pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Switching Loss for Generalized Nucleus Detection in Histopathology
Authors: Deepak Anand, Gaurav Patel, Yaman Dang, Amit Sethi
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Medical Image Analysis, Segmentation, whole slide images

The accuracy of deep learning methods for two foundational tasks in medical image analysis -- detection and segmentation -- can suffer from class imbalance. We propose a `switching loss' function that adaptively shifts the emphasis between foreground and background classes. While the existing loss functions to address this problem were motivated by the classification task, the switching loss is based on Dice loss, which is better suited for segmentation and detection. Furthermore, to get the most out the training samples, we adapt the loss with each mini-batch, unlike previous proposals that adapt once for the entire training set. A nucleus detector trained using the proposed loss function on a source dataset outperformed those trained using cross-entropy, Dice, or focal losses. Remarkably, without retraining on target datasets, our pre-trained nucleus detector also outperformed existing nucleus detectors that were trained on at least some of the images from the target datasets. To establish a broad utility of the proposed loss, we also confirmed that it led to more accurate ventricle segmentation in MRI as compared to the other loss functions. Our GPU-enabled pre-trained nucleus detection software is also ready to process whole slide images right out-of-the-box and is usably fast.
Depth image denoising using nuclear norm and learning graph model
Authors: Chenggang Yan, Zhisheng Li, Yongbing Zhang, Yutao Liu, Xiangyang Ji, Yongdong Zhang
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Image Restoration

The depth images denoising are increasingly becoming the hot research topic nowadays because they reflect the three-dimensional (3D) scene and can be applied in various fields of computer vision. But the depth images obtained from depth camera usually contain stains such as noise, which greatly impairs the performance of depth related applications. In this paper, considering that group-based image restoration methods are more effective in gathering the similarity among patches, a group based nuclear norm and learning graph (GNNLG) model was proposed. For each patch, we find and group the most similar patches within a searching window. The intrinsic low-rank property of the grouped patches is exploited in our model. In addition, we studied the manifold learning method and devised an effective optimized learning strategy to obtain the graph Laplacian matrix, which reflects the topological structure of image, to further impose the smoothing priors to the denoised depth image. To achieve fast speed and high convergence, the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed to solve our GNNLG. The experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to other current state-of-the-art denoising methods in both subjective and objective criterion.
Recurrent Feature Reasoning for Image Inpainting
Authors: Jingyuan Li, Ning Wang, Lefei Zhang, Bo Du, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Inpainting, SSIM

Existing inpainting methods have achieved promising performance for recovering regular or small image defects. However, filling in large continuous holes remains difficult due to the lack of constraints for the hole center. In this paper, we devise a Recurrent Feature Reasoning (RFR) network which is mainly constructed by a plug-and-play Recurrent Feature Reasoning module and a Knowledge Consistent Attention (KCA) module. Analogous to how humans solve puzzles (i.e., first solve the easier parts and then use the results as additional information to solve difficult parts), the RFR module recurrently infers the hole boundaries of the convolutional feature maps and then uses them as clues for further inference. The module progressively strengthens the constraints for the hole center and the results become explicit. To capture information from distant places in the feature map for RFR, we further develop KCA and incorporate it in RFR. Empirically, we first compare the proposed RFR-Net with existing backbones, demonstrating that RFR-Net is more efficient (e.g., a 4\% SSIM improvement for the same model size). We then place the network in the context of the current state-of-the-art, where it exhibits improved performance. The corresponding source code is available at: https://github.com/jingyuanli001/RFR-Inpainting
Fast and Accurate Neural CRF Constituency Parsing
Authors: Yu Zhang, Houquan Zhou, Zhenghua Li
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCAI 2020 7
Tasks: Constituency Parsing, Dependency Parsing, GPU

Estimating probability distribution is one of the core issues in the NLP field. However, in both deep learning (DL) and pre-DL eras, unlike the vast applications of linear-chain CRF in sequence labeling tasks, very few works have applied tree-structure CRF to constituency parsing, mainly due to the complexity and inefficiency of the inside-outside algorithm. This work presents a fast and accurate neural CRF constituency parser. The key idea is to batchify the inside algorithm for loss computation by direct large tensor operations on GPU, and meanwhile avoid the outside algorithm for gradient computation via efficient back-propagation. We also propose a simple two-stage bracketing-then-labeling parsing approach to improve efficiency further. To improve the parsing performance, inspired by recent progress in dependency parsing, we introduce a new scoring architecture based on boundary representation and biaffine attention, and a beneficial dropout strategy. Experiments on PTB, CTB5.1, and CTB7 show that our two-stage CRF parser achieves new state-of-the-art performance on both settings of w/o and w/ BERT, and can parse over 1,000 sentences per second. We release our code at https://github.com/yzhangcs/crfpar.
Metric Learning vs Classification for Disentangled Music Representation Learning
Authors: Jongpil Lee, Nicholas J. Bryan, Justin Salamon, Zeyu Jin, Juhan Nam
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Disentanglement, General Classification, Information Retrieval, Metric Learning, Music Auto-Tagging, Music Information Retrieval, Representation Learning, Retrieval, Triplet

