pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Identification of Play Styles in Universal Fighting Engine
Authors: Kaori Yuda, Shota Kamei, Riku Tanji, Ryoya Ito, Ippo Wakana, Maxim Mozgovoy
Date: 2021-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

AI-controlled characters in fighting games are expected to possess reasonably high skills and behave in a believable, human-like manner, exhibiting a diversity of play styles and strategies. Thus, the development of fighting game AI requires the ability to evaluate these properties. For instance, it should be possible to ensure that the characters created are believable and diverse. In this paper, we show how an automated procedure can be used to compare play styles of individual AI- and human-controlled characters, and to assess human-likeness and diversity of game participants.
FederatedNILM: A Distributed and Privacy-preserving Framework for Non-intrusive Load Monitoring based on Federated Deep Learning
Authors: Shuang Dai, Fanlin Meng, Qian Wang, Xizhong Chen
Date: 2021-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Federated Learning, Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring, Privacy Preserving

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM), which usually utilizes machine learning methods and is effective in disaggregating smart meter readings from the household-level into appliance-level consumptions, can help to analyze electricity consumption behaviours of users and enable practical smart energy and smart grid applications. However, smart meters are privately owned and distributed, which make real-world applications of NILM challenging. To this end, this paper develops a distributed and privacy-preserving federated deep learning framework for NILM (FederatedNILM), which combines federated learning with a state-of-the-art deep learning architecture to conduct NILM for the classification of typical states of household appliances. Through extensive comparative experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed FederatedNILM framework is demonstrated.
Ensemble neuroevolution based approach for multivariate time series anomaly detection
Authors: Kamil Faber, Dominik Żurek, Marcin Pietroń, Kamil Piętak
Date: 2021-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Deep Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Anomaly Detection

Multivariate time series anomaly detection is a very common problem in the field of failure prevention. Fast prevention means lower repair costs and losses. The amount of sensors in novel industry systems makes the anomaly detection process quite difficult for humans. Algorithms which automates the process of detecting anomalies are crucial in modern failure-prevention systems. Therefore, many machine and deep learning models have been designed to address this problem. Mostly, they are autoencoder-based architectures with some generative adversarial elements. In this work, a framework is shown which incorporates neuroevolution methods to boost the anomaly-detection scores of new and already known models. The presented approach adapts evolution strategies for evolving ensemble model, in which every single model works on a subgroup of data sensors. The next goal of neuroevolution is to optimise architecture and hyperparameters like window size, the number of layers, layer depths, etc. The proposed framework shows that it is possible to boost most of the anomaly detection deep learning models in a reasonable time and a fully automated mode. The tests were run on SWAT and WADI datasets. To our knowledge, this is the first approach in which an ensemble deep learning anomaly detection model is built in a fully automatic way using a neuroevolution strategy.
Rapid Automated Analysis of Skull Base Tumor Specimens Using Intraoperative Optical Imaging and Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Cheng Jiang, Abhishek Bhattacharya, Joseph Linzey, Rushikesh S. Joshi, Sung Jik Cha, Sudharsan Srinivasan, Daniel Alber, Akhil Kondepudi, Esteban Urias, Balaji Pandian, Wajd Al-Holou, Steve Sullivan, B. Gregory Thompson, Jason Heth, Chris Freudiger, Siri Khalsa, Donato Pacione, John G. Golfinos, Sandra Camelo-Piragua, Daniel A. Orringer, Honglak Lee, Todd Hollon
Date: 2021-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Decision Making, Diagnostic, Representation Learning

Background: Accurate diagnosis of skull base tumors is essential for providing personalized surgical treatment strategies. Intraoperative diagnosis can be challenging due to tumor diversity and lack of intraoperative pathology resources. Objective: To develop an independent and parallel intraoperative pathology workflow that can provide rapid and accurate skull base tumor diagnoses using label-free optical imaging and artificial intelligence. Method: We used a fiber laser-based, label-free, non-consumptive, high-resolution microscopy method ($<$ 60 sec per 1 $\times$ 1 mm$^\text{2}$), called stimulated Raman histology (SRH), to image a consecutive, multicenter cohort of skull base tumor patients. SRH images were then used to train a convolutional neural network (CNN) model using three representation learning strategies: cross-entropy, self-supervised contrastive learning, and supervised contrastive learning. Our trained CNN models were tested on a held-out, multicenter SRH dataset. Results: SRH was able to image the diagnostic features of both benign and malignant skull base tumors. Of the three representation learning strategies, supervised contrastive learning most effectively learned the distinctive and diagnostic SRH image features for each of the skull base tumor types. In our multicenter testing set, cross-entropy achieved an overall diagnostic accuracy of 91.5%, self-supervised contrastive learning 83.9%, and supervised contrastive learning 96.6%. Our trained model was able to identify tumor-normal margins and detect regions of microscopic tumor infiltration in whole-slide SRH images. Conclusion: SRH with trained artificial intelligence models can provide rapid and accurate intraoperative analysis of skull base tumor specimens to inform surgical decision-making.
Semantic-Based Explainable AI: Leveraging Semantic Scene Graphs and Pairwise Ranking to Explain Robot Failures
Authors: Devleena Das, Sonia Chernova
Date: 2021-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

