pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-stage Speaker Extraction with Utterance and Frame-Level Reference Signals
Authors: Meng Ge, Chenglin Xu, Longbiao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Jianwu Dang, Haizhou Li
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00

Speaker extraction requires a sample speech from the target speaker as the reference. However, enrolling a speaker with a long speech is not practical. We propose a speaker extraction technique, that performs in multiple stages to take full advantage of short reference speech sample. The extracted speech in early stages is used as the reference speech for late stages. For the first time, we use frame-level sequential speech embedding as the reference for target speaker. This is a departure from the traditional utterance-based speaker embedding reference. In addition, a signal fusion scheme is proposed to combine the decoded signals in multiple scales with automatically learned weights. Experiments on WSJ0-2mix and its noisy versions (WHAM! and WHAMR!) show that SpEx++ consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines.
Abnormal Event Detection in Urban Surveillance Videos Using GAN and Transfer Learning
Authors: Ali Atghaei, Soroush Ziaeinejad, Mohammad Rahmati
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, Optical Flow Estimation, Transfer Learning

Abnormal event detection (AED) in urban surveillance videos has multiple challenges. Unlike other computer vision problems, the AED is not solely dependent on the content of frames. It also depends on the appearance of the objects and their movements in the scene. Various methods have been proposed to address the AED problem. Among those, deep learning based methods show the best results. This paper is based on deep learning methods and provides an effective way to detect and locate abnormal events in videos by handling spatio temporal data. This paper uses generative adversarial networks (GANs) and performs transfer learning algorithms on pre trained convolutional neural network (CNN) which result in an accurate and efficient model. The efficiency of the model is further improved by processing the optical flow information of the video. This paper runs experiments on two benchmark datasets for AED problem (UCSD Peds1 and UCSD Peds2) and compares the results with other previous methods. The comparisons are based on various criteria such as area under curve (AUC) and true positive rate (TPR). Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively detect and locate abnormal events in crowd scenes.
Bidirectional RNN-based Few Shot Learning for 3D Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Soopil Kim, Sion An, Philip Chikontwe, Sang Hyun Park
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Organ Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Segmentation of organs of interest in 3D medical images is necessary for accurate diagnosis and longitudinal studies. Though recent advances using deep learning have shown success for many segmentation tasks, large datasets are required for high performance and the annotation process is both time consuming and labor intensive. In this paper, we propose a 3D few shot segmentation framework for accurate organ segmentation using limited training samples of the target organ annotation. To achieve this, a U-Net like network is designed to predict segmentation by learning the relationship between 2D slices of support data and a query image, including a bidirectional gated recurrent unit (GRU) that learns consistency of encoded features between adjacent slices. Also, we introduce a transfer learning method to adapt the characteristics of the target image and organ by updating the model before testing with arbitrary support and query data sampled from the support data. We evaluate our proposed model using three 3D CT datasets with annotations of different organs. Our model yielded significantly improved performance over state-of-the-art few shot segmentation models and was comparable to a fully supervised model trained with more target training data.
FinRL: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Library for Automated Stock Trading in Quantitative Finance
Authors: Xiao-Yang Liu, Hongyang Yang, Qian Chen, Runjia Zhang, Liuqing Yang, Bowen Xiao, Christina Dan Wang
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Stock Market Prediction

As deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been recognized as an effective approach in quantitative finance, getting hands-on experiences is attractive to beginners. However, to train a practical DRL trading agent that decides where to trade, at what price, and what quantity involves error-prone and arduous development and debugging. In this paper, we introduce a DRL library FinRL that facilitates beginners to expose themselves to quantitative finance and to develop their own stock trading strategies. Along with easily-reproducible tutorials, FinRL library allows users to streamline their own developments and to compare with existing schemes easily. Within FinRL, virtual environments are configured with stock market datasets, trading agents are trained with neural networks, and extensive backtesting is analyzed via trading performance. Moreover, it incorporates important trading constraints such as transaction cost, market liquidity and the investor's degree of risk-aversion. FinRL is featured with completeness, hands-on tutorial and reproducibility that favors beginners: (i) at multiple levels of time granularity, FinRL simulates trading environments across various stock markets, including NASDAQ-100, DJIA, S&P 500, HSI, SSE 50, and CSI 300; (ii) organized in a layered architecture with modular structure, FinRL provides fine-tuned state-of-the-art DRL algorithms (DQN, DDPG, PPO, SAC, A2C, TD3, etc.), commonly-used reward functions and standard evaluation baselines to alleviate the debugging workloads and promote the reproducibility, and (iii) being highly extendable, FinRL reserves a complete set of user-import interfaces. Furthermore, we incorporated three application demonstrations, namely single stock trading, multiple stock trading, and portfolio allocation. The FinRL library will be available on Github at link https://github.com/AI4Finance-LLC/FinRL-Library.
Deep Multi-view Depth Estimation with Predicted Uncertainty
Authors: Tong Ke, Tien Do, Khiem Vuong, Kourosh Sartipi, Stergios I. Roumeliotis
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation

