pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PESAO: Psychophysical Experimental Setup for Active Observers
Authors: Markus D. Solbach, John K. Tsotsos
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00

Most past and present research in computer vision involves passively observed data. Humans, however, are active observers outside the lab; they explore, search, select what and how to look. Nonetheless, how exactly active observation occurs in humans so that it can inform the design of active computer vision systems is an open problem. PESAO is designed for investigating active, visual observation in a 3D world. The goal was to build an experimental setup for various active perception tasks with human subjects (active observers) in mind that is capable of tracking the head and gaze. While many studies explore human performances, usually, they use line drawings portrayed in 2D, and no active observer is involved. PESAO allows us to bring many studies to the three-dimensional world, even involving active observers. In our instantiation, it spans an area of 400cm x 300cm and can track active observers at a frequency of 120Hz. Furthermore, PESAO provides tracking and recording of 6D head motion, gaze, eye movement-type, first-person video, head-mounted IMU sensor, birds-eye video, and experimenter notes. All are synchronized at microsecond resolution.
Deep Neural Network Approach for Annual Luminance Simulations
Authors: Yue Liu, Alex Colburn, Mehlika Inanici
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00

Annual luminance maps provide meaningful evaluations for occupants' visual comfort, preferences, and perception. However, acquiring long-term luminance maps require labor-intensive and time-consuming simulations or impracticable long-term field measurements. This paper presents a novel data-driven machine learning approach that makes annual luminance-based evaluations more efficient and accessible. The methodology is based on predicting the annual luminance maps from a limited number of point-in-time high dynamic range imagery by utilizing a deep neural network (DNN). Panoramic views are utilized, as they can be post-processed to study multiple view directions. The proposed DNN model can faithfully predict high-quality annual panoramic luminance maps from one of the three options within 30 minutes training time: a) point-in-time luminance imagery spanning 5% of the year, when evenly distributed during daylight hours, b) one-month hourly imagery generated or collected continuously during daylight hours around the equinoxes (8% of the year); or c) 9 days of hourly data collected around the spring equinox, summer and winter solstices (2.5% of the year) all suffice to predict the luminance maps for the rest of the year. The DNN predicted high-quality panoramas are validated against Radiance (RPICT) renderings using a series of quantitative and qualitative metrics. The most efficient predictions are achieved with 9 days of hourly data collected around the spring equinox, summer and winter solstices. The results clearly show that practitioners and researchers can efficiently incorporate long-term luminance-based metrics over multiple view directions into the design and research processes using the proposed DNN workflow.
CVPR 2020 Continual Learning in Computer Vision Competition: Approaches, Results, Current Challenges and Future Directions
Authors: Vincenzo Lomonaco, Lorenzo Pellegrini, Pau Rodriguez, Massimo Caccia, Qi She, Yu Chen, Quentin Jodelet, Ruiping Wang, Zheda Mai, David Vazquez, German I. Parisi, Nikhil Churamani, Marc Pickett, Issam Laradji, Davide Maltoni
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Continual Learning

In the last few years, we have witnessed a renewed and fast-growing interest in continual learning with deep neural networks with the shared objective of making current AI systems more adaptive, efficient and autonomous. However, despite the significant and undoubted progress of the field in addressing the issue of catastrophic forgetting, benchmarking different continual learning approaches is a difficult task by itself. In fact, given the proliferation of different settings, training and evaluation protocols, metrics and nomenclature, it is often tricky to properly characterize a continual learning algorithm, relate it to other solutions and gauge its real-world applicability. The first Continual Learning in Computer Vision challenge held at CVPR in 2020 has been one of the first opportunities to evaluate different continual learning algorithms on a common hardware with a large set of shared evaluation metrics and 3 different settings based on the realistic CORe50 video benchmark. In this paper, we report the main results of the competition, which counted more than 79 teams registered, 11 finalists and 2300$ in prizes. We also summarize the winning approaches, current challenges and future research directions.
A Machine Learning Approach to Detect Suicidal Ideation in US Veterans Based on Acoustic and Linguistic Features of Speech
Authors: Vaibhav Sourirajan, Anas Belouali, Mary Ann Dutton, Matthew Reinhard, Jyotishman Pathak
Date: 2020-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Preventing Veteran suicide is a national priority. The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) collects, analyzes, and publishes data to inform suicide prevention strategies. Current approaches for detecting suicidal ideation mostly rely on patient self report which are inadequate and time consuming. In this research study, our goal was to automate suicidal ideation detection from acoustic and linguistic features of an individual's speech using machine learning (ML) algorithms. Using voice data collected from Veterans enrolled in a large interventional study on Gulf War Illness at the Washington DC VA Medical Center, we conducted an evaluation of the performance of different ML approaches in achieving our objective. By fitting both classical ML and deep learning models to the dataset, we identified the algorithms that were most effective for each feature set. Among classical machine learning algorithms, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) trained on acoustic features performed best in classifying suicidal Veterans. Among deep learning methods, the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained on the linguistic features performed best. Our study shows that speech analysis in a machine learning pipeline is a promising approach for detecting suicidality among Veterans.
Field-Embedded Factorization Machines for Click-through rate prediction
Authors: Harshit Pande
Date: 2020-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Prediction, Recommendation Systems

