pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Personalized Human-Aware Robot Navigation Using Virtual Reality Demonstrations from a User Study
Authors: Jorge de Heuvel, Nathan Corral, Lilli Bruckschen, Maren Bennewitz
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Navigation

For the most comfortable, human-aware robot navigation, subjective user preferences need to be taken into account. This paper presents a novel reinforcement learning framework to train a personalized navigation controller along with an intuitive virtual reality demonstration interface. The conducted user study provides evidence that our personalized approach significantly outperforms classical approaches with more comfortable human-robot experiences. We achieve these results using only a few demonstration trajectories from non-expert users, who predominantly appreciate the intuitive demonstration setup. As we show in the experiments, the learned controller generalizes well to states not covered in the demonstration data, while still reflecting user preferences during navigation. Finally, we transfer the navigation controller without loss in performance to a real robot.
Image-text Retrieval: A Survey on Recent Research and Development
Authors: Min Cao, Shiping Li, Juntao Li, Liqiang Nie, Min Zhang
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-text Retrieval, Retrieval, Survey, Text Retrieval

In the past few years, cross-modal image-text retrieval (ITR) has experienced increased interest in the research community due to its excellent research value and broad real-world application. It is designed for the scenarios where the queries are from one modality and the retrieval galleries from another modality. This paper presents a comprehensive and up-to-date survey on the ITR approaches from four perspectives. By dissecting an ITR system into two processes: feature extraction and feature alignment, we summarize the recent advance of the ITR approaches from these two perspectives. On top of this, the efficiency-focused study on the ITR system is introduced as the third perspective. To keep pace with the times, we also provide a pioneering overview of the cross-modal pre-training ITR approaches as the fourth perspective. Finally, we outline the common benchmark datasets and valuation metric for ITR, and conduct the accuracy comparison among the representative ITR approaches. Some critical yet less studied issues are discussed at the end of the paper.
REPTILE: A Proactive Real-Time Deep Reinforcement Learning Self-adaptive Framework
Authors: Flavio Corradini, Miichele Loreti, Marco Piangerelli, Giacomo Rocchetti
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this work a general framework is proposed to support the development of software systems that are able to adapt their behaviour according to the operating environment changes. The proposed approach, named REPTILE, works in a complete proactive manner and relies on Deep Reinforcement Learning-based agents to react to events, referred as novelties, that can affect the expected behaviour of the system. In our framework, two types of novelties are taken into account: those related to the context/environment and those related to the physical architecture itself. The framework, predicting those novelties before their occurrence, extracts time-changing models of the environment and uses a suitable Markov Decision Process to deal with the real-time setting. Moreover, the architecture of our RL agent evolves based on the possible actions that can be taken.
AMCAD: Adaptive Mixed-Curvature Representation based Advertisement Retrieval System
Authors: Zhirong Xu, Shiyang Wen, Junshan Wang, Guojun Liu, Liang Wang, Zhi Yang, Lei Ding, Yan Zhang, Di Zhang, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Graph embedding based retrieval has become one of the most popular techniques in the information retrieval community and search engine industry. The classical paradigm mainly relies on the flat Euclidean geometry. In recent years, hyperbolic (negative curvature) and spherical (positive curvature) representation methods have shown their superiority to capture hierarchical and cyclic data structures respectively. However, in industrial scenarios such as e-commerce sponsored search platforms, the large-scale heterogeneous query-item-advertisement interaction graphs often have multiple structures coexisting. Existing methods either only consider a single geometry space, or combine several spaces manually, which are incapable and inflexible to model the complexity and heterogeneity in the real scenario. To tackle this challenge, we present a web-scale Adaptive Mixed-Curvature ADvertisement retrieval system (AMCAD) to automatically capture the complex and heterogeneous graph structures in non-Euclidean spaces. Specifically, entities are represented in adaptive mixed-curvature spaces, where the types and curvatures of the subspaces are trained to be optimal combinations. Besides, an attentive edge-wise space projector is designed to model the similarities between heterogeneous nodes according to local graph structures and the relation types. Moreover, to deploy AMCAD in Taobao, one of the largest ecommerce platforms with hundreds of million users, we design an efficient two-layer online retrieval framework for the task of graph based advertisement retrieval. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets and A/B tests on online traffic are conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.
Knowledge Distillation: Bad Models Can Be Good Role Models
Authors: Gal Kaplun, Eran Malach, Preetum Nakkiran, Shai Shalev-Shwartz
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Learning Theory

