pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
VPR-Bench: An Open-Source Visual Place Recognition Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Viewpoint and Appearance Change
Authors: Mubariz Zaffar, Sourav Garg, Michael Milford, Julian Kooij, David Flynn, Klaus McDonald-Maier, Shoaib Ehsan
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Autonomous Vehicles, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Visual Place Recognition

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is the process of recognising a previously visited place using visual information, often under varying appearance conditions and viewpoint changes and with computational constraints. VPR is related to the concepts of localisation, loop closure, image retrieval and is a critical component of many autonomous navigation systems ranging from autonomous vehicles to drones and computer vision systems. While the concept of place recognition has been around for many years, VPR research has grown rapidly as a field over the past decade due to improving camera hardware and its potential for deep learning-based techniques, and has become a widely studied topic in both the computer vision and robotics communities. This growth however has led to fragmentation and a lack of standardisation in the field, especially concerning performance evaluation. Moreover, the notion of viewpoint and illumination invariance of VPR techniques has largely been assessed qualitatively and hence ambiguously in the past. In this paper, we address these gaps through a new comprehensive open-source framework for assessing the performance of VPR techniques, dubbed "VPR-Bench". VPR-Bench (Open-sourced at: https://github.com/MubarizZaffar/VPR-Bench) introduces two much-needed capabilities for VPR researchers: firstly, it contains a benchmark of 12 fully-integrated datasets and 10 VPR techniques, and secondly, it integrates a comprehensive variation-quantified dataset for quantifying viewpoint and illumination invariance. We apply and analyse popular evaluation metrics for VPR from both the computer vision and robotics communities, and discuss how these different metrics complement and/or replace each other, depending upon the underlying applications and system requirements.
Neural Collaborative Reasoning
Authors: Hanxiong Chen, Shaoyun Shi, Yunqi Li, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Decision Making, Logical Reasoning, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning

Existing Collaborative Filtering (CF) methods are mostly designed based on the idea of matching, i.e., by learning user and item embeddings from data using shallow or deep models, they try to capture the associative relevance patterns in data, so that a user embedding can be matched with relevant item embeddings using designed or learned similarity functions. However, as a cognition rather than a perception intelligent task, recommendation requires not only the ability of pattern recognition and matching from data, but also the ability of cognitive reasoning in data. In this paper, we propose to advance Collaborative Filtering (CF) to Collaborative Reasoning (CR), which means that each user knows part of the reasoning space, and they collaborate for reasoning in the space to estimate preferences for each other. Technically, we propose a Neural Collaborative Reasoning (NCR) framework to bridge learning and reasoning. Specifically, we integrate the power of representation learning and logical reasoning, where representations capture similarity patterns in data from perceptual perspectives, and logic facilitates cognitive reasoning for informed decision making. An important challenge, however, is to bridge differentiable neural networks and symbolic reasoning in a shared architecture for optimization and inference. To solve the problem, we propose a modularized reasoning architecture, which learns logical operations such as AND ($\wedge$), OR ($\vee$) and NOT ($\neg$) as neural modules for implication reasoning ($\rightarrow$). In this way, logical expressions can be equivalently organized as neural networks, so that logical reasoning and prediction can be conducted in a continuous space. Experiments on real-world datasets verified the advantages of our framework compared with both shallow, deep and reasoning models.
Sparse Mixture of Local Experts for Efficient Speech Enhancement
Authors: Aswin Sivaraman, Minje Kim
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Denoising, Speech Enhancement

