pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Feature-Dependent Cross-Connections in Multi-Path Neural Networks
Authors: Dumindu Tissera, Kasun Vithanage, Rukshan Wijesinghe, Kumara Kahatapitiya, Subha Fernando, Ranga Rodrigo
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00

Learning a particular task from a dataset, samples in which originate from diverse contexts, is challenging, and usually addressed by deepening or widening standard neural networks. As opposed to conventional network widening, multi-path architectures restrict the quadratic increment of complexity to a linear scale. However, existing multi-column/path networks or model ensembling methods do not consider any feature-dependent allocation of parallel resources, and therefore, tend to learn redundant features. Given a layer in a multi-path network, if we restrict each path to learn a context-specific set of features and introduce a mechanism to intelligently allocate incoming feature maps to such paths, each path can specialize in a certain context, reducing the redundancy and improving the quality of extracted features. This eventually leads to better-optimized usage of parallel resources. To do this, we propose inserting feature-dependent cross-connections between parallel sets of feature maps in successive layers. The weighting coefficients of these cross-connections are computed from the input features of the particular layer. Our multi-path networks show improved image recognition accuracy at a similar complexity compared to conventional and state-of-the-art methods for deepening, widening and adaptive feature extracting, in both small and large scale datasets.
Unified Reinforcement Q-Learning for Mean Field Game and Control Problems
Authors: Andrea Angiuli, Jean-Pierre Fouque, Mathieu Laurière
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present a Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm to solve infinite horizon asymptotic Mean Field Game (MFG) and Mean Field Control (MFC) problems. Our approach can be described as a unified two-timescale Mean Field Q-learning: The \emph{same} algorithm can learn either the MFG or the MFC solution by simply tuning the ratio of two learning parameters. The algorithm is in discrete time and space where the agent not only provides an action to the environment but also a distribution of the state in order to take into account the mean field feature of the problem. Importantly, we assume that the agent can not observe the population's distribution and needs to estimate it in a model-free manner. The asymptotic MFG and MFC problems are also presented in continuous time and space, and compared with classical (non-asymptotic or stationary) MFG and MFC problems. They lead to explicit solutions in the linear-quadratic (LQ) case that are used as benchmarks for the results of our algorithm.
Improving task-specific representation via 1M unlabelled images without any extra knowledge
Authors: Aayush Bansal
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Surface Normal Estimation

We present a case-study to improve the task-specific representation by leveraging a million unlabelled images without any extra knowledge. We propose an exceedingly simple method of conditioning an existing representation on a diverse data distribution and observe that a model trained on diverse examples acts as a better initialization. We extensively study our findings for the task of surface normal estimation and semantic segmentation from a single image. We improve surface normal estimation on NYU-v2 depth dataset and semantic segmentation on PASCAL VOC by 4% over base model. We did not use any task-specific knowledge or auxiliary tasks, neither changed hyper-parameters nor made any modification in the underlying neural network architecture.
Classifying Referential and Non-referential It Using Gaze
Authors: Victoria Yaneva, Le An Ha, Richard Evans, Ruslan Mitkov
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2018 10
Tasks: POS

When processing a text, humans and machines must disambiguate between different uses of the pronoun it, including non-referential, nominal anaphoric or clause anaphoric ones. In this paper, we use eye-tracking data to learn how humans perform this disambiguation. We use this knowledge to improve the automatic classification of it. We show that by using gaze data and a POS-tagger we are able to significantly outperform a common baseline and classify between three categories of it with an accuracy comparable to that of linguisticbased approaches. In addition, the discriminatory power of specific gaze features informs the way humans process the pronoun, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been explored using data from a natural reading task.
One Model to Pronounce Them All: Multilingual Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion With a Transformer Ensemble
Authors: Kaili Vesik, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Miikka Silfverberg
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: All, Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

The task of grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion is important for both speech recognition and synthesis. Similar to other speech and language processing tasks, in a scenario where only small-sized training data are available, learning G2P models is challenging. We describe a simple approach of exploiting model ensembles, based on multilingual Transformers and self-training, to develop a highly effective G2P solution for 15 languages. Our models are developed as part of our participation in the SIGMORPHON 2020 Shared Task 1 focused at G2P. Our best models achieve 14.99 word error rate (WER) and 3.30 phoneme error rate (PER), a sizeable improvement over the shared task competitive baselines.
A High-Quality Multilingual Dataset for Structured Documentation Translation
Authors: Kazuma Hashimoto, Raffaella Buschiazzo, James Bradbury, Teresa Marshall, Richard Socher, Caiming Xiong
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 8
Tasks: Translation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

