pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Neural Alignment for Face De-pixelization
Authors: Maayan Shuvi, Noa Fish, Kfir Aberman, Ariel Shamir, Daniel Cohen-Or
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00

We present a simple method to reconstruct a high-resolution video from a face-video, where the identity of a person is obscured by pixelization. This concealment method is popular because the viewer can still perceive a human face figure and the overall head motion. However, we show in our experiments that a fairly good approximation of the original video can be reconstructed in a way that compromises anonymity. Our system exploits the simultaneous similarity and small disparity between close-by video frames depicting a human face, and employs a spatial transformation component that learns the alignment between the pixelated frames. Each frame, supported by its aligned surrounding frames, is first encoded, then decoded to a higher resolution. Reconstruction and perceptual losses promote adherence to the ground-truth, and an adversarial loss assists in maintaining domain faithfulness. There is no need for explicit temporal coherency loss as it is maintained implicitly by the alignment of neighboring frames and reconstruction. Although simple, our framework synthesizes high-quality face reconstructions, demonstrating that given the statistical prior of a human face, multiple aligned pixelated frames contain sufficient information to reconstruct a high-quality approximation of the original signal.
Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning based approach for User-Centric Power Optimization in Smart Home Environments
Authors: Saurabh Gupta, Siddhant Bhambri, Karan Dhingra, Arun Balaji Buduru, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Smart homes require every device inside them to be connected with each other at all times, which leads to a lot of power wastage on a daily basis. As the devices inside a smart home increase, it becomes difficult for the user to control or operate every individual device optimally. Therefore, users generally rely on power management systems for such optimization but often are not satisfied with the results. In this paper, we present a novel multi-objective reinforcement learning framework with two-fold objectives of minimizing power consumption and maximizing user satisfaction. The framework explores the trade-off between the two objectives and converges to a better power management policy when both objectives are considered while finding an optimal policy. We experiment on real-world smart home data, and show that the multi-objective approaches: i) establish trade-off between the two objectives, ii) achieve better combined user satisfaction and power consumption than single-objective approaches. We also show that the devices that are used regularly and have several fluctuations in device modes at regular intervals should be targeted for optimization, and the experiments on data from other smart homes fetch similar results, hence ensuring transfer-ability of the proposed framework.
Efficient SVDD Sampling with Approximation Guarantees for the Decision Boundary
Authors: Adrian Englhardt, Holger Trittenbach, Daniel Kottke, Bernhard Sick, Klemens Böhm
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Novelty Detection

Support Vector Data Description (SVDD) is a popular one-class classifiers for anomaly and novelty detection. But despite its effectiveness, SVDD does not scale well with data size. To avoid prohibitive training times, sampling methods select small subsets of the training data on which SVDD trains a decision boundary hopefully equivalent to the one obtained on the full data set. According to the literature, a good sample should therefore contain so-called boundary observations that SVDD would select as support vectors on the full data set. However, non-boundary observations also are essential to not fragment contiguous inlier regions and avoid poor classification accuracy. Other aspects, such as selecting a sufficiently representative sample, are important as well. But existing sampling methods largely overlook them, resulting in poor classification accuracy. In this article, we study how to select a sample considering these points. Our approach is to frame SVDD sampling as an optimization problem, where constraints guarantee that sampling indeed approximates the original decision boundary. We then propose RAPID, an efficient algorithm to solve this optimization problem. RAPID does not require any tuning of parameters, is easy to implement and scales well to large data sets. We evaluate our approach on real-world and synthetic data. Our evaluation is the most comprehensive one for SVDD sampling so far. Our results show that RAPID outperforms its competitors in classification accuracy, in sample size, and in runtime.
Machine Learning for Semi-Automated Meteorite Recovery
Authors: Seamus Anderson, Martin Towner, Phil Bland, Christopher Haikings, William Volante, Eleanor Sansom, Hadrien Devillepoix, Patrick Shober, Benjamin Hartig, Martin Cupak, Trent Jansen-Sturgeon, Robert Howie, Gretchen Benedix, Geoff Deacon
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We present a novel methodology for recovering meteorite falls observed and constrained by fireball networks, using drones and machine learning algorithms. This approach uses images of the local terrain for a given fall site to train an artificial neural network, designed to detect meteorite candidates. We have field tested our methodology to show a meteorite detection rate between 75-97%, while also providing an efficient mechanism to eliminate false-positives. Our tests at a number of locations within Western Australia also showcase the ability for this training scheme to generalize a model to learn localized terrain features. Our model-training approach was also able to correctly identify 3 meteorites in their native fall sites, that were found using traditional searching techniques. Our methodology will be used to recover meteorite falls in a wide range of locations within globe-spanning fireball networks.
Loop-box: Multi-Agent Direct SLAM Triggered by Single Loop Closure for Large-Scale Mapping
Authors: M Usman Maqbool Bhutta, Manohar Kuse, Rui Fan, Yanan Liu, Ming Liu
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

