pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Semantic Segmentation Network for Urban-Scale Building Footprint Extraction Using RGB Satellite Imagery
Authors: Aatif Jiwani, Shubhrakanti Ganguly, Chao Ding, Nan Zhou, David M. Chan
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Semantic Segmentation

Urban areas consume over two-thirds of the world's energy and account for more than 70 percent of global CO2 emissions. As stated in IPCC's Global Warming of 1.5C report, achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 requires a clear understanding of urban geometry. High-quality building footprint generation from satellite images can accelerate this predictive process and empower municipal decision-making at scale. However, previous Deep Learning-based approaches face consequential issues such as scale invariance and defective footprints, partly due to ever-present class-wise imbalance. Additionally, most approaches require supplemental data such as point cloud data, building height information, and multi-band imagery - which has limited availability and are tedious to produce. In this paper, we propose a modified DeeplabV3+ module with a Dilated Res-Net backbone to generate masks of building footprints from three-channel RGB satellite imagery only. Furthermore, we introduce an F-Beta measure in our objective function to help the model account for skewed class distributions and prevent false-positive footprints. In addition to F-Beta, we incorporate an exponentially weighted boundary loss and use a cross-dataset training strategy to further increase the quality of predictions. As a result, we achieve state-of-the-art performances across three public benchmarks and demonstrate that our RGB-only method produces higher quality visual results and is agnostic to the scale, resolution, and urban density of satellite imagery.
Robotic Waste Sorter with Agile Manipulation and Quickly Trainable Detector
Authors: Takuya Kiyokawa, Hiroki Katayama, Yuya Tatsuta, Jun Takamatsu, Tsukasa Ogasawara
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00

Owing to human labor shortages, the automation of labor-intensive manual waste-sorting is needed. The goal of automating waste-sorting is to replace the human role of robust detection and agile manipulation of waste items with robots. To achieve this, we propose three methods. First, we provide a combined manipulation method using graspless push-and-drop and pick-and-release manipulation. Second, we provide a robotic system that can automatically collect object images to quickly train a deep neural-network model. Third, we provide a method to mitigate the differences in the appearance of target objects from two scenes: one for dataset collection and the other for waste sorting in a recycling factory. If differences exist, the performance of a trained waste detector may decrease. We address differences in illumination and background by applying object scaling, histogram matching with histogram equalization, and background synthesis to the source target-object images. Via experiments in an indoor experimental workplace for waste-sorting, we confirm that the proposed methods enable quick collection of the training image sets for three classes of waste items (i.e., aluminum can, glass bottle, and plastic bottle) and detection with higher performance than the methods that do not consider the differences. We also confirm that the proposed method enables the robot quickly manipulate the objects.
Unsupervised Discovery of the Long-Tail in Instance Segmentation Using Hierarchical Self-Supervision
Authors: Zhenzhen Weng, Mehmet Giray Ogut, Shai Limonchik, Serena Yeung
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Novel Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Instance segmentation is an active topic in computer vision that is usually solved by using supervised learning approaches over very large datasets composed of object level masks. Obtaining such a dataset for any new domain can be very expensive and time-consuming. In addition, models trained on certain annotated categories do not generalize well to unseen objects. The goal of this paper is to propose a method that can perform unsupervised discovery of long-tail categories in instance segmentation, through learning instance embeddings of masked regions. Leveraging rich relationship and hierarchical structure between objects in the images, we propose self-supervised losses for learning mask embeddings. Trained on COCO dataset without additional annotations of the long-tail objects, our model is able to discover novel and more fine-grained objects than the common categories in COCO. We show that the model achieves competitive quantitative results on LVIS as compared to the supervised and partially supervised methods.
Uncertainty-Aware Annotation Protocol to Evaluate Deformable Registration Algorithms
Authors: Loic Peter, Daniel C. Alexander, Caroline Magnain, Juan Eugenio Iglesias
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Informativeness

Landmark correspondences are a widely used type of gold standard in image registration. However, the manual placement of corresponding points is subject to high inter-user variability in the chosen annotated locations and in the interpretation of visual ambiguities. In this paper, we introduce a principled strategy for the construction of a gold standard in deformable registration. Our framework: (i) iteratively suggests the most informative location to annotate next, taking into account its redundancy with previous annotations; (ii) extends traditional pointwise annotations by accounting for the spatial uncertainty of each annotation, which can either be directly specified by the user, or aggregated from pointwise annotations from multiple experts; and (iii) naturally provides a new strategy for the evaluation of deformable registration algorithms. Our approach is validated on four different registration tasks. The experimental results show the efficacy of suggesting annotations according to their informativeness, and an improved capacity to assess the quality of the outputs of registration algorithms. In addition, our approach yields, from sparse annotations only, a dense visualization of the errors made by a registration method. The source code of our approach supporting both 2D and 3D data is publicly available at https://github.com/LoicPeter/evaluation-deformable-registration.
Beyond Short Clips: End-to-End Video-Level Learning with Collaborative Memories
Authors: Xitong Yang, Haoqi Fan, Lorenzo Torresani, Larry Davis, Heng Wang
Date: 2021-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Action Detection, Action Recognition, Video Classification