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction models are common in many online applications such as digital advertising and recommender systems. Field-Aware Factorization Machine (FFM) and Field-weighted Factorization Machine (FwFM) are state-of-the-art among the shallow models for CTR prediction. Recently, many deep learning-based models have also been proposed. Among deeper models, DeepFM, xDeepFM, AutoInt+, and FiBiNet are state-of-the-art models. The deeper models combine a core architectural component, which learns explicit feature interactions, with a deep neural network (DNN) component. We propose a novel shallow Field-Embedded Factorization Machine (FEFM) and its deep counterpart Deep Field-Embedded Factorization Machine (DeepFEFM). FEFM learns symmetric matrix embeddings for each field pair along with the usual single vector embeddings for each feature. FEFM has significantly lower model complexity than FFM and roughly the same complexity as FwFM. FEFM also has insightful mathematical properties about important fields and field interactions. DeepFEFM combines the FEFM interaction vectors learned by the FEFM component with a DNN and is thus able to learn higher order interactions. We conducted comprehensive experiments over a wide range of hyperparameters on two large publicly available real-world datasets. When comparing test AUC and log loss, the results show that FEFM and DeepFEFM outperform the existing state-of-the-art shallow and deep models for CTR prediction tasks. We have made the code of FEFM and DeepFEFM available in the DeepCTR library (https://github.com/shenweichen/DeepCTR).
Is there a role for statistics in artificial intelligence?
Authors: Sarah Friedrich, Gerd Antes, Sigrid Behr, Harald Binder, Werner Brannath, Florian Dumpert, Katja Ickstadt, Hans Kestler, Johannes Lederer, Heinz Leitgöb, Markus Pauly, Ansgar Steland, Adalbert Wilhelm, Tim Friede
Date: 2020-09-13 00:00:00

The research on and application of artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered a comprehensive scientific, economic, social and political discussion. Here we argue that statistics, as an interdisciplinary scientific field, plays a substantial role both for the theoretical and practical understanding of AI and for its future development. Statistics might even be considered a core element of AI. With its specialist knowledge of data evaluation, starting with the precise formulation of the research question and passing through a study design stage on to analysis and interpretation of the results, statistics is a natural partner for other disciplines in teaching, research and practice. This paper aims at contributing to the current discussion by highlighting the relevance of statistical methodology in the context of AI development. In particular, we discuss contributions of statistics to the field of artificial intelligence concerning methodological development, planning and design of studies, assessment of data quality and data collection, differentiation of causality and associations and assessment of uncertainty in results. Moreover, the paper also deals with the equally necessary and meaningful extension of curricula in schools and universities.
AOBTM: Adaptive Online Biterm Topic Modeling for Version Sensitive Short-texts Analysis
Authors: Mohammad Abdul Hadi, Fatemeh H Fard
Date: 2020-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Topic Models

Analysis of mobile app reviews has shown its important role in requirement engineering, software maintenance and evolution of mobile apps. Mobile app developers check their users' reviews frequently to clarify the issues experienced by users or capture the new issues that are introduced due to a recent app update. App reviews have a dynamic nature and their discussed topics change over time. The changes in the topics among collected reviews for different versions of an app can reveal important issues about the app update. A main technique in this analysis is using topic modeling algorithms. However, app reviews are short texts and it is challenging to unveil their latent topics over time. Conventional topic models suffer from the sparsity of word co-occurrence patterns while inferring topics for short texts. Furthermore, these algorithms cannot capture topics over numerous consecutive time-slices. Online topic modeling algorithms speed up the inference of topic models for the texts collected in the latest time-slice by saving a fraction of data from the previous time-slice. But these algorithms do not analyze the statistical-data of all the previous time-slices, which can confer contributions to the topic distribution of the current time-slice. We propose Adaptive Online Biterm Topic Model (AOBTM) to model topics in short texts adaptively. AOBTM alleviates the sparsity problem in short-texts and considers the statistical-data for an optimal number of previous time-slices. We also propose parallel algorithms to automatically determine the optimal number of topics and the best number of previous versions that should be considered in topic inference phase. Automatic evaluation on collections of app reviews and real-world short text datasets confirm that AOBTM can find more coherent topics and outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.
Interpretable Machine Learning Approaches to Prediction of Chronic Homelessness
Authors: Blake VanBerlo, Matthew A. S. Ross, Jonathan Rivard, Ryan Booker
Date: 2020-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Interpretable Machine Learning, Management

