pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PECO: Examining Single Sentence Label Leakage in Natural Language Inference Datasets through Progressive Evaluation of Cluster Outliers
Authors: Michael Saxon, Xinyi Wang, Wenda Xu, William Yang Wang
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Sentence

Building natural language inference (NLI) benchmarks that are both challenging for modern techniques, and free from shortcut biases is difficult. Chief among these biases is "single sentence label leakage," where annotator-introduced spurious correlations yield datasets where the logical relation between (premise, hypothesis) pairs can be accurately predicted from only a single sentence, something that should in principle be impossible. We demonstrate that despite efforts to reduce this leakage, it persists in modern datasets that have been introduced since its 2018 discovery. To enable future amelioration efforts, introduce a novel model-driven technique, the progressive evaluation of cluster outliers (PECO) which enables both the objective measurement of leakage, and the automated detection of subpopulations in the data which maximally exhibit it.
Improving Ethical Outcomes with Machine-in-the-Loop: Broadening Human Understanding of Data Annotations
Authors: Ashis Kumer Biswas, Geeta Verma, Justin Otto Barber
Date: 2021-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

We introduce a machine-in-the-loop pipeline that aims to address root causes of unwanted bias in natural language based supervised machine learning tasks in the education domain. Learning from the experiences of students is foundational for education researchers, and academic administrators. 21st-century skills learned from experience are becoming a core part of college and career readiness as well as the hiring process in the new knowledge economy. Minoritized students demonstrate these skills in their daily lives, but documenting, assessing, and validating these skills is a huge problem for educational institutions. As an equity focused online platform, LivedX translates minoritized students' lived experiences into the 21st century skills, issues micro-credentials, and creates personal 21st century skills portfolio. To automate the micro credential mining from the natural language texts received from the students' submitted essays, we employed a bag-of-word model to construct a multi-output classifier. Despite our goal, our model initially exacerbated disparate impact on minoritized students. We used a machine-in-the-loop model development pipeline to address the problem and refine the aforementioned model to ensure fairness in its prediction.
LUC at ComMA-2021 Shared Task: Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification without using linguistic features
Authors: Rodrigo Cuéllar-Hidalgo, Julio de Jesús Guerrero-Zambrano, Dominic Forest, Gerardo Reyes-Salgado, Juan-Manuel Torres-Moreno
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICON 2021 12
Tasks: Language Identification

This work aims to evaluate the ability that both probabilistic and state-of-the-art vector space modeling (VSM) methods provide to well known machine learning algorithms to identify social network documents to be classified as aggressive, gender biased or communally charged. To this end, an exploratory stage was performed first in order to find relevant settings to test, i.e. by using training and development samples, we trained multiple algorithms using multiple vector space modeling and probabilistic methods and discarded the less informative configurations. These systems were submitted to the competition of the ComMA@ICON'21 Workshop on Multilingual Gender Biased and Communal Language Identification.
Towards End-to-End Image Compression and Analysis with Transformers
Authors: Yuanchao Bai, Xu Yang, Xianming Liu, Junjun Jiang, YaoWei Wang, Xiangyang Ji, Wen Gao
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Compression, Image Reconstruction, Inductive Bias

We propose an end-to-end image compression and analysis model with Transformers, targeting to the cloud-based image classification application. Instead of placing an existing Transformer-based image classification model directly after an image codec, we aim to redesign the Vision Transformer (ViT) model to perform image classification from the compressed features and facilitate image compression with the long-term information from the Transformer. Specifically, we first replace the patchify stem (i.e., image splitting and embedding) of the ViT model with a lightweight image encoder modelled by a convolutional neural network. The compressed features generated by the image encoder are injected convolutional inductive bias and are fed to the Transformer for image classification bypassing image reconstruction. Meanwhile, we propose a feature aggregation module to fuse the compressed features with the selected intermediate features of the Transformer, and feed the aggregated features to a deconvolutional neural network for image reconstruction. The aggregated features can obtain the long-term information from the self-attention mechanism of the Transformer and improve the compression performance. The rate-distortion-accuracy optimization problem is finally solved by a two-step training strategy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in both the image compression and the classification tasks.
A Simple Single-Scale Vision Transformer for Object Localization and Instance Segmentation
Authors: Wuyang Chen, Xianzhi Du, Fan Yang, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Tsung-Yi Lin, Huizhong Chen, Jing Li, Xiaodan Song, Zhangyang Wang, Denny Zhou
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Localization, Philosophy, Semantic Segmentation