In this paper, we present a multi-agent framework for real-time large-scale 3D reconstruction applications. In SLAM, researchers usually build and update a 3D map after applying non-linear pose graph optimization techniques. Moreover, many multi-agent systems are prevalently using odometry information from additional sensors. These methods generally involve intensive computer vision algorithms and are tightly coupled with various sensors. We develop a generic method for the keychallenging scenarios in multi-agent 3D mapping based on different camera systems. The proposed framework performs actively in terms of localizing each agent after the first loop closure between them. It is shown that the proposed system only uses monocular cameras to yield real-time multi-agent large-scale localization and 3D global mapping. Based on the initial matching, our system can calculate the optimal scale difference between multiple 3D maps and then estimate an accurate relative pose transformation for large-scale global mapping.
Research and Education Towards Smart and Sustainable World
Authors: Jukka Riekki, Aarne Mämmelä
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00

We propose a vision for directing research and education in the ICT field. Our Smart and Sustainable World vision targets at prosperity for the people and the planet through better awareness and control of both human-made and natural environment. The needs of the society, individuals, and industries are fulfilled with intelligent systems that sense their environment, make proactive decisions on actions advancing their goals, and perform the actions on the environment. We emphasize artificial intelligence, feedback loops, human acceptance and control, intelligent use of basic resources, performance parameters, mission-oriented interdisciplinary research, and a holistic systems view complementing the conventional analytical reductive view as a research paradigm especially for complex problems. To serve a broad audience, we explain these concepts and list the essential literature. We suggest planning research and education by specifying, in a step-wise manner, scenarios, performance criteria, system models, research problems and education content, resulting in common goals and a coherent project portfolio as well as education curricula. Research and education produce feedback to support evolutionary development and encourage creativity in research. Finally, we propose concrete actions for realizing this approach.
GraPPa: Grammar-Augmented Pre-Training for Table Semantic Parsing
Authors: Tao Yu, Chien-Sheng Wu, Xi Victoria Lin, Bailin Wang, Yi Chern Tan, Xinyi Yang, Dragomir Radev, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Semantic Parsing, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

We present GraPPa, an effective pre-training approach for table semantic parsing that learns a compositional inductive bias in the joint representations of textual and tabular data. We construct synthetic question-SQL pairs over high-quality tables via a synchronous context-free grammar (SCFG) induced from existing text-to-SQL datasets. We pre-train our model on the synthetic data using a novel text-schema linking objective that predicts the syntactic role of a table field in the SQL for each question-SQL pair. To maintain the model's ability to represent real-world data, we also include masked language modeling (MLM) over several existing table-and-language datasets to regularize the pre-training process. On four popular fully supervised and weakly supervised table semantic parsing benchmarks, GraPPa significantly outperforms RoBERTa-large as the feature representation layers and establishes new state-of-the-art results on all of them.
imdpGAN: Generating Private and Specific Data with Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Saurabh Gupta, Arun Balaji Buduru, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Generative Adversarial Network, Specificity

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and its variants have shown promising results in generating synthetic data. However, the issues with GANs are: (i) the learning happens around the training samples and the model often ends up remembering them, consequently, compromising the privacy of individual samples - this becomes a major concern when GANs are applied to training data including personally identifiable information, (ii) the randomness in generated data - there is no control over the specificity of generated samples. To address these issues, we propose imdpGAN - an information maximizing differentially private Generative Adversarial Network. It is an end-to-end framework that simultaneously achieves privacy protection and learns latent representations. With experiments on MNIST dataset, we show that imdpGAN preserves the privacy of the individual data point, and learns latent codes to control the specificity of the generated samples. We perform binary classification on digit pairs to show the utility versus privacy trade-off. The classification accuracy decreases as we increase privacy levels in the framework. We also experimentally show that the training process of imdpGAN is stable but experience a 10-fold time increase as compared with other GAN frameworks. Finally, we extend imdpGAN framework to CelebA dataset to show how the privacy and learned representations can be used to control the specificity of the output.
SIR: Similar Image Retrieval for Product Search in E-Commerce
Authors: Theban Stanley, Nihar Vanjara, Yanxin Pan, Ekaterina Pirogova, Swagata Chakraborty, Abon Chaudhuri
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

