pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Masked Face Recognition for Secure Authentication
Authors: Aqeel Anwar, Arijit Raychowdhury
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

With the recent world-wide COVID-19 pandemic, using face masks have become an important part of our lives. People are encouraged to cover their faces when in public area to avoid the spread of infection. The use of these face masks has raised a serious question on the accuracy of the facial recognition system used for tracking school/office attendance and to unlock phones. Many organizations use facial recognition as a means of authentication and have already developed the necessary datasets in-house to be able to deploy such a system. Unfortunately, masked faces make it difficult to be detected and recognized, thereby threatening to make the in-house datasets invalid and making such facial recognition systems inoperable. This paper addresses a methodology to use the current facial datasets by augmenting it with tools that enable masked faces to be recognized with low false-positive rates and high overall accuracy, without requiring the user dataset to be recreated by taking new pictures for authentication. We present an open-source tool, MaskTheFace to mask faces effectively creating a large dataset of masked faces. The dataset generated with this tool is then used towards training an effective facial recognition system with target accuracy for masked faces. We report an increase of 38% in the true positive rate for the Facenet system. We also test the accuracy of re-trained system on a custom real-world dataset MFR2 and report similar accuracy.
Improving Deep Stereo Network Generalization with Geometric Priors
Authors: Jialiang Wang, Varun Jampani, Deqing Sun, Charles Loop, Stan Birchfield, Jan Kautz
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00

End-to-end deep learning methods have advanced stereo vision in recent years and obtained excellent results when the training and test data are similar. However, large datasets of diverse real-world scenes with dense ground truth are difficult to obtain and currently not publicly available to the research community. As a result, many algorithms rely on small real-world datasets of similar scenes or synthetic datasets, but end-to-end algorithms trained on such datasets often generalize poorly to different images that arise in real-world applications. As a step towards addressing this problem, we propose to incorporate prior knowledge of scene geometry into an end-to-end stereo network to help networks generalize better. For a given network, we explicitly add a gradient-domain smoothness prior and occlusion reasoning into the network training, while the architecture remains unchanged during inference. Experimentally, we show consistent improvements if we train on synthetic datasets and test on the Middlebury (real images) dataset. Noticeably, we improve PSM-Net accuracy on Middlebury from 5.37 MAE to 3.21 MAE without sacrificing speed.
A Kernel Two-Sample Test for Functional Data
Authors: George Wynne, Andrew B. Duncan
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

We propose a nonparametric two-sample test procedure based on Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) for testing the hypothesis that two samples of functions have the same underlying distribution, using kernels defined on function spaces. This construction is motivated by a scaling analysis of the efficiency of MMD-based tests for datasets of increasing dimension. Theoretical properties of kernels on function spaces and their associated MMD are established and employed to ascertain the efficacy of the newly proposed test, as well as to assess the effects of using functional reconstructions based on discretised function samples. The theoretical results are demonstrated over a range of synthetic and real world datasets.
Looking Deeper into Tabular LIME
Authors: Damien Garreau, Ulrike Von Luxburg
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In this paper, we present a thorough theoretical analysis of the default implementation of LIME in the case of tabular data. We prove that in the large sample limit, the interpretable coefficients provided by Tabular LIME can be computed in an explicit way as a function of the algorithm parameters and some expectation computations related to the black-box model. When the function to explain has some nice algebraic structure (linear, multiplicative, or sparsely depending on a subset of the coordinates), our analysis provides interesting insights into the explanations provided by LIME. These can be applied to a range of machine learning models including Gaussian kernels or CART random forests. As an example, for linear functions we show that LIME has the desirable property to provide explanations that are proportional to the coefficients of the function to explain and to ignore coordinates that are not used by the function to explain. For partition-based regressors, on the other side, we show that LIME produces undesired artifacts that may provide misleading explanations.
Unconstrained optimisation on Riemannian manifolds
Authors: Tuyen Trung Truong
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00

