pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Temporal Joint Depths for Improving 3D Human Pose Estimation in Video
Authors: Naoki Kato, Hiroto Honda, Yusuke Uchida
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

The effectiveness of the approaches to predict 3D poses from 2D poses estimated in each frame of a video has been demonstrated for 3D human pose estimation. However, 2D poses without appearance information of persons have much ambiguity with respect to the joint depths. In this paper, we propose to estimate a 3D pose in each frame of a video and refine it considering temporal information. The proposed approach reduces the ambiguity of the joint depths and improves the 3D pose estimation accuracy.
BaFFLe: Backdoor detection via Feedback-based Federated Learning
Authors: Sebastien Andreina, Giorgia Azzurra Marson, Helen Möllering, Ghassan Karame
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Model Poisoning

Recent studies have shown that federated learning (FL) is vulnerable to poisoning attacks that inject a backdoor into the global model. These attacks are effective even when performed by a single client, and undetectable by most existing defensive techniques. In this paper, we propose Backdoor detection via Feedback-based Federated Learning (BAFFLE), a novel defense to secure FL against backdoor attacks. The core idea behind BAFFLE is to leverage data of multiple clients not only for training but also for uncovering model poisoning. We exploit the availability of diverse datasets at the various clients by incorporating a feedback loop into the FL process, to integrate the views of those clients when deciding whether a given model update is genuine or not. We show that this powerful construct can achieve very high detection rates against state-of-the-art backdoor attacks, even when relying on straightforward methods to validate the model. Through empirical evaluation using the CIFAR-10 and FEMNIST datasets, we show that by combining the feedback loop with a method that suspects poisoning attempts by assessing the per-class classification performance of the updated model, BAFFLE reliably detects state-of-the-art backdoor attacks with a detection accuracy of 100% and a false-positive rate below 5%. Moreover, we show that our solution can detect adaptive attacks aimed at bypassing the defense.
DAIS: Automatic Channel Pruning via Differentiable Annealing Indicator Search
Authors: Yushuo Guan, Ning Liu, Pengyu Zhao, Zhengping Che, Kaigui Bian, Yanzhi Wang, Jian Tang
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

The convolutional neural network has achieved great success in fulfilling computer vision tasks despite large computation overhead against efficient deployment. Structured (channel) pruning is usually applied to reduce the model redundancy while preserving the network structure, such that the pruned network can be easily deployed in practice. However, existing structured pruning methods require hand-crafted rules which may lead to tremendous pruning space. In this paper, we introduce Differentiable Annealing Indicator Search (DAIS) that leverages the strength of neural architecture search in the channel pruning and automatically searches for the effective pruned model with given constraints on computation overhead. Specifically, DAIS relaxes the binarized channel indicators to be continuous and then jointly learns both indicators and model parameters via bi-level optimization. To bridge the non-negligible discrepancy between the continuous model and the target binarized model, DAIS proposes an annealing-based procedure to steer the indicator convergence towards binarized states. Moreover, DAIS designs various regularizations based on a priori structural knowledge to control the pruning sparsity and to improve model performance. Experimental results show that DAIS outperforms state-of-the-art pruning methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet.
An Improved Attention for Visual Question Answering
Authors: Tanzila Rahman, Shih-Han Chou, Leonid Sigal, Giuseppe Carenini
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

We consider the problem of Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a free-form, open-ended, question, expressed in natural language, the goal of VQA system is to provide accurate answer to this question with respect to the image. The task is challenging because it requires simultaneous and intricate understanding of both visual and textual information. Attention, which captures intra- and inter-modal dependencies, has emerged as perhaps the most widely used mechanism for addressing these challenges. In this paper, we propose an improved attention-based architecture to solve VQA. We incorporate an Attention on Attention (AoA) module within encoder-decoder framework, which is able to determine the relation between attention results and queries. Attention module generates weighted average for each query. On the other hand, AoA module first generates an information vector and an attention gate using attention results and current context; and then adds another attention to generate final attended information by multiplying the two. We also propose multimodal fusion module to combine both visual and textual information. The goal of this fusion module is to dynamically decide how much information should be considered from each modality. Extensive experiments on VQA-v2 benchmark dataset show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
Data Augmentation for End-to-end Code-switching Speech Recognition
Authors: Chenpeng Du, Hao Li, Yizhou Lu, Lan Wang, Yanmin Qian
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Data Augmentation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Translation, Word Translation

