. In this paper, we propose a novel context reasoning approach for small object detection which models and infers the intrinsic semantic and spatial layout relationships between objects. Specifically, we first construct a semantic module to model the sparse semantic relationships based on the initial regional features, and a spatial layout module to model the sparse spatial layout relationships based on their position and shape information, respectively. Both of them are then fed into a context reasoning module for integrating the contextual information with respect to the objects and their relationships, which is further fused with the original regional visual features for classification and regression. Experimental results reveal that the proposed approach can effectively boost the small object detection performance.
Convolutional Nonlinear Dictionary with Cascaded Structure Filter Banks
Authors: Ruiki Kobayashi, Shogo Muramatsu
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

This study proposes a convolutional nonlinear dictionary (CNLD) for image restoration using cascaded filter banks. Generally, convolutional neural networks (CNN) demonstrate their practicality in image restoration applications; however, existing CNNs are constructed without considering the relationship among atomic images (convolution kernels). As a result, there remains room for discussing the role of design spaces. To provide a framework for constructing an effective and structured convolutional network, this study proposes the CNLD. The backpropagation learning procedure is derived from certain image restoration experiments, and thereby the significance of CNLD is verified. It is demonstrated that the number of parameters is reduced while preserving the restoration performance.
Automated Storytelling via Causal, Commonsense Plot Ordering
Authors: Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Wesley Cheung, William Broniec, Mark O. Riedl
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00

Automated story plot generation is the task of generating a coherent sequence of plot events. Causal relations between plot events are believed to increase the perception of story and plot coherence. In this work, we introduce the concept of soft causal relations as causal relations inferred from commonsense reasoning. We demonstrate C2PO, an approach to narrative generation that operationalizes this concept through Causal, Commonsense Plot Ordering. Using human-participant protocols, we evaluate our system against baseline systems with different commonsense reasoning reasoning and inductive biases to determine the role of soft causal relations in perceived story quality. Through these studies we also probe the interplay of how changes in commonsense norms across storytelling genres affect perceptions of story quality.
A Bayesian Approach with Type-2 Student-tMembership Function for T-S Model Identification
Authors: Vikas Singh, Homanga Bharadhwaj, Nishchal K. Verma
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, regression

Clustering techniques have been proved highly suc-cessful for Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model identification. Inparticular, fuzzyc-regression clustering based on type-2 fuzzyset has been shown the remarkable results on non-sparse databut their performance degraded on sparse data. In this paper, aninnovative architecture for fuzzyc-regression model is presentedand a novel student-tdistribution based membership functionis designed for sparse data modelling. To avoid the overfitting,we have adopted a Bayesian approach for incorporating aGaussian prior on the regression coefficients. Additional noveltyof our approach lies in type-reduction where the final output iscomputed using Karnik Mendel algorithm and the consequentparameters of the model are optimized using Stochastic GradientDescent method. As detailed experimentation, the result showsthat proposed approach outperforms on standard datasets incomparison of various state-of-the-art methods.
A reinforcement learning approach to hybrid control design
Authors: Meet Gandhi, Atreyee Kundu, Shalabh Bhatnagar
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper we design hybrid control policies for hybrid systems whose mathematical models are unknown. Our contributions are threefold. First, we propose a framework for modelling the hybrid control design problem as a single Markov Decision Process (MDP). This result facilitates the application of off-the-shelf algorithms from Reinforcement Learning (RL) literature towards designing optimal control policies. Second, we model a set of benchmark examples of hybrid control design problem in the proposed MDP framework. Third, we adapt the recently proposed Proximal Policy Optimisation (PPO) algorithm for the hybrid action space and apply it to the above set of problems. It is observed that in each case the algorithm converges and finds the optimal policy.
On the Structures of Representation for the Robustness of Semantic Segmentation to Input Corruption
Authors: Charles Lehman, Dogancan Temel, Ghassan AlRegib
Date: 2020-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is a scene understanding task at the heart of safety-critical applications where robustness to corrupted inputs is essential. Implicit Background Estimation (IBE) has demonstrated to be a promising technique to improve the robustness to out-of-distribution inputs for semantic segmentation models for little to no cost. In this paper, we provide analysis comparing the structures learned as a result of optimization objectives that use Softmax, IBE, and Sigmoid in order to improve understanding their relationship to robustness. As a result of this analysis, we propose combining Sigmoid with IBE (SCrIBE) to improve robustness. Finally, we demonstrate that SCrIBE exhibits superior segmentation performance aggregated across all corruptions and severity levels with a mIOU of 42.1 compared to both IBE 40.3 and the Softmax Baseline 37.5.