pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
To do or not to do: finding causal relations in smart homes
Authors: Kanvaly Fadiga, Etienne Houzé, Ada Diaconescu, Jean-Louis Dessalles
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning, Diagnostic

Research in Cognitive Science suggests that humans understand and represent knowledge of the world through causal relationships. In addition to observations, they can rely on experimenting and counterfactual reasoning -- i.e. referring to an alternative course of events -- to identify causal relations and explain atypical situations. Different instances of control systems, such as smart homes, would benefit from having a similar causal model, as it would help the user understand the logic of the system and better react when needed. However, while data-driven methods achieve high levels of correlation detection, they mainly fall short of finding causal relations, notably being limited to observations only. Notably, they struggle to identify the cause from the effect when detecting a correlation between two variables. This paper introduces a new way to learn causal models from a mixture of experiments on the environment and observational data. The core of our method is the use of selected interventions, especially our learning takes into account the variables where it is impossible to intervene, unlike other approaches. The causal model we obtain is then used to generate Causal Bayesian Networks, which can be later used to perform diagnostic and predictive inference. We use our method on a smart home simulation, a use case where knowing causal relations pave the way towards explainable systems. Our algorithm succeeds in generating a Causal Bayesian Network close to the simulation's ground truth causal interactions, showing encouraging prospects for application in real-life systems.
A Rule Mining-Based Advanced Persistent Threats Detection System
Authors: Sidahmed Benabderrahmane, Ghita Berrada, James Cheney, Petko Valtchev
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Blocking

Advanced persistent threats (APT) are stealthy cyber-attacks that are aimed at stealing valuable information from target organizations and tend to extend in time. Blocking all APTs is impossible, security experts caution, hence the importance of research on early detection and damage limitation. Whole-system provenance-tracking and provenance trace mining are considered promising as they can help find causal relationships between activities and flag suspicious event sequences as they occur. We introduce an unsupervised method that exploits OS-independent features reflecting process activity to detect realistic APT-like attacks from provenance traces. Anomalous processes are ranked using both frequent and rare event associations learned from traces. Results are then presented as implications which, since interpretable, help leverage causality in explaining the detected anomalies. When evaluated on Transparent Computing program datasets (DARPA), our method outperformed competing approaches.
Data Curation and Quality Assurance for Machine Learning-based Cyber Intrusion Detection
Authors: Haihua Chen, Ngan Tran, Anand Sagar Thumati, Jay Bhuyan, Junhua Ding
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Intrusion Detection

Intrusion detection is an essential task in the cyber threat environment. Machine learning and deep learning techniques have been applied for intrusion detection. However, most of the existing research focuses on the model work but ignores the fact that poor data quality has a direct impact on the performance of a machine learning system. More attention should be paid to the data work when building a machine learning-based intrusion detection system. This article first summarizes existing machine learning-based intrusion detection systems and the datasets used for building these systems. Then the data preparation workflow and quality requirements for intrusion detection are discussed. To figure out how data and models affect machine learning performance, we conducted experiments on 11 HIDS datasets using seven machine learning models and three deep learning models. The experimental results show that BERT and GPT were the best algorithms for HIDS on all of the datasets. However, the performance on different datasets varies, indicating the differences between the data quality of these datasets. We then evaluate the data quality of the 11 datasets based on quality dimensions proposed in this paper to determine the best characteristics that a HIDS dataset should possess in order to yield the best possible result. This research initiates a data quality perspective for researchers and practitioners to improve the performance of machine learning-based intrusion detection.
Cross-domain Imitation from Observations
Authors: Dripta S. Raychaudhuri, Sujoy Paul, Jeroen van Baar, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Position

Imitation learning seeks to circumvent the difficulty in designing proper reward functions for training agents by utilizing expert behavior. With environments modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDP), most of the existing imitation algorithms are contingent on the availability of expert demonstrations in the same MDP as the one in which a new imitation policy is to be learned. In this paper, we study the problem of how to imitate tasks when there exist discrepancies between the expert and agent MDP. These discrepancies across domains could include differing dynamics, viewpoint, or morphology; we present a novel framework to learn correspondences across such domains. Importantly, in contrast to prior works, we use unpaired and unaligned trajectories containing only states in the expert domain, to learn this correspondence. We utilize a cycle-consistency constraint on both the state space and a domain agnostic latent space to do this. In addition, we enforce consistency on the temporal position of states via a normalized position estimator function, to align the trajectories across the two domains. Once this correspondence is found, we can directly transfer the demonstrations on one domain to the other and use it for imitation. Experiments across a wide variety of challenging domains demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.
Improving Generation and Evaluation of Visual Stories via Semantic Consistency
Authors: Adyasha Maharana, Darryl Hannan, Mohit Bansal
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Image Generation, Story Visualization, Video Captioning