The standard way of training video models entails sampling at each iteration a single clip from a video and optimizing the clip prediction with respect to the video-level label. We argue that a single clip may not have enough temporal coverage to exhibit the label to recognize, since video datasets are often weakly labeled with categorical information but without dense temporal annotations. Furthermore, optimizing the model over brief clips impedes its ability to learn long-term temporal dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a collaborative memory mechanism that encodes information across multiple sampled clips of a video at each training iteration. This enables the learning of long-range dependencies beyond a single clip. We explore different design choices for the collaborative memory to ease the optimization difficulties. Our proposed framework is end-to-end trainable and significantly improves the accuracy of video classification at a negligible computational overhead. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our framework generalizes to different video architectures and tasks, outperforming the state of the art on both action recognition (e.g., Kinetics-400 & 700, Charades, Something-Something-V1) and action detection (e.g., AVA v2.1 & v2.2).
Segmentation of EM showers for neutrino experiments with deep graph neural networks
Authors: Vladislav Belavin, Ekaterina Trofimova, Andrey Ustyuzhanin
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, EM showers clusterization, Graph Neural Network, Point Cloud Segmentation

We introduce a first-ever algorithm for the reconstruction of multiple showers from the data collected with electromagnetic (EM) sampling calorimeters. Such detectors are widely used in High Energy Physics to measure the energy and kinematics of in-going particles. In this work, we consider the case when many electrons pass through an Emulsion Cloud Chamber (ECC) brick, initiating electron-induced electromagnetic showers, which can be the case with long exposure times or large input particle flux. For example, SHiP experiment is planning to use emulsion detectors for dark matter search and neutrino physics investigation. The expected full flux of SHiP experiment is about 10^20 particles over five years. To reduce the cost of the experiment associated with the replacement of the ECC brick and off-line data taking (emulsion scanning), it is decided to increase exposure time. Thus, we expect to observe a lot of overlapping showers, which turn EM showers reconstruction into a challenging point cloud segmentation problem. Our reconstruction pipeline consists of a Graph Neural Network that predicts an adjacency matrix and a clustering algorithm. We propose a new layer type (EmulsionConv) that takes into account geometrical properties of shower development in ECC brick. For the clustering of overlapping showers, we use a modified hierarchical density-based clustering algorithm. Our method does not use any prior information about the incoming particles and identifies up to 87% of electromagnetic showers in emulsion detectors. The main test bench for the algorithm for reconstructing electromagnetic showers is going to be SND@LHC.
Personalized Speech Enhancement through Self-Supervised Data Augmentation and Purification
Authors: Aswin Sivaraman, Sunwoo Kim, Minje Kim
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Denoising, Privacy Preserving, Self-Supervised Learning, Speech Enhancement

Training personalized speech enhancement models is innately a no-shot learning problem due to privacy constraints and limited access to noise-free speech from the target user. If there is an abundance of unlabeled noisy speech from the test-time user, a personalized speech enhancement model can be trained using self-supervised learning. One straightforward approach to model personalization is to use the target speaker's noisy recordings as pseudo-sources. Then, a pseudo denoising model learns to remove injected training noises and recover the pseudo-sources. However, this approach is volatile as it depends on the quality of the pseudo-sources, which may be too noisy. As a remedy, we propose an improvement to the self-supervised approach through data purification. We first train an SNR predictor model to estimate the frame-by-frame SNR of the pseudo-sources. Then, the predictor's estimates are converted into weights which adjust the frame-by-frame contribution of the pseudo-sources towards training the personalized model. We empirically show that the proposed data purification step improves the usability of the speaker-specific noisy data in the context of personalized speech enhancement. Without relying on any clean speech recordings or speaker embeddings, our approach may be seen as privacy-preserving.
Efficient Personalized Speech Enhancement through Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Aswin Sivaraman, Minje Kim
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Model Compression, Self-Supervised Learning, Speech Enhancement, Transfer Learning

