pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pervasive AI for IoT applications: A Survey on Resource-efficient Distributed Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Emna Baccour, Naram Mhaisen, Alaa Awad Abdellatif, Aiman Erbad, Amr Mohamed, Mounir Hamdi, Mohsen Guizani
Date: 2021-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Scheduling

Artificial intelligence (AI) has witnessed a substantial breakthrough in a variety of Internet of Things (IoT) applications and services, spanning from recommendation systems to robotics control and military surveillance. This is driven by the easier access to sensory data and the enormous scale of pervasive/ubiquitous devices that generate zettabytes (ZB) of real-time data streams. Designing accurate models using such data streams, to predict future insights and revolutionize the decision-taking process, inaugurates pervasive systems as a worthy paradigm for a better quality-of-life. The confluence of pervasive computing and artificial intelligence, Pervasive AI, expanded the role of ubiquitous IoT systems from mainly data collection to executing distributed computations with a promising alternative to centralized learning, presenting various challenges. In this context, a wise cooperation and resource scheduling should be envisaged among IoT devices (e.g., smartphones, smart vehicles) and infrastructure (e.g. edge nodes, and base stations) to avoid communication and computation overheads and ensure maximum performance. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the recent techniques developed to overcome these resource challenges in pervasive AI systems. Specifically, we first present an overview of the pervasive computing, its architecture, and its intersection with artificial intelligence. We then review the background, applications and performance metrics of AI, particularly Deep Learning (DL) and online learning, running in a ubiquitous system. Next, we provide a deep literature review of communication-efficient techniques, from both algorithmic and system perspectives, of distributed inference, training and online learning tasks across the combination of IoT devices, edge devices and cloud servers. Finally, we discuss our future vision and research challenges.
Towards End-to-End Deep Learning for Autonomous Racing: On Data Collection and a Unified Architecture for Steering and Throttle Prediction
Authors: Shakti N. Wadekar, Benjamin J. Schwartz, Shyam S. Kannan, Manuel Mar, Rohan Kumar Manna, Vishnu Chellapandi, Daniel J. Gonzalez, Aly El Gamal
Date: 2021-05-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Racing

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) which are trained end-to-end have been successfully applied to solve complex problems that we have not been able to solve in past decades. Autonomous driving is one of the most complex problems which is yet to be completely solved and autonomous racing adds more complexity and exciting challenges to this problem. Towards the challenge of applying end-to-end learning to autonomous racing, this paper shows results on two aspects: (1) Analyzing the relationship between the driving data used for training and the maximum speed at which the DNN can be successfully applied for predicting steering angle, (2) Neural network architecture and training methodology for learning steering and throttle without any feedback or recurrent connections.
PingAn-VCGroup's Solution for ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Table Image Recognition to Latex
Authors: Yelin He, Xianbiao Qi, Jiaquan Ye, Peng Gao, Yihao Chen, Bingcong Li, Xin Tang, Rong Xiao
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Scene Text Recognition

This paper presents our solution for the ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Table Image Recognition to LaTeX. This competition has two sub-tasks: Table Structure Reconstruction (TSR) and Table Content Reconstruction (TCR). We treat both sub-tasks as two individual image-to-sequence recognition problems. We leverage our previously proposed algorithm MASTER \cite{lu2019master}, which is originally proposed for scene text recognition. We optimize the MASTER model from several perspectives: network structure, optimizer, normalization method, pre-trained model, resolution of input image, data augmentation, and model ensemble. Our method achieves 0.7444 Exact Match and 0.8765 Exact Match @95\% on the TSR task, and obtains 0.5586 Exact Match and 0.7386 Exact Match 95\% on the TCR task.
PingAn-VCGroup's Solution for ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Literature Parsing Task B: Table Recognition to HTML
Authors: Jiaquan Ye, Xianbiao Qi, Yelin He, Yihao Chen, Dengyi Gu, Peng Gao, Rong Xiao
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Line Detection, Table Recognition

This paper presents our solution for ICDAR 2021 competition on scientific literature parsing taskB: table recognition to HTML. In our method, we divide the table content recognition task into foursub-tasks: table structure recognition, text line detection, text line recognition, and box assignment.Our table structure recognition algorithm is customized based on MASTER [1], a robust image textrecognition algorithm. PSENet [2] is used to detect each text line in the table image. For text linerecognition, our model is also built on MASTER. Finally, in the box assignment phase, we associatedthe text boxes detected by PSENet with the structure item reconstructed by table structure prediction,and fill the recognized content of the text line into the corresponding item. Our proposed methodachieves a 96.84% TEDS score on 9,115 validation samples in the development phase, and a 96.32%TEDS score on 9,064 samples in the final evaluation phase.
Full-Sentence Models Perform Better in Simultaneous Translation Using the Information Enhanced Decoding Strategy
Authors: Zhengxin Yang
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Translation