This work presents a simple vision transformer design as a strong baseline for object localization and instance segmentation tasks. Transformers recently demonstrate competitive performance in image classification tasks. To adopt ViT to object detection and dense prediction tasks, many works inherit the multistage design from convolutional networks and highly customized ViT architectures. Behind this design, the goal is to pursue a better trade-off between computational cost and effective aggregation of multiscale global contexts. However, existing works adopt the multistage architectural design as a black-box solution without a clear understanding of its true benefits. In this paper, we comprehensively study three architecture design choices on ViT -- spatial reduction, doubled channels, and multiscale features -- and demonstrate that a vanilla ViT architecture can fulfill this goal without handcrafting multiscale features, maintaining the original ViT design philosophy. We further complete a scaling rule to optimize our model's trade-off on accuracy and computation cost / model size. By leveraging a constant feature resolution and hidden size throughout the encoder blocks, we propose a simple and compact ViT architecture called Universal Vision Transformer (UViT) that achieves strong performance on COCO object detection and instance segmentation tasks.
SiamTrans: Zero-Shot Multi-Frame Image Restoration with Pre-Trained Siamese Transformers
Authors: Lin Liu, Shanxin Yuan, Jianzhuang Liu, Xin Guo, Youliang Yan, Qi Tian
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Restoration, Rain Removal

We propose a novel zero-shot multi-frame image restoration method for removing unwanted obstruction elements (such as rains, snow, and moire patterns) that vary in successive frames. It has three stages: transformer pre-training, zero-shot restoration, and hard patch refinement. Using the pre-trained transformers, our model is able to tell the motion difference between the true image information and the obstructing elements. For zero-shot image restoration, we design a novel model, termed SiamTrans, which is constructed by Siamese transformers, encoders, and decoders. Each transformer has a temporal attention layer and several self-attention layers, to capture both temporal and spatial information of multiple frames. Only pre-trained (self-supervised) on the denoising task, SiamTrans is tested on three different low-level vision tasks (deraining, demoireing, and desnowing). Compared with related methods, ours achieves the best performances, even outperforming those with supervised learning.
On Efficient Transformer-Based Image Pre-training for Low-Level Vision
Authors: Wenbo Li, Xin Lu, Shengju Qian, Jiangbo Lu, Xiangyu Zhang, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Pre-training has marked numerous state of the arts in high-level computer vision, while few attempts have ever been made to investigate how pre-training acts in image processing systems. In this paper, we tailor transformer-based pre-training regimes that boost various low-level tasks. To comprehensively diagnose the influence of pre-training, we design a whole set of principled evaluation tools that uncover its effects on internal representations. The observations demonstrate that pre-training plays strikingly different roles in low-level tasks. For example, pre-training introduces more local information to higher layers in super-resolution (SR), yielding significant performance gains, while pre-training hardly affects internal feature representations in denoising, resulting in limited gains. Further, we explore different methods of pre-training, revealing that multi-related-task pre-training is more effective and data-efficient than other alternatives. Finally, we extend our study to varying data scales and model sizes, as well as comparisons between transformers and CNNs-based architectures. Based on the study, we successfully develop state-of-the-art models for multiple low-level tasks. Code is released at https://github.com/fenglinglwb/EDT.
Efficient Visual Tracking with Exemplar Transformers
Authors: Philippe Blatter, Menelaos Kanakis, Martin Danelljan, Luc van Gool
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Object Tracking, Video Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking, Visual Tracking

The design of more complex and powerful neural network models has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in visual object tracking. These advances can be attributed to deeper networks, or the introduction of new building blocks, such as transformers. However, in the pursuit of increased tracking performance, runtime is often hindered. Furthermore, efficient tracking architectures have received surprisingly little attention. In this paper, we introduce the Exemplar Transformer, a transformer module utilizing a single instance level attention layer for realtime visual object tracking. E.T.Track, our visual tracker that incorporates Exemplar Transformer modules, runs at 47 FPS on a CPU. This is up to 8x faster than other transformer-based models. When compared to lightweight trackers that can operate in realtime on standard CPUs, E.T.Track consistently outperforms all other methods on the LaSOT, OTB-100, NFS, TrackingNet, and VOT-ST2020 datasets. Code and models are available at https://github.com/pblatter/ettrack.
Pre-Training Transformers for Domain Adaptation
Authors: Burhan Ul Tayyab, Nicholas Chua
Date: 2021-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge 2021 called for unsupervised domain adaptation methods that could improve the performance of models by transferring the knowledge obtained from source datasets to out-of-distribution target datasets. In this paper, we utilize BeiT [1] and demonstrate its capability of capturing key attributes from source datasets and apply it to target datasets in a semi-supervised manner. Our method was able to outperform current state-of-the-art (SoTA) techniques and was able to achieve 1st place on the ViSDA Domain Adaptation Challenge with ACC of 56.29% and AUROC of 69.79%.
LocFormer: Enabling Transformers to Perform Temporal Moment Localization on Long Untrimmed Videos With a Feature Sampling Approach
Authors: Cristian Rodriguez-Opazo, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Basura Fernando, Hiroya Takamura, Qi Wu
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Video Grounding