This work presents self-supervised learning methods for developing monaural speaker-specific (i.e., personalized) speech enhancement models. While generalist models must broadly address many speakers, specialist models can adapt their enhancement function towards a particular speaker's voice, expecting to solve a narrower problem. Hence, specialists are capable of achieving more optimal performance in addition to reducing computational complexity. However, naive personalization methods can require clean speech from the target user, which is inconvenient to acquire, e.g., due to subpar recording conditions. To this end, we pose personalization as either a zero-shot task, in which no additional clean speech of the target speaker is used for training, or a few-shot learning task, in which the goal is to minimize the duration of the clean speech used for transfer learning. With this paper, we propose self-supervised learning methods as a solution to both zero- and few-shot personalization tasks. The proposed methods are designed to learn the personalized speech features from unlabeled data (i.e., in-the-wild noisy recordings from the target user) without knowing the corresponding clean sources. Our experiments investigate three different self-supervised learning mechanisms. The results show that self-supervised models achieve zero-shot and few-shot personalization using fewer model parameters and less clean data from the target user, achieving the data efficiency and model compression goals.
Quantized Gromov-Wasserstein
Authors: Samir Chowdhury, David Miller, Tom Needham
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

The Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) framework adapts ideas from optimal transport to allow for the comparison of probability distributions defined on different metric spaces. Scalable computation of GW distances and associated matchings on graphs and point clouds have recently been made possible by state-of-the-art algorithms such as S-GWL and MREC. Each of these algorithmic breakthroughs relies on decomposing the underlying spaces into parts and performing matchings on these parts, adding recursion as needed. While very successful in practice, theoretical guarantees on such methods are limited. Inspired by recent advances in the theory of quantization for metric measure spaces, we define Quantized Gromov Wasserstein (qGW): a metric that treats parts as fundamental objects and fits into a hierarchy of theoretical upper bounds for the GW problem. This formulation motivates a new algorithm for approximating optimal GW matchings which yields algorithmic speedups and reductions in memory complexity. Consequently, we are able to go beyond outperforming state-of-the-art and apply GW matching at scales that are an order of magnitude larger than in the existing literature, including datasets containing over 1M points.
Uncertainty-Aware COVID-19 Detection from Imbalanced Sound Data
Authors: Tong Xia, Jing Han, Lorena Qendro, Ting Dang, Cecilia Mascolo
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

Recently, sound-based COVID-19 detection studies have shown great promise to achieve scalable and prompt digital pre-screening. However, there are still two unsolved issues hindering the practice. First, collected datasets for model training are often imbalanced, with a considerably smaller proportion of users tested positive, making it harder to learn representative and robust features. Second, deep learning models are generally overconfident in their predictions. Clinically, false predictions aggravate healthcare costs. Estimation of the uncertainty of screening would aid this. To handle these issues, we propose an ensemble framework where multiple deep learning models for sound-based COVID-19 detection are developed from different but balanced subsets from original data. As such, data are utilized more effectively compared to traditional up-sampling and down-sampling approaches: an AUC of 0.74 with a sensitivity of 0.68 and a specificity of 0.69 is achieved. Simultaneously, we estimate uncertainty from the disagreement across multiple models. It is shown that false predictions often yield higher uncertainty, enabling us to suggest the users with certainty higher than a threshold to repeat the audio test on their phones or to take clinical tests if digital diagnosis still fails. This study paves the way for a more robust sound-based COVID-19 automated screening system.
Generalized Joint Probability Density Function Formulation inTurbulent Combustion using DeepONet
Authors: Rishikesh Ranade, Kevin Gitushi, Tarek Echekki
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

Joint probability density function (PDF)-based models in turbulent combustion provide direct closure for turbulence-chemistry interactions. The joint PDFs capture the turbulent flame dynamics at different spatial locations and hence it is crucial to represent them accurately. The jointPDFs are parameterized on the unconditional means of thermo-chemical state variables, which can be high dimensional. Thus, accurate construction of joint PDFs at various spatial locations may require an exorbitant amount of data. In a previous work, we introduced a framework that alleviated data requirements by constructing joint PDFs in a lower dimensional space using principal component analysis (PCA) in conjunction with Kernel Density Estimation (KDE). However, constructing the principal component (PC) joint PDFs is still computationally expensive as they are required to be calculated at each spatial location in the turbulent flame. In this work, we propose the concept of a generalized joint PDF model using the Deep Operator Network (DeepONet). The DeepONet is a machine learning model that is parameterized on the unconditional means of PCs at a given spatial location and discrete PC coordinates and predicts the joint probability density value for the corresponding PC coordinate. We demonstrate the accuracy and generalizability of the DeepONet on the Sandia flames, D, E and F. The DeepONet is trained based on the PC joint PDFs observed inflame E and yields excellent predictions of joint PDFs shapes at different spatial locations of flamesD and F, which are not seen during training
Dr-Vectors: Decision Residual Networks and an Improved Loss for Speaker Recognition
Authors: Jason Pelecanos, Quan Wang, Ignacio Lopez Moreno
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Recognition