Story visualization is an under-explored task that falls at the intersection of many important research directions in both computer vision and natural language processing. In this task, given a series of natural language captions which compose a story, an agent must generate a sequence of images that correspond to the captions. Prior work has introduced recurrent generative models which outperform text-to-image synthesis models on this task. However, there is room for improvement of generated images in terms of visual quality, coherence and relevance. We present a number of improvements to prior modeling approaches, including (1) the addition of a dual learning framework that utilizes video captioning to reinforce the semantic alignment between the story and generated images, (2) a copy-transform mechanism for sequentially-consistent story visualization, and (3) MART-based transformers to model complex interactions between frames. We present ablation studies to demonstrate the effect of each of these techniques on the generative power of the model for both individual images as well as the entire narrative. Furthermore, due to the complexity and generative nature of the task, standard evaluation metrics do not accurately reflect performance. Therefore, we also provide an exploration of evaluation metrics for the model, focused on aspects of the generated frames such as the presence/quality of generated characters, the relevance to captions, and the diversity of the generated images. We also present correlation experiments of our proposed automated metrics with human evaluations. Code and data available at: https://github.com/adymaharana/StoryViz
Evaluating Robustness over High Level Driving Instruction for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Florence Carton, David Filliat, Jaonary Rabarisoa, Quoc Cuong Pham
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Navigate, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In recent years, we have witnessed increasingly high performance in the field of autonomous end-to-end driving. In particular, more and more research is being done on driving in urban environments, where the car has to follow high level commands to navigate. However, few evaluations are made on the ability of these agents to react in an unexpected situation. Specifically, no evaluations are conducted on the robustness of driving agents in the event of a bad high-level command. We propose here an evaluation method, namely a benchmark that allows to assess the robustness of an agent, and to appreciate its understanding of the environment through its ability to keep a safe behavior, regardless of the instruction.
Robust Unsupervised Multi-Object Tracking in Noisy Environments
Authors: C. -H. Huck Yang, Mohit Chhabra, Y. -C. Liu, Quan Kong, Tomoaki Yoshinaga, Tomokazu Murakami
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking, Variational Inference

Physical processes, camera movement, and unpredictable environmental conditions like the presence of dust can induce noise and artifacts in video feeds. We observe that popular unsupervised MOT methods are dependent on noise-free inputs. We show that the addition of a small amount of artificial random noise causes a sharp degradation in model performance on benchmark metrics. We resolve this problem by introducing a robust unsupervised multi-object tracking (MOT) model: AttU-Net. The proposed single-head attention model helps limit the negative impact of noise by learning visual representations at different segment scales. AttU-Net shows better unsupervised MOT tracking performance over variational inference-based state-of-the-art baselines. We evaluate our method in the MNIST-MOT and the Atari game video benchmark. We also provide two extended video datasets: ``Kuzushiji-MNIST MOT'' which consists of moving Japanese characters and ``Fashion-MNIST MOT'' to validate the effectiveness of the MOT models.
Optimizing Neural Network Weights using Nature-Inspired Algorithms
Authors: Wael Korani, Malek Mouhoub, Samira Sadaoui
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Prognosis

This study aims to optimize Deep Feedforward Neural Networks (DFNNs) training using nature-inspired optimization algorithms, such as PSO, MTO, and its variant called MTOCL. We show how these algorithms efficiently update the weights of DFNNs when learning from data. We evaluate the performance of DFNN fused with optimization algorithms using three Wisconsin breast cancer datasets, Original, Diagnostic, and Prognosis, under different experimental scenarios. The empirical analysis demonstrates that MTOCL is the most performing in most scenarios across the three datasets. Also, MTOCL is comparable to past weight optimization algorithms for the original dataset, and superior for the other datasets, especially for the challenging Prognostic dataset.
Epistemic Planning with Attention as a Bounded Resource
Authors: Gaia Belardinelli, Rasmus K. Rendsvig
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00