In this paper, we investigate a deep learning approach for speech denoising through an efficient ensemble of specialist neural networks. By splitting up the speech denoising task into non-overlapping subproblems and introducing a classifier, we are able to improve denoising performance while also reducing computational complexity. More specifically, the proposed model incorporates a gating network which assigns noisy speech signals to an appropriate specialist network based on either speech degradation level or speaker gender. In our experiments, a baseline recurrent network is compared against an ensemble of similarly-designed smaller recurrent networks regulated by the auxiliary gating network. Using stochastically generated batches from a large noisy speech corpus, the proposed model learns to estimate a time-frequency masking matrix based on the magnitude spectrogram of an input mixture signal. Both baseline and specialist networks are trained to estimate the ideal ratio mask, while the gating network is trained to perform subproblem classification. Our findings demonstrate that a fine-tuned ensemble network is able to exceed the speech denoising capabilities of a generalist network, doing so with fewer model parameters.
Inferring astrophysical X-ray polarization with deep learning
Authors: Nikita Moriakov, Ashwin Samudre, Michela Negro, Fabian Gieseke, Sydney Otten, Luc Hendriks
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We investigate the use of deep learning in the context of X-ray polarization detection from astrophysical sources as will be observed by the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE), a future NASA selected space-based mission expected to be operative in 2021. In particular, we propose two models that can be used to estimate the impact point as well as the polarization direction of the incoming radiation. The results obtained show that data-driven approaches depict a promising alternative to the existing analytical approaches. We also discuss problems and challenges to be addressed in the near future.
A Combined Data-driven and Physics-driven Method for Steady Heat Conduction Prediction using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Hao Ma, Xiangyu Hu, Yuxuan Zhang, Nils Thuerey, Oskar J. Haidn
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00

With several advantages and as an alternative to predict physics field, machine learning methods can be classified into two distinct types: data-driven relying on training data and physics-driven using physics law. Choosing heat conduction problem as an example, we compared the data- and physics-driven learning process with deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). It shows that the convergences of the error to ground truth solution and the residual of heat conduction equation exhibit remarkable differences. Based on this observation, we propose a combined-driven method for learning acceleration and more accurate solutions. With a weighted loss function, reference data and physical equation are able to simultaneously drive the learning. Several numerical experiments are conducted to investigate the effectiveness of the combined method. For the data-driven based method, the introduction of physical equation not only is able to speed up the convergence, but also produces physically more consistent solutions. For the physics-driven based method, it is observed that the combined method is able to speed up the convergence up to 49.0\% by using a not very restrictive coarse reference.
That Sounds Familiar: an Analysis of Phonetic Representations Transfer Across Languages
Authors: Piotr Żelasko, Laureano Moro-Velázquez, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Odette Scharenborg, Najim Dehak
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Only a handful of the world's languages are abundant with the resources that enable practical applications of speech processing technologies. One of the methods to overcome this problem is to use the resources existing in other languages to train a multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model, which, intuitively, should learn some universal phonetic representations. In this work, we focus on gaining a deeper understanding of how general these representations might be, and how individual phones are getting improved in a multilingual setting. To that end, we select a phonetically diverse set of languages, and perform a series of monolingual, multilingual and crosslingual (zero-shot) experiments. The ASR is trained to recognize the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) token sequences. We observe significant improvements across all languages in the multilingual setting, and stark degradation in the crosslingual setting, where the model, among other errors, considers Javanese as a tone language. Notably, as little as 10 hours of the target language training data tremendously reduces ASR error rates. Our analysis uncovered that even the phones that are unique to a single language can benefit greatly from adding training data from other languages - an encouraging result for the low-resource speech community.
From Boundaries to Bumps: when closed (extremal) contours are critical
Authors: Benjamin Kunsberg, Steven W. Zucker
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00

Invariants underlying shape inference are elusive: a variety of shapes can give rise to the same image, and a variety of images can be rendered from the same shape. The occluding contour is a rare exception: it has both image salience, in terms of isophotes, and surface meaning, in terms of surface normal. We relax the notion of occluding contour to define closed extremal curves, a new shape invariant that exists at the topological level. They surround bumps, a common but ill-specified interior shape component, and formalize the qualitative nature of bump perception. Extremal curves are biologically computable, unify shape inferences from shading, texture, and specular materials, and predict new phenomena in bump perception.
Mutual Information Maximization for Robust Plannable Representations
Authors: Yiming Ding, Ignasi Clavera, Pieter Abbeel
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning

Extending the capabilities of robotics to real-world complex, unstructured environments requires the need of developing better perception systems while maintaining low sample complexity. When dealing with high-dimensional state spaces, current methods are either model-free or model-based based on reconstruction objectives. The sample inefficiency of the former constitutes a major barrier for applying them to the real-world. The later, while they present low sample complexity, they learn latent spaces that need to reconstruct every single detail of the scene. In real environments, the task typically just represents a small fraction of the scene. Reconstruction objectives suffer in such scenarios as they capture all the unnecessary components. In this work, we present MIRO, an information theoretic representational learning algorithm for model-based reinforcement learning. We design a latent space that maximizes the mutual information with the future information while being able to capture all the information needed for planning. We show that our approach is more robust than reconstruction objectives in the presence of distractors and cluttered scenes
RPD: A Distance Function Between Word Embeddings
Authors: Xuhui Zhou, Zaixiang Zheng, Shu-Jian Huang
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Word Embeddings

