pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Self-supervised Pseudo Multi-class Pre-training for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection and Segmentation in Medical Images
Authors: Yu Tian, Fengbei Liu, Guansong Pang, Yuanhong Chen, Yuyuan Liu, Johan W. Verjans, Rajvinder Singh, Gustavo Carneiro
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Self-Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) methods are trained with normal (or healthy) images only, but during testing, they are able to classify normal and abnormal (or disease) images. UAD is an important medical image analysis (MIA) method to be applied in disease screening problems because the training sets available for those problems usually contain only normal images. However, the exclusive reliance on normal images may result in the learning of ineffective low-dimensional image representations that are not sensitive enough to detect and segment unseen abnormal lesions of varying size, appearance, and shape. Pre-training UAD methods with self-supervised learning, based on computer vision techniques, can mitigate this challenge, but they are sub-optimal because they do not explore domain knowledge for designing the pretext tasks, and their contrastive learning losses do not try to cluster the normal training images, which may result in a sparse distribution of normal images that is ineffective for anomaly detection. In this paper, we propose a new self-supervised pre-training method for MIA UAD applications, named Pseudo Multi-class Strong Augmentation via Contrastive Learning (PMSACL). PMSACL consists of a novel optimisation method that contrasts a normal image class from multiple pseudo classes of synthesised abnormal images, with each class enforced to form a dense cluster in the feature space. In the experiments, we show that our PMSACL pre-training improves the accuracy of SOTA UAD methods on many MIA benchmarks using colonoscopy, fundus screening and Covid-19 Chest X-ray datasets. The code is made publicly available via https://github.com/tianyu0207/PMSACL.
LATFormer: Locality-Aware Point-View Fusion Transformer for 3D Shape Recognition
Authors: Xinwei He, Silin Cheng, Dingkang Liang, Song Bai, Xi Wang, Yingying Zhu
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Classification, 3D Object Retrieval, 3D Shape Recognition, 3D Shape Retrieval, Retrieval

Recently, 3D shape understanding has achieved significant progress due to the advances of deep learning models on various data formats like images, voxels, and point clouds. Among them, point clouds and multi-view images are two complementary modalities of 3D objects and learning representations by fusing both of them has been proven to be fairly effective. While prior works typically focus on exploiting global features of the two modalities, herein we argue that more discriminative features can be derived by modeling ``where to fuse''. To investigate this, we propose a novel Locality-Aware Point-View Fusion Transformer (LATFormer) for 3D shape retrieval and classification. The core component of LATFormer is a module named Locality-Aware Fusion (LAF) which integrates the local features of correlated regions across the two modalities based on the co-occurrence scores. We further propose to filter out scores with low values to obtain salient local co-occurring regions, which reduces redundancy for the fusion process. In our LATFormer, we utilize the LAF module to fuse the multi-scale features of the two modalities both bidirectionally and hierarchically to obtain more informative features. Comprehensive experiments on four popular 3D shape benchmarks covering 3D object retrieval and classification validate its effectiveness.
Two Shifts for Crop Mapping: Leveraging Aggregate Crop Statistics to Improve Satellite-based Maps in New Regions
Authors: Dan M. Kluger, Sherrie Wang, David B. Lobell
Date: 2021-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Crop Type Mapping, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Crop type mapping at the field level is critical for a variety of applications in agricultural monitoring, and satellite imagery is becoming an increasingly abundant and useful raw input from which to create crop type maps. Still, in many regions crop type mapping with satellite data remains constrained by a scarcity of field-level crop labels for training supervised classification models. When training data is not available in one region, classifiers trained in similar regions can be transferred, but shifts in the distribution of crop types as well as transformations of the features between regions lead to reduced classification accuracy. We present a methodology that uses aggregate-level crop statistics to correct the classifier by accounting for these two types of shifts. To adjust for shifts in the crop type composition we present a scheme for properly reweighting the posterior probabilities of each class that are output by the classifier. To adjust for shifts in features we propose a method to estimate and remove linear shifts in the mean feature vector. We demonstrate that this methodology leads to substantial improvements in overall classification accuracy when using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to map crop types in Occitanie, France and in Western Province, Kenya. When using LDA as our base classifier, we found that in France our methodology led to percent reductions in misclassifications ranging from 2.8% to 42.2% (mean = 21.9%) over eleven different training departments, and in Kenya the percent reductions in misclassification were 6.6%, 28.4%, and 42.7% for three training regions. While our methodology was statistically motivated by the LDA classifier, it can be applied to any type of classifier. As an example, we demonstrate its successful application to improve a Random Forest classifier.
DeepTracks: Geopositioning Maritime Vehicles in Video Acquired from a Moving Platform
Authors: Jianli Wei, Guanyu Xu, Alper Yilmaz
Date: 2021-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