In this paper, we address the problem of estimating dense depth from a sequence of images using deep neural networks. Specifically, we employ a dense-optical-flow network to compute correspondences and then triangulate the point cloud to obtain an initial depth map.Parts of the point cloud, however, may be less accurate than others due to lack of common observations or small parallax. To further increase the triangulation accuracy, we introduce a depth-refinement network (DRN) that optimizes the initial depth map based on the image's contextual cues. In particular, the DRN contains an iterative refinement module (IRM) that improves the depth accuracy over iterations by refining the deep features. Lastly, the DRN also predicts the uncertainty in the refined depths, which is desirable in applications such as measurement selection for scene reconstruction. We show experimentally that our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of depth accuracy, and verify that our predicted uncertainty is highly correlated to the actual depth error.
Variational Bayes Neural Network: Posterior Consistency, Classification Accuracy and Computational Challenges
Authors: Shrijita Bhattacharya, Zihuan Liu, Tapabrata Maiti
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Bayesian neural network models (BNN) have re-surged in recent years due to the advancement of scalable computations and its utility in solving complex prediction problems in a wide variety of applications. Despite the popularity and usefulness of BNN, the conventional Markov Chain Monte Carlo based implementation suffers from high computational cost, limiting the use of this powerful technique in large scale studies. The variational Bayes inference has become a viable alternative to circumvent some of the computational issues. Although the approach is popular in machine learning, its application in statistics is somewhat limited. This paper develops a variational Bayesian neural network estimation methodology and related statistical theory. The numerical algorithms and their implementational are discussed in detail. The theory for posterior consistency, a desirable property in nonparametric Bayesian statistics, is also developed. This theory provides an assessment of prediction accuracy and guidelines for characterizing the prior distributions and variational family. The loss of using a variational posterior over the true posterior has also been quantified. The development is motivated by an important biomedical engineering application, namely building predictive tools for the transition from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer's disease. The predictors are multi-modal and may involve complex interactive relations.
Beyond Pinball Loss: Quantile Methods for Calibrated Uncertainty Quantification
Authors: Youngseog Chung, Willie Neiswanger, Ian Char, Jeff Schneider
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: regression, Uncertainty Quantification

Among the many ways of quantifying uncertainty in a regression setting, specifying the full quantile function is attractive, as quantiles are amenable to interpretation and evaluation. A model that predicts the true conditional quantiles for each input, at all quantile levels, presents a correct and efficient representation of the underlying uncertainty. To achieve this, many current quantile-based methods focus on optimizing the so-called pinball loss. However, this loss restricts the scope of applicable regression models, limits the ability to target many desirable properties (e.g. calibration, sharpness, centered intervals), and may produce poor conditional quantiles. In this work, we develop new quantile methods that address these shortcomings. In particular, we propose methods that can apply to any class of regression model, allow for selecting a trade-off between calibration and sharpness, optimize for calibration of centered intervals, and produce more accurate conditional quantiles. We provide a thorough experimental evaluation of our methods, which includes a high dimensional uncertainty quantification task in nuclear fusion.
SAFARI: Safe and Active Robot Imitation Learning with Imagination
Authors: Norman Di Palo, Edward Johns
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Behavioural cloning, Imitation Learning

One of the main issues in Imitation Learning is the erroneous behavior of an agent when facing out-of-distribution situations, not covered by the set of demonstrations given by the expert. In this work, we tackle this problem by introducing a novel active learning and control algorithm, SAFARI. During training, it allows an agent to request further human demonstrations when these out-of-distribution situations are met. At deployment, it combines model-free acting using behavioural cloning with model-based planning to reduce state-distribution shift, using future state reconstruction as a test for state familiarity. We empirically demonstrate how this method increases the performance on a set of manipulation tasks with respect to passive Imitation Learning, by gathering more informative demonstrations and by minimizing state-distribution shift at test time. We also show how this method enables the agent to autonomously predict failure rapidly and safely.
ACRONYM: A Large-Scale Grasp Dataset Based on Simulation
Authors: Clemens Eppner, Arsalan Mousavian, Dieter Fox
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00