It is well-understood that different algorithms, training processes, and corpora produce different word embeddings. However, less is known about the relation between different embedding spaces, i.e. how far different sets of embeddings deviate from each other. In this paper, we propose a novel metric called Relative pairwise inner Product Distance (RPD) to quantify the distance between different sets of word embeddings. This metric has a unified scale for comparing different sets of word embeddings. Based on the properties of RPD, we study the relations of word embeddings of different algorithms systematically and investigate the influence of different training processes and corpora. The results shed light on the poorly understood word embeddings and justify RPD as a measure of the distance of embedding spaces.
Generalized Bayesian Posterior Expectation Distillation for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Meet P. Vadera, Brian Jalaian, Benjamin M. Marlin
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection

In this paper, we present a general framework for distilling expectations with respect to the Bayesian posterior distribution of a deep neural network classifier, extending prior work on the Bayesian Dark Knowledge framework. The proposed framework takes as input "teacher" and student model architectures and a general posterior expectation of interest. The distillation method performs an online compression of the selected posterior expectation using iteratively generated Monte Carlo samples. We focus on the posterior predictive distribution and expected entropy as distillation targets. We investigate several aspects of this framework including the impact of uncertainty and the choice of student model architecture. We study methods for student model architecture search from a speed-storage-accuracy perspective and evaluate down-stream tasks leveraging entropy distillation including uncertainty ranking and out-of-distribution detection.
Analytic Signal Phase in $N-D$ by Linear Symmetry Tensor--fingerprint modeling
Authors: Josef Bigun, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Disparity Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation

We reveal that the Analytic Signal phase, and its gradient have a hitherto unstudied discontinuity in $2-D $ and higher dimensions. The shortcoming can result in severe artifacts whereas the problem does not exist in $1-D $ signals. Direct use of Gabor phase, or its gradient, in computer vision and biometric recognition e.g., as done in influential studies \cite{fleet90,wiskott1997face}, may produce undesired results that will go unnoticed unless special images similar to ours reveal them. Instead of the Analytic Signal phase, we suggest the use of Linear Symmetry phase, relying on more than one set of Gabor filters, but with a negligible computational add-on, as a remedy. Gradient magnitudes of this phase are continuous in contrast to that of the analytic signal whereas continuity of the gradient direction of the phase is guaranteed if Linear Symmetry Tensor replaces gradient vector. The suggested phase has also a built-in automatic scale estimator, useful for robust detection of patterns by multi-scale processing. We show crucial concepts on synthesized fingerprint images, where ground truth regarding instantaneous frequency, (scale \& direction), and phase are known with favorable results. A comparison to a baseline alternative is also reported. To that end, a novel multi-scale minutia model where location, direction, and scale of minutia parameters are steerable, without the creation of uncontrollable minutia is also presented. This is a useful tool, to reduce development times of minutia detection methods with explainable behavior. A revealed consequence is that minutia directions are not determined by the linear phase alone, but also by each other and the influence must be corrected to obtain steerability and accurate ground truths. Essential conclusions are readily transferable to $N-D $, and unrelated applications, e.g. optical flow or disparity estimation in stereo.
Machine Learning for Exploring Spatial Affordance Patterns
Authors: Boyana Buyuklieva
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

This dissertation uses supervised and unsupervised data mining techniques to analyse office floor plans in an attempt to gain a better understanding of their geometry-to-function relationship. This question was deemed relevant after a background review of the state-of-the-art in automated floor-plan generation tools showed that such tools have been prototyped since the 1960s, but their search space is ill-informed because there are few formalisms to describe spatial affordance. To show and evaluate the relationship of geometry and use, data from visual graph analysis were used to train three supervised learners and compare these to a baseline accuracy established with a ZeroR classifier. This showed that for the office dataset examined, visual mean depth and integration are most tightly linked to usage and that the supervised learning algorithm J48 can correctly predict class performance on unseen examples to up to 79.5%. The thesis also includes an evaluation of the layout case studies with unsupervised learners, which showed that use could not be immediately reverse-engineered based solemnly on the VGA information to achieve a strong cluster-to-class evaluation.
Learning Probabilistic Sentence Representations from Paraphrases
Authors: Mingda Chen, Kevin Gimpel
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Sentence, Specificity, Word Embeddings