Geopositioning and tracking a moving boat at sea is a very challenging problem, requiring boat detection, matching and estimating its GPS location from imagery with no common features. The problem can be stated as follows: given imagery from a camera mounted on a moving platform with known GPS location as the only valid sensor, we predict the geoposition of a target boat visible in images. Our solution uses recent ML algorithms, the camera-scene geometry and Bayesian filtering. The proposed pipeline first detects and tracks the target boat's location in the image with the strategy of tracking by detection. This image location is then converted to geoposition to the local sea coordinates referenced to the camera GPS location using plane projective geometry. Finally, target boat local coordinates are transformed to global GPS coordinates to estimate the geoposition. To achieve a smooth geotrajectory, we apply unscented Kalman filter (UKF) which implicitly overcomes small detection errors in the early stages of the pipeline. We tested the performance of our approach using GPS ground truth and show the accuracy and speed of the estimated geopositions. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/JianliWei1995/AI-Track-at-Sea.
A Reliable, Self-Adaptive Face Identification Framework via Lyapunov Optimization
Authors: Dohyeon Kim, Joongheon Kim, Jae young Bang
Date: 2021-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Identification

Realtime face identification (FID) from a video feed is highly computation-intensive, and may exhaust computation resources if performed on a device with a limited amount of resources (e.g., a mobile device). In general, FID performs better when images are sampled at a higher rate, minimizing false negatives. However, performing it at an overwhelmingly high rate exposes the system to the risk of a queue overflow that hampers the system's reliability. This paper proposes a novel, queue-aware FID framework that adapts the sampling rate to maximize the FID performance while avoiding a queue overflow by implementing the Lyapunov optimization. A preliminary evaluation via a trace-based simulation confirms the effectiveness of the framework.
Remote Multilinear Compressive Learning with Adaptive Compression
Authors: Dat Thanh Tran, Moncef Gabbouj, Alexandros Iosifidis
Date: 2021-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing

Multilinear Compressive Learning (MCL) is an efficient signal acquisition and learning paradigm for multidimensional signals. The level of signal compression affects the detection or classification performance of a MCL model, with higher compression rates often associated with lower inference accuracy. However, higher compression rates are more amenable to a wider range of applications, especially those that require low operating bandwidth and minimal energy consumption such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Many communication protocols provide support for adaptive data transmission to maximize the throughput and minimize energy consumption. By developing compressive sensing and learning models that can operate with an adaptive compression rate, we can maximize the informational content throughput of the whole application. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization scheme that enables such a feature for MCL models. Our proposal enables practical implementation of adaptive compressive signal acquisition and inference systems. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the amount of computations required during the training phase of remote learning systems but also improve the informational content throughput via adaptive-rate sensing.
roadscene2vec: A Tool for Extracting and Embedding Road Scene-Graphs
Authors: Arnav Vaibhav Malawade, Shih-Yuan Yu, Brandon Hsu, Harsimrat Kaeley, Anurag Karra, Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque
Date: 2021-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Graph Embedding, Graph Generation, Graph Learning, Scene Graph Generation, Transfer Learning

Recently, road scene-graph representations used in conjunction with graph learning techniques have been shown to outperform state-of-the-art deep learning techniques in tasks including action classification, risk assessment, and collision prediction. To enable the exploration of applications of road scene-graph representations, we introduce roadscene2vec: an open-source tool for extracting and embedding road scene-graphs. The goal of roadscene2vec is to enable research into the applications and capabilities of road scene-graphs by providing tools for generating scene-graphs, graph learning models to generate spatio-temporal scene-graph embeddings, and tools for visualizing and analyzing scene-graph-based methodologies. The capabilities of roadscene2vec include (i) customized scene-graph generation from either video clips or data from the CARLA simulator, (ii) multiple configurable spatio-temporal graph embedding models and baseline CNN-based models, (iii) built-in functionality for using graph and sequence embeddings for risk assessment and collision prediction applications, (iv) tools for evaluating transfer learning, and (v) utilities for visualizing scene-graphs and analyzing the explainability of graph learning models. We demonstrate the utility of roadscene2vec for these use cases with experimental results and qualitative evaluations for both graph learning models and CNN-based models. roadscene2vec is available at https://github.com/AICPS/roadscene2vec.
Optimal Target Shape for LiDAR Pose Estimation
Authors: Jiunn-Kai Huang, William Clark, Jessy W. Grizzle
Date: 2021-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Tracking, Pose Estimation, Quantization, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, Translation

