pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HoloLens 2 Research Mode as a Tool for Computer Vision Research
Authors: Dorin Ungureanu, Federica Bogo, Silvano Galliani, Pooja Sama, Xin Duan, Casey Meekhof, Jan Stühmer, Thomas J. Cashman, Bugra Tekin, Johannes L. Schönberger, Pawel Olszta, Marc Pollefeys
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixed Reality

Mixed reality headsets, such as the Microsoft HoloLens 2, are powerful sensing devices with integrated compute capabilities, which makes it an ideal platform for computer vision research. In this technical report, we present HoloLens 2 Research Mode, an API and a set of tools enabling access to the raw sensor streams. We provide an overview of the API and explain how it can be used to build mixed reality applications based on processing sensor data. We also show how to combine the Research Mode sensor data with the built-in eye and hand tracking capabilities provided by HoloLens 2. By releasing the Research Mode API and a set of open-source tools, we aim to foster further research in the fields of computer vision as well as robotics and encourage contributions from the research community.
A Pipeline to Understand Emerging Illness via Social Media Data Analysis: A Case Study on Breast Implant Illness
Authors: Vishal Dey, Peter Krasniak, Minh Nguyen, Clara Lee, Xia Ning
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00

Background: A new illness could first come to the public attention over social media before it is medically defined, formally documented or systematically studied. One example is a phenomenon known as breast implant illness (BII) that has been extensively discussed on social media, though vaguely defined in medical literature. Objectives: The objective of this study is to construct a data analysis pipeline to understand emerging illness using social media data, and to apply the pipeline to understand key attributes of BII. Methods: We conducted a pipeline of social media data analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and topic modeling. We extracted mentions related to signs/symptoms, diseases/disorders and medical procedures using the Clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System (cTAKES) from social media data. We mapped the mentions to standard medical concepts. We summarized mapped concepts to topics using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Finally, we applied this pipeline to understand BII from several BII-dedicated social media sites. Results: Our pipeline identified topics related to toxicity, cancer and mental health issues that are highly associated with BII. Our pipeline also shows that cancers, autoimmune disorders and mental health problems are emerging concerns associated with breast implants based on social media discussions. The pipeline also identified mentions such as rupture, infection, pain and fatigue as common self-reported issues among the public, as well as toxicity from silicone implants. Conclusions: Our study could inspire future work studying the suggested symptoms and factors of BII. Our study provides the first analysis and derived knowledge of BII from social media using NLP techniques, and demonstrates the potential of using social media information to better understand similar emerging illnesses.
Flood Extent Mapping based on High Resolution Aerial Imagery and DEM: A Hidden Markov Tree Approach
Authors: Zhe Jiang, Arpan Man Sainju
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Management

Flood extent mapping plays a crucial role in disaster management and national water forecasting. In recent years, high-resolution optical imagery becomes increasingly available with the deployment of numerous small satellites and drones. However, analyzing such imagery data to extract flood extent poses unique challenges due to the rich noise and shadows, obstacles (e.g., tree canopies, clouds), and spectral confusion between pixel classes (flood, dry) due to spatial heterogeneity. Existing machine learning techniques often focus on spectral and spatial features from raster images without fully incorporating the geographic terrain within classification models. In contrast, we recently proposed a novel machine learning model called geographical hidden Markov tree that integrates spectral features of pixels and topographic constraints from Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data (i.e., water flow directions) in a holistic manner. This paper evaluates the model through case studies on high-resolution aerial imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Geodetic Survey together with DEM. Three scenes are selected in heavily vegetated floodplains near the cities of Grimesland and Kinston in North Carolina during Hurricane Matthew floods in 2016. Results show that the proposed hidden Markov tree model outperforms several state of the art machine learning algorithms (e.g., random forests, gradient boosted model) by an improvement of F-score (the harmonic mean of the user's accuracy and producer's accuracy) from around 70% to 80% to over 95% on our datasets.
Uncovering Soccer Teams Passing Strategies Using Implication Rules
Authors: Olumide Leshi
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00

Formal Concept Analysis FCA has seen application in different knowledge areas, including Social Network Analysis SNA. In turn, research has also shown the applicability of SNA in assessing team sports. In this project, to uncover frequent passing sequences of a soccer team, an FCA based approach is introduced. The approach relies on a minimum cover of implications, the Duquenne Guigues DG basis and the notion that a soccer teams passes describe a social network.
A simple method for domain adaptation of sentence embeddings
Authors: Anna Kruspe
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings

