pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
How to trust unlabeled data? Instance Credibility Inference for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Yikai Wang, Li Zhang, Yuan YAO, Yanwei Fu
Date: 2020-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning

Deep learning based models have excelled in many computer vision tasks and appear to surpass humans' performance. However, these models require an avalanche of expensive human labeled training data and many iterations to train their large number of parameters. This severely limits their scalability to the real-world long-tail distributed categories, some of which are with a large number of instances, but with only a few manually annotated. Learning from such extremely limited labeled examples is known as Few-shot learning (FSL). Different to prior arts that leverage meta-learning or data augmentation strategies to alleviate this extremely data-scarce problem, this paper presents a statistical approach, dubbed Instance Credibility Inference (ICI) to exploit the support of unlabeled instances for few-shot visual recognition. Typically, we repurpose the self-taught learning paradigm to predict pseudo-labels of unlabeled instances with an initial classifier trained from the few shot and then select the most confident ones to augment the training set to re-train the classifier. This is achieved by constructing a (Generalized) Linear Model (LM/GLM) with incidental parameters to model the mapping from (un-)labeled features to their (pseudo-)labels, in which the sparsity of the incidental parameters indicates the credibility of the corresponding pseudo-labeled instance. We rank the credibility of pseudo-labeled instances along the regularization path of their corresponding incidental parameters, and the most trustworthy pseudo-labeled examples are preserved as the augmented labeled instances. Theoretically, under mild conditions of restricted eigenvalue, irrepresentability, and large error, our approach is guaranteed to collect all the correctly-predicted instances from the noisy pseudo-labeled set.
Stutter Diagnosis and Therapy System Based on Deep Learning
Authors: Gresha Bhatia, Binoy Saha, Mansi Khamkar, Ashish Chandwani, Reshma Khot
Date: 2020-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Stuttering, also called stammering, is a communication disorder that breaks the continuity of the speech. This program of work is an attempt to develop automatic recognition procedures to assess stuttered dysfluencies and use these assessments to filter out speech therapies for an individual. Stuttering may be in the form of repetitions, prolongations or abnormal stoppages of sounds and syllables. Our system aims to help stutterers by diagnosing the severity and type of stutter and also by suggesting appropriate therapies for practice by learning the correlation between stutter descriptors and the effectiveness of speech therapies on them. This paper focuses on the implementation of a stutter diagnosis agent using Gated Recurrent CNN on MFCC audio features and therapy recommendation agent using SVM. It also presents the results obtained and various key findings of the system developed.
Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter
Authors: Runxin Xu, Jun Cao, Mingxuan Wang, Jiaze Chen, Hao Zhou, Ying Zeng, Yu-Ping Wang, Li Chen, Xiang Yin, Xijin Zhang, Songcheng Jiang, Yuxuan Wang, Lei LI
Date: 2020-07-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Articles, News Generation, Translation, Voice Cloning

This paper proposes the building of Xiaomingbot, an intelligent, multilingual and multimodal software robot equipped with four integral capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. Its system summarizes Chinese news that it automatically generates from data tables. Next, it translates the summary or the full article into multiple languages, and reads the multilingual rendition through synthesized speech. Notably, Xiaomingbot utilizes a voice cloning technology to synthesize the speech trained from a real person's voice data in one input language. The proposed system enjoys several merits: it has an animated avatar, and is able to generate and read multilingual news. Since it was put into practice, Xiaomingbot has written over 600,000 articles, and gained over 150,000 followers on social media platforms.
Multi-ary Pulse Amplitude Modulated Signal Processing Using Bistable Stochastic Resonance
Authors: Jin Liu, Zan Li, Rui Gao, Jun Bai, Linlin Liang
Date: 2015-06-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: International Conference on Noise and Fluctuations (ICNF) 2015 6