Where information grows abundant, attention becomes a scarce resource. As a result, agents must plan wisely how to allocate their attention in order to achieve epistemic efficiency. Here, we present a framework for multi-agent epistemic planning with attention, based on Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL, a powerful formalism for epistemic planning). We identify the framework as a fragment of standard DEL, and consider its plan existence problem. While in the general case undecidable, we show that when attention is required for learning, all instances of the problem are decidable.
Pseudo Pixel-level Labeling for Images with Evolving Content
Authors: Sara Mousavi, Zhenning Yang, Kelley Cross, Dawnie Steadman, Audris Mockus
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Pseudo Label, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Annotating images for semantic segmentation requires intense manual labor and is a time-consuming and expensive task especially for domains with a scarcity of experts, such as Forensic Anthropology. We leverage the evolving nature of images depicting the decay process in human decomposition data to design a simple yet effective pseudo-pixel-level label generation technique to reduce the amount of effort for manual annotation of such images. We first identify sequences of images with a minimum variation that are most suitable to share the same or similar annotation using an unsupervised approach. Given one user-annotated image in each sequence, we propagate the annotation to the remaining images in the sequence by merging it with annotations produced by a state-of-the-art CAM-based pseudo label generation technique. To evaluate the quality of our pseudo-pixel-level labels, we train two semantic segmentation models with VGG and ResNet backbones on images labeled using our pseudo labeling method and those of a state-of-the-art method. The results indicate that using our pseudo-labels instead of those generated using the state-of-the-art method in the training process improves the mean-IoU and the frequency-weighted-IoU of the VGG and ResNet-based semantic segmentation models by 3.36%, 2.58%, 10.39%, and 12.91% respectively.
Going Deeper through the Gleason Scoring Scale: An Automatic end-to-end System for Histology Prostate Grading and Cribriform Pattern Detection
Authors: Julio Silva-Rodríguez, Adrián Colomer, María A. Sales, Rafael Molina, Valery Naranjo
Date: 2021-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, whole slide images

The Gleason scoring system is the primary diagnostic and prognostic tool for prostate cancer. In recent years, with the development of digitisation devices, the use of computer vision techniques for the analysis of biopsies has increased. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the development of algorithms to automatically detect individual cribriform patterns belonging to Gleason grade 4 has not yet been studied in the literature. The objective of the work presented in this paper is to develop a deep-learning-based system able to support pathologists in the daily analysis of prostate biopsies. The methodological core of this work is a patch-wise predictive model based on convolutional neural networks able to determine the presence of cancerous patterns. In particular, we train from scratch a simple self-design architecture. The cribriform pattern is detected by retraining the set of filters of the last convolutional layer in the network. From the reconstructed prediction map, we compute the percentage of each Gleason grade in the tissue to feed a multi-layer perceptron which provides a biopsy-level score.mIn our SICAPv2 database, composed of 182 annotated whole slide images, we obtained a Cohen's quadratic kappa of 0.77 in the test set for the patch-level Gleason grading with the proposed architecture trained from scratch. Our results outperform previous ones reported in the literature. Furthermore, this model reaches the level of fine-tuned state-of-the-art architectures in a patient-based four groups cross validation. In the cribriform pattern detection task, we obtained an area under ROC curve of 0.82. Regarding the biopsy Gleason scoring, we achieved a quadratic Cohen's Kappa of 0.81 in the test subset. Shallow CNN architectures trained from scratch outperform current state-of-the-art methods for Gleason grades classification.
Towards Realization of Augmented Intelligence in Dermatology: Advances and Future Directions
Authors: Roxana Daneshjou, Carrie Kovarik, Justin M Ko
Date: 2021-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Deep Learning, Diagnostic, Position

Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms using deep learning have advanced the classification of skin disease images; however these algorithms have been mostly applied "in silico" and not validated clinically. Most dermatology AI algorithms perform binary classification tasks (e.g. malignancy versus benign lesions), but this task is not representative of dermatologists' diagnostic range. The American Academy of Dermatology Task Force on Augmented Intelligence published a position statement emphasizing the importance of clinical validation to create human-computer synergy, termed augmented intelligence (AuI). Liu et al's recent paper, "A deep learning system for differential diagnosis of skin diseases" represents a significant advancement of AI in dermatology, bringing it closer to clinical impact. However, significant issues must be addressed before this algorithm can be integrated into clinical workflow. These issues include accurate and equitable model development, defining and assessing appropriate clinical outcomes, and real-world integration.
Graph Convolutional Networks in Feature Space for Image Deblurring and Super-resolution
Authors: Boyan Xu, Hujun Yin
Date: 2021-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Decoder, Image Deblurring, Image Restoration, Super-Resolution