We propose LocFormer, a Transformer-based model for video grounding which operates at a constant memory footprint regardless of the video length, i.e. number of frames. LocFormer is designed for tasks where it is necessary to process the entire long video and at its core lie two main contributions. First, our model incorporates a new sampling technique that splits the input feature sequence into a fixed number of sections and selects a single feature per section using a stochastic approach, which allows us to obtain a feature sample set that is representative of the video content for the task at hand while keeping the memory footprint constant. Second, we propose a modular design that separates functionality, enabling us to learn an inductive bias via supervising the self-attention heads, while also effectively leveraging pre-trained text and video encoders. We test our proposals on relevant benchmark datasets for video grounding, showing that not only LocFormer can achieve excellent results including state-of-the-art performance on YouCookII, but also that our sampling technique is more effective than competing counterparts and that it consistently improves the performance of prior work, by up to 3.13\% in the mean temporal IoU, ultimately leading to a new state-of-the-art performance on Charades-STA.
Light Field Neural Rendering
Authors: Mohammed Suhail, Carlos Esteves, Leonid Sigal, Ameesh Makadia
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Neural Rendering, Novel View Synthesis

Classical light field rendering for novel view synthesis can accurately reproduce view-dependent effects such as reflection, refraction, and translucency, but requires a dense view sampling of the scene. Methods based on geometric reconstruction need only sparse views, but cannot accurately model non-Lambertian effects. We introduce a model that combines the strengths and mitigates the limitations of these two directions. By operating on a four-dimensional representation of the light field, our model learns to represent view-dependent effects accurately. By enforcing geometric constraints during training and inference, the scene geometry is implicitly learned from a sparse set of views. Concretely, we introduce a two-stage transformer-based model that first aggregates features along epipolar lines, then aggregates features along reference views to produce the color of a target ray. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art on multiple forward-facing and 360{\deg} datasets, with larger margins on scenes with severe view-dependent variations.
Tell me what you see: A zero-shot action recognition method based on natural language descriptions
Authors: Valter Estevam, Rayson Laroca, David Menotti, Helio Pedrini
Date: 2021-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Descriptive, Domain Adaptation, Video Captioning, Zero-Shot Action Recognition

This paper presents a novel approach to Zero-Shot Action Recognition. Recent works have explored the detection and classification of objects to obtain semantic information from videos with remarkable performance. Inspired by them, we propose using video captioning methods to extract semantic information about objects, scenes, humans, and their relationships. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to represent both videos and labels with descriptive sentences. More specifically, we represent videos using sentences generated via video captioning methods and classes using sentences extracted from documents acquired through search engines on the Internet. Using these representations, we build a shared semantic space employing BERT-based embedders pre-trained in the paraphrasing task on multiple text datasets. The projection of both visual and semantic information onto this space is straightforward, as they are sentences, enabling classification using the nearest neighbor rule. We demonstrate that representing videos and labels with sentences alleviates the domain adaptation problem. Additionally, we show that word vectors are unsuitable for building the semantic embedding space of our descriptions. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art performance on the UCF101 dataset by 3.3 p.p. in accuracy under the TruZe protocol and achieves competitive results on both the UCF101 and HMDB51 datasets under the conventional protocol (0/50\% - training/testing split). Our code is available at https://github.com/valterlej/zsarcap.
Data Efficient Language-supervised Zero-shot Recognition with Optimal Transport Distillation
Authors: Bichen Wu, Ruizhe Cheng, Peizhao Zhang, Tianren Gao, Peter Vajda, Joseph E. Gonzalez
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Zero-Shot Learning