Simultaneous translation, which starts translating each sentence after receiving only a few words in source sentence, has a vital role in many scenarios. Although the previous prefix-to-prefix framework is considered suitable for simultaneous translation and achieves good performance, it still has two inevitable drawbacks: the high computational resource costs caused by the need to train a separate model for each latency $k$ and the insufficient ability to encode information because each target token can only attend to a specific source prefix. We propose a novel framework that adopts a simple but effective decoding strategy which is designed for full-sentence models. Within this framework, training a single full-sentence model can achieve arbitrary given latency and save computational resources. Besides, with the competence of the full-sentence model to encode the whole sentence, our decoding strategy can enhance the information maintained in the decoded states in real time. Experimental results show that our method achieves better translation quality than baselines on 4 directions: Zh$\rightarrow$En, En$\rightarrow$Ro and En$\leftrightarrow$De.
Do Natural Language Explanations Represent Valid Logical Arguments? Verifying Entailment in Explainable NLI Gold Standards
Authors: Marco Valentino, Ian Pratt-Hartmann, André Freitas
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: IWCS (ACL) 2021 6
Tasks: Explanation Generation, valid

An emerging line of research in Explainable NLP is the creation of datasets enriched with human-annotated explanations and rationales, used to build and evaluate models with step-wise inference and explanation generation capabilities. While human-annotated explanations are used as ground-truth for the inference, there is a lack of systematic assessment of their consistency and rigour. In an attempt to provide a critical quality assessment of Explanation Gold Standards (XGSs) for NLI, we propose a systematic annotation methodology, named Explanation Entailment Verification (EEV), to quantify the logical validity of human-annotated explanations. The application of EEV on three mainstream datasets reveals the surprising conclusion that a majority of the explanations, while appearing coherent on the surface, represent logically invalid arguments, ranging from being incomplete to containing clearly identifiable logical errors. This conclusion confirms that the inferential properties of explanations are still poorly formalised and understood, and that additional work on this line of research is necessary to improve the way Explanation Gold Standards are constructed.
Contrastive Learning and Self-Training for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Robert A. Marsden, Alexander Bartler, Mario Döbler, Bin Yang
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Domain Adaptation, Semantic Segmentation, Synthetic-to-Real Translation, Transfer Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Deep convolutional neural networks have considerably improved state-of-the-art results for semantic segmentation. Nevertheless, even modern architectures lack the ability to generalize well to a test dataset that originates from a different domain. To avoid the costly annotation of training data for unseen domains, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) attempts to provide efficient knowledge transfer from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Previous work has mainly focused on minimizing the discrepancy between the two domains by using adversarial training or self-training. While adversarial training may fail to align the correct semantic categories as it minimizes the discrepancy between the global distributions, self-training raises the question of how to provide reliable pseudo-labels. To align the correct semantic categories across domains, we propose a contrastive learning approach that adapts category-wise centroids across domains. Furthermore, we extend our method with self-training, where we use a memory-efficient temporal ensemble to generate consistent and reliable pseudo-labels. Although both contrastive learning and self-training (CLST) through temporal ensembling enable knowledge transfer between two domains, it is their combination that leads to a symbiotic structure. We validate our approach on two domain adaptation benchmarks: GTA5 $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes and SYNTHIA $\rightarrow$ Cityscapes. Our method achieves better or comparable results than the state-of-the-art. We will make the code publicly available.
ScissionLite: Accelerating Distributed Deep Neural Networks Using Transfer Layer
Authors: Hyunho Ahn, Munkyu Lee, Cheol-Ho Hong, Blesson Varghese
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications can benefit from leveraging edge computing. For example, applications underpinned by deep neural networks (DNN) models can be sliced and distributed across the IIoT device and the edge of the network for improving the overall performance of inference and for enhancing privacy of the input data, such as industrial product images. However, low network performance between IIoT devices and the edge is often a bottleneck. In this study, we develop ScissionLite, a holistic framework for accelerating distributed DNN inference using the Transfer Layer (TL). The TL is a traffic-aware layer inserted between the optimal slicing point of a DNN model slice in order to decrease the outbound network traffic without a significant accuracy drop. For the TL, we implement a new lightweight down/upsampling network for performance-limited IIoT devices. In ScissionLite, we develop ScissionTL, the Preprocessor, and the Offloader for end-to-end activities for deploying DNN slices with the TL. They decide the optimal slicing point of the DNN, prepare pre-trained DNN slices including the TL, and execute the DNN slices on an IIoT device and the edge. Employing the TL for the sliced DNN models has a negligible overhead. ScissionLite improves the inference latency by up to 16 and 2.8 times when compared to execution on the local device and an existing state-of-the-art model slicing approach respectively.
Bayesian Logistic Shape Model Inference: application to cochlea image segmentation
Authors: Wang Zihao, Demarcy Thomas, Vandersteen Clair, Gnansia Dan, Raffaelli Charles, Guevara Nicolas, Delingette Hervé
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Incorporating shape information is essential for the delineation of many organs and anatomical structures in medical images. While previous work has mainly focused on parametric spatial transformations applied on reference template shapes, in this paper, we address the Bayesian inference of parametric shape models for segmenting medical images with the objective to provide interpretable results. The proposed framework defines a likelihood appearance probability and a prior label probability based on a generic shape function through a logistic function. A reference length parameter defined in the sigmoid controls the trade-off between shape and appearance information. The inference of shape parameters is performed within an Expectation-Maximisation approach where a Gauss-Newton optimization stage allows to provide an approximation of the posterior probability of shape parameters. This framework is applied to the segmentation of cochlea structures from clinical CT images constrained by a 10 parameter shape model. It is evaluated on three different datasets, one of which includes more than 200 patient images. The results show performances comparable to supervised methods and better than previously proposed unsupervised ones. It also enables an analysis of parameter distributions and the quantification of segmentation uncertainty including the effect of the shape model.
Towards Interpretable and Transferable Speech Emotion Recognition: Latent Representation Based Analysis of Features, Methods and Corpora
Authors: Sneha Das, Nicole Nadine Lønfeldt, Anne Katrine Pagsberg, Line H. Clemmensen
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Decision Making, Denoising, Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