Targets are essential in problems such as object tracking in cluttered or textureless environments, camera (and multi-sensor) calibration tasks, and simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Target shapes for these tasks typically are symmetric (square, rectangular, or circular) and work well for structured, dense sensor data such as pixel arrays (i.e., image). However, symmetric shapes lead to pose ambiguity when using sparse sensor data such as LiDAR point clouds and suffer from the quantization uncertainty of the LiDAR. This paper introduces the concept of optimizing target shape to remove pose ambiguity for LiDAR point clouds. A target is designed to induce large gradients at edge points under rotation and translation relative to the LiDAR to ameliorate the quantization uncertainty associated with point cloud sparseness. Moreover, given a target shape, we present a means that leverages the target's geometry to estimate the target's vertices while globally estimating the pose. Both the simulation and the experimental results (verified by a motion capture system) confirm that by using the optimal shape and the global solver, we achieve centimeter error in translation and a few degrees in rotation even when a partially illuminated target is placed 30 meters away. All the implementations and datasets are available at https://github.com/UMich-BipedLab/optimal_shape_global_pose_estimation.
MitoDet: Simple and robust mitosis detection
Authors: Jakob Dexl, Michaela Benz, Volker Bruns, Petr Kuritcyn, Thomas Wittenberg
Date: 2021-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Generalization, Mitosis Detection

Mitotic figure detection is a challenging task in digital pathology that has a direct impact on therapeutic decisions. While automated methods often achieve acceptable results under laboratory conditions, they frequently fail in the clinical deployment phase. This problem can be mainly attributed to a phenomenon called domain shift. An important source of a domain shift is introduced by different microscopes and their camera systems, which noticeably change the color representation of digitized images. In this method description we present our submitted algorithm for the Mitosis Domain Generalization Challenge, which employs a RetinaNet trained with strong data augmentation and achieves an F1 score of 0.7138 on the preliminary test set.
Studying the Effects of Self-Attention for Medical Image Analysis
Authors: Adrit Rao, Jongchan Park, Sanghyun Woo, Joon-Young Lee, Oliver Aalami
Date: 2021-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Image Analysis

When the trained physician interprets medical images, they understand the clinical importance of visual features. By applying cognitive attention, they apply greater focus onto clinically relevant regions while disregarding unnecessary features. The use of computer vision to automate the classification of medical images is widely studied. However, the standard convolutional neural network (CNN) does not necessarily employ subconscious feature relevancy evaluation techniques similar to the trained medical specialist and evaluates features more generally. Self-attention mechanisms enable CNNs to focus more on semantically important regions or aggregated relevant context with long-range dependencies. By using attention, medical image analysis systems can potentially become more robust by focusing on more important clinical feature regions. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive comparison of various state-of-the-art self-attention mechanisms across multiple medical image analysis tasks. Through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations along with a clinical user-centric survey study, we aim to provide a deeper understanding of the effects of self-attention in medical computer vision tasks.
Multi-agent Natural Actor-critic Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Authors: Prashant Trivedi, Nandyala Hemachandra
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Multi-agent actor-critic algorithms are an important part of the Reinforcement Learning paradigm. We propose three fully decentralized multi-agent natural actor-critic (MAN) algorithms in this work. The objective is to collectively find a joint policy that maximizes the average long-term return of these agents. In the absence of a central controller and to preserve privacy, agents communicate some information to their neighbors via a time-varying communication network. We prove convergence of all the 3 MAN algorithms to a globally asymptotically stable set of the ODE corresponding to actor update; these use linear function approximations. We show that the Kullback-Leibler divergence between policies of successive iterates is proportional to the objective function's gradient. We observe that the minimum singular value of the Fisher information matrix is well within the reciprocal of the policy parameter dimension. Using this, we theoretically show that the optimal value of the deterministic variant of the MAN algorithm at each iterate dominates that of the standard gradient-based multi-agent actor-critic (MAAC) algorithm. To our knowledge, it is a first such result in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). To illustrate the usefulness of our proposed algorithms, we implement them on a bi-lane traffic network to reduce the average network congestion. We observe an almost 25\% reduction in the average congestion in 2 MAN algorithms; the average congestion in another MAN algorithm is on par with the MAAC algorithm. We also consider a generic $15$ agent MARL; the performance of the MAN algorithms is again as good as the MAAC algorithm.
Empirical Study of Named Entity Recognition Performance Using Distribution-aware Word Embedding
Authors: Xin Chen, Qi Zhao, Xinyang Liu
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Specificity