Bistable stochastic resonance (BSR) is a nonlinear
phenomenon in which the weak periodic signal can be enhanced
by a certain level of noise, and it reveals a possibility of turning
the noise from a nuisance into a benefit. Later, the aperiodic
stochastic resonance (ASR) (BSR system with aperiodic inputs)
theory was proposed, which makes a combination of BSR theory
with information theory. However, the latest researches on BSR
are still confined to binary signal processing. This paper
investigates multi-ary pulse amplitude modulated (MPAM) signal
processing under additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) using
BSR technique. First, we analyze the feasibility of using the BSR
system to process the MPAM signal. On this basis, the
mechanism of the BSR system response to MPAM signal inputs is
elucidated, and a corresponding decoding scheme is proposed.
Further, the expression of the decision threshold for decoding the
MPAM signal is derived. Finally, simulation results are given to
validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.
Increasingly Packing Multiple Facial-Informatics Modules in A Unified Deep-Learning Model via Lifelong Learning
Authors: Steven C. Y. Hung, Jia-Hong Lee, Timmy S. T. Wan, Chein-Hung Chen, Yi-Ming Chan, Chu-Song Chen
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: Proceedings of the 2019 on International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval 2019 6
Tasks: Age And Gender Classification, Continual Learning, Face Recognition, Face Verification, Facial Expression Recognition (FER), Gender Prediction, Lifelong learning

Simultaneously running multiple modules is a key requirement for a smart multimedia system for facial applications including face recognition, facial expression understanding, and gender identification. To effectively integrate them, a continual learning approach to learn new tasks without forgetting is introduced. Unlike previous methods growing monotonically in size, our approach maintains the compactness in continual learning. The proposed packing-and-expanding method is effective and easy to implement, which can iteratively shrink and enlarge the model to integrate new functions. Our integrated multitask model can achieve similar accuracy with only 39.9% of the original size.
ChaLearn Looking at People and Faces of the World: Face Analysis Workshop and Challenge 2016
Authors: Sergio Escalera, Mercedes Torres Torres, Brais Martínez, Xavier Baró, Hugo Jair Escalante, Isabelle Guyon, Georgios Tzimiropoulos, Ciprian Corneanu, Marc Oliu, Mohammad Ali Bagheri, Michel Valstar
Date: 2016-12-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW) 2016 12
Tasks: Age Estimation, Gender Classification, Gender Prediction, General Classification

We present the 2016 ChaLearn Looking at People and Faces of the World Challenge and Workshop, which ran three competitions on the common theme of face analysis from still images. The first one, Looking at People, addressed age estimation, while the second and third competitions, Faces of the World, addressed accessory classification and smile and gender classification, respectively. We present two crowd-sourcing methodologies used to collect manual annotations. A custom-build application was used to collect and label data about the apparent age of people (as opposed to the real age). For the Faces of the World data, the citizen-science Zooniverse platform was used. This paper summarizes the three challenges and the data used, as well as the results achieved by the participants of the competitions. Details of the ChaLearn LAP FotW competitions can be found at http://gesture.chalearn.org.
ERMIA: Fast Memory-Optimized Database System forHeterogeneous Workloads
Authors: Kangnyeon Kim, Tianzheng Wang, Ryan Johnson, Ippokratis Pandis
Date: 2016-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: SIGMOD 2016 6

Large main memories and massively parallel processors have triggered not only a resurgence of high-performance transaction processing systems optimized for large main-memory and massively parallel processors, but also an increasing demand for processing heterogeneous workloads that include read-mostly transactions. Many modern transaction processing systems adopt a lightweight optimistic concurrency control (OCC) scheme to leverage its low overhead in low contention workloads. However, we observe that the lightweight OCC is not suitable for heterogeneous workloads, causing significant starvation of read-mostly transactions and overall performance degradation.