In recent years, speech emotion recognition (SER) has been used in wide ranging applications, from healthcare to the commercial sector. In addition to signal processing approaches, methods for SER now also use deep learning techniques. However, generalizing over languages, corpora and recording conditions is still an open challenge in the field. Furthermore, due to the black-box nature of deep learning algorithms, a newer challenge is the lack of interpretation and transparency in the models and the decision making process. This is critical when the SER systems are deployed in applications that influence human lives. In this work we address this gap by providing an in-depth analysis of the decision making process of the proposed SER system. Towards that end, we present low-complexity SER based on undercomplete- and denoising- autoencoders that achieve an average classification accuracy of over 55\% for four-class emotion classification. Following this, we investigate the clustering of emotions in the latent space to understand the influence of the corpora on the model behavior and to obtain a physical interpretation of the latent embedding. Lastly, we explore the role of each input feature towards the performance of the SER.
Conditional Invertible Neural Networks for Diverse Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Lynton Ardizzone, Jakob Kruse, Carsten Lüth, Niels Bracher, Carsten Rother, Ullrich Köthe
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Colorization, Image Colorization, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

We introduce a new architecture called a conditional invertible neural network (cINN), and use it to address the task of diverse image-to-image translation for natural images. This is not easily possible with existing INN models due to some fundamental limitations. The cINN combines the purely generative INN model with an unconstrained feed-forward network, which efficiently preprocesses the conditioning image into maximally informative features. All parameters of a cINN are jointly optimized with a stable, maximum likelihood-based training procedure. Even though INN-based models have received far less attention in the literature than GANs, they have been shown to have some remarkable properties absent in GANs, e.g. apparent immunity to mode collapse. We find that our cINNs leverage these properties for image-to-image translation, demonstrated on day to night translation and image colorization. Furthermore, we take advantage of our bidirectional cINN architecture to explore and manipulate emergent properties of the latent space, such as changing the image style in an intuitive way.
Goodness of Causal Fit
Authors: Robert R. Tucci
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00

We propose a Goodness of Causal Fit (GCF) measure which depends on Judea Pearl's ``do" interventions. This is different from Goodness of Fit (GF) measures, which do not use interventions. Given a set ${\cal G}$ of DAGs with the same nodes, to find a good $G\in {\cal G}$, we propose plotting $GCF(G)$ versus $GF(G)$ for all $G\in {\cal G}$, and finding a graph $G\in {\cal G}$ with a large amount of both types of goodness.
Physically Inspired Dense Fusion Networks for Relighting
Authors: Amirsaeed Yazdani, Tiantong Guo, Vishal Monga
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Relighting, Intrinsic Image Decomposition