Pre-trained sentence embeddings have been shown to be very useful for a variety of NLP tasks. Due to the fact that training such embeddings requires a large amount of data, they are commonly trained on a variety of text data. An adaptation to specific domains could improve results in many cases, but such a finetuning is usually problem-dependent and poses the risk of over-adapting to the data used for adaptation. In this paper, we present a simple universal method for finetuning Google's Universal Sentence Encoder (USE) using a Siamese architecture. We demonstrate how to use this approach for a variety of data sets and present results on different data sets representing similar problems. The approach is also compared to traditional finetuning on these data sets. As a further advantage, the approach can be used for combining data sets with different annotations. We also present an embedding finetuned on all data sets in parallel.
A Computationally Efficient Multiclass Time-Frequency Common Spatial Pattern Analysis on EEG Motor Imagery
Authors: Ce Zhang, Azim Eskandarian
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Computer Interface, Classification, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), General Classification, Motor Imagery

Common spatial pattern (CSP) is a popular feature extraction method for electroencephalogram (EEG) motor imagery (MI). This study modifies the conventional CSP algorithm to improve the multi-class MI classification accuracy and ensure the computation process is efficient. The EEG MI data is gathered from the Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) Competition IV. At first, a bandpass filter and a time-frequency analysis are performed for each experiment trial. Then, the optimal EEG signals for every experiment trials are selected based on the signal energy for CSP feature extraction. In the end, the extracted features are classified by three classifiers, linear discriminant analysis (LDA), na\"ive Bayes (NVB), and support vector machine (SVM), in parallel for classification accuracy comparison. The experiment results show the proposed algorithm average computation time is 37.22% less than the FBCSP (1st winner in the BCI Competition IV) and 4.98% longer than the conventional CSP method. For the classification rate, the proposed algorithm kappa value achieved 2nd highest compared with the top 3 winners in BCI Competition IV.
A Survey and Tutorial of EEG-Based Brain Monitoring for Driver State Analysis
Authors: Ce Zhang, Azim Eskandarian
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Drivers cognitive and physiological states affect their ability to control their vehicles. Thus, these driver states are important to the safety of automobiles. The design of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) or autonomous vehicles will depend on their ability to interact effectively with the driver. A deeper understanding of the driver state is, therefore, paramount. EEG is proven to be one of the most effective methods for driver state monitoring and human error detection. This paper discusses EEG-based driver state detection systems and their corresponding analysis algorithms over the last three decades. First, the commonly used EEG system setup for driver state studies is introduced. Then, the EEG signal preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification algorithms for driver state detection are reviewed. Finally, EEG-based driver state monitoring research is reviewed in-depth, and its future development is discussed. It is concluded that the current EEG-based driver state monitoring algorithms are promising for safety applications. However, many improvements are still required in EEG artifact reduction, real-time processing, and between-subject classification accuracy.
End-to-End 3D Multi-Object Tracking and Trajectory Forecasting
Authors: Xinshuo Weng, Ye Yuan, Kris Kitani
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Multi-Object Tracking, Diversity, Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking, Trajectory Forecasting