Deep representation learning offers a powerful paradigm for mapping input data onto an organized embedding space and is useful for many music information retrieval tasks. Two central methods for representation learning include deep metric learning and classification, both having the same goal of learning a representation that can generalize well across tasks. Along with generalization, the emerging concept of disentangled representations is also of great interest, where multiple semantic concepts (e.g., genre, mood, instrumentation) are learned jointly but remain separable in the learned representation space. In this paper we present a single representation learning framework that elucidates the relationship between metric learning, classification, and disentanglement in a holistic manner. For this, we (1) outline past work on the relationship between metric learning and classification, (2) extend this relationship to multi-label data by exploring three different learning approaches and their disentangled versions, and (3) evaluate all models on four tasks (training time, similarity retrieval, auto-tagging, and triplet prediction). We find that classification-based models are generally advantageous for training time, similarity retrieval, and auto-tagging, while deep metric learning exhibits better performance for triplet-prediction. Finally, we show that our proposed approach yields state-of-the-art results for music auto-tagging.
Representative elementary volume via averaged scalar Minkowski functionals
Authors: M. V. Andreeva, A. V. Kalyuzhnyuk, V. V. Krutko, N. E. Russkikh, I. A. Taimanov
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00

Representative Elementary Volume (REV) at which the material properties do not vary with change in volume is an important quantity for making measurements or simulations which represent the whole. We discuss the geometrical method to evaluation of REV based on the quantities coming in the Steiner formula from convex geometry. For bodies in the three-space this formula gives us four scalar functionals known as scalar Minkowski functionals. We demonstrate on certain samples that the values of such averaged functionals almost stabilize for cells for which the length of edges are greater than certain threshold value R. Therefore, from this point of view, it is reasonable to consider cubes of volume R^3 as representative elementary volumes.
SOFA-Net: Second-Order and First-order Attention Network for Crowd Counting
Authors: Haoran Duan, Shidong Wang, Yu Guan
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

Automated crowd counting from images/videos has attracted more attention in recent years because of its wide application in smart cities. But modelling the dense crowd heads is challenging and most of the existing works become less reliable. To obtain the appropriate crowd representation, in this work we proposed SOFA-Net(Second-Order and First-order Attention Network): second-order statistics were extracted to retain selectivity of the channel-wise spatial information for dense heads while first-order statistics, which can enhance the feature discrimination for the heads' areas, were used as complementary information. Via a multi-stream architecture, the proposed second/first-order statistics were learned and transformed into attention for robust representation refinement. We evaluated our method on four public datasets and the performance reached state-of-the-art on most of them. Extensive experiments were also conducted to study the components in the proposed SOFA-Net, and the results suggested the high-capability of second/first-order statistics on modelling crowd in challenging scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first work to explore the second/first-order statistics for crowd counting.
Online Extrinsic Camera Calibration for Temporally Consistent IPM Using Lane Boundary Observations with a Lane Width Prior
Authors: Jeong-Kyun Lee, Young-Ki Baik, Hankyu Cho, Seungwoo Yoo
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration

In this paper, we propose a method for online extrinsic camera calibration, i.e., estimating pitch, yaw, roll angles and camera height from road surface in sequential driving scene images. The proposed method estimates the extrinsic camera parameters in two steps: 1) pitch and yaw angles are estimated simultaneously using a vanishing point computed from a set of lane boundary observations, and then 2) roll angle and camera height are computed by minimizing difference between lane width observations and a lane width prior. The extrinsic camera parameters are sequentially updated using extended Kalman filtering (EKF) and are finally used to generate a temporally consistent bird-eye-view (BEV) image by inverse perspective mapping (IPM). We demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in synthetic and real-world datasets.
Disentangled Multidimensional Metric Learning for Music Similarity
Authors: Jongpil Lee, Nicholas J. Bryan, Justin Salamon, Zeyu Jin, Juhan Nam
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Specificity, Video Editing