When interacting in unstructured human environments, occasional robot failures are inevitable. When such failures occur, everyday people, rather than trained technicians, will be the first to respond. Existing natural language explanations hand-annotate contextual information from an environment to help everyday people understand robot failures. However, this methodology lacks generalizability and scalability. In our work, we introduce a more generalizable semantic explanation framework. Our framework autonomously captures the semantic information in a scene to produce semantically descriptive explanations for everyday users. To generate failure-focused explanations that are semantically grounded, we leverages both semantic scene graphs to extract spatial relations and object attributes from an environment, as well as pairwise ranking. Our results show that these semantically descriptive explanations significantly improve everyday users' ability to both identify failures and provide assistance for recovery than the existing state-of-the-art context-based explanations.
Spatio-Temporal Attention Mechanism and Knowledge Distillation for Lip Reading
Authors: Shahd Elashmawy, Marian Ramsis, Hesham M. Eraqi, Farah Eldeshnawy, Hadeel Mabrouk, Omar Abugabal, Nourhan Sakr
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition, Knowledge Distillation, Lip Reading, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Visual Speech Recognition

Despite the advancement in the domain of audio and audio-visual speech recognition, visual speech recognition systems are still quite under-explored due to the visual ambiguity of some phonemes. In this work, we propose a new lip-reading model that combines three contributions. First, the model front-end adopts a spatio-temporal attention mechanism to help extract the informative data from the input visual frames. Second, the model back-end utilizes a sequence-level and frame-level Knowledge Distillation (KD) techniques that allow leveraging audio data during the visual model training. Third, a data preprocessing pipeline is adopted that includes facial landmarks detection-based lip-alignment. On LRW lip-reading dataset benchmark, a noticeable accuracy improvement is demonstrated; the spatio-temporal attention, Knowledge Distillation, and lip-alignment contributions achieved 88.43%, 88.64%, and 88.37% respectively.
OSCAR-Net: Object-centric Scene Graph Attention for Image Attribution
Authors: Eric Nguyen, Tu Bui, Vishy Swaminathan, John Collomosse
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Graph Attention, Image Attribution

Images tell powerful stories but cannot always be trusted. Matching images back to trusted sources (attribution) enables users to make a more informed judgment of the images they encounter online. We propose a robust image hashing algorithm to perform such matching. Our hash is sensitive to manipulation of subtle, salient visual details that can substantially change the story told by an image. Yet the hash is invariant to benign transformations (changes in quality, codecs, sizes, shapes, etc.) experienced by images during online redistribution. Our key contribution is OSCAR-Net (Object-centric Scene Graph Attention for Image Attribution Network); a robust image hashing model inspired by recent successes of Transformers in the visual domain. OSCAR-Net constructs a scene graph representation that attends to fine-grained changes of every object's visual appearance and their spatial relationships. The network is trained via contrastive learning on a dataset of original and manipulated images yielding a state of the art image hash for content fingerprinting that scales to millions of images.
Cough Detection Using Selected Informative Features from Audio Signals
Authors: Xinru Chen, Menghan Hu, Guangtao Zhai
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00

Cough is a common symptom of respiratory and lung diseases. Cough detection is important to prevent, assess and control epidemic, such as COVID-19. This paper proposes a model to detect cough events from cough audio signals. The models are trained by the dataset combined ESC-50 dataset with self-recorded cough recordings. The test dataset contains inpatient cough recordings collected from inpatients of the respiratory disease department in Ruijin Hospital. We totally build 15 cough detection models based on different feature numbers selected by Random Frog, Uninformative Variable Elimination (UVE), and Variable influence on projection (VIP) algorithms respectively. The optimal model is based on 20 features selected from Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features by UVE algorithm and classified with Support Vector Machine (SVM) linear two-class classifier. The best cough detection model realizes the accuracy, recall, precision and F1-score with 94.9%, 97.1%, 93.1% and 0.95 respectively. Its excellent performance with fewer dimensionality of the feature vector shows the potential of being applied to mobile devices, such as smartphones, thus making cough detection remote and non-contact.
Improving Similar Language Translation With Transfer Learning
Authors: Ife Adebara, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: WMT (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Machine Translation, Transfer Learning, Translation