Training a code-switching end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) model normally requires a large amount of data, while code-switching data is often limited. In this paper, three novel approaches are proposed for code-switching data augmentation. Specifically, they are audio splicing with the existing code-switching data, and TTS with new code-switching texts generated by word translation or word insertion. Our experiments on 200 hours Mandarin-English code-switching dataset show that all the three proposed approaches yield significant improvements on code-switching ASR individually. Moreover, all the proposed approaches can be combined with recent popular SpecAugment, and an addition gain can be obtained. WER is significantly reduced by relative 24.0% compared to the system without any data augmentation, and still relative 13.0% gain compared to the system with only SpecAugment
Reverse engineering learned optimizers reveals known and novel mechanisms
Authors: Niru Maheswaranathan, David Sussillo, Luke Metz, Ruoxi Sun, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Learned optimizers are algorithms that can themselves be trained to solve optimization problems. In contrast to baseline optimizers (such as momentum or Adam) that use simple update rules derived from theoretical principles, learned optimizers use flexible, high-dimensional, nonlinear parameterizations. Although this can lead to better performance in certain settings, their inner workings remain a mystery. How is a learned optimizer able to outperform a well tuned baseline? Has it learned a sophisticated combination of existing optimization techniques, or is it implementing completely new behavior? In this work, we address these questions by careful analysis and visualization of learned optimizers. We study learned optimizers trained from scratch on three disparate tasks, and discover that they have learned interpretable mechanisms, including: momentum, gradient clipping, learning rate schedules, and a new form of learning rate adaptation. Moreover, we show how the dynamics of learned optimizers enables these behaviors. Our results help elucidate the previously murky understanding of how learned optimizers work, and establish tools for interpreting future learned optimizers.
Do Noises Bother Human and Neural Networks In the Same Way? A Medical Image Analysis Perspective
Authors: Shao-Cheng Wen, Yu-Jen Chen, Zihao Liu, Wujie Wen, Xiaowei Xu, Yiyu Shi, Tsung-Yi Ho, Qianjun Jia, Meiping Huang, Jian Zhuang
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Medical Image Analysis

Deep learning had already demonstrated its power in medical images, including denoising, classification, segmentation, etc. All these applications are proposed to automatically analyze medical images beforehand, which brings more information to radiologists during clinical assessment for accuracy improvement. Recently, many medical denoising methods had shown their significant artifact reduction result and noise removal both quantitatively and qualitatively. However, those existing methods are developed around human-vision, i.e., they are designed to minimize the noise effect that can be perceived by human eyes. In this paper, we introduce an application-guided denoising framework, which focuses on denoising for the following neural networks. In our experiments, we apply the proposed framework to different datasets, models, and use cases. Experimental results show that our proposed framework can achieve a better result than human-vision denoising network.
Simulation of Human and Artificial Emotion (SHArE)
Authors: Kwadwo Opong-Mensah
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00

The framework for Simulation of Human and Artificial Emotion (SHArE) describes the architecture of emotion in terms of parameters transferable between psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. These parameters can be defined as abstract concepts or granularized down to the voltage levels of individual neurons. This model enables emotional trajectory design for humans which may lead to novel therapeutic solutions for various mental health concerns. For artificial intelligence, this work provides a compact notation which can be applied to neural networks as a means to observe the emotions and motivations of machines.
EAdam Optimizer: How $ε$ Impact Adam
Authors: Wei Yuan, Kai-Xin Gao
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00

Many adaptive optimization methods have been proposed and used in deep learning, in which Adam is regarded as the default algorithm and widely used in many deep learning frameworks. Recently, many variants of Adam, such as Adabound, RAdam and Adabelief, have been proposed and show better performance than Adam. However, these variants mainly focus on changing the stepsize by making differences on the gradient or the square of it. Motivated by the fact that suitable damping is important for the success of powerful second-order optimizers, we discuss the impact of the constant $\epsilon$ for Adam in this paper. Surprisingly, we can obtain better performance than Adam simply changing the position of $\epsilon$. Based on this finding, we propose a new variant of Adam called EAdam, which doesn't need extra hyper-parameters or computational costs. We also discuss the relationships and differences between our method and Adam. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on various popular tasks and models. Experimental results show that our method can bring significant improvement compared with Adam. Our code is available at https://github.com/yuanwei2019/EAdam-optimizer.
HypperSteer: Hypothetical Steering and Data Perturbation in Sequence Prediction with Deep Learning
Authors: Chuan Wang, Kwan-Liu Ma
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Learning, Prediction

