pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ArcFace Knows the Gender, Too!
Authors: Majid Farzaneh
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Gender Classification

The main idea of this paper is that if a model can recognize a person, of course, it must be able to know the gender of that person, too. Therefore, instead of defining a new model for gender classification, this paper uses ArcFace features to determine gender, based on the facial features. A face image is given to ArcFace and 512 features are obtained for the face. Then, with the help of traditional machine learning models, gender is determined. Discriminative methods such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Linear Discriminant, and Logistic Regression well demonstrate that the features extracted from the ArcFace create a remarkable distinction between the gender classes. Experiments on the Gender Classification Dataset show that SVM with Gaussian kernel is able to classify gender with an accuracy of 96.4% using ArcFace features.
Camera-aware Style Separation and Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-identification
Authors: Xue Li, Tengfei Liang, Yi Jin, Tao Wang, Yidong Li
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Person Re-Identification, Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised person re-identification (ReID) is a challenging task without data annotation to guide discriminative learning. Existing methods attempt to solve this problem by clustering extracted embeddings to generate pseudo labels. However, most methods ignore the intra-class gap caused by camera style variance, and some methods are relatively complex and indirect although they try to solve the negative impact of the camera style on feature distribution. To solve this problem, we propose a camera-aware style separation and contrastive learning method (CA-UReID), which directly separates camera styles in the feature space with the designed camera-aware attention module. It can explicitly divide the learnable feature into camera-specific and camera-agnostic parts, reducing the influence of different cameras. Moreover, to further narrow the gap across cameras, we design a camera-aware contrastive center loss to learn more discriminative embedding for each identity. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art methods on the unsupervised person ReID task.
D-HAN: Dynamic News Recommendation with Hierarchical Attention Network
Authors: Qinghua Zhao
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: News Recommendation, Sentence

News recommendation models often fall short in capturing users' preferences due to their static approach to user-news interactions. To address this limitation, we present a novel dynamic news recommender model that seamlessly integrates continuous time information to a hierarchical attention network that effectively represents news information at the sentence, element, and sequence levels. Moreover, we introduce a dynamic negative sampling method to optimize users' implicit feedback. To validate our model's effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Rapid Face Mask Detection and Person Identification Model based on Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Abdullah Ahmad Khan, Mohd. Belal, GhufranUllah
Date: 2021-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Face Detection, Face Recognition, Person Identification, Person Recognition

As Covid-19 has been constantly getting mutated and in three or four months a new variant gets introduced to us and it comes with more deadly problems. The things that prevent us from getting Covid is getting vaccinated and wearing a face mask. In this paper, we have implemented a new Face Mask Detection and Person Recognition model named Insight face which is based on SoftMax loss classification algorithm Arc Face loss and names it as RFMPI-DNN(Rapid Face Detection and Peron Identification Model based on Deep Neural Networks) to detect face mask and person identity rapidly as compared to other models available. To compare our new model, we have used previous MobileNet_V2 model and face recognition module for effective comparison on the basis of time. The proposed model implemented in the system has outperformed the model compared in this paper in every aspect
Dialog+ in Broadcasting: First Field Tests Using Deep-Learning-Based Dialogue Enhancement
Authors: Matteo Torcoli, Christian Simon, Jouni Paulus, Davide Straninger, Alfred Riedel, Volker Koch, Stefan Wits, Daniela Rieger, Harald Fuchs, Christian Uhle, Stefan Meltzer, Adrian Murtaza
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Difficulties in following speech due to loud background sounds are common in broadcasting. Object-based audio, e.g., MPEG-H Audio solves this problem by providing a user-adjustable speech level. While object-based audio is gaining momentum, transitioning to it requires time and effort. Also, lots of content exists, produced and archived outside the object-based workflows. To address this, Fraunhofer IIS has developed a deep-learning solution called Dialog+, capable of enabling speech level personalization also for content with only the final audio tracks available. This paper reports on public field tests evaluating Dialog+, conducted together with Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) and Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), starting from September 2020. To our knowledge, these are the first large-scale tests of this kind. As part of one of these, a survey with more than 2,000 participants showed that 90% of the people above 60 years old have problems in understanding speech in TV "often" or "very often". Overall, 83% of the participants liked the possibility to switch to Dialog+, including those who do not normally struggle with speech intelligibility. Dialog+ introduces a clear benefit for the audience, filling the gap between object-based broadcasting and traditionally produced material.
Knowledge graph enhanced recommender system
Authors: Zepeng Huai, JianHua Tao, Feihu Che, Guohua Yang, Dawei Zhang
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Graph Neural Network, Knowledge Graphs, Recommendation Systems