We present a similar image retrieval (SIR) platform that is used to quickly discover visually similar products in a catalog of millions. Given the size, diversity, and dynamism of our catalog, product search poses many challenges. It can be addressed by building supervised models to tagging product images with labels representing themes and later retrieving them by labels. This approach suffices for common and perennial themes like "white shirt" or "lifestyle image of TV". It does not work for new themes such as "e-cigarettes", hard-to-define ones such as "image with a promotional badge", or the ones with short relevance span such as "Halloween costumes". SIR is ideal for such cases because it allows us to search by an example, not a pre-defined theme. We describe the steps - embedding computation, encoding, and indexing - that power the approximate nearest neighbor search back-end. We also highlight two applications of SIR. The first one is related to the detection of products with various types of potentially objectionable themes. This application is run with a sense of urgency, hence the typical time frame to train and bootstrap a model is not permitted. Also, these themes are often short-lived based on current trends, hence spending resources to build a lasting model is not justified. The second application is a variant item detection system where SIR helps discover visual variants that are hard to find through text search. We analyze the performance of SIR in the context of these applications.
HINT3: Raising the bar for Intent Detection in the Wild
Authors: Gaurav Arora, Chirag Jain, Manas Chaturvedi, Krupal Modi
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (insights) 2020 11
Tasks: Benchmarking, Intent Detection

Intent Detection systems in the real world are exposed to complexities of imbalanced datasets containing varying perception of intent, unintended correlations and domain-specific aberrations. To facilitate benchmarking which can reflect near real-world scenarios, we introduce 3 new datasets created from live chatbots in diverse domains. Unlike most existing datasets that are crowdsourced, our datasets contain real user queries received by the chatbots and facilitates penalising unwanted correlations grasped during the training process. We evaluate 4 NLU platforms and a BERT based classifier and find that performance saturates at inadequate levels on test sets because all systems latch on to unintended patterns in training data.
Testing for Normality with Neural Networks
Authors: Miloš Simić
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

In this paper, we treat the problem of testing for normality as a binary classification problem and construct a feedforward neural network that can successfully detect normal distributions by inspecting small samples from them. The numerical experiments conducted on small samples with no more than 100 elements indicated that the neural network which we trained was more accurate and far more powerful than the most frequently used and most powerful standard tests of normality: Shapiro-Wilk, Anderson-Darling, Lilliefors and Jarque-Berra, as well as the kernel tests of goodness-of-fit. The neural network had the AUROC score of almost 1, which corresponds to the perfect binary classifier. Additionally, the network's accuracy was higher than 96% on a set of larger samples with 250-1000 elements. Since the normality of data is an assumption of numerous techniques for analysis and inference, the neural network constructed in this study has a very high potential for use in everyday practice of statistics, data analysis and machine learning in both science and industry.
TinyGAN: Distilling BigGAN for Conditional Image Generation
Authors: Ting-Yun Chang, Chi-Jen Lu
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Image Generation, Knowledge Distillation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have become a powerful approach for generative image modeling. However, GANs are notorious for their training instability, especially on large-scale, complex datasets. While the recent work of BigGAN has significantly improved the quality of image generation on ImageNet, it requires a huge model, making it hard to deploy on resource-constrained devices. To reduce the model size, we propose a black-box knowledge distillation framework for compressing GANs, which highlights a stable and efficient training process. Given BigGAN as the teacher network, we manage to train a much smaller student network to mimic its functionality, achieving competitive performance on Inception and FID scores with the generator having $16\times$ fewer parameters.
Neural Model-based Optimization with Right-Censored Observations
Authors: Katharina Eggensperger, Kai Haase, Philipp Müller, Marius Lindauer, Frank Hutter
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: model, regression, Thompson Sampling

In many fields of study, we only observe lower bounds on the true response value of some experiments. When fitting a regression model to predict the distribution of the outcomes, we cannot simply drop these right-censored observations, but need to properly model them. In this work, we focus on the concept of censored data in the light of model-based optimization where prematurely terminating evaluations (and thus generating right-censored data) is a key factor for efficiency, e.g., when searching for an algorithm configuration that minimizes runtime of the algorithm at hand. Neural networks (NNs) have been demonstrated to work well at the core of model-based optimization procedures and here we extend them to handle these censored observations. We propose (i)~a loss function based on the Tobit model to incorporate censored samples into training and (ii) use an ensemble of networks to model the posterior distribution. To nevertheless be efficient in terms of optimization-overhead, we propose to use Thompson sampling s.t. we only need to train a single NN in each iteration. Our experiments show that our trained regression models achieve a better predictive quality than several baselines and that our approach achieves new state-of-the-art performance for model-based optimization on two optimization problems: minimizing the solution time of a SAT solver and the time-to-accuracy of neural networks.
SynSetExpan: An Iterative Framework for Joint Entity Set Expansion and Synonym Discovery
Authors: Jiaming Shen, Wenda Qiu, Jingbo Shang, Michelle Vanni, Xiang Ren, Jiawei Han
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11