Large neural networks trained in the overparameterized regime are able to fit noise to zero train error. Recent work \citep{nakkiran2020distributional} has empirically observed that such networks behave as "conditional samplers" from the noisy distribution. That is, they replicate the noise in the train data to unseen examples. We give a theoretical framework for studying this conditional sampling behavior in the context of learning theory. We relate the notion of such samplers to knowledge distillation, where a student network imitates the outputs of a teacher on unlabeled data. We show that samplers, while being bad classifiers, can be good teachers. Concretely, we prove that distillation from samplers is guaranteed to produce a student which approximates the Bayes optimal classifier. Finally, we show that some common learning algorithms (e.g., Nearest-Neighbours and Kernel Machines) can generate samplers when applied in the overparameterized regime.
Subjective Evaluation of Deep Learning Models for Symbolic Music Composition
Authors: Carlos Hernandez-Olivan, Jorge Abadias Puyuelo, Jose R. Beltran
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Deep learning models are typically evaluated to measure and compare their performance on a given task. The metrics that are commonly used to evaluate these models are standard metrics that are used for different tasks. In the field of music composition or generation, the standard metrics used in other fields have no clear meaning in terms of music theory. In this paper, we propose a subjective method to evaluate AI-based music composition systems by asking questions related to basic music principles to different levels of users based on their musical experience and knowledge. We use this method to compare state-of-the-art models for music composition with deep learning. We give the results of this evaluation method and we compare the responses of each user level for each evaluated model.
Demystifying the Neural Tangent Kernel from a Practical Perspective: Can it be trusted for Neural Architecture Search without training?
Authors: Jisoo Mok, Byunggook Na, Ji-Hoon Kim, Dongyoon Han, Sungroh Yoon
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

In Neural Architecture Search (NAS), reducing the cost of architecture evaluation remains one of the most crucial challenges. Among a plethora of efforts to bypass training of each candidate architecture to convergence for evaluation, the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) is emerging as a promising theoretical framework that can be utilized to estimate the performance of a neural architecture at initialization. In this work, we revisit several at-initialization metrics that can be derived from the NTK and reveal their key shortcomings. Then, through the empirical analysis of the time evolution of NTK, we deduce that modern neural architectures exhibit highly non-linear characteristics, making the NTK-based metrics incapable of reliably estimating the performance of an architecture without some amount of training. To take such non-linear characteristics into account, we introduce Label-Gradient Alignment (LGA), a novel NTK-based metric whose inherent formulation allows it to capture the large amount of non-linear advantage present in modern neural architectures. With minimal amount of training, LGA obtains a meaningful level of rank correlation with the post-training test accuracy of an architecture. Lastly, we demonstrate that LGA, complemented with few epochs of training, successfully guides existing search algorithms to achieve competitive search performances with significantly less search cost. The code is available at: https://github.com/nutellamok/DemystifyingNTK.
The Digitalization of Bioassays in the Open Research Knowledge Graph
Authors: Jennifer D'Souza, Anita Monteverdi, Muhammad Haris, Marco Anteghini, Kheir Eddine Farfar, Markus Stocker, Vitor A. P. Martins dos Santos, Sören Auer
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Background: Recent years are seeing a growing impetus in the semantification of scholarly knowledge at the fine-grained level of scientific entities in knowledge graphs. The Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) https://www.orkg.org/ represents an important step in this direction, with thousands of scholarly contributions as structured, fine-grained, machine-readable data. There is a need, however, to engender change in traditional community practices of recording contributions as unstructured, non-machine-readable text. For this in turn, there is a strong need for AI tools designed for scientists that permit easy and accurate semantification of their scholarly contributions. We present one such tool, ORKG-assays. Implementation: ORKG-assays is a freely available AI micro-service in ORKG written in Python designed to assist scientists obtain semantified bioassays as a set of triples. It uses an AI-based clustering algorithm which on gold-standard evaluations over 900 bioassays with 5,514 unique property-value pairs for 103 predicates shows competitive performance. Results and Discussion: As a result, semantified assay collections can be surveyed on the ORKG platform via tabulation or chart-based visualizations of key property values of the chemicals and compounds offering smart knowledge access to biochemists and pharmaceutical researchers in the advancement of drug development.
CenterLoc3D: Monocular 3D Vehicle Localization Network for Roadside Surveillance Cameras
Authors: Tang Xinyao, Wang Wei, Song Huansheng, Zhao Chunhui
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration, vehicle detection