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have shown great success in recommendation. This is attributed to the rich attribute information contained in KG to improve item and user representations as side information. However, existing knowledge-aware methods leverage attribute information at a coarse-grained level both in item and user side. In this paper, we proposed a novel attentive knowledge graph attribute network(AKGAN) to learn item attributes and user interests via attribute information in KG. Technically, AKGAN adopts a heterogeneous graph neural network framework, which has a different design between the first layer and the latter layer. With one attribute placed in the corresponding range of element-wise positions, AKGAN employs a novel interest-aware attention network, which releases the limitation that the sum of attention weight is 1, to model the complexity and personality of user interests towards attributes. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show the effectiveness and explainability of AKGAN.
Personalized On-Device E-health Analytics with Decentralized Block Coordinate Descent
Authors: Guanhua Ye, Hongzhi Yin, Tong Chen, Miao Xu, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Jiangning Song
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Diagnostic, Fairness, Medical Diagnosis

Actuated by the growing attention to personal healthcare and the pandemic, the popularity of E-health is proliferating. Nowadays, enhancement on medical diagnosis via machine learning models has been highly effective in many aspects of e-health analytics. Nevertheless, in the classic cloud-based/centralized e-health paradigms, all the data will be centrally stored on the server to facilitate model training, which inevitably incurs privacy concerns and high time delay. Distributed solutions like Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent (D-SGD) are proposed to provide safe and timely diagnostic results based on personal devices. However, methods like D-SGD are subject to the gradient vanishing issue and usually proceed slowly at the early training stage, thereby impeding the effectiveness and efficiency of training. In addition, existing methods are prone to learning models that are biased towards users with dense data, compromising the fairness when providing E-health analytics for minority groups. In this paper, we propose a Decentralized Block Coordinate Descent (D-BCD) learning framework that can better optimize deep neural network-based models distributed on decentralized devices for E-health analytics. Benchmarking experiments on three real-world datasets illustrate the effectiveness and practicality of our proposed D-BCD, where additional simulation study showcases the strong applicability of D-BCD in real-life E-health scenarios.
Cinderella's shoe won't fit Soundarya: An audit of facial processing tools on Indian faces
Authors: Gaurav Jain, Smriti Parsheera
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Classification, Face Detection, Gender Classification

The increasing adoption of facial processing systems in India is fraught with concerns of privacy, transparency, accountability, and missing procedural safeguards. At the same time, we also know very little about how these technologies perform on the diverse features, characteristics, and skin tones of India's 1.34 billion-plus population. In this paper, we test the face detection and facial analysis functions of four commercial facial processing tools on a dataset of Indian faces. The tools display varying error rates in the face detection and gender and age classification functions. The gender classification error rate for Indian female faces is consistently higher compared to that of males -- the highest female error rate being 14.68%. In some cases, this error rate is much higher than that shown by previous studies for females of other nationalities. Age classification errors are also high. Despite taking into account an acceptable error margin of plus or minus 10 years from a person's actual age, age prediction failures are in the range of 14.3% to 42.2%. These findings point to the limited accuracy of facial processing tools, particularly for certain demographic groups, and the need for more critical thinking before adopting such systems.
Meta Propagation Networks for Graph Few-shot Semi-supervised Learning
Authors: Kaize Ding, Jianling Wang, James Caverlee, Huan Liu
Date: 2021-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Meta-Learning