Many neural network speaker recognition systems model each speaker using a fixed-dimensional embedding vector. These embeddings are generally compared using either linear or 2nd-order scoring and, until recently, do not handle utterance-specific uncertainty. In this work we propose scoring these representations in a way that can capture uncertainty, enroll/test asymmetry and additional non-linear information. This is achieved by incorporating a 2nd-stage neural network (known as a decision network) as part of an end-to-end training regimen. In particular, we propose the concept of decision residual networks which involves the use of a compact decision network to leverage cosine scores and to model the residual signal that's needed. Additionally, we present a modification to the generalized end-to-end softmax loss function to target the separation of same/different speaker scores. We observed significant performance gains for the two techniques.
Rejoinder: Gaussian Differential Privacy
Authors: Jinshuo Dong, Aaron Roth, Weijie J. Su
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

In this rejoinder, we aim to address two broad issues that cover most comments made in the discussion. First, we discuss some theoretical aspects of our work and comment on how this work might impact the theoretical foundation of privacy-preserving data analysis. Taking a practical viewpoint, we next discuss how f-differential privacy (f-DP) and Gaussian differential privacy (GDP) can make a difference in a range of applications.
ECRM: Efficient Fault Tolerance for Recommendation Model Training via Erasure Coding
Authors: Kaige Liu, Jack Kosaian, K. V. Rashmi
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00

Deep-learning-based recommendation models (DLRMs) are widely deployed to serve personalized content to users. DLRMs are large in size due to their use of large embedding tables, and are trained by distributing the model across the memory of tens or hundreds of servers. Server failures are common in such large distributed systems and must be mitigated to enable training to progress. Checkpointing is the primary approach used for fault tolerance in these systems, but incurs significant training-time overhead both during normal operation and when recovering from failures. As these overheads increase with DLRM size, checkpointing is slated to become an even larger overhead for future DLRMs, which are expected to grow in size. This calls for rethinking fault tolerance in DLRM training. We present ECRM, a DLRM training system that achieves efficient fault tolerance using erasure coding. ECRM chooses which DLRM parameters to encode, correctly and efficiently updates parities, and enables training to proceed without any pauses, while maintaining consistency of the recovered parameters. We implement ECRM atop XDL, an open-source, industrial-scale DLRM training system. Compared to checkpointing, ECRM reduces training-time overhead for large DLRMs by up to 88%, recovers from failures up to 10.3$\times$ faster, and allows training to proceed during recovery. These results show the promise of erasure coding in imparting efficient fault tolerance to training current and future DLRMs.
Performance Evaluation of Machine Learning Techniques for DoS Detection in Wireless Sensor Network
Authors: Lama Alsulaiman, Saad Al-Ahmadi
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Intrusion Detection, Scheduling

The nature of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and the widespread of using WSN introduce many security threats and attacks. An effective Intrusion Detection System (IDS) should be used to detect attacks. Detecting such an attack is challenging, especially the detection of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Machine learning classification techniques have been used as an approach for DoS detection. This paper conducted an experiment using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis (WEKA)to evaluate the efficiency of five machine learning algorithms for detecting flooding, grayhole, blackhole, and scheduling at DoS attacks in WSNs. The evaluation is based on a dataset, called WSN-DS. The results showed that the random forest classifier outperforms the other classifiers with an accuracy of 99.72%.
Machine Learning Applications in the Routing in Computer Networks
Authors: Ke Liang, Mitchel Myers
Date: 2021-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Development of routing algorithms is of clear importance as the volume of Internet traffic continues to increase. In this survey, there is much research into how Machine Learning techniques can be employed to improve the performance and scalability of routing algorithms. We surveyed both centralized and decentralized ML routing architectures and using a variety of ML techniques broadly divided into supervised learning and reinforcement learning. Many of the papers showed promise in their ability to optimize some aspect of network routing. We also implemented two routing protocols within 14 surveyed routing algorithms and verified the efficacy of their results. While the results of most of the papers showed promise, many of them are based on simulations of potentially unrealistic network configurations. To provide further efficacy to the results, more real-world results are necessary.