pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Review of Machine Learning Algorithms for Brain Stroke Diagnosis and Prognosis by EEG Analysis
Authors: Mohammad-Parsa Hosseini, Cecilia Hemingway, Jerard Madamba, Alexander McKee, Natalie Ploof, Jennifer Schuman, Elliot Voss
Date: 2020-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Prognosis

Currently, strokes are the leading cause of adult disability in the United States. Traditional treatment and rehabilitation options such as physical therapy and tissue plasminogen activator are limited in their effectiveness and ability to restore mobility and function to the patient. As a result, there exists an opportunity to greatly improve the treatment for strokes. Machine learning, specifically techniques that utilize Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) to help the patient either restore neurologic pathways or effectively communicate with an electronic prosthetic, show promising results when applied to both stroke diagnosis and rehabilitation. In this review, sources that design and implement BCIs for treatment of stroke patients are evaluated and categorized based on their successful applications for stroke diagnosis or stroke rehabilitation. The various machine learning techniques and algorithms that are addressed and combined with BCI technology show that the use of BCIs for stroke treatment is a promising and rapidly expanding field.
DeepLiDARFlow: A Deep Learning Architecture For Scene Flow Estimation Using Monocular Camera and Sparse LiDAR
Authors: Rishav, Ramy Battrawy, René Schuster, Oliver Wasenmüller, Didier Stricker
Date: 2020-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Scene Flow Estimation

Scene flow is the dense 3D reconstruction of motion and geometry of a scene. Most state-of-the-art methods use a pair of stereo images as input for full scene reconstruction. These methods depend a lot on the quality of the RGB images and perform poorly in regions with reflective objects, shadows, ill-conditioned light environment and so on. LiDAR measurements are much less sensitive to the aforementioned conditions but LiDAR features are in general unsuitable for matching tasks due to their sparse nature. Hence, using both LiDAR and RGB can potentially overcome the individual disadvantages of each sensor by mutual improvement and yield robust features which can improve the matching process. In this paper, we present DeepLiDARFlow, a novel deep learning architecture which fuses high level RGB and LiDAR features at multiple scales in a monocular setup to predict dense scene flow. Its performance is much better in the critical regions where image-only and LiDAR-only methods are inaccurate. We verify our DeepLiDARFlow using the established data sets KITTI and FlyingThings3D and we show strong robustness compared to several state-of-the-art methods which used other input modalities. The code of our paper is available at https://github.com/dfki-av/DeepLiDARFlow.
Robust Handwriting Recognition with Limited and Noisy Data
Authors: Hai Pham, Amrith Setlur, Saket Dingliwal, Tzu-Hsiang Lin, Barnabas Poczos, Kang Huang, Zhuo Li, Jae Lim, Collin McCormack, Tam Vu
Date: 2020-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Handwriting Recognition, Scene Text Detection, Text Detection

Despite the advent of deep learning in computer vision, the general handwriting recognition problem is far from solved. Most existing approaches focus on handwriting datasets that have clearly written text and carefully segmented labels. In this paper, we instead focus on learning handwritten characters from maintenance logs, a constrained setting where data is very limited and noisy. We break the problem into two consecutive stages of word segmentation and word recognition respectively and utilize data augmentation techniques to train both stages. Extensive comparisons with popular baselines for scene-text detection and word recognition show that our system achieves a lower error rate and is more suited to handle noisy and difficult documents
Heteroscedastic Uncertainty for Robust Generative Latent Dynamics
Authors: Oliver Limoyo, Bryan Chan, Filip Marić, Brandon Wagstaff, Rupam Mahmood, Jonathan Kelly
Date: 2020-08-18 00:00:00

Learning or identifying dynamics from a sequence of high-dimensional observations is a difficult challenge in many domains, including reinforcement learning and control. The problem has recently been studied from a generative perspective through latent dynamics: high-dimensional observations are embedded into a lower-dimensional space in which the dynamics can be learned. Despite some successes, latent dynamics models have not yet been applied to real-world robotic systems where learned representations must be robust to a variety of perceptual confounds and noise sources not seen during training. In this paper, we present a method to jointly learn a latent state representation and the associated dynamics that is amenable for long-term planning and closed-loop control under perceptually difficult conditions. As our main contribution, we describe how our representation is able to capture a notion of heteroscedastic or input-specific uncertainty at test time by detecting novel or out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. We present results from prediction and control experiments on two image-based tasks: a simulated pendulum balancing task and a real-world robotic manipulator reaching task. We demonstrate that our model produces significantly more accurate predictions and exhibits improved control performance, compared to a model that assumes homoscedastic uncertainty only, in the presence of varying degrees of input degradation.
Fingerprinting Search Keywords over HTTPS at Scale
Authors: Junhua Yan, Hasan Faik Alan, Jasleen Kaur
Date: 2020-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