Monocular 3D vehicle localization is an important task in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and Cooperative Vehicle Infrastructure System (CVIS), which is usually achieved by monocular 3D vehicle detection. However, depth information cannot be obtained directly by monocular cameras due to the inherent imaging mechanism, resulting in more challenging monocular 3D tasks. Most of the current monocular 3D vehicle detection methods leverage 2D detectors and additional geometric modules, which reduces the efficiency. In this paper, we propose a 3D vehicle localization network CenterLoc3D for roadside monocular cameras, which directly predicts centroid and eight vertexes in image space, and the dimension of 3D bounding boxes without 2D detectors. To improve the precision of 3D vehicle localization, we propose a weighted-fusion module and a loss with spatial constraints embedded in CenterLoc3D. Firstly, the transformation matrix between 2D image space and 3D world space is solved by camera calibration. Secondly, vehicle type, centroid, eight vertexes, and the dimension of 3D vehicle bounding boxes are obtained by CenterLoc3D. Finally, centroid in 3D world space can be obtained by camera calibration and CenterLoc3D for 3D vehicle localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of 3D vehicle localization for roadside monocular cameras. Hence, we also propose a benchmark for this application including a dataset (SVLD-3D), an annotation tool (LabelImg-3D), and evaluation metrics. Through experimental validation, the proposed method achieves high accuracy and real-time performance. (limited words, please see the article for more details)
Distributed Finite-Sum Constrained Optimization subject to Nonlinearity on the Node Dynamics
Authors: Mohammadreza Doostmohammadian, Maria Vrakopoulou, Alireza Aghasi, Themistoklis Charalambous
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Motivated by recent development in networking and parallel data-processing, we consider a distributed and localized finite-sum (or fixed-sum) allocation technique to solve resource-constrained convex optimization problems over multi-agent networks (MANs). Such networks include (smart) agents representing an intelligent entity capable of communication, processing, and decision-making. In particular, we consider problems subject to practical nonlinear constraints on the dynamics of the agents in terms of their communications and actuation capabilities (referred to as the node dynamics), e.g., networks of mobile robots subject to actuator saturation and quantized communication. The considered distributed sum-preserving optimization solution further enables adding purposeful nonlinear constraints, for example, sign-based nonlinearities, to reach convergence in predefined-time or robust to impulsive noise and disturbances in faulty environments. Moreover, convergence can be achieved under minimal network connectivity requirements among the agents; thus, the solution is applicable over dynamic networks where the channels come and go due to the agent's mobility and limited range. This paper discusses how various nonlinearity constraints on the optimization problem (e.g., collaborative allocation of resources) can be addressed for different applications via a distributed setup (over a network).
Translation Consistent Semi-supervised Segmentation for 3D Medical Images
Authors: Yuyuan Liu, Yu Tian, Chong Wang, Yuanhong Chen, Fengbei Liu, Vasileios Belagiannis, Gustavo Carneiro
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation, Translation, Tumor Segmentation

3D medical image segmentation methods have been successful, but their dependence on large amounts of voxel-level annotated data is a disadvantage that needs to be addressed given the high cost to obtain such annotation. Semi-supervised learning (SSL) solve this issue by training models with a large unlabelled and a small labelled dataset. The most successful SSL approaches are based on consistency learning that minimises the distance between model responses obtained from perturbed views of the unlabelled data. These perturbations usually keep the spatial input context between views fairly consistent, which may cause the model to learn segmentation patterns from the spatial input contexts instead of the segmented objects. In this paper, we introduce the Translation Consistent Co-training (TraCoCo) which is a consistency learning SSL method that perturbs the input data views by varying their spatial input context, allowing the model to learn segmentation patterns from visual objects. Furthermore, we propose the replacement of the commonly used mean squared error (MSE) semi-supervised loss by a new Cross-model confident Binary Cross entropy (CBC) loss, which improves training convergence and keeps the robustness to co-training pseudo-labelling mistakes. We also extend CutMix augmentation to 3D SSL to further improve generalisation. Our TraCoCo shows state-of-the-art results for the Left Atrium (LA) and Brain Tumor Segmentation (BRaTS19) datasets with different backbones. Our code is available at https://github.com/yyliu01/TraCoCo.
Automated Progressive Learning for Efficient Training of Vision Transformers
Authors: Changlin Li, Bohan Zhuang, Guangrun Wang, Xiaodan Liang, Xiaojun Chang, Yi Yang
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1