In this paper, we give explicit descriptions of versions of (Local-) Backtracking Gradient Descent and New Q-Newton's method to the Riemannian setting.Here are some easy to state consequences of results in this paper, where X is a general Riemannian manifold of finite dimension and $f:X\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ a $C^2$ function which is Morse (that is, all its critical points are non-degenerate). {\bf Theorem.} For random choices of the hyperparameters in the Riemanian Local Backtracking Gradient Descent algorithm and for random choices of the initial point $x_0$, the sequence $\{x_n\}$ constructed by the algorithm either (i) converges to a local minimum of $f$ or (ii) eventually leaves every compact subsets of $X$ (in other words, diverges to infinity on $X$). If $f$ has compact sublevels, then only the former alternative happens. The convergence rate is the same as in the classical paper by Armijo. {\bf Theorem.} Assume that $f$ is $C^3$. For random choices of the hyperparametes in the Riemannian New Q-Newton's method, if the sequence constructed by the algorithm converges, then the limit is a critical point of $f$. We have a local Stable-Center manifold theorem, near saddle points of $f$, for the dynamical system associated to the algorithm. If the limit point is a non-degenerate minimum point, then the rate of convergence is quadratic. If moreover $X$ is an open subset of a Lie group and the initial point $x_0$ is chosen randomly, then we can globally avoid saddle points. As an application, we propose a general method using Riemannian Backtracking GD to find minimum of a function on a bounded ball in a Euclidean space, and do explicit calculations for calculating the smallest eigenvalue of a symmetric square matrix.
Two Sides of the Same Coin: White-box and Black-box Attacks for Transfer Learning
Authors: Yinghua Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Jian Liang, Kun Bai, Qiang Yang
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Transfer learning has become a common practice for training deep learning models with limited labeled data in a target domain. On the other hand, deep models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Though transfer learning has been widely applied, its effect on model robustness is unclear. To figure out this problem, we conduct extensive empirical evaluations to show that fine-tuning effectively enhances model robustness under white-box FGSM attacks. We also propose a black-box attack method for transfer learning models which attacks the target model with the adversarial examples produced by its source model. To systematically measure the effect of both white-box and black-box attacks, we propose a new metric to evaluate how transferable are the adversarial examples produced by a source model to a target model. Empirical results show that the adversarial examples are more transferable when fine-tuning is used than they are when the two networks are trained independently.
Few Shot Text-Independent speaker verification using 3D-CNN
Authors: Prateek Mishra
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Verification, Text-Independent Speaker Verification

Facial recognition system is one of the major successes of Artificial intelligence and has been used a lot over the last years. But, images are not the only biometric present: audio is another possible biometric that can be used as an alternative to the existing recognition systems. However, the text-independent audio data is not always available for tasks like speaker verification and also no work has been done in the past for text-independent speaker verification assuming very little training data. Therefore, In this paper, we have proposed a novel method to verify the identity of the claimed speaker using very few training data. To achieve this we are using a Siamese neural network with center loss and speaker bias loss. Experiments conducted on the VoxCeleb1 dataset show that the proposed model accuracy even on training with very few data is near to the state of the art model on text-independent speaker verification
Auxiliary-task Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Participant Selection Problem in Mobile Crowdsourcing
Authors: Wei Shen, Xiaonan He, Chuheng Zhang, Qiang Ni, Wanchun Dou, Yan Wang
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Fairness, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In mobile crowdsourcing (MCS), the platform selects participants to complete location-aware tasks from the recruiters aiming to achieve multiple goals (e.g., profit maximization, energy efficiency, and fairness). However, different MCS systems have different goals and there are possibly conflicting goals even in one MCS system. Therefore, it is crucial to design a participant selection algorithm that applies to different MCS systems to achieve multiple goals. To deal with this issue, we formulate the participant selection problem as a reinforcement learning problem and propose to solve it with a novel method, which we call auxiliary-task based deep reinforcement learning (ADRL). We use transformers to extract representations from the context of the MCS system and a pointer network to deal with the combinatorial optimization problem. To improve the sample efficiency, we adopt an auxiliary-task training process that trains the network to predict the imminent tasks from the recruiters, which facilitates the embedding learning of the deep learning model. Additionally, we release a simulated environment on a specific MCS task, the ride-sharing task, and conduct extensive performance evaluations in this environment. The experimental results demonstrate that ADRL outperforms and improves sample efficiency over other well-recognized baselines in various settings.
Using the discrete radon transformation for grayscale image moments
Authors: William Diggin, Michael Diggin
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Image moments are weighted sums over pixel values in a given image and are used in object detection and localization. Raw image moments are derived directly from the image and are fundamental in deriving moment invariants quantities. The current general algorithm for raw image moments is computationally expensive and the number of multiplications needed scales with the number of pixels in the image. For an image of size (N,M), it has O(NM) multiplications. In this paper we outline an algorithm using the Discrete Radon Transformation for computing the raw image moments of a grayscale image. It reduces two dimensional moment calculations to linear combinations of one dimensional moment calculations. We show that the number of multiplications needed scales as O(N + M), making it faster then the most widely used algorithm of raw image moments.
Mask-guided sample selection for Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation
Authors: Miriam Bellver, Amaia Salvador, Jordi Torres, Xavier Giro-i-Nieto
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Image Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Instance Segmentation