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have achieved great success in dealing with data of non-Euclidean structures. Their success directly attributes to fitting graph structures effectively to data such as in social media and knowledge databases. For image processing applications, the use of graph structures and GCNs have not been fully explored. In this paper, we propose a novel encoder-decoder network with added graph convolutions by converting feature maps to vertexes of a pre-generated graph to synthetically construct graph-structured data. By doing this, we inexplicitly apply graph Laplacian regularization to the feature maps, making them more structured. The experiments show that it significantly boosts performance for image restoration tasks, including deblurring and super-resolution. We believe it opens up opportunities for GCN-based approaches in more applications.
WeGleNet: A Weakly-Supervised Convolutional Neural Network for the Semantic Segmentation of Gleason Grades in Prostate Histology Images
Authors: Julio Silva-Rodríguez, Adrián Colomer, Valery Naranjo
Date: 2021-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Semantic Segmentation

Prostate cancer is one of the main diseases affecting men worldwide. The Gleason scoring system is the primary diagnostic tool for prostate cancer. This is obtained via the visual analysis of cancerous patterns in prostate biopsies performed by expert pathologists, and the aggregation of the main Gleason grades in a combined score. Computer-aided diagnosis systems allow to reduce the workload of pathologists and increase the objectivity. Recently, efforts have been made in the literature to develop algorithms aiming the direct estimation of the global Gleason score at biopsy/core level with global labels. However, these algorithms do not cover the accurate localization of the Gleason patterns into the tissue. In this work, we propose a deep-learning-based system able to detect local cancerous patterns in the prostate tissue using only the global-level Gleason score during training. The methodological core of this work is the proposed weakly-supervised-trained convolutional neural network, WeGleNet, based on a multi-class segmentation layer after the feature extraction module, a global-aggregation, and the slicing of the background class for the model loss estimation during training. We obtained a Cohen's quadratic kappa (k) of 0.67 for the pixel-level prediction of cancerous patterns in the validation cohort. We compared the model performance for semantic segmentation of Gleason grades with supervised state-of-the-art architectures in the test cohort. We obtained a pixel-level k of 0.61 and a macro-averaged f1-score of 0.58, at the same level as fully-supervised methods. Regarding the estimation of the core-level Gleason score, we obtained a k of 0.76 and 0.67 between the model and two different pathologists. WeGleNet is capable of performing the semantic segmentation of Gleason grades similarly to fully-supervised methods without requiring pixel-level annotations.
Compositional Fine-Grained Low-Shot Learning
Authors: Dat Huynh, Ehsan Elhamifar
Date: 2021-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Diversity, Few-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

We develop a novel compositional generative model for zero- and few-shot learning to recognize fine-grained classes with a few or no training samples. Our key observation is that generating holistic features for fine-grained classes fails to capture small attribute differences between classes. Therefore, we propose a feature composition framework that learns to extract attribute features from training samples and combines them to construct fine-grained features for rare and unseen classes. Feature composition allows us to not only selectively compose features of every class from only relevant training samples, but also obtain diversity among composed features via changing samples used for the composition. In addition, instead of building holistic features for classes, we use our attribute features to form dense representations capable of capturing fine-grained attribute details of classes. We propose a training scheme that uses a discriminative model to construct features that are subsequently used to train the model itself. Therefore, we directly train the discriminative model on the composed features without learning a separate generative model. We conduct experiments on four popular datasets of DeepFashion, AWA2, CUB, and SUN, showing the effectiveness of our method.
Compressing Deep CNNs using Basis Representation and Spectral Fine-tuning
Authors: Muhammad Tayyab, Fahad Ahmad Khan, Abhijit Mahalanobis
Date: 2021-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection

We propose an efficient and straightforward method for compressing deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that uses basis filters to represent the convolutional layers, and optimizes the performance of the compressed network directly in the basis space. Specifically, any spatial convolution layer of the CNN can be replaced by two successive convolution layers: the first is a set of three-dimensional orthonormal basis filters, followed by a layer of one-dimensional filters that represents the original spatial filters in the basis space. We jointly fine-tune both the basis and the filter representation to directly mitigate any performance loss due to the truncation. Generality of the proposed approach is demonstrated by applying it to several well known deep CNN architectures and data sets for image classification and object detection. We also present the execution time and power usage at different compression levels on the Xavier Jetson AGX processor.