This paper presents a high-quality multilingual dataset for the documentation domain to advance research on localization of structured text. Unlike widely-used datasets for translation of plain text, we collect XML-structured parallel text segments from the online documentation for an enterprise software platform. These Web pages have been professionally translated from English into 16 languages and maintained by domain experts, and around 100,000 text segments are available for each language pair. We build and evaluate translation models for seven target languages from English, with several different copy mechanisms and an XML-constrained beam search. We also experiment with a non-English pair to show that our dataset has the potential to explicitly enable $17 \times 16$ translation settings. Our experiments show that learning to translate with the XML tags improves translation accuracy, and the beam search accurately generates XML structures. We also discuss trade-offs of using the copy mechanisms by focusing on translation of numerical words and named entities. We further provide a detailed human analysis of gaps between the model output and human translations for real-world applications, including suitability for post-editing.
Attention-Based Neural Networks for Sentiment Attitude Extraction using Distant Supervision
Authors: Nicolay Rusnachenko, Natalia Loukachevitch
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

In the sentiment attitude extraction task, the aim is to identify <<attitudes>> -- sentiment relations between entities mentioned in text. In this paper, we provide a study on attention-based context encoders in the sentiment attitude extraction task. For this task, we adapt attentive context encoders of two types: (1) feature-based; (2) self-based. In our study, we utilize the corpus of Russian analytical texts RuSentRel and automatically constructed news collection RuAttitudes for enriching the training set. We consider the problem of attitude extraction as two-class (positive, negative) and three-class (positive, negative, neutral) classification tasks for whole documents. Our experiments with the RuSentRel corpus show that the three-class classification models, which employ the RuAttitudes corpus for training, result in 10% increase and extra 3% by F1, when model architectures include the attention mechanism. We also provide the analysis of attention weight distributions in dependence on the term type.
On Analyzing Annotation Consistency in Online Abusive Behavior Datasets
Authors: Md Rabiul Awal, Rui Cao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Sandra Mitrović
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00

Online abusive behavior is an important issue that breaks the cohesiveness of online social communities and even raises public safety concerns in our societies. Motivated by this rising issue, researchers have proposed, collected, and annotated online abusive content datasets. These datasets play a critical role in facilitating the research on online hate speech and abusive behaviors. However, the annotation of such datasets is a difficult task; it is often contentious on what should be the true label of a given text as the semantic difference of the labels may be blurred (e.g., abusive and hate) and often subjective. In this study, we proposed an analytical framework to study the annotation consistency in online hate and abusive content datasets. We applied our proposed framework to evaluate the consistency of the annotation in three popular datasets that are widely used in online hate speech and abusive behavior studies. We found that there is still a substantial amount of annotation inconsistency in the existing datasets, particularly when the labels are semantically similar.
Black-box Adaptation of ASR for Accented Speech
Authors: Kartik Khandelwal, Preethi Jyothi, Abhijeet Awasthi, Sunita Sarawagi
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00

We introduce the problem of adapting a black-box, cloud-based ASR system to speech from a target accent. While leading online ASR services obtain impressive performance on main-stream accents, they perform poorly on sub-populations - we observed that the word error rate (WER) achieved by Google's ASR API on Indian accents is almost twice the WER on US accents. Existing adaptation methods either require access to model parameters or overlay an error-correcting module on output transcripts. We highlight the need for correlating outputs with the original speech to fix accent errors. Accordingly, we propose a novel coupling of an open-source accent-tuned local model with the black-box service where the output from the service guides frame-level inference in the local model. Our fine-grained merging algorithm is better at fixing accent errors than existing word-level combination strategies. Experiments on Indian and Australian accents with three leading ASR models as service, show that we achieve as much as 28% relative reduction in WER over both the local and service models.
Meta Transfer Learning for Emotion Recognition
Authors: Dung Nguyen, Sridha Sridharan, Duc Thanh Nguyen, Simon Denman, David Dean, Clinton Fookes
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER), Speech Emotion Recognition, Transfer Learning