We investigate transfer learning based on pre-trained neural machine translation models to translate between (low-resource) similar languages. This work is part of our contribution to the WMT 2021 Similar Languages Translation Shared Task where we submitted models for different language pairs, including French-Bambara, Spanish-Catalan, and Spanish-Portuguese in both directions. Our models for Catalan-Spanish ($82.79$ BLEU) and Portuguese-Spanish ($87.11$ BLEU) rank top 1 in the official shared task evaluation, and we are the only team to submit models for the French-Bambara pairs.
Machine Learning Assisted Security Analysis of 5G-Network-Connected Systems
Authors: Tanujay Saha, Najwa Aaraj, Niraj K. Jha
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The core network architecture of telecommunication systems has undergone a paradigm shift in the fifth-generation (5G)networks. 5G networks have transitioned to software-defined infrastructures, thereby reducing their dependence on hardware-based network functions. New technologies, like network function virtualization and software-defined networking, have been incorporated in the 5G core network (5GCN) architecture to enable this transition. This has resulted in significant improvements in efficiency, performance, and robustness of the networks. However, this has also made the core network more vulnerable, as software systems are generally easier to compromise than hardware systems. In this article, we present a comprehensive security analysis framework for the 5GCN. The novelty of this approach lies in the creation and analysis of attack graphs of the software-defined and virtualized 5GCN through machine learning. This analysis points to 119 novel possible exploits in the 5GCN. We demonstrate that these possible exploits of 5GCN vulnerabilities generate five novel attacks on the 5G Authentication and Key Agreement protocol. We combine the attacks at the network, protocol, and the application layers to generate complex attack vectors. In a case study, we use these attack vectors to find four novel security loopholes in WhatsApp running on a 5G network.
Solution Enumeration by Optimality in Answer Set Programming
Authors: Jukka Pajunen, Tomi Janhunen
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00

Given a combinatorial search problem, it may be highly useful to enumerate its (all) solutions besides just finding one solution, or showing that none exists. The same can be stated about optimal solutions if an objective function is provided. This work goes beyond the bare enumeration of optimal solutions and addresses the computational task of solution enumeration by optimality (SEO). This task is studied in the context of Answer Set Programming (ASP) where (optimal) solutions of a problem are captured with the answer sets of a logic program encoding the problem. Existing answer-set solvers already support the enumeration of all (optimal) answer sets. However, in this work, we generalize the enumeration of optimal answer sets beyond strictly optimal ones, giving rise to the idea of answer set enumeration in the order of optimality (ASEO). This approach is applicable up to the best k answer sets or in an unlimited setting, which amounts to a process of sorting answer sets based on the objective function. As the main contribution of this work, we present the first general algorithms for the aforementioned tasks of answer set enumeration. Moreover, we illustrate the potential use cases of ASEO. First, we study how efficiently access to the next-best solutions can be achieved in a number of optimization problems that have been formalized and solved in ASP. Second, we show that ASEO provides us with an effective sampling technique for Bayesian networks.
A Unified Model for Zero-shot Music Source Separation, Transcription and Synthesis
Authors: Liwei Lin, Qiuqiang Kong, Junyan Jiang, Gus Xia
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Disentanglement, Music Source Separation, Music Transcription, Zero-Shot Learning

We propose a unified model for three inter-related tasks: 1) to \textit{separate} individual sound sources from a mixed music audio, 2) to \textit{transcribe} each sound source to MIDI notes, and 3) to\textit{ synthesize} new pieces based on the timbre of separated sources. The model is inspired by the fact that when humans listen to music, our minds can not only separate the sounds of different instruments, but also at the same time perceive high-level representations such as score and timbre. To mirror such capability computationally, we designed a pitch-timbre disentanglement module based on a popular encoder-decoder neural architecture for source separation. The key inductive biases are vector-quantization for pitch representation and pitch-transformation invariant for timbre representation. In addition, we adopted a query-by-example method to achieve \textit{zero-shot} learning, i.e., the model is capable of doing source separation, transcription, and synthesis for \textit{unseen} instruments. The current design focuses on audio mixtures of two monophonic instruments. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing multi-task baselines, and the transcribed score serves as a powerful auxiliary for separation tasks.
Rethinking of AlphaStar
Authors: Ruo-Ze Liu
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Starcraft, Starcraft II

We present a different view for AlphaStar (AS), the program achieving Grand-Master level in the game StarCraft II. It is considered big progress for AI research. However, in this paper, we present problems with the AS, some of which are the defects of it, and some of which are important details that are neglected in its article. These problems arise two questions. One is that what can we get from the built of AS? The other is that does the battle between it with humans fair? After the discussion, we present the future research directions for these problems. Our study is based on a reproduction code of the AS, and the codes are available online.
Towards Discriminative Representation Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-identification
Authors: Takashi Isobe, Dong Li, Lu Tian, Weihua Chen, Yi Shan, Shengjin Wang
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Domain Adaptation, Person Re-Identification, Representation Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