With the fast development of Deep Learning techniques, Named Entity Recognition (NER) is becoming more and more important in the information extraction task. The greatest difficulty that the NER task faces is to keep the detectability even when types of NE and documents are unfamiliar. Realizing that the specificity information may contain potential meanings of a word and generate semantic-related features for word embedding, we develop a distribution-aware word embedding and implement three different methods to make use of the distribution information in a NER framework. And the result shows that the performance of NER will be improved if the word specificity is incorporated into existing NER methods.
Pareto-Optimal Learning-Augmented Algorithms for Online Conversion Problems
Authors: Bo Sun, Russell Lee, Mohammad Hajiesmaili, Adam Wierman, Danny H. K. Tsang
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

This paper leverages machine-learned predictions to design competitive algorithms for online conversion problems with the goal of improving the competitive ratio when predictions are accurate (i.e., consistency), while also guaranteeing a worst-case competitive ratio regardless of the prediction quality (i.e., robustness). We unify the algorithmic design of both integral and fractional conversion problems, which are also known as the 1-max-search and one-way trading problems, into a class of online threshold-based algorithms (OTA). By incorporating predictions into design of OTA, we achieve the Pareto-optimal trade-off of consistency and robustness, i.e., no online algorithm can achieve a better consistency guarantee given for a robustness guarantee. We demonstrate the performance of OTA using numerical experiments on Bitcoin conversion.
Large-Scale Learning with Fourier Features and Tensor Decompositions
Authors: Frederiek Wesel, Kim Batselier
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Tensor Decomposition

Random Fourier features provide a way to tackle large-scale machine learning problems with kernel methods. Their slow Monte Carlo convergence rate has motivated the research of deterministic Fourier features whose approximation error can decrease exponentially in the number of basis functions. However, due to their tensor product extension to multiple dimensions, these methods suffer heavily from the curse of dimensionality, limiting their applicability to one, two or three-dimensional scenarios. In our approach we overcome said curse of dimensionality by exploiting the tensor product structure of deterministic Fourier features, which enables us to represent the model parameters as a low-rank tensor decomposition. We derive a monotonically converging block coordinate descent algorithm with linear complexity in both the sample size and the dimensionality of the inputs for a regularized squared loss function, allowing to learn a parsimonious model in decomposed form using deterministic Fourier features. We demonstrate by means of numerical experiments how our low-rank tensor approach obtains the same performance of the corresponding nonparametric model, consistently outperforming random Fourier features.
Investigate the Correlation of Breast Cancer Dataset using Different Clustering Technique
Authors: Somenath Chakraborty, Beddhu Murali
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Prognosis

The objectives of this paper are to explore ways to analyze breast cancer dataset in the context of unsupervised learning without prior training model. The paper investigates different ways of clustering techniques as well as preprocessing. This in-depth analysis builds the footprint which can further use for designing a most robust and accurate medical prognosis system. This paper also give emphasis on correlations of data points with different standard benchmark techniques. Keywords: Breast cancer dataset, Clustering Technique Hopkins Statistic, K-means Clustering, k-medoids or partitioning around medoids (PAM)
LightAutoML: AutoML Solution for a Large Financial Services Ecosystem
Authors: Anton Vakhrushev, Alexander Ryzhkov, Maxim Savchenko, Dmitry Simakov, Rinchin Damdinov, Alexander Tuzhilin
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML

We present an AutoML system called LightAutoML developed for a large European financial services company and its ecosystem satisfying the set of idiosyncratic requirements that this ecosystem has for AutoML solutions. Our framework was piloted and deployed in numerous applications and performed at the level of the experienced data scientists while building high-quality ML models significantly faster than these data scientists. We also compare the performance of our system with various general-purpose open source AutoML solutions and show that it performs better for most of the ecosystem and OpenML problems. We also present the lessons that we learned while developing the AutoML system and moving it into production.
Biomedical Data-to-Text Generation via Fine-Tuning Transformers
Authors: Ruslan Yermakov, Nicholas Drago, Angelo Ziletti
Date: 2021-09-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: INLG (ACL) 2021 8
Tasks: Benchmarking, Data-to-Text Generation, Text Generation

Data-to-text (D2T) generation in the biomedical domain is a promising - yet mostly unexplored - field of research. Here, we apply neural models for D2T generation to a real-world dataset consisting of package leaflets of European medicines. We show that fine-tuned transformers are able to generate realistic, multisentence text from data in the biomedical domain, yet have important limitations. We also release a new dataset (BioLeaflets) for benchmarking D2T generation models in the biomedical domain.