We introduce a machine learning approach to predict chronic homelessness from de-identified client shelter records drawn from a commonly used Canadian homelessness management information system. Using a 30-day time step, a dataset for 6521 individuals was generated. Our model, HIFIS-RNN-MLP, incorporates both static and dynamic features of a client's history to forecast chronic homelessness 6 months into the client's future. The training method was fine-tuned to achieve a high F1-score, giving a desired balance between high recall and precision. Mean recall and precision across 10-fold cross validation were 0.921 and 0.651 respectively. An interpretability method was applied to explain individual predictions and gain insight into the overall factors contributing to chronic homelessness among the population studied. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance and improved stakeholder trust of what is usually a "black box" neural network model through interpretable AI.
Supervised Learning with Projected Entangled Pair States
Authors: Song Cheng, Lei Wang, Pan Zhang
Date: 2020-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Tensor Networks

Tensor networks, a model that originated from quantum physics, has been gradually generalized as efficient models in machine learning in recent years. However, in order to achieve exact contraction, only tree-like tensor networks such as the matrix product states and tree tensor networks have been considered, even for modeling two-dimensional data such as images. In this work, we construct supervised learning models for images using the projected entangled pair states (PEPS), a two-dimensional tensor network having a similar structure prior to natural images. Our approach first performs a feature map, which transforms the image data to a product state on a grid, then contracts the product state to a PEPS with trainable parameters to predict image labels. The tensor elements of PEPS are trained by minimizing differences between training labels and predicted labels. The proposed model is evaluated on image classifications using the MNIST and the Fashion-MNIST datasets. We show that our model is significantly superior to existing models using tree-like tensor networks. Moreover, using the same input features, our method performs as well as the multilayer perceptron classifier, but with much fewer parameters and is more stable. Our results shed light on potential applications of two-dimensional tensor network models in machine learning.
Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) from SAR Imaginary by Using Machine Learning Techniques
Authors: Umut Özkaya
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) in Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images becomes a very challenging problem owing to containing high level noise. In this study, a machine learning-based method is proposed to detect different moving and stationary targets using SAR images. First Order Statistical (FOS) features were obtained from Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) on gray level SAR images. Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM), Gray Level Run Length Matrix (GLRLM) and Gray Level Size Zone Matrix (GLSZM) algorithms are also used. These features are provided as input for the training and testing stage Support Vector Machine (SVM) model with Gaussian kernels. 4-fold cross-validations were implemented in performance evaluation. Obtained results showed that GLCM + SVM algorithm is the best model with 95.26% accuracy. This proposed method shows that moving and stationary targets in MSTAR database could be recognized with high performance.
Monocular Depth Estimation Using Multi Scale Neural Network And Feature Fusion
Authors: Abhinav Sagar
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, SSIM

Depth estimation from monocular images is a challenging problem in computer vision. In this paper, we tackle this problem using a novel network architecture using multi scale feature fusion. Our network uses two different blocks, first which uses different filter sizes for convolution and merges all the individual feature maps. The second block uses dilated convolutions in place of fully connected layers thus reducing computations and increasing the receptive field. We present a new loss function for training the network which uses a depth regression term, SSIM loss term and a multinomial logistic loss term combined. We train and test our network on Make 3D dataset, NYU Depth V2 dataset and Kitti dataset using standard evaluation metrics for depth estimation comprised of RMSE loss and SILog loss. Our network outperforms previous state of the art methods with lesser parameters.
Listener Modeling and Context-aware Music Recommendation Based on Country Archetypes
Authors: Markus Schedl, Christine Bauer, Wolfgang Reisinger, Dominik Kowald, Elisabeth Lex
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Recommendation