Image segmentation methods are usually trained with pixel-level annotations, which require significant human effort to collect. The most common solution to address this constraint is to implement weakly-supervised pipelines trained with lower forms of supervision, such as bounding boxes or scribbles. Another option are semi-supervised methods, which leverage a large amount of unlabeled data and a limited number of strongly-labeled samples. In this second setup, samples to be strongly-annotated can be selected randomly or with an active learning mechanism that chooses the ones that will maximize the model performance. In this work, we propose a sample selection approach to decide which samples to annotate for semi-supervised instance segmentation. Our method consists in first predicting pseudo-masks for the unlabeled pool of samples, together with a score predicting the quality of the mask. This score is an estimate of the Intersection Over Union (IoU) of the segment with the ground truth mask. We study which samples are better to annotate given the quality score, and show how our approach outperforms a random selection, leading to improved performance for semi-supervised instance segmentation with low annotation budgets.
An Economic Perspective on Predictive Maintenance of Filtration Units
Authors: Denis Tan Jing Yu, Adrian Law Wing-Keung
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Management

This paper provides an economic perspective on the predictive maintenance of filtration units. The rise of predictive maintenance is possible due to the growing trend of industry 4.0 and the availability of inexpensive sensors. However, the adoption rate for predictive maintenance by companies remains low. The majority of companies are sticking to corrective and preventive maintenance. This is not due to a lack of information on the technical implementation of predictive maintenance, with an abundance of research papers on state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms that can be used effectively. The main issue is that most upper management has not yet been fully convinced of the idea of predictive maintenance. The economic value of the implementation has to be linked to the predictive maintenance program for better justification by the management. In this study, three machine learning models were trained to demonstrate the economic value of predictive maintenance. Data was collected from a testbed located at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. The testbed closely resembles a real-world water treatment plant. A cost-benefit analysis coupled with Monte Carlo simulation was proposed. It provided a structured approach to document potential costs and savings by implementing a predictive maintenance program. The simulation incorporated real-world risk into a financial model. Financial figures were adapted from CITIC Envirotech Ltd, a leading membrane-based integrated environmental solutions provider. Two scenarios were used to elaborate on the economic values of predictive maintenance. Overall, this study seeks to bridge the gap between technical and business domains of predictive maintenance.
GAN Slimming: All-in-One GAN Compression by A Unified Optimization Framework
Authors: Haotao Wang, Shupeng Gui, Haichuan Yang, Ji Liu, Zhangyang Wang
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: All, Image-to-Image Translation, Quantization, Style Transfer

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have gained increasing popularity in various computer vision applications, and recently start to be deployed to resource-constrained mobile devices. Similar to other deep models, state-of-the-art GANs suffer from high parameter complexities. That has recently motivated the exploration of compressing GANs (usually generators). Compared to the vast literature and prevailing success in compressing deep classifiers, the study of GAN compression remains in its infancy, so far leveraging individual compression techniques instead of more sophisticated combinations. We observe that due to the notorious instability of training GANs, heuristically stacking different compression techniques will result in unsatisfactory results. To this end, we propose the first unified optimization framework combining multiple compression means for GAN compression, dubbed GAN Slimming (GS). GS seamlessly integrates three mainstream compression techniques: model distillation, channel pruning and quantization, together with the GAN minimax objective, into one unified optimization form, that can be efficiently optimized from end to end. Without bells and whistles, GS largely outperforms existing options in compressing image-to-image translation GANs. Specifically, we apply GS to compress CartoonGAN, a state-of-the-art style transfer network, by up to 47 times, with minimal visual quality degradation. Codes and pre-trained models can be found at https://github.com/TAMU-VITA/GAN-Slimming.
Abstractive Summarization of Spoken and Written Instructions with BERT
Authors: Alexandra Savelieva, Bryan Au-Yeung, Vasanth Ramani
Date: 2020-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Articles, Sentence, Sentence segmentation, Transfer Learning