In this paper, we present ERMIA, a memory-optimized database system built from scratch to cater the need of handling heterogeneous workloads. ERMIA adopts snapshot isolation concurrency control to coordinate heterogeneous transactions and provides serializability when desired. Its physical layer supports the concurrency control schemes in a scalable way. Experimental results show that ERMIA delivers comparable or superior performance and near-linear scalability in a variety of workloads, compared to a recent lightweight OCC-based system. At the same time, ERMIA maintains high throughput on read-mostly transactions when the performance of the OCC-based system drops by orders of magnitude.
Dealing with Nuisance Parameters using Machine Learning in High Energy Physics: a Review
Authors: Tommaso Dorigo, Pablo de Castro
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In this work we discuss the impact of nuisance parameters on the effectiveness of machine learning in high-energy physics problems, and provide a review of techniques that allow to include their effect and reduce their impact in the search for optimal selection criteria and variable transformations. The introduction of nuisance parameters complicates the supervised learning task and its correspondence with the data analysis goal, due to their contribution degrading the model performances in real data, and the necessary addition of uncertainties in the resulting statistical inference. The approaches discussed include nuisance-parameterized models, modified or adversary losses, semi-supervised learning approaches, and inference-aware techniques.
A Fourier State Space Model for Bayesian ODE Filters
Authors: Hans Kersting, Maren Mahsereci
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00

Gaussian ODE filtering is a probabilistic numerical method to solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs). It computes a Bayesian posterior over the solution from evaluations of the vector field defining the ODE. Its most popular version, which employs an integrated Brownian motion prior, uses Taylor expansions of the mean to extrapolate forward and has the same convergence rates as classical numerical methods. As the solution of many important ODEs are periodic functions (oscillators), we raise the question whether Fourier expansions can also be brought to bear within the framework of Gaussian ODE filtering. To this end, we construct a Fourier state space model for ODEs and a `hybrid' model that combines a Taylor (Brownian motion) and Fourier state space model. We show by experiments how the hybrid model might become useful in cheaply predicting until the end of the time domain.
Estimating COVID-19 cases and reproduction number in Mexico
Authors: Michelle Anzarut, Luis Felipe González, Sonia Mendizábal, María Teresa Ortiz
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00

In this report we fit a semi-mechanistic Bayesian hierarchical model to describe the Mexican COVID-19 epidemic. We obtain two epidemiological measures: the number of infections and the reproduction number. Estimations are based on death data. Hence, we expect our estimates to be more accurate than the attack rates estimated from the reported number of cases.
Scale Equivariance Improves Siamese Tracking
Authors: Ivan Sosnovik, Artem Moskalev, Arnold Smeulders
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Tracking, Translation, Visual Object Tracking, Visual Tracking

Siamese trackers turn tracking into similarity estimation between a template and the candidate regions in the frame. Mathematically, one of the key ingredients of success of the similarity function is translation equivariance. Non-translation-equivariant architectures induce a positional bias during training, so the location of the target will be hard to recover from the feature space. In real life scenarios, objects undergoe various transformations other than translation, such as rotation or scaling. Unless the model has an internal mechanism to handle them, the similarity may degrade. In this paper, we focus on scaling and we aim to equip the Siamese network with additional built-in scale equivariance to capture the natural variations of the target a priori. We develop the theory for scale-equivariant Siamese trackers, and provide a simple recipe for how to make a wide range of existing trackers scale-equivariant. We present SE-SiamFC, a scale-equivariant variant of SiamFC built according to the recipe. We conduct experiments on OTB and VOT benchmarks and on the synthetically generated T-MNIST and S-MNIST datasets. We demonstrate that a built-in additional scale equivariance is useful for visual object tracking.
SBI -- A toolkit for simulation-based inference
Authors: Alvaro Tejero-Cantero, Jan Boelts, Michael Deistler, Jan-Matthis Lueckmann, Conor Durkan, Pedro J. Gonçalves, David S. Greenberg, Jakob H. Macke
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Scientists and engineers employ stochastic numerical simulators to model empirically observed phenomena. In contrast to purely statistical models, simulators express scientific principles that provide powerful inductive biases, improve generalization to new data or scenarios and allow for fewer, more interpretable and domain-relevant parameters. Despite these advantages, tuning a simulator's parameters so that its outputs match data is challenging. Simulation-based inference (SBI) seeks to identify parameter sets that a) are compatible with prior knowledge and b) match empirical observations. Importantly, SBI does not seek to recover a single 'best' data-compatible parameter set, but rather to identify all high probability regions of parameter space that explain observed data, and thereby to quantify parameter uncertainty. In Bayesian terminology, SBI aims to retrieve the posterior distribution over the parameters of interest. In contrast to conventional Bayesian inference, SBI is also applicable when one can run model simulations, but no formula or algorithm exists for evaluating the probability of data given parameters, i.e. the likelihood. We present $\texttt{sbi}$, a PyTorch-based package that implements SBI algorithms based on neural networks. $\texttt{sbi}$ facilitates inference on black-box simulators for practising scientists and engineers by providing a unified interface to state-of-the-art algorithms together with documentation and tutorials.
Synthetic and Real Inputs for Tool Segmentation in Robotic Surgery
Authors: Emanuele Colleoni, Philip Edwards, Danail Stoyanov
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Scene Understanding, Segmentation