Deep Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) continues to find success in predictive decision-making with temporal event sequences. Recent studies have shown the importance and practicality of visual analytics in interpreting deep learning models for real-world applications. However, very limited work enables interactions with deep learning models and guides practitioners to form hypotheticals towards the desired prediction outcomes, especially for sequence prediction. Specifically, no existing work has addressed the what-if analysis and value perturbation along different time-steps for sequence outcome prediction. We present a model-agnostic visual analytics tool, HypperSteer, that steers hypothetical testing and allows users to perturb data for sequence predictions interactively. We showcase how HypperSteer helps in steering patient data to achieve desired treatment outcomes and discuss how HypperSteer can serve as a comprehensive solution for other practical scenarios.
Capped norm linear discriminant analysis and its applications
Authors: Jiakou Liu, Xiong Xiong, Pei-Wei Ren, Da Zhao, Chun-Na Li, Yuan-Hai Shao
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00

Classical linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is based on squared Frobenious norm and hence is sensitive to outliers and noise. To improve the robustness of LDA, in this paper, we introduce capped l_{2,1}-norm of a matrix, which employs non-squared l_2-norm and "capped" operation, and further propose a novel capped l_{2,1}-norm linear discriminant analysis, called CLDA. Due to the use of capped l_{2,1}-norm, CLDA can effectively remove extreme outliers and suppress the effect of noise data. In fact, CLDA can be also viewed as a weighted LDA. CLDA is solved through a series of generalized eigenvalue problems with theoretical convergency. The experimental results on an artificial data set, some UCI data sets and two image data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of CLDA.
Deep Image Compositing
Authors: He Zhang, Jianming Zhang, Federico Perazzi, Zhe Lin, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Matting

Image compositing is a task of combining regions from different images to compose a new image. A common use case is background replacement of portrait images. To obtain high quality composites, professionals typically manually perform multiple editing steps such as segmentation, matting and foreground color decontamination, which is very time consuming even with sophisticated photo editing tools. In this paper, we propose a new method which can automatically generate high-quality image compositing without any user input. Our method can be trained end-to-end to optimize exploitation of contextual and color information of both foreground and background images, where the compositing quality is considered in the optimization. Specifically, inspired by Laplacian pyramid blending, a dense-connected multi-stream fusion network is proposed to effectively fuse the information from the foreground and background images at different scales. In addition, we introduce a self-taught strategy to progressively train from easy to complex cases to mitigate the lack of training data. Experiments show that the proposed method can automatically generate high-quality composites and outperforms existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Cross-Lingual Machine Speech Chain for Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Bataks Speech Recognition and Synthesis
Authors: Sashi Novitasari, Andros Tjandra, Sakriani Sakti, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Speech Translation, Translation

Even though over seven hundred ethnic languages are spoken in Indonesia, the available technology remains limited that could support communication within indigenous communities as well as with people outside the villages. As a result, indigenous communities still face isolation due to cultural barriers; languages continue to disappear. To accelerate communication, speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) technology is one approach that can overcome language barriers. However, S2ST systems require machine translation (MT), speech recognition (ASR), and synthesis (TTS) that rely heavily on supervised training and a broad set of language resources that can be difficult to collect from ethnic communities. Recently, a machine speech chain mechanism was proposed to enable ASR and TTS to assist each other in semi-supervised learning. The framework was initially implemented only for monolingual languages. In this study, we focus on developing speech recognition and synthesis for these Indonesian ethnic languages: Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Bataks. We first separately train ASR and TTS of standard Indonesian in supervised training. We then develop ASR and TTS of ethnic languages by utilizing Indonesian ASR and TTS in a cross-lingual machine speech chain framework with only text or only speech data removing the need for paired speech-text data of those ethnic languages.
Sequence-to-Sequence Learning via Attention Transfer for Incremental Speech Recognition
Authors: Sashi Novitasari, Andros Tjandra, Sakriani Sakti, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Attention-based sequence-to-sequence automatic speech recognition (ASR) requires a significant delay to recognize long utterances because the output is generated after receiving entire input sequences. Although several studies recently proposed sequence mechanisms for incremental speech recognition (ISR), using different frameworks and learning algorithms is more complicated than the standard ASR model. One main reason is because the model needs to decide the incremental steps and learn the transcription that aligns with the current short speech segment. In this work, we investigate whether it is possible to employ the original architecture of attention-based ASR for ISR tasks by treating a full-utterance ASR as the teacher model and the ISR as the student model. We design an alternative student network that, instead of using a thinner or a shallower model, keeps the original architecture of the teacher model but with shorter sequences (few encoder and decoder states). Using attention transfer, the student network learns to mimic the same alignment between the current input short speech segments and the transcription. Our experiments show that by delaying the starting time of recognition process with about 1.7 sec, we can achieve comparable performance to one that needs to wait until the end.
Incremental Machine Speech Chain Towards Enabling Listening while Speaking in Real-time
Authors: Sashi Novitasari, Andros Tjandra, Tomoya Yanagita, Sakriani Sakti, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