Music preferences are strongly shaped by the cultural and socio-economic background of the listener, which is reflected, to a considerable extent, in country-specific music listening profiles. Previous work has already identified several country-specific differences in the popularity distribution of music artists listened to. In particular, what constitutes the "music mainstream" strongly varies between countries. To complement and extend these results, the article at hand delivers the following major contributions: First, using state-of-the-art unsupervised learning techniques, we identify and thoroughly investigate (1) country profiles of music preferences on the fine-grained level of music tracks (in contrast to earlier work that relied on music preferences on the artist level) and (2) country archetypes that subsume countries sharing similar patterns of listening preferences. Second, we formulate four user models that leverage the user's country information on music preferences. Among others, we propose a user modeling approach to describe a music listener as a vector of similarities over the identified country clusters or archetypes. Third, we propose a context-aware music recommendation system that leverages implicit user feedback, where context is defined via the four user models. More precisely, it is a multi-layer generative model based on a variational autoencoder, in which contextual features can influence recommendations through a gating mechanism. Fourth, we thoroughly evaluate the proposed recommendation system and user models on a real-world corpus of more than one billion listening records of users around the world (out of which we use 369 million in our experiments) and show its merits vis-a-vis state-of-the-art algorithms that do not exploit this type of context information.
Multi-Task Learning with Deep Neural Networks: A Survey
Authors: Michael Crawshaw
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Survey

Multi-task learning (MTL) is a subfield of machine learning in which multiple tasks are simultaneously learned by a shared model. Such approaches offer advantages like improved data efficiency, reduced overfitting through shared representations, and fast learning by leveraging auxiliary information. However, the simultaneous learning of multiple tasks presents new design and optimization challenges, and choosing which tasks should be learned jointly is in itself a non-trivial problem. In this survey, we give an overview of multi-task learning methods for deep neural networks, with the aim of summarizing both the well-established and most recent directions within the field. Our discussion is structured according to a partition of the existing deep MTL techniques into three groups: architectures, optimization methods, and task relationship learning. We also provide a summary of common multi-task benchmarks.
Prune Responsibly
Authors: Michela Paganini
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness, image-classification, Image Classification, Network Pruning

Irrespective of the specific definition of fairness in a machine learning application, pruning the underlying model affects it. We investigate and document the emergence and exacerbation of undesirable per-class performance imbalances, across tasks and architectures, for almost one million categories considered across over 100K image classification models that undergo a pruning process.We demonstrate the need for transparent reporting, inclusive of bias, fairness, and inclusion metrics, in real-life engineering decision-making around neural network pruning. In response to the calls for quantitative evaluation of AI models to be population-aware, we present neural network pruning as a tangible application domain where the ways in which accuracy-efficiency trade-offs disproportionately affect underrepresented or outlier groups have historically been overlooked. We provide a simple, Pareto-based framework to insert fairness considerations into value-based operating point selection processes, and to re-evaluate pruning technique choices.
Applying a random projection algorithm to optimize machine learning model for breast lesion classification
Authors: Morteza Heidari, Sivaramakrishnan Lakshmivarahan, Seyedehnafiseh Mirniaharikandehei, Gopichandh Danala, Sai Kiran R. Maryada, Hong Liu, Bin Zheng
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Dimensionality Reduction, General Classification, Lesion Classification

Machine learning is widely used in developing computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) schemes of medical images. However, CAD usually computes large number of image features from the targeted regions, which creates a challenge of how to identify a small and optimal feature vector to build robust machine learning models. In this study, we investigate feasibility of applying a random projection algorithm to build an optimal feature vector from the initially CAD-generated large feature pool and improve performance of machine learning model. We assemble a retrospective dataset involving 1,487 cases of mammograms in which 644 cases have confirmed malignant mass lesions and 843 have benign lesions. A CAD scheme is first applied to segment mass regions and initially compute 181 features. Then, support vector machine (SVM) models embedded with several feature dimensionality reduction methods are built to predict likelihood of lesions being malignant. All SVM models are trained and tested using a leave-one-case-out cross-validation method. SVM generates a likelihood score of each segmented mass region depicting on one-view mammogram. By fusion of two scores of the same mass depicting on two-view mammograms, a case-based likelihood score is also evaluated. Comparing with the principle component analyses, nonnegative matrix factorization, and Chi-squared methods, SVM embedded with the random projection algorithm yielded a significantly higher case-based lesion classification performance with the area under ROC curve of 0.84+0.01 (p<0.02). The study demonstrates that the random project algorithm is a promising method to generate optimal feature vectors to help improve performance of machine learning models of medical images.
Is Each Layer Non-trivial in CNN?
Authors: Wei Wang, Yanjie Zhu, Zhuoxu Cui, Dong Liang
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00

Convolutional neural network (CNN) models have achieved great success in many fields. With the advent of ResNet, networks used in practice are getting deeper and wider. However, is each layer non-trivial in networks? To answer this question, we trained a network on the training set, then we replace the network convolution kernels with zeros and test the result models on the test set. We compared experimental results with baseline and showed that we can reach similar or even the same performances. Although convolution kernels are the cores of networks, we demonstrate that some of them are trivial and regular in ResNet.