pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Evolution for Facial Emotion Recognition
Authors: Emmanuel Dufourq, Bruce A. Bassett
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Evolutionary Algorithms, Facial Emotion Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Deep facial expression recognition faces two challenges that both stem from the large number of trainable parameters: long training times and a lack of interpretability. We propose a novel method based on evolutionary algorithms, that deals with both challenges by massively reducing the number of trainable parameters, whilst simultaneously retaining classification performance, and in some cases achieving superior performance. We are robustly able to reduce the number of parameters on average by 95% (e.g. from 2M to 100k parameters) with no loss in classification accuracy. The algorithm learns to choose small patches from the image, relative to the nose, which carry the most important information about emotion, and which coincide with typical human choices of important features. Our work implements a novel form attention and shows that evolutionary algorithms are a valuable addition to machine learning in the deep learning era, both for reducing the number of parameters for facial expression recognition and for providing interpretable features that can help reduce bias.
Uncertainty Sets for Image Classifiers using Conformal Prediction
Authors: Anastasios Angelopoulos, Stephen Bates, Jitendra Malik, Michael. I. Jordan
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction, Uncertainty Quantification

Convolutional image classifiers can achieve high predictive accuracy, but quantifying their uncertainty remains an unresolved challenge, hindering their deployment in consequential settings. Existing uncertainty quantification techniques, such as Platt scaling, attempt to calibrate the network's probability estimates, but they do not have formal guarantees. We present an algorithm that modifies any classifier to output a predictive set containing the true label with a user-specified probability, such as 90%. The algorithm is simple and fast like Platt scaling, but provides a formal finite-sample coverage guarantee for every model and dataset. Our method modifies an existing conformal prediction algorithm to give more stable predictive sets by regularizing the small scores of unlikely classes after Platt scaling. In experiments on both Imagenet and Imagenet-V2 with ResNet-152 and other classifiers, our scheme outperforms existing approaches, achieving coverage with sets that are often factors of 5 to 10 smaller than a stand-alone Platt scaling baseline.
Analysis of the displacement of terrestrial mobile robots in corridors using paraconsistent annotated evidential logic eτ
Authors: Flavio Amadeu Bernardini, Marcia Terra da Silva, Jair Minoro Abe, Luiz Antonio de Lima, Kanstantsin Miatluk
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00

This article proposes an algorithm for a servo motor that controls the movement of an autonomous terrestrial mobile robot using Paraconsistent Logic. The design process of mechatronic systems guided the robot construction phases. The project intends to monitor the robot through its sensors that send positioning signals to the microcontroller. The signals are adjusted by an embedded technology interface maintained in the concepts of Paraconsistent Annotated Logic acting directly on the servo steering motor. The electric signals sent to the servo motor were analyzed, and it indicates that the algorithm paraconsistent can contribute to the increase of precision of movements of servo motors.
Large-Scale Cargo Distribution
Authors: Luka Stopar, Luka Bradesko, Tobias Jacobs, Azur Kurbašić, Miha Cimperman
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This study focuses on the design and development of methods for generating cargo distribution plans for large-scale logistics networks. It uses data from three large logistics operators while focusing on cross border logistics operations using one large graph. The approach uses a three-step methodology to first represent the logistic infrastructure as a graph, then partition the graph into smaller size regions, and finally generate cargo distribution plans for each individual region. The initial graph representation has been extracted from regional graphs by spectral clustering and is then further used for computing the distribution plan. The approach introduces methods for each of the modelling steps. The proposed approach on using regionalization of large logistics infrastructure for generating partial plans, enables scaling to thousands of drop-off locations. Results also show that the proposed approach scales better than the state-of-the-art, while preserving the quality of the solution. Our methodology is suited to address the main challenge in transforming rigid large logistics infrastructure into dynamic, just-in-time, and point-to-point delivery-oriented logistics operations.
Robust Detection of Objects under Periodic Motion with Gaussian Process Filtering
Authors: Joris Guerin, Anne Magaly de Paula Canuto, Luiz Marcos Garcia Goncalves
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Object Detection (OD) is an important task in Computer Vision with many practical applications. For some use cases, OD must be done on videos, where the object of interest has a periodic motion. In this paper, we formalize the problem of periodic OD, which consists in improving the performance of an OD model in the specific case where the object of interest is repeating similar spatio-temporal trajectories with respect to the video frames. The proposed approach is based on training a Gaussian Process to model the periodic motion, and use it to filter out the erroneous predictions of the OD model. By simulating various OD models and periodic trajectories, we demonstrate that this filtering approach, which is entirely data-driven, improves the detection performance by a large margin.
Self-Supervised Few-Shot Learning on Point Clouds
Authors: Charu Sharma, Manohar Kaul
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Few-Shot 3D Point Cloud Classification, Few-Shot Learning, General Classification, Self-Driving Cars, Self-Supervised Learning