Inspired by the extensive success of deep learning, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been proposed to learn expressive node representations and demonstrated promising performance in various graph learning tasks. However, existing endeavors predominately focus on the conventional semi-supervised setting where relatively abundant gold-labeled nodes are provided. While it is often impractical due to the fact that data labeling is unbearably laborious and requires intensive domain knowledge, especially when considering the heterogeneity of graph-structured data. Under the few-shot semi-supervised setting, the performance of most of the existing GNNs is inevitably undermined by the overfitting and oversmoothing issues, largely owing to the shortage of labeled data. In this paper, we propose a decoupled network architecture equipped with a novel meta-learning algorithm to solve this problem. In essence, our framework Meta-PN infers high-quality pseudo labels on unlabeled nodes via a meta-learned label propagation strategy, which effectively augments the scarce labeled data while enabling large receptive fields during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach offers easy and substantial performance gains compared to existing techniques on various benchmark datasets.
Automated Domain Discovery from Multiple Sources to Improve Zero-Shot Generalization
Authors: Kowshik Thopalli, Sameeksha Katoch, Pavan Turaga, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Zero-shot Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) methods aim to develop models that generalize to settings where the test distribution is different from the training data. In this paper, we focus on the challenging problem of multi-source zero shot DG (MDG), where labeled training data from multiple source domains is available but with no access to data from the target domain. A wide range of solutions have been proposed for this problem, including the state-of-the-art multi-domain ensembling approaches. Despite these advances, the na\"ive ERM solution of pooling all source data together and training a single classifier is surprisingly effective on standard benchmarks. In this paper, we hypothesize that, it is important to elucidate the link between pre-specified domain labels and MDG performance, in order to explain this behavior. More specifically, we consider two popular classes of MDG algorithms -- distributional robust optimization (DRO) and multi-domain ensembles, in order to demonstrate how inferring custom domain groups can lead to consistent improvements over the original domain labels that come with the dataset. To this end, we propose (i) Group-DRO++, which incorporates an explicit clustering step to identify custom domains in an existing DRO technique; and (ii) DReaME, which produces effective multi-domain ensembles through implicit domain re-labeling with a novel meta-optimization algorithm. Using empirical studies on multiple standard benchmarks, we show that our variants consistently outperform ERM by significant margins (1.5% - 9%), and produce state-of-the-art MDG performance. Our code can be found at https://github.com/kowshikthopalli/DREAME
Query Adaptive Few-Shot Object Detection with Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Guangxing Han, Yicheng He, Shiyuan Huang, Jiawei Ma, Shih-Fu Chang
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Few-Shot Object Detection, Meta-Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

Few-shot object detection (FSOD) aims to detect never-seen objects using few examples. This field sees recent improvement owing to the meta-learning techniques by learning how to match between the query image and few-shot class examples, such that the learned model can generalize to few-shot novel classes. However, currently, most of the meta-learning-based methods perform pairwise matching between query image regions (usually proposals) and novel classes separately, therefore failing to take into account multiple relationships among them. In this paper, we propose a novel FSOD model using heterogeneous graph convolutional networks. Through efficient message passing among all the proposal and class nodes with three different types of edges, we could obtain context-aware proposal features and query-adaptive, multiclass-enhanced prototype representations for each class, which could help promote the pairwise matching and improve final FSOD accuracy. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed model, denoted as QA-FewDet, outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches on the PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO FSOD benchmarks under different shots and evaluation metrics.
Learning Robust Policy against Disturbance in Transition Dynamics via State-Conservative Policy Optimization
Authors: Yufei Kuang, Miao Lu, Jie Wang, Qi Zhou, Bin Li, Houqiang Li
Date: 2021-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing algorithms learn robust policies by modeling the disturbance and applying it to source environments during training, which usually requires prior knowledge about the disturbance and control of simulators. However, these algorithms can fail in scenarios where the disturbance from target environments is unknown or is intractable to model in simulators. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model-free actor-critic algorithm -- namely, state-conservative policy optimization (SCPO) -- to learn robust policies without modeling the disturbance in advance. Specifically, SCPO reduces the disturbance in transition dynamics to that in state space and then approximates it by a simple gradient-based regularizer. The appealing features of SCPO include that it is simple to implement and does not require additional knowledge about the disturbance or specially designed simulators. Experiments in several robot control tasks demonstrate that SCPO learns robust policies against the disturbance in transition dynamics.
Exploration-exploitation trade-off for continuous-time episodic reinforcement learning with linear-convex models
Authors: Lukasz Szpruch, Tanut Treetanthiploet, Yufei Zhang
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We develop a probabilistic framework for analysing model-based reinforcement learning in the episodic setting. We then apply it to study finite-time horizon stochastic control problems with linear dynamics but unknown coefficients and convex, but possibly irregular, objective function. Using probabilistic representations, we study regularity of the associated cost functions and establish precise estimates for the performance gap between applying optimal feedback control derived from estimated and true model parameters. We identify conditions under which this performance gap is quadratic, improving the linear performance gap in recent work [X. Guo, A. Hu, and Y. Zhang, arXiv preprint, arXiv:2104.09311, (2021)], which matches the results obtained for stochastic linear-quadratic problems. Next, we propose a phase-based learning algorithm for which we show how to optimise exploration-exploitation trade-off and achieve sublinear regrets in high probability and expectation. When assumptions needed for the quadratic performance gap hold, the algorithm achieves an order $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{N} \ln N)$ high probability regret, in the general case, and an order $\mathcal{O}((\ln N)^2)$ expected regret, in self-exploration case, over $N$ episodes, matching the best possible results from the literature. The analysis requires novel concentration inequalities for correlated continuous-time observations, which we derive.
A model of opinion dynamics with echo chambers explains the spatial distribution of vaccine hesitancy
Authors: Johannes Müller, Aurelien Tellier, Michael Kurschilgen
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00