The possibility of fingerprinting the search keywords issued by a user on popular web search engines is a significant threat to user privacy. This threat has received surprisingly little attention in the network traffic analysis literature. In this work, we consider the problem of keyword fingerprinting of HTTPS traffic -- we study the impact of several factors, including client platform diversity, choice of search engine, feature sets as well as classification frameworks. We conduct both closed-world and open-world evaluations using nearly 4 million search queries collected over a period of three months. Our analysis reveals several insights into the threat of keyword fingerprinting in modern HTTPS traffic.
Physics-informed machine learning for the COVID-19 pandemic: Adherence to social distancing and short-term predictions for eight countries
Authors: G. D. Barmparis, G. P. Tsironis
Date: 2020-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Physics-informed machine learning

The spread of COVID-19 during the initial phase of the first half of 2020 was curtailed to a larger or lesser extent through measures of social distancing imposed by most countries. In this work, we link directly, through machine learning techniques, infection data at a country level to a single number that signifies social distancing effectiveness. We assume that the standard SIR model gives a reasonable description of the dynamics of spreading, and thus the social distancing aspect can be modeled through time-dependent infection rates that are imposed externally. We use an exponential ansatz to analyze the SIR model, find an exact solution for the time-independent infection rate, and derive a simple first-order differential equation for the time-dependent infection rate as a function of the infected population. Using infected number data from the "first wave" of the infection from eight countries, and through physics-informed machine learning, we extract the degree of linear dependence in social distancing that led to the specific infections. We find that in the two extremes are Greece, with the highest decay slope on one side, and the US on the other with a practically flat "decay". The hierarchy of slopes is compatible with the effectiveness of the pandemic containment in each country. Finally, we train our network with data after the end of the analyzed period, and we make week-long predictions for the current phase of the infection that appear to be very close to the actual infection values.
Accelerated Zeroth-Order and First-Order Momentum Methods from Mini to Minimax Optimization
Authors: Feihu Huang, Shangqian Gao, Jian Pei, Heng Huang
Date: 2020-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

In the paper, we propose a class of accelerated zeroth-order and first-order momentum methods for both nonconvex mini-optimization and minimax-optimization. Specifically, we propose a new accelerated zeroth-order momentum (Acc-ZOM) method for black-box mini-optimization where only function values can be obtained. Moreover, we prove that our Acc-ZOM method achieves a lower query complexity of $\tilde{O}(d^{3/4}\epsilon^{-3})$ for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point, which improves the best known result by a factor of $O(d^{1/4})$ where $d$ denotes the variable dimension. In particular, our Acc-ZOM does not need large batches required in the existing zeroth-order stochastic algorithms. Meanwhile, we propose an accelerated zeroth-order momentum descent ascent (Acc-ZOMDA) method for black-box minimax optimization, where only function values can be obtained. Our Acc-ZOMDA obtains a low query complexity of $\tilde{O}((d_1+d_2)^{3/4}\kappa_y^{4.5}\epsilon^{-3})$ without requiring large batches for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point, where $d_1$ and $d_2$ denote variable dimensions and $\kappa_y$ is condition number. Moreover, we propose an accelerated first-order momentum descent ascent (Acc-MDA) method for minimax optimization, whose explicit gradients are accessible. Our Acc-MDA achieves a low gradient complexity of $\tilde{O}(\kappa_y^{4.5}\epsilon^{-3})$ without requiring large batches for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point. In particular, our Acc-MDA can obtain a lower gradient complexity of $\tilde{O}(\kappa_y^{2.5}\epsilon^{-3})$ with a batch size $O(\kappa_y^4)$, which improves the best known result by a factor of $O(\kappa_y^{1/2})$. Extensive experimental results on black-box adversarial attack to deep neural networks and poisoning attack to logistic regression demonstrate efficiency of our algorithms.
BraggNN: Fast X-ray Bragg Peak Analysis Using Deep Learning
Authors: Zhengchun Liu, Hemant Sharma, Jun-Sang Park, Peter Kenesei, Antonino Miceli, Jonathan Almer, Rajkumar Kettimuthu, Ian Foster
Date: 2020-08-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Deep Learning, GPU