Inspired by a human speech chain mechanism, a machine speech chain framework based on deep learning was recently proposed for the semi-supervised development of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech synthesis TTS) systems. However, the mechanism to listen while speaking can be done only after receiving entire input sequences. Thus, there is a significant delay when encountering long utterances. By contrast, humans can listen to what hey speak in real-time, and if there is a delay in hearing, they won't be able to continue speaking. In this work, we propose an incremental machine speech chain towards enabling machine to listen while speaking in real-time. Specifically, we construct incremental ASR (ISR) and incremental TTS (ITTS) by letting both systems improve together through a short-term loop. Our experimental results reveal that our proposed framework is able to reduce delays due to long utterances while keeping a comparable performance to the non-incremental basic machine speech chain.
Analysing Long Short Term Memory Models for Cricket Match Outcome Prediction
Authors: Rahul Chakwate, Madhan R A
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Sports Analytics

As the technology advances, an ample amount of data is collected in sports with the help of advanced sensors. Sports Analytics is the study of this data to provide a constructive advantage to the team and its players. The game of international cricket is popular all across the globe. Recently, various machine learning techniques have been used to analyse the cricket match data and predict the match outcome as win or lose. Generally these models make use of the overall match level statistics such as teams, venue, average run rate, win margin, etc to predict the match results before the beginning of the match. However, very few works provide insights based on the ball-by-ball level statistics. Here we propose a novel Recurrent Neural Network model which can predict the win probability of a match at regular intervals given the ball-by-ball statistics. The Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Model takes as input the ball wise features as well as the match level details available from the training dataset. It gives a prediction of winning the match at any time stamp during the match. This level of insight will help the team to predict the probability of them winning the match after every ball and help them determine the critical in-game changes they should make in their game strategies.
PheMT: A Phenomenon-wise Dataset for Machine Translation Robustness on User-Generated Contents
Authors: Ryo Fujii, Masato Mita, Kaori Abe, Kazuaki Hanawa, Makoto Morishita, Jun Suzuki, Kentaro Inui
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has shown drastic improvement in its quality when translating clean input, such as text from the news domain. However, existing studies suggest that NMT still struggles with certain kinds of input with considerable noise, such as User-Generated Contents (UGC) on the Internet. To make better use of NMT for cross-cultural communication, one of the most promising directions is to develop a model that correctly handles these expressions. Though its importance has been recognized, it is still not clear as to what creates the great gap in performance between the translation of clean input and that of UGC. To answer the question, we present a new dataset, PheMT, for evaluating the robustness of MT systems against specific linguistic phenomena in Japanese-English translation. Our experiments with the created dataset revealed that not only our in-house models but even widely used off-the-shelf systems are greatly disturbed by the presence of certain phenomena.
Learning Discriminative Representations for Fine-Grained Diabetic Retinopathy Grading
Authors: Li Tian, Liyan Ma, Zhijie Wen, Shaorong Xie, Yupeng Xu
Date: 2020-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Diabetic Retinopathy Grading, Medical Image Analysis

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the leading causes of blindness. However, no specific symptoms of early DR lead to a delayed diagnosis, which results in disease progression in patients. To determine the disease severity levels, ophthalmologists need to focus on the discriminative parts of the fundus images. In recent years, deep learning has achieved great success in medical image analysis. However, most works directly employ algorithms based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which ignore the fact that the difference among classes is subtle and gradual. Hence, we consider automatic image grading of DR as a fine-grained classification task, and construct a bilinear model to identify the pathologically discriminative areas. In order to leverage the ordinal information among classes, we use an ordinal regression method to obtain the soft labels. In addition, other than only using a categorical loss to train our network, we also introduce the metric loss to learn a more discriminative feature space. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method on two public IDRiD and DeepDR datasets.