Deep learning has been widely adopted in automatic emotion recognition and has lead to significant progress in the field. However, due to insufficient annotated emotion datasets, pre-trained models are limited in their generalization capability and thus lead to poor performance on novel test sets. To mitigate this challenge, transfer learning performing fine-tuning on pre-trained models has been applied. However, the fine-tuned knowledge may overwrite and/or discard important knowledge learned from pre-trained models. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a PathNet-based transfer learning method that is able to transfer emotional knowledge learned from one visual/audio emotion domain to another visual/audio emotion domain, and transfer the emotional knowledge learned from multiple audio emotion domains into one another to improve overall emotion recognition accuracy. To show the robustness of our proposed system, various sets of experiments for facial expression recognition and speech emotion recognition task on three emotion datasets: SAVEE, EMODB, and eNTERFACE have been carried out. The experimental results indicate that our proposed system is capable of improving the performance of emotion recognition, making its performance substantially superior to the recent proposed fine-tuning/pre-trained models based transfer learning methods.
Iris Presentation Attack Detection: Where Are We Now?
Authors: Aidan Boyd, Zhaoyuan Fang, Adam Czajka, Kevin W. Bowyer
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Iris Recognition

As the popularity of iris recognition systems increases, the importance of effective security measures against presentation attacks becomes paramount. This work presents an overview of the most important advances in the area of iris presentation attack detection published in recent two years. Newly-released, publicly-available datasets for development and evaluation of iris presentation attack detection are discussed. Recent literature can be seen to be broken into three categories: traditional "hand-crafted" feature extraction and classification, deep learning-based solutions, and hybrid approaches fusing both methodologies. Conclusions of modern approaches underscore the difficulty of this task. Finally, commentary on possible directions for future research is provided.
Anomaly Detection in Medical Imaging with Deep Perceptual Autoencoders
Authors: Nina Shvetsova, Bart Bakker, Irina Fedulova, Heinrich Schulz, Dmitry V. Dylov
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Medical Image Analysis, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is the problem of recognizing abnormal inputs based on the seen examples of normal data. Despite recent advances of deep learning in recognizing image anomalies, these methods still prove incapable of handling complex medical images, such as barely visible abnormalities in chest X-rays and metastases in lymph nodes. To address this problem, we introduce a new powerful method of image anomaly detection. It relies on the classical autoencoder approach with a re-designed training pipeline to handle high-resolution, complex images and a robust way of computing an image abnormality score. We revisit the very problem statement of fully unsupervised anomaly detection, where no abnormal examples at all are provided during the model setup. We propose to relax this unrealistic assumption by using a very small number of anomalies of confined variability merely to initiate the search of hyperparameters of the model. We evaluate our solution on natural image datasets with a known benchmark, as well as on two medical datasets containing radiology and digital pathology images. The proposed approach suggests a new strong baseline for image anomaly detection and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in complex medical image analysis tasks.
Applying Lie Groups Approaches for Rigid Registration of Point Clouds
Authors: Liliane Rodrigues de Almeida, Gilson A. Giraldi, Marcelo Bernardes Vieira
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

In the last decades, some literature appeared using the Lie groups theory to solve problems in computer vision. On the other hand, Lie algebraic representations of the transformations therein were introduced to overcome the difficulties behind group structure by mapping the transformation groups to linear spaces. In this paper we focus on application of Lie groups and Lie algebras to find the rigid transformation that best register two surfaces represented by point clouds. The so called pairwise rigid registration can be formulated by comparing intrinsic second-order orientation tensors that encode local geometry. These tensors can be (locally) represented by symmetric non-negative definite matrices. In this paper we interpret the obtained tensor field as a multivariate normal model. So, we start with the fact that the space of Gaussians can be equipped with a Lie group structure, that is isomorphic to a subgroup of the upper triangular matrices. Consequently, the associated Lie algebra structure enables us to handle Gaussians, and consequently, to compare orientation tensors, with Euclidean operations. We apply this methodology to variants of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP), a known technique for pairwise registration. We compare the obtained results with the original implementations that apply the comparative tensor shape factor (CTSF), which is a similarity notion based on the eigenvalues of the orientation tensors. We notice that the similarity measure in tensor spaces directly derived from Lie's approach is not invariant under rotations, which is a problem in terms of rigid registration. Despite of this, the performed computational experiments show promising results when embedding orientation tensor fields in Lie algebras.
Road surface detection and differentiation considering surface damages
Authors: Thiago Rateke, Aldo von Wangenheim
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