The increased availability of massive point clouds coupled with their utility in a wide variety of applications such as robotics, shape synthesis, and self-driving cars has attracted increased attention from both industry and academia. Recently, deep neural networks operating on labeled point clouds have shown promising results on supervised learning tasks like classification and segmentation. However, supervised learning leads to the cumbersome task of annotating the point clouds. To combat this problem, we propose two novel self-supervised pre-training tasks that encode a hierarchical partitioning of the point clouds using a cover-tree, where point cloud subsets lie within balls of varying radii at each level of the cover-tree. Furthermore, our self-supervised learning network is restricted to pre-train on the support set (comprising of scarce training examples) used to train the downstream network in a few-shot learning (FSL) setting. Finally, the fully-trained self-supervised network's point embeddings are input to the downstream task's network. We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation of our method on both downstream classification and segmentation tasks and show that supervised methods pre-trained with our self-supervised learning method significantly improve the accuracy of state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, our method also outperforms previous unsupervised methods in downstream classification tasks.
Contrastive Distillation on Intermediate Representations for Language Model Compression
Authors: Siqi Sun, Zhe Gan, Yu Cheng, Yuwei Fang, Shuohang Wang, Jingjing Liu
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Model Compression

Existing language model compression methods mostly use a simple L2 loss to distill knowledge in the intermediate representations of a large BERT model to a smaller one. Although widely used, this objective by design assumes that all the dimensions of hidden representations are independent, failing to capture important structural knowledge in the intermediate layers of the teacher network. To achieve better distillation efficacy, we propose Contrastive Distillation on Intermediate Representations (CoDIR), a principled knowledge distillation framework where the student is trained to distill knowledge through intermediate layers of the teacher via a contrastive objective. By learning to distinguish positive sample from a large set of negative samples, CoDIR facilitates the student's exploitation of rich information in teacher's hidden layers. CoDIR can be readily applied to compress large-scale language models in both pre-training and finetuning stages, and achieves superb performance on the GLUE benchmark, outperforming state-of-the-art compression methods.
Multi-View Consistency Loss for Improved Single-Image 3D Reconstruction of Clothed People
Authors: Akin Caliskan, Armin Mustafa, Evren Imre, Adrian Hilton
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Shape Estimation, 3D Reconstruction

We present a novel method to improve the accuracy of the 3D reconstruction of clothed human shape from a single image. Recent work has introduced volumetric, implicit and model-based shape learning frameworks for reconstruction of objects and people from one or more images. However, the accuracy and completeness for reconstruction of clothed people is limited due to the large variation in shape resulting from clothing, hair, body size, pose and camera viewpoint. This paper introduces two advances to overcome this limitation: firstly a new synthetic dataset of realistic clothed people, 3DVH; and secondly, a novel multiple-view loss function for training of monocular volumetric shape estimation, which is demonstrated to significantly improve generalisation and reconstruction accuracy. The 3DVH dataset of realistic clothed 3D human models rendered with diverse natural backgrounds is demonstrated to allows transfer to reconstruction from real images of people. Comprehensive comparative performance evaluation on both synthetic and real images of people demonstrates that the proposed method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art learning-based single image 3D human shape estimation approaches achieving significant improvement of reconstruction accuracy, completeness, and quality. An ablation study shows that this is due to both the proposed multiple-view training and the new 3DVH dataset. The code and the dataset can be found at the project website: https://akincaliskan3d.github.io/MV3DH/.
Unbalanced Sobolev Descent
Authors: Youssef Mroueh, Mattia Rigotti
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