3D multi-object tracking (MOT) and trajectory forecasting are two critical components in modern 3D perception systems. We hypothesize that it is beneficial to unify both tasks under one framework to learn a shared feature representation of agent interaction. To evaluate this hypothesis, we propose a unified solution for 3D MOT and trajectory forecasting which also incorporates two additional novel computational units. First, we employ a feature interaction technique by introducing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to capture the way in which multiple agents interact with one another. The GNN is able to model complex hierarchical interactions, improve the discriminative feature learning for MOT association, and provide socially-aware context for trajectory forecasting. Second, we use a diversity sampling function to improve the quality and diversity of our forecasted trajectories. The learned sampling function is trained to efficiently extract a variety of outcomes from a generative trajectory distribution and helps avoid the problem of generating many duplicate trajectory samples. We show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI dataset. Our project website is at http://www.xinshuoweng.com/projects/GNNTrkForecast.
Detection of Retinal Blood Vessels by using Gabor filter with Entropic threshold
Authors: Mohamed. I. Waly, Ahmed El-Hossiny
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Diabetic retinopathy is the basic reason for visual deficiency. This paper introduces a programmed strategy to identify and dispense with the blood vessels. The location of the blood vessels is the fundamental stride in the discovery of diabetic retinopathy because the blood vessels are the typical elements of the retinal picture. The location of the blood vessels can help the ophthalmologists to recognize the sicknesses prior and quicker. The blood vessels recognized and wiped out by utilizing Gobar filter on two freely accessible retinal databases which are STARE and DRIVE. The exactness of segmentation calculation is assessed quantitatively by contrasting the physically sectioned pictures and the comparing yield pictures, the Gabor filter with Entropic threshold vessel pixel segmentation by Entropic thresholding is better vessels with less false positive portion rate.
Robust Reinforcement Learning: A Case Study in Linear Quadratic Regulation
Authors: Bo Pang, Zhong-Ping Jiang
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Ended Question Answering, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper studies the robustness of reinforcement learning algorithms to errors in the learning process. Specifically, we revisit the benchmark problem of discrete-time linear quadratic regulation (LQR) and study the long-standing open question: Under what conditions is the policy iteration method robustly stable from a dynamical systems perspective? Using advanced stability results in control theory, it is shown that policy iteration for LQR is inherently robust to small errors in the learning process and enjoys small-disturbance input-to-state stability: whenever the error in each iteration is bounded and small, the solutions of the policy iteration algorithm are also bounded, and, moreover, enter and stay in a small neighbourhood of the optimal LQR solution. As an application, a novel off-policy optimistic least-squares policy iteration for the LQR problem is proposed, when the system dynamics are subjected to additive stochastic disturbances. The proposed new results in robust reinforcement learning are validated by a numerical example.
A comparison of deep machine learning algorithms in COVID-19 disease diagnosis
Authors: Samir S. Yadav, Jasminder Kaur Sandhu, Mininath R. Bendre, Pratap S. Vikhe, Amandeep Kaur
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The aim of the work is to use deep neural network models for solving the problem of image recognition. These days, every human being is threatened by a harmful coronavirus disease, also called COVID-19 disease. The spread of coronavirus affects the economy of many countries in the world. To find COVID-19 patients early is very essential to avoid the spread and harm to society. Pathological tests and Chromatography(CT) scans are helpful for the diagnosis of COVID-19. However, these tests are having drawbacks such as a large number of false positives, and cost of these tests are so expensive. Hence, it requires finding an easy, accurate, and less expensive way for the detection of the harmful COVID-19 disease. Chest-x-ray can be useful for the detection of this disease. Therefore, in this work chest, x-ray images are used for the diagnosis of suspected COVID-19 patients using modern machine learning techniques. The analysis of the results is carried out and conclusions are made about the effectiveness of deep machine learning algorithms in image recognition problems.
Weakly Supervised Learning with Side Information for Noisy Labeled Images
Authors: Lele Cheng, Xiangzeng Zhou, Liming Zhao, Dangwei Li, Hong Shang, Yun Zheng, Pan Pan, Yinghui Xu
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Weakly-supervised Learning

In many real-world datasets, like WebVision, the performance of DNN based classifier is often limited by the noisy labeled data. To tackle this problem, some image related side information, such as captions and tags, often reveal underlying relationships across images. In this paper, we present an efficient weakly supervised learning by using a Side Information Network (SINet), which aims to effectively carry out a large scale classification with severely noisy labels. The proposed SINet consists of a visual prototype module and a noise weighting module. The visual prototype module is designed to generate a compact representation for each category by introducing the side information. The noise weighting module aims to estimate the correctness of each noisy image and produce a confidence score for image ranking during the training procedure. The propsed SINet can largely alleviate the negative impact of noisy image labels, and is beneficial to train a high performance CNN based classifier. Besides, we released a fine-grained product dataset called AliProducts, which contains more than 2.5 million noisy web images crawled from the internet by using queries generated from 50,000 fine-grained semantic classes. Extensive experiments on several popular benchmarks (i.e. Webvision, ImageNet and Clothing-1M) and our proposed AliProducts achieve state-of-the-art performance. The SINet has won the first place in the classification task on WebVision Challenge 2019, and outperformed other competitors by a large margin.
3D Semantic Segmentation of Brain Tumor for Overall Survival Prediction
Authors: Rupal Agravat, Mehul S. Raval
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Decoder, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Survival Prediction

Glioma, the malignant brain tumor, requires immediate treatment to improve the survival of patients. Gliomas heterogeneous nature makes the segmentation difficult, especially for sub-regions like necrosis, enhancing tumor, non-enhancing tumor, and Edema. Deep neural networks like full convolution neural networks and ensemble of fully convolution neural networks are successful for Glioma segmentation. The paper demonstrates the use of a 3D fully convolution neural network with a three layer encoder decoder approach for layer arrangement. The encoder blocks include the dense modules, and decoder blocks include convolution modules. The input to the network is 3D patches. The loss function combines dice loss and focal loss functions. The validation set dice score of the network is 0.74, 0.88, and 0.73 for enhancing tumor, whole tumor, and tumor core, respectively. The Random Forest Regressor uses shape, volumetric, and age features extracted from ground truth for overall survival prediction. The regressor achieves an accuracy of 44.8% on the validation set.
Towards Structured Prediction in Bioinformatics with Deep Learning
Authors: Yu Li
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Prediction, Structured Prediction