Probabilistic word embeddings have shown effectiveness in capturing notions of generality and entailment, but there is very little work on doing the analogous type of investigation for sentences. In this paper we define probabilistic models that produce distributions for sentences. Our best-performing model treats each word as a linear transformation operator applied to a multivariate Gaussian distribution. We train our models on paraphrases and demonstrate that they naturally capture sentence specificity. While our proposed model achieves the best performance overall, we also show that specificity is represented by simpler architectures via the norm of the sentence vectors. Qualitative analysis shows that our probabilistic model captures sentential entailment and provides ways to analyze the specificity and preciseness of individual words.
Single-Stage Semantic Segmentation from Image Labels
Authors: Nikita Araslanov, Stefan Roth
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recent years have seen a rapid growth in new approaches improving the accuracy of semantic segmentation in a weakly supervised setting, i.e. with only image-level labels available for training. However, this has come at the cost of increased model complexity and sophisticated multi-stage training procedures. This is in contrast to earlier work that used only a single stage $-$ training one segmentation network on image labels $-$ which was abandoned due to inferior segmentation accuracy. In this work, we first define three desirable properties of a weakly supervised method: local consistency, semantic fidelity, and completeness. Using these properties as guidelines, we then develop a segmentation-based network model and a self-supervised training scheme to train for semantic masks from image-level annotations in a single stage. We show that despite its simplicity, our method achieves results that are competitive with significantly more complex pipelines, substantially outperforming earlier single-stage methods.
Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition
Authors: Anmol Gulati, James Qin, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Niki Parmar, Yu Zhang, Jiahui Yu, Wei Han, Shibo Wang, Zhengdong Zhang, Yonghui Wu, Ruoming Pang
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Speech Recognition

Recently Transformer and Convolution neural network (CNN) based models have shown promising results in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), outperforming Recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Transformer models are good at capturing content-based global interactions, while CNNs exploit local features effectively. In this work, we achieve the best of both worlds by studying how to combine convolution neural networks and transformers to model both local and global dependencies of an audio sequence in a parameter-efficient way. To this regard, we propose the convolution-augmented transformer for speech recognition, named Conformer. Conformer significantly outperforms the previous Transformer and CNN based models achieving state-of-the-art accuracies. On the widely used LibriSpeech benchmark, our model achieves WER of 2.1%/4.3% without using a language model and 1.9%/3.9% with an external language model on test/testother. We also observe competitive performance of 2.7%/6.3% with a small model of only 10M parameters.
Reducibility and Statistical-Computational Gaps from Secret Leakage
Authors: Matthew Brennan, Guy Bresler
Date: 2020-05-16 00:00:00

Inference problems with conjectured statistical-computational gaps are ubiquitous throughout modern statistics, computer science and statistical physics. While there has been success evidencing these gaps from the failure of restricted classes of algorithms, progress towards a more traditional reduction-based approach to computational complexity in statistical inference has been limited. Existing reductions have largely been limited to inference problems with similar structure -- primarily mapping among problems representable as a sparse submatrix signal plus a noise matrix, which are similar to the common hardness assumption of planted clique. The insight in this work is that a slight generalization of the planted clique conjecture -- secret leakage planted clique -- gives rise to a variety of new average-case reduction techniques, yielding a web of reductions among problems with very different structure. Using variants of the planted clique conjecture for specific forms of secret leakage planted clique, we deduce tight statistical-computational tradeoffs for a diverse range of problems including robust sparse mean estimation, mixtures of sparse linear regressions, robust sparse linear regression, tensor PCA, variants of dense $k$-block stochastic block models, negatively correlated sparse PCA, semirandom planted dense subgraph, detection in hidden partition models and a universality principle for learning sparse mixtures. In particular, a $k$-partite hypergraph variant of the planted clique conjecture is sufficient to establish all of our computational lower bounds. Our techniques also reveal novel connections to combinatorial designs and to random matrix theory. This work gives the first evidence that an expanded set of hardness assumptions, such as for secret leakage planted clique, may be a key first step towards a more complete theory of reductions among statistical problems.