Music similarity search is useful for a variety of creative tasks such as replacing one music recording with another recording with a similar "feel", a common task in video editing. For this task, it is typically necessary to define a similarity metric to compare one recording to another. Music similarity, however, is hard to define and depends on multiple simultaneous notions of similarity (i.e. genre, mood, instrument, tempo). While prior work ignore this issue, we embrace this idea and introduce the concept of multidimensional similarity and unify both global and specialized similarity metrics into a single, semantically disentangled multidimensional similarity metric. To do so, we adapt a variant of deep metric learning called conditional similarity networks to the audio domain and extend it using track-based information to control the specificity of our model. We evaluate our method and show that our single, multidimensional model outperforms both specialized similarity spaces and alternative baselines. We also run a user-study and show that our approach is favored by human annotators as well.
1-Point RANSAC-Based Method for Ground Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Jeong-Kyun Lee, Young-Ki Baik, Hankyu Cho, Kang Kim, Duck Hoon Kim
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Pose Estimation

Solving Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problems is a traditional way of estimating object poses. Given outlier-contaminated data, a pose of an object is calculated with PnP algorithms of n = {3, 4} in the RANSAC-based scheme. However, the computational complexity considerably increases along with n and the high complexity imposes a severe strain on devices which should estimate multiple object poses in real time. In this paper, we propose an efficient method based on 1-point RANSAC for estimating a pose of an object on the ground. In the proposed method, a pose is calculated with 1-DoF parameterization by using a ground object assumption and a 2D object bounding box as an additional observation, thereby achieving the fastest performance among the RANSAC-based methods. In addition, since the method suffers from the errors of the additional information, we propose a hierarchical robust estimation method for polishing a rough pose estimate and discovering more inliers in a coarse-to-fine manner. The experiments in synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
Analysing the Effect of Clarifying Questions on Document Ranking in Conversational Search
Authors: Antonios Minas Krasakis, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Nikos Voskarides, Evangelos Kanoulas
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search, Document Ranking

Recent research on conversational search highlights the importance of mixed-initiative in conversations. To enable mixed-initiative, the system should be able to ask clarifying questions to the user. However, the ability of the underlying ranking models (which support conversational search) to account for these clarifying questions and answers has not been analysed when ranking documents, at large. To this end, we analyse the performance of a lexical ranking model on a conversational search dataset with clarifying questions. We investigate, both quantitatively and qualitatively, how different aspects of clarifying questions and user answers affect the quality of ranking. We argue that there needs to be some fine-grained treatment of the entire conversational round of clarification, based on the explicit feedback which is present in such mixed-initiative settings. Informed by our findings, we introduce a simple heuristic-based lexical baseline, that significantly outperforms the existing naive baselines. Our work aims to enhance our understanding of the challenges present in this particular task and inform the design of more appropriate conversational ranking models.
I2L-MeshNet: Image-to-Lixel Prediction Network for Accurate 3D Human Pose and Mesh Estimation from a Single RGB Image
Authors: Gyeongsik Moon, Kyoung Mu Lee
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: 3D Hand Pose Estimation, 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Human Reconstruction, Prediction

Most of the previous image-based 3D human pose and mesh estimation methods estimate parameters of the human mesh model from an input image. However, directly regressing the parameters from the input image is a highly non-linear mapping because it breaks the spatial relationship between pixels in the input image. In addition, it cannot model the prediction uncertainty, which can make training harder. To resolve the above issues, we propose I2L-MeshNet, an image-to-lixel (line+pixel) prediction network. The proposed I2L-MeshNet predicts the per-lixel likelihood on 1D heatmaps for each mesh vertex coordinate instead of directly regressing the parameters. Our lixel-based 1D heatmap preserves the spatial relationship in the input image and models the prediction uncertainty. We demonstrate the benefit of the image-to-lixel prediction and show that the proposed I2L-MeshNet outperforms previous methods. The code is publicly available https://github.com/mks0601/I2L-MeshNet_RELEASE.
Intervention Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Jiadong Liang, Liangyu Zhang, Cheng Zhang, Zhihua Zhang
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00