Semantic tool segmentation in surgical videos is important for surgical scene understanding and computer-assisted interventions as well as for the development of robotic automation. The problem is challenging because different illumination conditions, bleeding, smoke and occlusions can reduce algorithm robustness. At present labelled data for training deep learning models is still lacking for semantic surgical instrument segmentation and in this paper we show that it may be possible to use robot kinematic data coupled with laparoscopic images to alleviate the labelling problem. We propose a new deep learning based model for parallel processing of both laparoscopic and simulation images for robust segmentation of surgical tools. Due to the lack of laparoscopic frames annotated with both segmentation ground truth and kinematic information a new custom dataset was generated using the da Vinci Research Kit (dVRK) and is made available.
Partial local entropy and anisotropy in deep weight spaces
Authors: Daniele Musso
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

We refine a recently-proposed class of local entropic loss functions by restricting the smoothening regularization to only a subset of weights. The new loss functions are referred to as partial local entropies. They can adapt to the weight-space anisotropy, thus outperforming their isotropic counterparts. We support the theoretical analysis with experiments on image classification tasks performed with multi-layer, fully-connected and convolutional neural networks. The present study suggests how to better exploit the anisotropic nature of deep landscapes and provides direct probes of the shape of the minima encountered by stochastic gradient descent algorithms. As a by-product, we observe an asymptotic dynamical regime at late training times where the temperature of all the layers obeys a common cooling behavior.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Hardware and Neural Architecture Co-Search with Hot Start
Authors: Weiwen Jiang, Lei Yang, Sakyasingha Dasgupta, Jingtong Hu, Yiyu Shi
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Neural Architecture Search

Hardware and neural architecture co-search that automatically generates Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions from a given dataset is promising to promote AI democratization; however, the amount of time that is required by current co-search frameworks is in the order of hundreds of GPU hours for one target hardware. This inhibits the use of such frameworks on commodity hardware. The root cause of the low efficiency in existing co-search frameworks is the fact that they start from a "cold" state (i.e., search from scratch). In this paper, we propose a novel framework, namely HotNAS, that starts from a "hot" state based on a set of existing pre-trained models (a.k.a. model zoo) to avoid lengthy training time. As such, the search time can be reduced from 200 GPU hours to less than 3 GPU hours. In HotNAS, in addition to hardware design space and neural architecture search space, we further integrate a compression space to conduct model compressing during the co-search, which creates new opportunities to reduce latency but also brings challenges. One of the key challenges is that all of the above search spaces are coupled with each other, e.g., compression may not work without hardware design support. To tackle this issue, HotNAS builds a chain of tools to design hardware to support compression, based on which a global optimizer is developed to automatically co-search all the involved search spaces. Experiments on ImageNet dataset and Xilinx FPGA show that, within the timing constraint of 5ms, neural architectures generated by HotNAS can achieve up to 5.79% Top-1 and 3.97% Top-5 accuracy gain, compared with the existing ones.
TopoAL: An Adversarial Learning Approach for Topology-Aware Road Segmentation
Authors: Subeesh Vasu, Mateusz Kozinski, Leonardo Citraro, Pascal Fua
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Road Segmentation