Entity set expansion and synonym discovery are two critical NLP tasks. Previous studies accomplish them separately, without exploring their interdependencies. In this work, we hypothesize that these two tasks are tightly coupled because two synonymous entities tend to have similar likelihoods of belonging to various semantic classes. This motivates us to design SynSetExpan, a novel framework that enables two tasks to mutually enhance each other. SynSetExpan uses a synonym discovery model to include popular entities' infrequent synonyms into the set, which boosts the set expansion recall. Meanwhile, the set expansion model, being able to determine whether an entity belongs to a semantic class, can generate pseudo training data to fine-tune the synonym discovery model towards better accuracy. To facilitate the research on studying the interplays of these two tasks, we create the first large-scale Synonym-Enhanced Set Expansion (SE2) dataset via crowdsourcing. Extensive experiments on the SE2 dataset and previous benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of SynSetExpan for both entity set expansion and synonym discovery tasks.
EEMC: Embedding Enhanced Multi-tag Classification
Authors: Yanlin Li, Shi An, Ruisheng Zhang
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Representation Learning, TAG

The recently occurred representation learning make an attractive performance in NLP and complex network, it is becoming a fundamental technology in machine learning and data mining. How to use representation learning to improve the performance of classifiers is a very significance research direction. We using representation learning technology to map raw data(node of graph) to a low-dimensional feature space. In this space, each raw data obtained a lower dimensional vector representation, we do some simple linear operations for those vectors to produce some virtual data, using those vectors and virtual data to training multi-tag classifier. After that we measured the performance of classifier by F1 score(Macro% F1 and Micro% F1). Our method make Macro F1 rise from 28 % - 450% and make average F1 score rise from 12 % - 224%. By contrast, we trained the classifier directly with the lower dimensional vector, and measured the performance of classifiers. We validate our algorithm on three public data sets, we found that the virtual data helped the classifier greatly improve the F1 score. Therefore, our algorithm is a effective way to improve the performance of classifier. These result suggest that the virtual data generated by simple linear operation, in representation space, still retains the information of the raw data. It's also have great significance to the learning of small sample data sets.
An Image Processing Pipeline for Automated Packaging Structure Recognition
Authors: Laura Dörr, Felix Brandt, Martin Pouls, Alexander Naumann
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00

Dispatching and receiving logistics goods, as well as transportation itself, involve a high amount of manual efforts. The transported goods, including their packaging and labeling, need to be double-checked, verified or recognized at many supply chain network points. These processes hold automation potentials, which we aim to exploit using computer vision techniques. More precisely, we propose a cognitive system for the fully automated recognition of packaging structures for standardized logistics shipments based on single RGB images. Our contribution contains descriptions of a suitable system design and its evaluation on relevant real-world data. Further, we discuss our algorithmic choices.
A Simple but Tough-to-Beat Data Augmentation Approach for Natural Language Understanding and Generation
Authors: Dinghan Shen, Mingzhi Zheng, Yelong Shen, Yanru Qu, Weizhu Chen
Date: 2020-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, Natural Language Understanding, Sentence, Translation

Adversarial training has been shown effective at endowing the learned representations with stronger generalization ability. However, it typically requires expensive computation to determine the direction of the injected perturbations. In this paper, we introduce a set of simple yet effective data augmentation strategies dubbed cutoff, where part of the information within an input sentence is erased to yield its restricted views (during the fine-tuning stage). Notably, this process relies merely on stochastic sampling and thus adds little computational overhead. A Jensen-Shannon Divergence consistency loss is further utilized to incorporate these augmented samples into the training objective in a principled manner. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategies, we apply cutoff to both natural language understanding and generation problems. On the GLUE benchmark, it is demonstrated that cutoff, in spite of its simplicity, performs on par or better than several competitive adversarial-based approaches. We further extend cutoff to machine translation and observe significant gains in BLEU scores (based upon the Transformer Base model). Moreover, cutoff consistently outperforms adversarial training and achieves state-of-the-art results on the IWSLT2014 German-English dataset.