Traditional computer vision models are trained to predict a fixed set of predefined categories. Recently, natural language has been shown to be a broader and richer source of supervision that provides finer descriptions to visual concepts than supervised "gold" labels. Previous works, such as CLIP, use InfoNCE loss to train a model to predict the pairing between images and text captions. CLIP, however, is data hungry and requires more than 400M image-text pairs for training. The inefficiency can be partially attributed to the fact that the image-text pairs are noisy. To address this, we propose OTTER (Optimal TransporT distillation for Efficient zero-shot Recognition), which uses online entropic optimal transport to find a soft image-text match as labels for contrastive learning. Based on pretrained image and text encoders, models trained with OTTER achieve strong performance with only 3M image text pairs. Compared with InfoNCE loss, label smoothing, and knowledge distillation, OTTER consistently outperforms these baselines in zero shot evaluation on Google Open Images (19,958 classes) and multi-labeled ImageNet 10K (10032 classes) from Tencent ML-Images. Over 42 evaluations on 7 different dataset/architecture settings x 6 metrics, OTTER outperforms (32) or ties (2) all baselines in 34 of them.
Contrastive Vision-Language Pre-training with Limited Resources
Authors: Quan Cui, Boyan Zhou, Yu Guo, Weidong Yin, Hao Wu, Osamu Yoshie, Yubo Chen
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Pioneering dual-encoder pre-training works (e.g., CLIP and ALIGN) have revealed the potential of aligning multi-modal representations with contrastive learning. However, these works require a tremendous amount of data and computational resources (e.g., billion-level web data and hundreds of GPUs), which prevent researchers with limited resources from reproduction and further exploration. To this end, we propose a stack of novel methods, which significantly cut down the heavy resource dependency and allow us to conduct dual-encoder multi-modal representation alignment with limited resources. Besides, we provide a reproducible baseline of competitive results, namely ZeroVL, with only 14M publicly accessible academic datasets and 8 V100 GPUs. Additionally, we collect 100M web data for pre-training, and achieve comparable or superior results than state-of-the-art methods, further proving the effectiveness of our methods on large-scale data. We hope that this work will provide useful data points and experience for future research in contrastive vision-language pre-training. Code is available at https://github.com/zerovl/ZeroVL.
Task-oriented Dialogue Systems: performance vs. quality-optima, a review
Authors: Ryan Fellows, Hisham Ihshaish, Steve Battle, Ciaran Haines, Peter Mayhew, J. Ignacio Deza
Date: 2021-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Task-oriented dialogue systems (TODS) are continuing to rise in popularity as various industries find ways to effectively harness their capabilities, saving both time and money. However, even state-of-the-art TODS are not yet reaching their full potential. TODS typically have a primary design focus on completing the task at hand, so the metric of task-resolution should take priority. Other conversational quality attributes that may point to the success, or otherwise, of the dialogue, may be ignored. This can cause interactions between human and dialogue system that leave the user dissatisfied or frustrated. This paper explores the literature on evaluative frameworks of dialogue systems and the role of conversational quality attributes in dialogue systems, looking at if, how, and where they are utilised, and examining their correlation with the performance of the dialogue system.
Applying SoftTriple Loss for Supervised Language Model Fine Tuning
Authors: Witold Sosnowski, Anna Wroblewska, Piotr Gawrysiak
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We introduce a new loss function TripleEntropy, to improve classification performance for fine-tuning general knowledge pre-trained language models based on cross-entropy and SoftTriple loss. This loss function can improve the robust RoBERTa baseline model fine-tuned with cross-entropy loss by about (0.02% - 2.29%). Thorough tests on popular datasets indicate a steady gain. The fewer samples in the training dataset, the higher gain -- thus, for small-sized dataset it is 0.78%, for medium-sized -- 0.86% for large -- 0.20% and for extra-large 0.04%.
Multiple Time Series Fusion Based on LSTM An Application to CAP A Phase Classification Using EEG
Authors: Fábio Mendonça, Sheikh Shanawaz Mostafa, Diogo Freitas, Fernando Morgado-Dias, Antonio G. Ravelo-García
Date: 2021-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: channel selection, Decision Making, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Biomedical decision making involves multiple signal processing, either from different sensors or from different channels. In both cases, information fusion plays a significant role. A deep learning based electroencephalogram channels' feature level fusion is carried out in this work for the electroencephalogram cyclic alternating pattern A phase classification. Channel selection, fusion, and classification procedures were optimized by two optimization algorithms, namely, Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization. The developed methodologies were evaluated by fusing the information from multiple electroencephalogram channels for patients with nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy and patients without any neurological disorder, which was significantly more challenging when compared to other state of the art works. Results showed that both optimization algorithms selected a comparable structure with similar feature level fusion, consisting of three electroencephalogram channels, which is in line with the CAP protocol to ensure multiple channels' arousals for CAP detection. Moreover, the two optimized models reached an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.82, with average accuracy ranging from 77% to 79%, a result which is in the upper range of the specialist agreement. The proposed approach is still in the upper range of the best state of the art works despite a difficult dataset, and has the advantage of providing a fully automatic analysis without requiring any manual procedure. Ultimately, the models revealed to be noise resistant and resilient to multiple channel loss.