A challenge still to be overcome in the field of visual perception for vehicle and robotic navigation on heavily damaged and unpaved roads is the task of reliable path and obstacle detection. The vast majority of the researches have as scenario roads in good condition, from developed countries. These works cope with few situations of variation on the road surface and even fewer situations presenting surface damages. In this paper we present an approach for road detection considering variation in surface types, identifying paved and unpaved surfaces and also detecting damage and other information on other road surface that may be relevant to driving safety. We also present a new Ground Truth with image segmentation, used in our approach and that allowed us to evaluate our results. Our results show that it is possible to use passive vision for these purposes, even using images captured with low cost cameras.
Learning Semantically Enhanced Feature for Fine-Grained Image Classification
Authors: Wei Luo, Hengmin Zhang, Jun Li, Xiu-Shen Wei
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Fine-Grained Image Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

We aim to provide a computationally cheap yet effective approach for fine-grained image classification (FGIC) in this letter. Unlike previous methods that rely on complex part localization modules, our approach learns fine-grained features by enhancing the semantics of sub-features of a global feature. Specifically, we first achieve the sub-feature semantic by arranging feature channels of a CNN into different groups through channel permutation. Meanwhile, to enhance the discriminability of sub-features, the groups are guided to be activated on object parts with strong discriminability by a weighted combination regularization. Our approach is parameter parsimonious and can be easily integrated into the backbone model as a plug-and-play module for end-to-end training with only image-level supervision. Experiments verified the effectiveness of our approach and validated its comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/cswluo/SEF
IA-MOT: Instance-Aware Multi-Object Tracking with Motion Consistency
Authors: Jiarui Cai, Yizhou Wang, Haotian Zhang, Hung-Min Hsu, Chengqian Ma, Jenq-Neng Hwang
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Multiple Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

Multiple object tracking (MOT) is a crucial task in computer vision society. However, most tracking-by-detection MOT methods, with available detected bounding boxes, cannot effectively handle static, slow-moving and fast-moving camera scenarios simultaneously due to ego-motion and frequent occlusion. In this work, we propose a novel tracking framework, called "instance-aware MOT" (IA-MOT), that can track multiple objects in either static or moving cameras by jointly considering the instance-level features and object motions. First, robust appearance features are extracted from a variant of Mask R-CNN detector with an additional embedding head, by sending the given detections as the region proposals. Meanwhile, the spatial attention, which focuses on the foreground within the bounding boxes, is generated from the given instance masks and applied to the extracted embedding features. In the tracking stage, object instance masks are aligned by feature similarity and motion consistency using the Hungarian association algorithm. Moreover, object re-identification (ReID) is incorporated to recover ID switches caused by long-term occlusion or missing detection. Overall, when evaluated on the MOTS20 and KITTI-MOTS dataset, our proposed method won the first place in Track 3 of the BMTT Challenge in CVPR2020 workshops.
ATSO: Asynchronous Teacher-Student Optimization for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Xinyue Huo, Lingxi Xie, Jianzhong He, Zijie Yang, Qi Tian
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Self-Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

In medical image analysis, semi-supervised learning is an effective method to extract knowledge from a small amount of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data. This paper focuses on a popular pipeline known as self learning, and points out a weakness named lazy learning that refers to the difficulty for a model to learn from the pseudo labels generated by itself. To alleviate this issue, we propose ATSO, an asynchronous version of teacher-student optimization. ATSO partitions the unlabeled data into two subsets and alternately uses one subset to fine-tune the model and updates the label on the other subset. We evaluate ATSO on two popular medical image segmentation datasets and show its superior performance in various semi-supervised settings. With slight modification, ATSO transfers well to natural image segmentation for autonomous driving data.
Learning Interclass Relations for Image Classification
Authors: Muhamedrahimov Raouf, Bar Amir, Akselrod-Ballin Ayelet
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

In standard classification, we typically treat class categories as independent of one-another. In many problems, however, we would be neglecting the natural relations that exist between categories, which are often dictated by an underlying biological or physical process. In this work, we propose novel formulations of the classification problem, based on a realization that the assumption of class-independence is a limiting factor that leads to the requirement of more training data. First, we propose manual ways to reduce our data needs by reintroducing knowledge about problem-specific interclass relations into the training process. Second, we propose a general approach to jointly learn categorical label representations that can implicitly encode natural interclass relations, alleviating the need for strong prior assumptions, which are not always available. We demonstrate this in the domain of medical images, where access to large amounts of labelled data is not trivial. Specifically, our experiments show the advantages of this approach in the classification of Intravenous Contrast enhancement phases in CT images, which encapsulate multiple interesting inter-class relations.