Vaccination hesitancy is a major obstacle to achieving and maintaining herd immunity. It is therefore of prime importance for public health authorities to understand the dynamics of an anti-vaccine opinion in the population. We introduce a novel mathematical model of opinion dynamics with spatial reinforcement, which can generate echo chambers, i.e. opinion bubbles in which information that is incompatible with one's entrenched worldview, is likely disregarded. In a first mathematical part, we scale the model both to a deterministic limit and to a weak-effects limit, and obtain bifurcations, phase transitions, and the invariant measure. In a second part, we fit our model to measles and meningococci vaccination coverage across 413 districts in Germany. We reveal that strong echo chambers explain the occurrence and persistence of the anti-vaccination opinion. We predict and compare the effectiveness of different policies aimed at influencing opinion dynamics in order to increase vaccination uptake.
RoboAssembly: Learning Generalizable Furniture Assembly Policy in a Novel Multi-robot Contact-rich Simulation Environment
Authors: Mingxin Yu, Lin Shao, Zhehuan Chen, Tianhao Wu, Qingnan Fan, Kaichun Mo, Hao Dong
Date: 2021-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Part assembly is a typical but challenging task in robotics, where robots assemble a set of individual parts into a complete shape. In this paper, we develop a robotic assembly simulation environment for furniture assembly. We formulate the part assembly task as a concrete reinforcement learning problem and propose a pipeline for robots to learn to assemble a diverse set of chairs. Experiments show that when testing with unseen chairs, our approach achieves a success rate of 74.5% under the object-centric setting and 50.0% under the full setting. We adopt an RRT-Connect algorithm as the baseline, which only achieves a success rate of 18.8% after a significantly longer computation time. Supplemental materials and videos are available on our project webpage.
Curriculum Based Reinforcement Learning of Grid Topology Controllers to Prevent Thermal Cascading
Authors: Amarsagar Reddy Ramapuram Matavalam, Kishan Prudhvi Guddanti, Yang Weng, Venkataramana Ajjarapu
Date: 2021-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), RTE

This paper describes how domain knowledge of power system operators can be integrated into reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks to effectively learn agents that control the grid's topology to prevent thermal cascading. Typical RL-based topology controllers fail to perform well due to the large search/optimization space. Here, we propose an actor-critic-based agent to address the problem's combinatorial nature and train the agent using the RL environment developed by RTE, the French TSO. To address the challenge of the large optimization space, a curriculum-based approach with reward tuning is incorporated into the training procedure by modifying the environment using network physics for enhanced agent learning. Further, a parallel training approach on multiple scenarios is employed to avoid biasing the agent to a few scenarios and make it robust to the natural variability in grid operations. Without these modifications to the training procedure, the RL agent failed for most test scenarios, illustrating the importance of properly integrating domain knowledge of physical systems for real-world RL learning. The agent was tested by RTE for the 2019 learning to run the power network challenge and was awarded the 2nd place in accuracy and 1st place in speed. The developed code is open-sourced for public use.
Space Non-cooperative Object Active Tracking with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Dong Zhou, Guanghui Sun, Wenxiao Lei
Date: 2021-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Pose Estimation, Position, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Visual Tracking

Active visual tracking of space non-cooperative object is significant for future intelligent spacecraft to realise space debris removal, asteroid exploration, autonomous rendezvous and docking. However, existing works often consider this task into different subproblems (e.g. image preprocessing, feature extraction and matching, position and pose estimation, control law design) and optimize each module alone, which are trivial and sub-optimal. To this end, we propose an end-to-end active visual tracking method based on DQN algorithm, named as DRLAVT. It can guide the chasing spacecraft approach to arbitrary space non-cooperative target merely relied on color or RGBD images, which significantly outperforms position-based visual servoing baseline algorithm that adopts state-of-the-art 2D monocular tracker, SiamRPN. Extensive experiments implemented with diverse network architectures, different perturbations and multiple targets demonstrate the advancement and robustness of DRLAVT. In addition, We further prove our method indeed learnt the motion patterns of target with deep reinforcement learning through hundreds of trial-and-errors.