Summarization of speech is a difficult problem due to the spontaneity of the flow, disfluencies, and other issues that are not usually encountered in written texts. Our work presents the first application of the BERTSum model to conversational language. We generate abstractive summaries of narrated instructional videos across a wide variety of topics, from gardening and cooking to software configuration and sports. In order to enrich the vocabulary, we use transfer learning and pretrain the model on a few large cross-domain datasets in both written and spoken English. We also do preprocessing of transcripts to restore sentence segmentation and punctuation in the output of an ASR system. The results are evaluated with ROUGE and Content-F1 scoring for the How2 and WikiHow datasets. We engage human judges to score a set of summaries randomly selected from a dataset curated from HowTo100M and YouTube. Based on blind evaluation, we achieve a level of textual fluency and utility close to that of summaries written by human content creators. The model beats current SOTA when applied to WikiHow articles that vary widely in style and topic, while showing no performance regression on the canonical CNN/DailyMail dataset. Due to the high generalizability of the model across different styles and domains, it has great potential to improve accessibility and discoverability of internet content. We envision this integrated as a feature in intelligent virtual assistants, enabling them to summarize both written and spoken instructional content upon request.
On estimating gaze by self-attention augmented convolutions
Authors: Gabriel Lefundes, Luciano Oliveira
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaze Estimation

Estimation of 3D gaze is highly relevant to multiple fields, including but not limited to interactive systems, specialized human-computer interfaces, and behavioral research. Although recently deep learning methods have boosted the accuracy of appearance-based gaze estimation, there is still room for improvement in the network architectures for this particular task. Therefore we propose here a novel network architecture grounded on self-attention augmented convolutions to improve the quality of the learned features during the training of a shallower residual network. The rationale is that self-attention mechanism can help outperform deeper architectures by learning dependencies between distant regions in full-face images. This mechanism can also create better and more spatially-aware feature representations derived from the face and eye images before gaze regression. We dubbed our framework ARes-gaze, which explores our Attention-augmented ResNet (ARes-14) as twin convolutional backbones. In our experiments, results showed a decrease of the average angular error by 2.38% when compared to state-of-the-art methods on the MPIIFaceGaze data set, and a second-place on the EyeDiap data set. It is noteworthy that our proposed framework was the only one to reach high accuracy simultaneously on both data sets.
JokeMeter at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Convolutional humor
Authors: Martin Docekal, Martin Fajcik, Josef Jon, Pavel Smrz
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2020

This paper describes our system that was designed for Humor evaluation within the SemEval-2020 Task 7. The system is based on convolutional neural network architecture. We investigate the system on the official dataset, and we provide more insight to model itself to see how the learned inner features look.
Label Decoupling Framework for Salient Object Detection
Authors: Jun Wei, Shuhui Wang, Zhe Wu, Chi Su, Qingming Huang, Qi Tian
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Saliency Detection, Salient Object Detection

To get more accurate saliency maps, recent methods mainly focus on aggregating multi-level features from fully convolutional network (FCN) and introducing edge information as auxiliary supervision. Though remarkable progress has been achieved, we observe that the closer the pixel is to the edge, the more difficult it is to be predicted, because edge pixels have a very imbalance distribution. To address this problem, we propose a label decoupling framework (LDF) which consists of a label decoupling (LD) procedure and a feature interaction network (FIN). LD explicitly decomposes the original saliency map into body map and detail map, where body map concentrates on center areas of objects and detail map focuses on regions around edges. Detail map works better because it involves much more pixels than traditional edge supervision. Different from saliency map, body map discards edge pixels and only pays attention to center areas. This successfully avoids the distraction from edge pixels during training. Therefore, we employ two branches in FIN to deal with body map and detail map respectively. Feature interaction (FI) is designed to fuse the two complementary branches to predict the saliency map, which is then used to refine the two branches again. This iterative refinement is helpful for learning better representations and more precise saliency maps. Comprehensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that LDF outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on different evaluation metrics.
ICE-Talk: an Interface for a Controllable Expressive Talking Machine
Authors: Noé Tits, Kevin El Haddad, Thierry Dutoit
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00

ICE-Talk is an open source web-based GUI that allows the use of a TTS system with controllable parameters via a text field and a clickable 2D plot. It enables the study of latent spaces for controllable TTS. Moreover it is implemented as a module that can be used as part of a Human-Agent interaction.
A Discriminative Technique for Multiple-Source Adaptation
Authors: Corinna Cortes, Mehryar Mohri, Ananda Theertha Suresh, Ningshan Zhang
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Domain Adaptation

We present a new discriminative technique for the multiple-source adaptation, MSA, problem. Unlike previous work, which relies on density estimation for each source domain, our solution only requires conditional probabilities that can easily be accurately estimated from unlabeled data from the source domains. We give a detailed analysis of our new technique, including general guarantees based on R\'enyi divergences, and learning bounds when conditional Maxent is used for estimating conditional probabilities for a point to belong to a source domain. We show that these guarantees compare favorably to those that can be derived for the generative solution, using kernel density estimation. Our experiments with real-world applications further demonstrate that our new discriminative MSA algorithm outperforms the previous generative solution as well as other domain adaptation baselines.