Using machine learning, especially deep learning, to facilitate biological research is a fascinating research direction. However, in addition to the standard classification or regression problems, in bioinformatics, we often need to predict more complex structured targets, such as 2D images and 3D molecular structures. The above complex prediction tasks are referred to as structured prediction. Structured prediction is more complicated than the traditional classification but has much broader applications, considering that most of the original bioinformatics problems have complex output objects. Due to the properties of those structured prediction problems, such as having problem-specific constraints and dependency within the labeling space, the straightforward application of existing deep learning models can lead to unsatisfactory results. Here, we argue that the following ideas can help resolve structured prediction problems in bioinformatics. Firstly, we can combine deep learning with other classic algorithms, such as probabilistic graphical models, which model the problem structure explicitly. Secondly, we can design the problem-specific deep learning architectures or methods by considering the structured labeling space and problem constraints, either explicitly or implicitly. We demonstrate our ideas with six projects from four bioinformatics subfields, including sequencing analysis, structure prediction, function annotation, and network analysis. The structured outputs cover 1D signals, 2D images, 3D structures, hierarchical labeling, and heterogeneous networks. With the help of the above ideas, all of our methods can achieve SOTA performance on the corresponding problems. The success of these projects motivates us to extend our work towards other more challenging but important problems, such as health-care problems, which can directly benefit people's health and wellness.
Event Cause Analysis in Distribution Networks using Synchro Waveform Measurements
Authors: Iman Niazazari, Hanif Livani, Amir Ghasemkhani, Yunchuan Liu, Lei Yang
Date: 2020-08-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This paper presents a machine learning method for event cause analysis to enhance situational awareness in distribution networks. The data streams are captured using time-synchronized high sampling rates synchro waveform measurement units (SWMU). The proposed method is formulated based on a machine learning method, the convolutional neural network (CNN). This method is capable of capturing the spatiotemporal feature of the measurements effectively and perform the event cause analysis. Several events are considered in this paper to encompass a range of possible events in real distribution networks, including capacitor bank switching, transformer energization, fault, and high impedance fault (HIF). The dataset for our study is generated using the real-time digital simulator (RTDS) to simulate real-world events. The event cause analysis is performed using only one cycle of the voltage waveforms after the event is detected. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed machine learning-based method compared to the state-of-the-art classifiers.
Independent Vector Analysis with Deep Neural Network Source Priors
Authors: Xi-Lin Li
Date: 2020-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Separation

This paper studies the density priors for independent vector analysis (IVA) with convolutive speech mixture separation as the exemplary application. Most existing source priors for IVA are too simplified to capture the fine structures of speeches. Here, we first time show that it is possible to efficiently estimate the derivative of speech density with universal approximators like deep neural networks (DNN) by optimizing certain proxy separation related performance indices. Experimental results suggest that the resultant neural network density priors consistently outperform previous ones in convergence speed for online implementation and signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) for batch implementation.
The Effects of Quantum Randomness on a System Exhibiting Computational Creativity
Authors: Azlan Iqbal
Date: 2020-08-22 00:00:00

We present experimental results on the effects of using quantum or 'truly' random numbers, as opposed to pseudorandom numbers, in a system that exhibits computational creativity (given its ability to compose original chess problems). The results indicate that using quantum random numbers too often or too seldom in the composing process does not have any positive effect on the output generated. Interestingly, there is a 'sweet spot' of using quantum random numbers 15% of the time that results in fewer statistical outliers. Overall, it would appear that there may indeed be a slight advantage to using quantum random numbers in such a system and this may also be true in other systems that exhibit computational creativity. The benefits of doing so should, however, be weighed against the overhead of obtaining quantum random numbers in contrast to a pseudorandom number generator that is likely more convenient to incorporate.
GraphReach: Position-Aware Graph Neural Network using Reachability Estimations
Authors: Sunil Nishad, Shubhangi Agarwal, Arnab Bhattacharya, Sayan Ranu
Date: 2020-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Link Prediction, Node Classification, Position

Majority of the existing graph neural networks (GNN) learn node embeddings that encode their local neighborhoods but not their positions. Consequently, two nodes that are vastly distant but located in similar local neighborhoods map to similar embeddings in those networks. This limitation prevents accurate performance in predictive tasks that rely on position information. In this paper, we develop GraphReach, a position-aware inductive GNN that captures the global positions of nodes through reachability estimations with respect to a set of anchor nodes. The anchors are strategically selected so that reachability estimations across all the nodes are maximized. We show that this combinatorial anchor selection problem is NP-hard and, consequently, develop a greedy (1-1/e) approximation heuristic. Empirical evaluation against state-of-the-art GNN architectures reveal that GraphReach provides up to 40% relative improvement in accuracy. In addition, it is more robust to adversarial attacks.