In this paper we propose a novel approach for stabilizing the training process of Generative Adversarial Networks as well as alleviating the mode collapse problem. The main idea is to introduce a regularization term that we call intervention loss into the objective. We refer to the resulting generative model as Intervention Generative Adversarial Networks (IVGAN). By perturbing the latent representations of real images obtained from an auxiliary encoder network with Gaussian invariant interventions and penalizing the dissimilarity of the distributions of the resulting generated images, the intervention loss provides more informative gradient for the generator, significantly improving GAN's training stability. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods via solid theoretical analysis and thorough evaluation on standard real-world datasets as well as the stacked MNIST dataset.
Deep MOS Predictor for Synthetic Speech Using Cluster-Based Modeling
Authors: Yeunju Choi, Youngmoon Jung, Hoirin Kim
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Speech Synthesis, Voice Conversion

While deep learning has made impressive progress in speech synthesis and voice conversion, the assessment of the synthesized speech is still carried out by human participants. Several recent papers have proposed deep-learning-based assessment models and shown the potential to automate the speech quality assessment. To improve the previously proposed assessment model, MOSNet, we propose three models using cluster-based modeling methods: using a global quality token (GQT) layer, using an Encoding Layer, and using both of them. We perform experiments using the evaluation results of the Voice Conversion Challenge 2018 to predict the mean opinion score of synthesized speech and similarity score between synthesized speech and reference speech. The results show that the GQT layer helps to predict human assessment better by automatically learning the useful quality tokens for the task and that the Encoding Layer helps to utilize frame-level scores more precisely.
Adversarial Training with Fast Gradient Projection Method against Synonym Substitution based Text Attacks
Authors: Xiaosen Wang, Yichen Yang, Yihe Deng, Kun He
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Image Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Adversarial training is the most empirically successful approach in improving the robustness of deep neural networks for image classification.For text classification, however, existing synonym substitution based adversarial attacks are effective but not efficient to be incorporated into practical text adversarial training. Gradient-based attacks, which are very efficient for images, are hard to be implemented for synonym substitution based text attacks due to the lexical, grammatical and semantic constraints and the discrete text input space. Thereby, we propose a fast text adversarial attack method called Fast Gradient Projection Method (FGPM) based on synonym substitution, which is about 20 times faster than existing text attack methods and could achieve similar attack performance. We then incorporate FGPM with adversarial training and propose a text defense method called Adversarial Training with FGPM enhanced by Logit pairing (ATFL). Experiments show that ATFL could significantly improve the model robustness and block the transferability of adversarial examples.
Risk-Sensitive Markov Decision Processes with Combined Metrics of Mean and Variance
Authors: Li Xia
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

This paper investigates the optimization problem of an infinite stage discrete time Markov decision process (MDP) with a long-run average metric considering both mean and variance of rewards together. Such performance metric is important since the mean indicates average returns and the variance indicates risk or fairness. However, the variance metric couples the rewards at all stages, the traditional dynamic programming is inapplicable as the principle of time consistency fails. We study this problem from a new perspective called the sensitivity-based optimization theory. A performance difference formula is derived and it can quantify the difference of the mean-variance combined metrics of MDPs under any two different policies. The difference formula can be utilized to generate new policies with strictly improved mean-variance performance. A necessary condition of the optimal policy and the optimality of deterministic policies are derived. We further develop an iterative algorithm with a form of policy iteration, which is proved to converge to local optima both in the mixed and randomized policy space. Specially, when the mean reward is constant in policies, the algorithm is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum. Finally, we apply our approach to study the fluctuation reduction of wind power in an energy storage system, which demonstrates the potential applicability of our optimization method.
Block Shuffle: A Method for High-resolution Fast Style Transfer with Limited Memory
Authors: Weifeng Ma, Zhe Chen, Caoting Ji
Date: 2020-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Style Transfer

Fast Style Transfer is a series of Neural Style Transfer algorithms that use feed-forward neural networks to render input images. Because of the high dimension of the output layer, these networks require much memory for computation. Therefore, for high-resolution images, most mobile devices and personal computers cannot stylize them, which greatly limits the application scenarios of Fast Style Transfer. At present, the two existing solutions are purchasing more memory and using the feathering-based method, but the former requires additional cost, and the latter has poor image quality. To solve this problem, we propose a novel image synthesis method named \emph{block shuffle}, which converts a single task with high memory consumption to multiple subtasks with low memory consumption. This method can act as a plug-in for Fast Style Transfer without any modification to the network architecture. We use the most popular Fast Style Transfer repository on GitHub as the baseline. Experiments show that the quality of high-resolution images generated by our method is better than that of the feathering-based method. Although our method is an order of magnitude slower than the baseline, it can stylize high-resolution images with limited memory, which is impossible with the baseline. The code and models will be made available on \url{https://github.com/czczup/block-shuffle}.