We introduce ACRONYM, a dataset for robot grasp planning based on physics simulation. The dataset contains 17.7M parallel-jaw grasps, spanning 8872 objects from 262 different categories, each labeled with the grasp result obtained from a physics simulator. We show the value of this large and diverse dataset by using it to train two state-of-the-art learning-based grasp planning algorithms. Grasp performance improves significantly when compared to the original smaller dataset. Data and tools can be accessed at https://sites.google.com/nvidia.com/graspdataset.
Patient-independent Epileptic Seizure Prediction using Deep Learning Models
Authors: Theekshana Dissanayake, Tharindu Fernando, Simon Denman, Sridha Sridharan, Clinton Fookes
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Prediction, Seizure prediction

Objective: Epilepsy is one of the most prevalent neurological diseases among humans and can lead to severe brain injuries, strokes, and brain tumors. Early detection of seizures can help to mitigate injuries, and can be used to aid the treatment of patients with epilepsy. The purpose of a seizure prediction system is to successfully identify the pre-ictal brain stage, which occurs before a seizure event. Patient-independent seizure prediction models are designed to offer accurate performance across multiple subjects within a dataset, and have been identified as a real-world solution to the seizure prediction problem. However, little attention has been given for designing such models to adapt to the high inter-subject variability in EEG data. Methods: We propose two patient-independent deep learning architectures with different learning strategies that can learn a global function utilizing data from multiple subjects. Results: Proposed models achieve state-of-the-art performance for seizure prediction on the CHB-MIT-EEG dataset, demonstrating 88.81% and 91.54% accuracy respectively. Conclusions: The Siamese model trained on the proposed learning strategy is able to learn patterns related to patient variations in data while predicting seizures. Significance: Our models show superior performance for patient-independent seizure prediction, and the same architecture can be used as a patient-specific classifier after model adaptation. We are the first study that employs model interpretation to understand classifier behavior for the task for seizure prediction, and we also show that the MFCC feature map utilized by our models contains predictive biomarkers related to interictal and pre-ictal brain states.
Non-Linear Multiple Field Interactions Neural Document Ranking
Authors: Kentaro Takiguchi, Niall Twomey, Luis M. Vaquero
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Ranking

Ranking tasks are usually based on the text of the main body of the page and the actions (clicks) of users on the page. There are other elements that could be leveraged to better contextualise the ranking experience (e.g. text in other fields, query made by the user, images, etc). We present one of the first in-depth analyses of field interaction for multiple field ranking in two separate datasets. While some works have taken advantage of full document structure, some aspects remain unexplored. In this work we build on previous analyses to show how query-field interactions, non-linear field interactions, and the architecture of the underlying neural model affect performance.
An Efficient and Scalable Deep Learning Approach for Road Damage Detection
Authors: Sadra Naddaf-sh, M-Mahdi Naddaf-Sh, Amir R. Kashani, Hassan Zargarzadeh
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Augmentation, Object Detection, Road Damage Detection

Pavement condition evaluation is essential to time the preventative or rehabilitative actions and control distress propagation. Failing to conduct timely evaluations can lead to severe structural and financial loss of the infrastructure and complete reconstructions. Automated computer-aided surveying measures can provide a database of road damage patterns and their locations. This database can be utilized for timely road repairs to gain the minimum cost of maintenance and the asphalt's maximum durability. This paper introduces a deep learning-based surveying scheme to analyze the image-based distress data in real-time. A database consisting of a diverse population of crack distress types such as longitudinal, transverse, and alligator cracks, photographed using mobile-device is used. Then, a family of efficient and scalable models that are tuned for pavement crack detection is trained, and various augmentation policies are explored. Proposed models, resulted in F1-scores, ranging from 52% to 56%, and average inference time from 178-10 images per second. Finally, the performance of the object detectors are examined, and error analysis is reported against various images. The source code is available at https://github.com/mahdi65/roadDamageDetection2020.
Learning Recurrent Neural Net Models of Nonlinear Systems
Authors: Joshua Hanson, Maxim Raginsky, Eduardo Sontag
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00

We consider the following learning problem: Given sample pairs of input and output signals generated by an unknown nonlinear system (which is not assumed to be causal or time-invariant), we wish to find a continuous-time recurrent neural net with hyperbolic tangent activation function that approximately reproduces the underlying i/o behavior with high confidence. Leveraging earlier work concerned with matching output derivatives up to a given finite order, we reformulate the learning problem in familiar system-theoretic language and derive quantitative guarantees on the sup-norm risk of the learned model in terms of the number of neurons, the sample size, the number of derivatives being matched, and the regularity properties of the inputs, the outputs, and the unknown i/o map.
Predicting metrical patterns in Spanish poetry with language models
Authors: Javier de la Rosa, Salvador Ros, Elena González-Blanco
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00