We introduce Unbalanced Sobolev Descent (USD), a particle descent algorithm for transporting a high dimensional source distribution to a target distribution that does not necessarily have the same mass. We define the Sobolev-Fisher discrepancy between distributions and show that it relates to advection-reaction transport equations and the Wasserstein-Fisher-Rao metric between distributions. USD transports particles along gradient flows of the witness function of the Sobolev-Fisher discrepancy (advection step) and reweighs the mass of particles with respect to this witness function (reaction step). The reaction step can be thought of as a birth-death process of the particles with rate of growth proportional to the witness function. When the Sobolev-Fisher witness function is estimated in a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), under mild assumptions we show that USD converges asymptotically (in the limit of infinite particles) to the target distribution in the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) sense. We then give two methods to estimate the Sobolev-Fisher witness with neural networks, resulting in two Neural USD algorithms. The first one implements the reaction step with mirror descent on the weights, while the second implements it through a birth-death process of particles. We show on synthetic examples that USD transports distributions with or without conservation of mass faster than previous particle descent algorithms, and finally demonstrate its use for molecular biology analyses where our method is naturally suited to match developmental stages of populations of differentiating cells based on their single-cell RNA sequencing profile. Code is available at https://github.com/ibm/usd .
A Survey on Deep Learning Techniques for Video Anomaly Detection
Authors: Jessie James P. Suarez, Prospero C. Naval, Jr
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Deep Learning, Survey, Video Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in videos is a problem that has been studied for more than a decade. This area has piqued the interest of researchers due to its wide applicability. Because of this, there has been a wide array of approaches that have been proposed throughout the years and these approaches range from statistical-based approaches to machine learning-based approaches. Numerous surveys have already been conducted on this area but this paper focuses on providing an overview on the recent advances in the field of anomaly detection using Deep Learning. Deep Learning has been applied successfully in many fields of artificial intelligence such as computer vision, natural language processing and more. This survey, however, focuses on how Deep Learning has improved and provided more insights to the area of video anomaly detection. This paper provides a categorization of the different Deep Learning approaches with respect to their objectives. Additionally, it also discusses the commonly used datasets along with the common evaluation metrics. Afterwards, a discussion synthesizing all of the recent approaches is made to provide direction and possible areas for future research.
Score-level Multi Cue Fusion for Sign Language Recognition
Authors: Çağrı Gökçe, Oğulcan Özdemir, Ahmet Alp Kındıroğlu, Lale Akarun
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Sign Language Recognition, Sign Language Translation, Translation

Sign Languages are expressed through hand and upper body gestures as well as facial expressions. Therefore, Sign Language Recognition (SLR) needs to focus on all such cues. Previous work uses hand-crafted mechanisms or network aggregation to extract the different cue features, to increase SLR performance. This is slow and involves complicated architectures. We propose a more straightforward approach that focuses on training separate cue models specializing on the dominant hand, hands, face, and upper body regions. We compare the performance of 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models specializing in these regions, combine them through score-level fusion, and use the weighted alternative. Our experimental results have shown the effectiveness of mixed convolutional models. Their fusion yields up to 19% accuracy improvement over the baseline using the full upper body. Furthermore, we include a discussion for fusion settings, which can help future work on Sign Language Translation (SLT).
Selective Cascade of Residual ExtraTrees
Authors: Qimin Liu, Fang Liu
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, regression, Representation Learning, Variable Selection

We propose a novel tree-based ensemble method named Selective Cascade of Residual ExtraTrees (SCORE). SCORE draws inspiration from representation learning, incorporates regularized regression with variable selection features, and utilizes boosting to improve prediction and reduce generalization errors. We also develop a variable importance measure to increase the explainability of SCORE. Our computer experiments show that SCORE provides comparable or superior performance in prediction against ExtraTrees, random forest, gradient boosting machine, and neural networks; and the proposed variable importance measure for SCORE is comparable to studied benchmark methods. Finally, the predictive performance of SCORE remains stable across hyper-parameter values, suggesting potential robustness to hyperparameter specification.
EEG to fMRI Synthesis: Is Deep Learning a candidate?
Authors: David Calhas, Rui Henriques
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Image Generation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Video Generation

Advances on signal, image and video generation underly major breakthroughs on generative medical imaging tasks, including Brain Image Synthesis. Still, the extent to which functional Magnetic Ressonance Imaging (fMRI) can be mapped from the brain electrophysiology remains largely unexplored. This work provides the first comprehensive view on how to use state-of-the-art principles from Neural Processing to synthesize fMRI data from electroencephalographic (EEG) data. Given the distinct spatiotemporal nature of haemodynamic and electrophysiological signals, this problem is formulated as the task of learning a mapping function between multivariate time series with highly dissimilar structures. A comparison of state-of-the-art synthesis approaches, including Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks and Pairwise Learning, is undertaken. Results highlight the feasibility of EEG to fMRI brain image mappings, pinpointing the role of current advances in Machine Learning and showing the relevance of upcoming contributions to further improve performance. EEG to fMRI synthesis offers a way to enhance and augment brain image data, and guarantee access to more affordable, portable and long-lasting protocols of brain activity monitoring. The code used in this manuscript is available in Github and the datasets are open source.
Dynamic sparsity on dynamic regression models
Authors: Paloma W. Uribe, Hedibert F. Lopes
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Variable Selection