Image relighting has emerged as a problem of significant research interest inspired by augmented reality applications. Physics-based traditional methods, as well as black box deep learning models, have been developed. The existing deep networks have exploited training to achieve a new state of the art; however, they may perform poorly when training is limited or does not represent problem phenomenology, such as the addition or removal of dense shadows. We propose a model which enriches neural networks with physical insight. More precisely, our method generates the relighted image with new illumination settings via two different strategies and subsequently fuses them using a weight map (w). In the first strategy, our model predicts the material reflectance parameters (albedo) and illumination/geometry parameters of the scene (shading) for the relit image (we refer to this strategy as intrinsic image decomposition (IID)). The second strategy is solely based on the black box approach, where the model optimizes its weights based on the ground-truth images and the loss terms in the training stage and generates the relit output directly (we refer to this strategy as direct). While our proposed method applies to both one-to-one and any-to-any relighting problems, for each case we introduce problem-specific components that enrich the model performance: 1) For one-to-one relighting we incorporate normal vectors of the surfaces in the scene to adjust gloss and shadows accordingly in the image. 2) For any-to-any relighting, we propose an additional multiscale block to the architecture to enhance feature extraction. Experimental results on the VIDIT 2020 and the VIDIT 2021 dataset (used in the NTIRE 2021 relighting challenge) reveals that our proposal can outperform many state-of-the-art methods in terms of well-known fidelity metrics and perceptual loss.
Audio Retrieval with Natural Language Queries
Authors: Andreea-Maria Oncescu, A. Sophia Koepke, João F. Henriques, Zeynep Akata, Samuel Albanie
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: AudioCaps, Audio to Text Retrieval, Audio/Video to Text Retrieval, Form, Natural Language Queries, Retrieval, Text to Audio Retrieval, Text to Audio/Video Retrieval

We consider the task of retrieving audio using free-form natural language queries. To study this problem, which has received limited attention in the existing literature, we introduce challenging new benchmarks for text-based audio retrieval using text annotations sourced from the Audiocaps and Clotho datasets. We then employ these benchmarks to establish baselines for cross-modal audio retrieval, where we demonstrate the benefits of pre-training on diverse audio tasks. We hope that our benchmarks will inspire further research into cross-modal text-based audio retrieval with free-form text queries.
Data Augmentation by Concatenation for Low-Resource Translation: A Mystery and a Solution
Authors: Toan Q. Nguyen, Kenton Murray, David Chiang
Date: 2021-05-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL (IWSLT) 2021 8
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Low Resource Neural Machine Translation, Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation, Machine Translation, Position, Translation

In this paper, we investigate the driving factors behind concatenation, a simple but effective data augmentation method for low-resource neural machine translation. Our experiments suggest that discourse context is unlikely the cause for the improvement of about +1 BLEU across four language pairs. Instead, we demonstrate that the improvement comes from three other factors unrelated to discourse: context diversity, length diversity, and (to a lesser extent) position shifting.
ExcavatorCovid: Extracting Events and Relations from Text Corpora for Temporal and Causal Analysis for COVID-19
Authors: Bonan Min, Benjamin Rozonoyer, Haoling Qiu, Alexander Zamanian, Jessica MacBride
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (ACL) 2021 11
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

Timely responses from policy makers to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic rely on a comprehensive grasp of events, their causes, and their impacts. These events are reported at such a speed and scale as to be overwhelming. In this paper, we present ExcavatorCovid, a machine reading system that ingests open-source text documents (e.g., news and scientific publications), extracts COVID19 related events and relations between them, and builds a Temporal and Causal Analysis Graph (TCAG). Excavator will help government agencies alleviate the information overload, understand likely downstream effects of political and economic decisions and events related to the pandemic, and respond in a timely manner to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. We expect the utility of Excavator to outlive the COVID-19 pandemic: analysts and decision makers will be empowered by Excavator to better understand and solve complex problems in the future. An interactive TCAG visualization is available at http://afrl402.bbn.com:5050/index.html. We also released a demonstration video at https://vimeo.com/528619007.
Mind Reading at Work: Cooperation without common ground
Authors: Peter Wallis
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00

As Stefan Kopp and Nicole Kramer say in their recent paper[Frontiers in Psychology 12 (2021) 597], despite some very impressive demonstrations over the last decade or so, we still don't know how how to make a computer have a half decent conversation with a human. They argue that the capabilities required to do this include incremental joint co-construction and mentalizing. Although agreeing whole heartedly with their statement of the problem, this paper argues for a different approach to the solution based on the "new" AI of situated action.
Evaluation Of Word Embeddings From Large-Scale French Web Content
Authors: Hadi Abdine, Christos Xypolopoulos, Moussa Kamal Eddine, Michalis Vazirgiannis
Date: 2021-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

Distributed word representations are popularly used in many tasks in natural language processing. Adding that pretrained word vectors on huge text corpus achieved high performance in many different NLP tasks. This paper introduces multiple high-quality word vectors for the French language where two of them are trained on massive crawled French data during this study and the others are trained on an already existing French corpus. We also evaluate the quality of our proposed word vectors and the existing French word vectors on the French word analogy task. In addition, we do the evaluation on multiple real NLP tasks that shows the important performance enhancement of the pre-trained word vectors compared to the existing and random ones. Finally, we created a demo web application to test and visualize the obtained word embeddings. The produced French word embeddings are available to the public, along with the finetuning code on the NLU tasks and the demo code.