In this paper, we compare automated metrical pattern identification systems available for Spanish against extensive experiments done by fine-tuning language models trained on the same task. Despite being initially conceived as a model suitable for semantic tasks, our results suggest that BERT-based models retain enough structural information to perform reasonably well for Spanish scansion.
Robustified Domain Adaptation
Authors: Jiajin Zhang, Hanqing Chao, Pingkun Yan
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) is widely used to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain with different data distribution. While extensive studies attested that deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, the adversarial robustness of models in domain adaptation application has largely been overlooked. This paper points out that the inevitable domain distribution deviation in UDA is a critical barrier to model robustness on the target domain. To address the problem, we propose a novel Class-consistent Unsupervised Robust Domain Adaptation (CURDA) framework for training robust UDA models. With the introduced contrastive robust training and source anchored adversarial contrastive losses, our proposed CURDA framework can effectively robustify UDA models by simultaneously minimizing the data distribution deviation and the distance between target domain clean-adversarial pairs without creating classification confusion. Experiments on several public benchmarks show that CURDA can significantly improve model robustness in the target domain with only minor cost of accuracy on the clean samples.
Visual Diver Face Recognition for Underwater Human-Robot Interaction
Authors: Jungseok Hong, Sadman Sakib Enan, Christopher Morse, Junaed Sattar
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Face Recognition

This paper presents a deep-learned facial recognition method for underwater robots to identify scuba divers. Specifically, the proposed method is able to recognize divers underwater with faces heavily obscured by scuba masks and breathing apparatus. Our contribution in this research is towards robust facial identification of individuals under significant occlusion of facial features and image degradation from underwater optical distortions. With the ability to correctly recognize divers, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) will be able to engage in collaborative tasks with the correct person in human-robot teams and ensure that instructions are accepted from only those authorized to command the robots. We demonstrate that our proposed framework is able to learn discriminative features from real-world diver faces through different data augmentation and generation techniques. Experimental evaluations show that this framework achieves a 3-fold increase in prediction accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms and is well-suited for embedded inference on robotic platforms.
A Cognitive Approach based on the Actionable Knowledge Graph for supporting Maintenance Operations
Authors: Giuseppe Fenza, Mariacristina Gallo, Vincenzo Loia, Domenico Marino, Francesco Orciuoli
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, Object Recognition, Outdoor Positioning

In the era of Industry 4.0, cognitive computing and its enabling technologies (Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, etc.) allow to define systems able to support maintenance by providing relevant information, at the right time, retrieved from structured companies' databases, and unstructured documents, like technical manuals, intervention reports, and so on. Moreover, contextual information plays a crucial role in tailoring the support both during the planning and the execution of interventions. Contextual information can be detected with the help of sensors, wearable devices, indoor and outdoor positioning systems, and object recognition capabilities (using fixed or wearable cameras), all of which can collect historical data for further analysis. In this work, we propose a cognitive system that learns from past interventions to generate contextual recommendations for improving maintenance practices in terms of time, budget, and scope. The system uses formal conceptual models, incremental learning, and ranking algorithms to accomplish these objectives.
A Sequence-to-Sequence Approach to Dialogue State Tracking
Authors: Yue Feng, Yang Wang, Hang Li
Date: 2020-11-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Classification, Decoder, Dialogue State Tracking, Multi-domain Dialogue State Tracking, Natural Language Understanding

This paper is concerned with dialogue state tracking (DST) in a task-oriented dialogue system. Building a DST module that is highly effective is still a challenging issue, although significant progresses have been made recently. This paper proposes a new approach to dialogue state tracking, referred to as Seq2Seq-DU, which formalizes DST as a sequence-to-sequence problem. Seq2Seq-DU employs two BERT-based encoders to respectively encode the utterances in the dialogue and the descriptions of schemas, an attender to calculate attentions between the utterance embeddings and the schema embeddings, and a decoder to generate pointers to represent the current state of dialogue. Seq2Seq-DU has the following advantages. It can jointly model intents, slots, and slot values; it can leverage the rich representations of utterances and schemas based on BERT; it can effectively deal with categorical and non-categorical slots, and unseen schemas. In addition, Seq2Seq-DU can also be used in the NLU (natural language understanding) module of a dialogue system. Experimental results on benchmark datasets in different settings (SGD, MultiWOZ2.2, MultiWOZ2.1, WOZ2.0, DSTC2, M2M, SNIPS, and ATIS) show that Seq2Seq-DU outperforms the existing methods.