In the present work, we consider variable selection and shrinkage for the Gaussian dynamic linear regression within a Bayesian framework. In particular, we propose a novel method that allows for time-varying sparsity, based on an extension of spike-and-slab priors for dynamic models. This is done by assigning appropriate Markov switching priors for the time-varying coefficients' variances, extending the previous work of Ishwaran and Rao (2005). Furthermore, we investigate different priors, including the common Inverted gamma prior for the process variances, and other mixture prior distributions such as Gamma priors for both the spike and the slab, which leads to a mixture of Normal-Gammas priors (Griffin ad Brown, 2010) for the coefficients. In this sense, our prior can be view as a dynamic variable selection prior which induces either smoothness (through the slab) or shrinkage towards zero (through the spike) at each time point. The MCMC method used for posterior computation uses Markov latent variables that can assume binary regimes at each time point to generate the coefficients' variances. In that way, our model is a dynamic mixture model, thus, we could use the algorithm of Gerlach et al (2000) to generate the latent processes without conditioning on the states. Finally, our approach is exemplified through simulated examples and a real data application.
Parsing with Multilingual BERT, a Small Corpus, and a Small Treebank
Authors: Ethan C. Chau, Lucy H. Lin, Noah A. Smith
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Dependency Parsing

Pretrained multilingual contextual representations have shown great success, but due to the limits of their pretraining data, their benefits do not apply equally to all language varieties. This presents a challenge for language varieties unfamiliar to these models, whose labeled \emph{and unlabeled} data is too limited to train a monolingual model effectively. We propose the use of additional language-specific pretraining and vocabulary augmentation to adapt multilingual models to low-resource settings. Using dependency parsing of four diverse low-resource language varieties as a case study, we show that these methods significantly improve performance over baselines, especially in the lowest-resource cases, and demonstrate the importance of the relationship between such models' pretraining data and target language varieties.
Asymmetric Loss For Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Emanuel Ben-Baruch, Tal Ridnik, Nadav Zamir, Asaf Noy, Itamar Friedman, Matan Protter, Lihi Zelnik-Manor
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Image Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, object-detection, Object Detection

In a typical multi-label setting, a picture contains on average few positive labels, and many negative ones. This positive-negative imbalance dominates the optimization process, and can lead to under-emphasizing gradients from positive labels during training, resulting in poor accuracy. In this paper, we introduce a novel asymmetric loss ("ASL"), which operates differently on positive and negative samples. The loss enables to dynamically down-weights and hard-thresholds easy negative samples, while also discarding possibly mislabeled samples. We demonstrate how ASL can balance the probabilities of different samples, and how this balancing is translated to better mAP scores. With ASL, we reach state-of-the-art results on multiple popular multi-label datasets: MS-COCO, Pascal-VOC, NUS-WIDE and Open Images. We also demonstrate ASL applicability for other tasks, such as single-label classification and object detection. ASL is effective, easy to implement, and does not increase the training time or complexity. Implementation is available at: https://github.com/Alibaba-MIIL/ASL.
A Survey on Semantic Parsing from the perspective of Compositionality
Authors: Pawan Kumar, Srikanta Bedathur
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Base Question Answering, Question Answering, Semantic Composition, Semantic Parsing, Survey

Different from previous surveys in semantic parsing (Kamath and Das, 2018) and knowledge base question answering(KBQA)(Chakraborty et al., 2019; Zhu et al., 2019; Hoffner et al., 2017) we try to takes a different perspective on the study of semantic parsing. Specifically, we will focus on (a)meaning composition from syntactical structure(Partee, 1975), and (b) the ability of semantic parsers to handle lexical variation given the context of a knowledge base (KB). In the following section after an introduction of the field of semantic parsing and its uses in KBQA, we will describe meaning representation using grammar formalism CCG (Steedman, 1996). We will discuss semantic composition using formal languages in Section 2. In section 3 we will consider systems that uses formal languages e.g. $\lambda$-calculus (Steedman, 1996), $\lambda$-DCS (Liang, 2013). Section 4 and 5 consider semantic parser using structured-language for logical form. Section 6 is on different benchmark datasets ComplexQuestions (Bao et al.,2016) and GraphQuestions (Su et al., 2016) that can be used to evaluate semantic parser on their ability to answer complex questions that are highly compositional in nature.