Recent advances in vision Transformers (ViTs) have come with a voracious appetite for computing power, high-lighting the urgent need to develop efficient training methods for ViTs. Progressive learning, a training scheme where the model capacity grows progressively during training, has started showing its ability in efficient training. In this paper, we take a practical step towards efficient training of ViTs by customizing and automating progressive learning. First, we develop a strong manual baseline for progressive learning of ViTs, by introducing momentum growth (MoGrow) to bridge the gap brought by model growth. Then, we propose automated progressive learning (AutoProg), an efficient training scheme that aims to achieve lossless acceleration by automatically increasing the training overload on-the-fly; this is achieved by adaptively deciding whether, where and how much should the model grow during progressive learning. Specifically, we first relax the optimization of the growth schedule to sub-network architecture optimization problem, then propose one-shot estimation of the sub-network performance via an elastic supernet. The searching overhead is reduced to minimal by recycling the parameters of the supernet. Extensive experiments of efficient training on ImageNet with two representative ViT models, DeiT and VOLO, demonstrate that AutoProg can accelerate ViTs training by up to 85.1% with no performance drop. Code: https://github.com/changlin31/AutoProg
Stratified Transformer for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation
Authors: Xin Lai, Jianhui Liu, Li Jiang, LiWei Wang, Hengshuang Zhao, Shu Liu, Xiaojuan Qi, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Point Cloud Segmentation, Position, Semantic Segmentation

3D point cloud segmentation has made tremendous progress in recent years. Most current methods focus on aggregating local features, but fail to directly model long-range dependencies. In this paper, we propose Stratified Transformer that is able to capture long-range contexts and demonstrates strong generalization ability and high performance. Specifically, we first put forward a novel key sampling strategy. For each query point, we sample nearby points densely and distant points sparsely as its keys in a stratified way, which enables the model to enlarge the effective receptive field and enjoy long-range contexts at a low computational cost. Also, to combat the challenges posed by irregular point arrangements, we propose first-layer point embedding to aggregate local information, which facilitates convergence and boosts performance. Besides, we adopt contextual relative position encoding to adaptively capture position information. Finally, a memory-efficient implementation is introduced to overcome the issue of varying point numbers in each window. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method on S3DIS, ScanNetv2 and ShapeNetPart datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Stratified-Transformer.
EnCBP: A New Benchmark Dataset for Finer-Grained Cultural Background Prediction in English
Authors: Weicheng Ma, Samiha Datta, Lili Wang, Soroush Vosoughi
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, QNLI, RTE, SST-2, STS, STS-B

While cultural backgrounds have been shown to affect linguistic expressions, existing natural language processing (NLP) research on culture modeling is overly coarse-grained and does not examine cultural differences among speakers of the same language. To address this problem and augment NLP models with cultural background features, we collect, annotate, manually validate, and benchmark EnCBP, a finer-grained news-based cultural background prediction dataset in English. Through language modeling (LM) evaluations and manual analyses, we confirm that there are noticeable differences in linguistic expressions among five English-speaking countries and across four states in the US. Additionally, our evaluations on nine syntactic (CoNLL-2003), semantic (PAWS-Wiki, QNLI, STS-B, and RTE), and psycholinguistic tasks (SST-5, SST-2, Emotion, and Go-Emotions) show that, while introducing cultural background information does not benefit the Go-Emotions task due to text domain conflicts, it noticeably improves deep learning (DL) model performance on other tasks. Our findings strongly support the importance of cultural background modeling to a wide variety of NLP tasks and demonstrate the applicability of EnCBP in culture-related research.
Enhancing Neural Mathematical Reasoning by Abductive Combination with Symbolic Library
Authors: Yangyang Hu, Yang Yu
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Mathematical Reasoning, Translation

Mathematical reasoning recently has been shown as a hard challenge for neural systems. Abilities including expression translation, logical reasoning, and mathematics knowledge acquiring appear to be essential to overcome the challenge. This paper demonstrates that some abilities can be achieved through abductive combination with discrete systems that have been programmed with human knowledge. On a mathematical reasoning dataset, we adopt the recently proposed abductive learning framework, and propose the ABL-Sym algorithm that combines the Transformer neural models with a symbolic mathematics library. ABL-Sym shows 9.73% accuracy improvement on the interpolation tasks and 47.22% accuracy improvement on the extrapolation tasks, over the state-of-the-art approaches. Online demonstration: http://math.polixir.ai
Enhancing Transformer Efficiency for Multivariate Time Series Classification
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Yun Zhao, Linda Petzold
Date: 2022-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

Most current multivariate time series (MTS) classification algorithms focus on improving the predictive accuracy. However, for large-scale (either high-dimensional or long-sequential) time series (TS) datasets, there is an additional consideration: to design an efficient network architecture to reduce computational costs such as training time and memory footprint. In this work we propose a methodology based on module-wise pruning and Pareto analysis to investigate the relationship between model efficiency and accuracy, as well as its complexity. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark MTS datasets illustrate the effectiveness of our method.