X-ray diffraction based microscopy techniques such as High Energy Diffraction Microscopy rely on knowledge of the position of diffraction peaks with high precision. These positions are typically computed by fitting the observed intensities in area detector data to a theoretical peak shape such as pseudo-Voigt. As experiments become more complex and detector technologies evolve, the computational cost of such peak detection and shape fitting becomes the biggest hurdle to the rapid analysis required for real-time feedback during in-situ experiments. To this end, we propose BraggNN, a deep learning-based method that can determine peak positions much more rapidly than conventional pseudo-Voigt peak fitting. When applied to a test dataset, BraggNN gives errors of less than 0.29 and 0.57 pixels, relative to the conventional method, for 75% and 95% of the peaks, respectively. When applied to a real experimental dataset, a 3D reconstruction that used peak positions computed by BraggNN yields 15% better results on average as compared to a reconstruction obtained using peak positions determined using conventional 2D pseudo-Voigt fitting. Recent advances in deep learning method implementations and special-purpose model inference accelerators allow BraggNN to deliver enormous performance improvements relative to the conventional method, running, for example, more than 200 times faster than a conventional method on a consumer-class GPU card with out-of-the-box software.
Augmenting Neural Differential Equations to Model Unknown Dynamical Systems with Incomplete State Information
Authors: Robert Strauss
Date: 2020-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations replace the right-hand side of a conventional ODE with a neural net, which by virtue of the universal approximation theorem, can be trained to the representation of any function. When we do not know the function itself, but have state trajectories (time evolution) of the ODE system we can still train the neural net to learn the representation of the underlying but unknown ODE. However if the state of the system is incompletely known then the right-hand side of the ODE cannot be calculated. The derivatives to propagate the system are unavailable. We show that a specially augmented Neural ODE can learn the system when given incomplete state information. As a worked example we apply neural ODEs to the Lotka-Voltera problem of 3 species, rabbits, wolves, and bears. We show that even when the data for the bear time series is removed the remaining time series of the rabbits and wolves is sufficient to learn the dynamical system despite the missing the incomplete state information. This is surprising since a conventional ODE system cannot output the correct derivatives without the full state as the input. We implement augmented neural ODEs and differential equation solvers in the julia programming language.
Salient Instance Segmentation with Region and Box-level Annotations
Authors: Jialun Pei, He Tang, Tianyang Cheng, Chuanbo Chen
Date: 2020-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Saliency Detection, Salient Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Salient instance segmentation is a new challenging task that received widespread attention in the saliency detection area. The new generation of saliency detection provides a strong theoretical and technical basis for video surveillance. Due to the limited scale of the existing dataset and the high mask annotations cost, plenty of supervision source is urgently needed to train a well-performing salient instance model. In this paper, we aim to train a novel salient instance segmentation framework by an inexact supervision without resorting to laborious labeling. To this end, we present a cyclic global context salient instance segmentation network (CGCNet), which is supervised by the combination of salient regions and bounding boxes from the ready-made salient object detection datasets. To locate salient instance more accurately, a global feature refining layer is proposed that dilates the features of the region of interest (ROI) to the global context in a scene. Meanwhile, a labeling updating scheme is embedded in the proposed framework to update the coarse-grained labels for next iteration. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed end-to-end framework trained by inexact supervised annotations can be competitive to the existing fully supervised salient instance segmentation methods. Without bells and whistles, our proposed method achieves a mask AP of 58.3% in the test set of Dataset1K that outperforms the mainstream state-of-the-art methods.
Enhanced MRI Reconstruction Network using Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Qiaoying Huang, Dong Yang, Yikun Xian, Pengxiang Wu, Jingru Yi, Hui Qu, Dimitris Metaxas
Date: 2020-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI Reconstruction, Neural Architecture Search