Most state-of-the-art approaches to road extraction from aerial images rely on a CNN trained to label road pixels as foreground and remainder of the image as background. The CNN is usually trained by minimizing pixel-wise losses, which is less than ideal to produce binary masks that preserve the road network's global connectivity. To address this issue, we introduce an Adversarial Learning (AL) strategy tailored for our purposes. A naive one would treat the segmentation network as a generator and would feed its output along with ground-truth segmentations to a discriminator. It would then train the generator and discriminator jointly. We will show that this is not enough because it does not capture the fact that most errors are local and need to be treated as such. Instead, we use a more sophisticated discriminator that returns a label pyramid describing what portions of the road network are correct at several different scales. This discriminator and the structured labels it returns are what gives our approach its edge and we will show that it outperforms state-of-the-art ones on the challenging RoadTracer dataset.
Multi-Stage Influence Function
Authors: Hongge Chen, Si Si, Yang Li, Ciprian Chelba, Sanjiv Kumar, Duane Boning, Cho-Jui Hsieh
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Multi-stage training and knowledge transfer, from a large-scale pretraining task to various finetuning tasks, have revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision resulting in state-of-the-art performance improvements. In this paper, we develop a multi-stage influence function score to track predictions from a finetuned model all the way back to the pretraining data. With this score, we can identify the pretraining examples in the pretraining task that contribute most to a prediction in the finetuning task. The proposed multi-stage influence function generalizes the original influence function for a single model in (Koh & Liang, 2017), thereby enabling influence computation through both pretrained and finetuned models. We study two different scenarios with the pretrained embeddings fixed or updated in the finetuning tasks. We test our proposed method in various experiments to show its effectiveness and potential applications.
Necessarily Optimal One-Sided Matchings
Authors: Hadi Hosseini, Vijay Menon, Nisarg Shah, Sujoy Sikdar
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00

We study the classical problem of matching $n$ agents to $n$ objects, where the agents have ranked preferences over the objects. We focus on two popular desiderata from the matching literature: Pareto optimality and rank-maximality. Instead of asking the agents to report their complete preferences, our goal is to learn a desirable matching from partial preferences, specifically a matching that is necessarily Pareto optimal (NPO) or necessarily rank-maximal (NRM) under any completion of the partial preferences. We focus on the top-$k$ model in which agents reveal a prefix of their preference rankings. We design efficient algorithms to check if a given matching is NPO or NRM, and to check whether such a matching exists given top-$k$ partial preferences. We also study online algorithms for eliciting partial preferences adaptively, and prove bounds on their competitive ratio.
Generating Person Images with Appearance-aware Pose Stylizer
Authors: Siyu Huang, Haoyi Xiong, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Qingzhong Wang, Xingran Zhou, Bihan Wen, Jun Huan, Dejing Dou
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Generation of high-quality person images is challenging, due to the sophisticated entanglements among image factors, e.g., appearance, pose, foreground, background, local details, global structures, etc. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end framework to generate realistic person images based on given person poses and appearances. The core of our framework is a novel generator called Appearance-aware Pose Stylizer (APS) which generates human images by coupling the target pose with the conditioned person appearance progressively. The framework is highly flexible and controllable by effectively decoupling various complex person image factors in the encoding phase, followed by re-coupling them in the decoding phase. In addition, we present a new normalization method named adaptive patch normalization, which enables region-specific normalization and shows a good performance when adopted in person image generation model. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that our method is capable of generating visually appealing and realistic-looking results using arbitrary image and pose inputs.