In this work, we address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation for person re-ID where annotations are available for the source domain but not for target. Previous methods typically follow a two-stage optimization pipeline, where the network is first pre-trained on source and then fine-tuned on target with pseudo labels created by feature clustering. Such methods sustain two main limitations. (1) The label noise may hinder the learning of discriminative features for recognizing target classes. (2) The domain gap may hinder knowledge transferring from source to target. We propose three types of technical schemes to alleviate these issues. First, we propose a cluster-wise contrastive learning algorithm (CCL) by iterative optimization of feature learning and cluster refinery to learn noise-tolerant representations in the unsupervised manner. Second, we adopt a progressive domain adaptation (PDA) strategy to gradually mitigate the domain gap between source and target data. Third, we propose Fourier augmentation (FA) for further maximizing the class separability of re-ID models by imposing extra constraints in the Fourier space. We observe that these proposed schemes are capable of facilitating the learning of discriminative feature representations. Experiments demonstrate that our method consistently achieves notable improvements over the state-of-the-art unsupervised re-ID methods on multiple benchmarks, e.g., surpassing MMT largely by 8.1\%, 9.9\%, 11.4\% and 11.1\% mAP on the Market-to-Duke, Duke-to-Market, Market-to-MSMT and Duke-to-MSMT tasks, respectively.
NASOA: Towards Faster Task-oriented Online Fine-tuning with a Zoo of Models
Authors: Hang Xu, Ning Kang, Gengwei Zhang, Chuanlong Xie, Xiaodan Liang, Zhenguo Li
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Cloud Computing, GPU, Neural Architecture Search

Fine-tuning from pre-trained ImageNet models has been a simple, effective, and popular approach for various computer vision tasks. The common practice of fine-tuning is to adopt a default hyperparameter setting with a fixed pre-trained model, while both of them are not optimized for specific tasks and time constraints. Moreover, in cloud computing or GPU clusters where the tasks arrive sequentially in a stream, faster online fine-tuning is a more desired and realistic strategy for saving money, energy consumption, and CO2 emission. In this paper, we propose a joint Neural Architecture Search and Online Adaption framework named NASOA towards a faster task-oriented fine-tuning upon the request of users. Specifically, NASOA first adopts an offline NAS to identify a group of training-efficient networks to form a pretrained model zoo. We propose a novel joint block and macro-level search space to enable a flexible and efficient search. Then, by estimating fine-tuning performance via an adaptive model by accumulating experience from the past tasks, an online schedule generator is proposed to pick up the most suitable model and generate a personalized training regime with respect to each desired task in a one-shot fashion. The resulting model zoo is more training efficient than SOTA models, e.g. 6x faster than RegNetY-16GF, and 1.7x faster than EfficientNetB3. Experiments on multiple datasets also show that NASOA achieves much better fine-tuning results, i.e. improving around 2.1% accuracy than the best performance in RegNet series under various constraints and tasks; 40x faster compared to the BOHB.
Enhancing MR Image Segmentation with Realistic Adversarial Data Augmentation
Authors: Chen Chen, Chen Qin, Cheng Ouyang, Zeju Li, Shuo Wang, Huaqi Qiu, Liang Chen, Giacomo Tarroni, Wenjia Bai, Daniel Rueckert
Date: 2021-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Cardiac Segmentation, Data Augmentation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The success of neural networks on medical image segmentation tasks typically relies on large labeled datasets for model training. However, acquiring and manually labeling a large medical image set is resource-intensive, expensive, and sometimes impractical due to data sharing and privacy issues. To address this challenge, we propose AdvChain, a generic adversarial data augmentation framework, aiming at improving both the diversity and effectiveness of training data for medical image segmentation tasks. AdvChain augments data with dynamic data augmentation, generating randomly chained photo-metric and geometric transformations to resemble realistic yet challenging imaging variations to expand training data. By jointly optimizing the data augmentation model and a segmentation network during training, challenging examples are generated to enhance network generalizability for the downstream task. The proposed adversarial data augmentation does not rely on generative networks and can be used as a plug-in module in general segmentation networks. It is computationally efficient and applicable for both low-shot supervised and semi-supervised learning. We analyze and evaluate the method on two MR image segmentation tasks: cardiac segmentation and prostate segmentation with limited labeled data. Results show that the proposed approach can alleviate the need for labeled data while improving model generalization ability, indicating its practical value in medical imaging applications.