The accurate reconstruction of under-sampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data using modern deep learning technology, requires significant effort to design the necessary complex neural network architectures. The cascaded network architecture for MRI reconstruction has been widely used, while it suffers from the "vanishing gradient" problem when the network becomes deep. In addition, homogeneous architecture degrades the representation capacity of the network. In this work, we present an enhanced MRI reconstruction network using a residual in residual basic block. For each cell in the basic block, we use the differentiable neural architecture search (NAS) technique to automatically choose the optimal operation among eight variants of the dense block. This new heterogeneous network is evaluated on two publicly available datasets and outperforms all current state-of-the-art methods, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Compiling ONNX Neural Network Models Using MLIR
Authors: Tian Jin, Gheorghe-Teodor Bercea, Tung D. Le, Tong Chen, Gong Su, Haruki Imai, Yasushi Negishi, Anh Leu, Kevin O'Brien, Kiyokuni Kawachiya, Alexandre E. Eichenberger
Date: 2020-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Deep neural network models are becoming increasingly popular and have been used in various tasks such as computer vision, speech recognition, and natural language processing. Machine learning models are commonly trained in a resource-rich environment and then deployed in a distinct environment such as high availability machines or edge devices. To assist the portability of models, the open-source community has proposed the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) standard. In this paper, we present a high-level, preliminary report on our onnx-mlir compiler, which generates code for the inference of deep neural network models described in the ONNX format. Onnx-mlir is an open-source compiler implemented using the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) infrastructure recently integrated in the LLVM project. Onnx-mlir relies on the MLIR concept of dialects to implement its functionality. We propose here two new dialects: (1) an ONNX specific dialect that encodes the ONNX standard semantics, and (2) a loop-based dialect to provide for a common lowering point for all ONNX dialect operations. Each intermediate representation facilitates its own characteristic set of graph-level and loop-based optimizations respectively. We illustrate our approach by following several models through the proposed representations and we include some early optimization work and performance results.
Channel-wise Hessian Aware trace-Weighted Quantization of Neural Networks
Authors: Xu Qian, Victor Li, Crews Darren
Date: 2020-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Quantization

Second-order information has proven to be very effective in determining the redundancy of neural network weights and activations. Recent paper proposes to use Hessian traces of weights and activations for mixed-precision quantization and achieves state-of-the-art results. However, prior works only focus on selecting bits for each layer while the redundancy of different channels within a layer also differ a lot. This is mainly because the complexity of determining bits for each channel is too high for original methods. Here, we introduce Channel-wise Hessian Aware trace-Weighted Quantization (CW-HAWQ). CW-HAWQ uses Hessian trace to determine the relative sensitivity order of different channels of activations and weights. What's more, CW-HAWQ proposes to use deep Reinforcement learning (DRL) Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG)-based agent to find the optimal ratios of different quantization bits and assign bits to channels according to the Hessian trace order. The number of states in CW-HAWQ is much smaller compared with traditional AutoML based mix-precision methods since we only need to search ratios for the quantization bits. Compare CW-HAWQ with state-of-the-art shows that we can achieve better results for multiple networks.
Attribute Prototype Network for Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Wenjia Xu, Yongqin Xian, Jiuniu Wang, Bernt Schiele, Zeynep Akata
Date: 2020-08-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Attribute, Representation Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

From the beginning of zero-shot learning research, visual attributes have been shown to play an important role. In order to better transfer attribute-based knowledge from known to unknown classes, we argue that an image representation with integrated attribute localization ability would be beneficial for zero-shot learning. To this end, we propose a novel zero-shot representation learning framework that jointly learns discriminative global and local features using only class-level attributes. While a visual-semantic embedding layer learns global features, local features are learned through an attribute prototype network that simultaneously regresses and decorrelates attributes from intermediate features. We show that our locality augmented image representations achieve a new state-of-the-art on three zero-shot learning benchmarks. As an additional benefit, our model points to the visual evidence of the attributes in an image, e.g. for the CUB dataset, confirming the improved attribute localization ability of our image representation.
Toward Smart Security Enhancement of Federated Learning Networks
Authors: Junjie Tan, Ying-Chang Liang, Nguyen Cong Luong, Dusit Niyato
Date: 2020-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Federated Learning

As traditional centralized learning networks (CLNs) are facing increasing challenges in terms of privacy preservation, communication overheads, and scalability, federated learning networks (FLNs) have been proposed as a promising alternative paradigm to support the training of machine learning (ML) models. In contrast to the centralized data storage and processing in CLNs, FLNs exploit a number of edge devices (EDs) to store data and perform training distributively. In this way, the EDs in FLNs can keep training data locally, which preserves privacy and reduces communication overheads. However, since the model training within FLNs relies on the contribution of all EDs, the training process can be disrupted if some of the EDs upload incorrect or falsified training results, i.e., poisoning attacks. In this paper, we review the vulnerabilities of FLNs, and particularly give an overview of poisoning attacks and mainstream countermeasures. Nevertheless, the existing countermeasures can only provide passive protection and fail to consider the training fees paid for the contributions of the EDs, resulting in a unnecessarily high training cost. Hence, we present a smart security enhancement framework for FLNs. In particular, a verify-before-aggregate (VBA) procedure is developed to identify and remove the non-benign training results from the EDs. Afterward, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is applied to learn the behaving patterns of the EDs and to actively select the EDs that can provide benign training results and charge low training fees. Simulation results reveal that the proposed framework can protect FLNs effectively and efficiently.