pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Geometric algorithms for predicting resilience and recovering damage in neural networks
Authors: Guruprasad Raghavan, Jiayi Li, Matt Thomson
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00

Biological neural networks have evolved to maintain performance despite significant circuit damage. To survive damage, biological network architectures have both intrinsic resilience to component loss and also activate recovery programs that adjust network weights through plasticity to stabilize performance. Despite the importance of resilience in technology applications, the resilience of artificial neural networks is poorly understood, and autonomous recovery algorithms have yet to be developed. In this paper, we establish a mathematical framework to analyze the resilience of artificial neural networks through the lens of differential geometry. Our geometric language provides natural algorithms that identify local vulnerabilities in trained networks as well as recovery algorithms that dynamically adjust networks to compensate for damage. We reveal striking vulnerabilities in commonly used image analysis networks, like MLP's and CNN's trained on MNIST and CIFAR10 respectively. We also uncover high-performance recovery paths that enable the same networks to dynamically re-adjust their parameters to compensate for damage. Broadly, our work provides procedures that endow artificial systems with resilience and rapid-recovery routines to enhance their integration with IoT devices as well as enable their deployment for critical applications.
Knee Point Identification Based on Trade-Off Utility
Authors: Ke Li, Haifeng Nie, Huifu Gao, Xin Yao
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, GPU

Knee points, characterised as their smallest trade-off loss at all objectives, are attractive to decision makers in multi-criterion decision-making. In contrast, other Pareto-optimal solutions are less attractive since a small improvement on one objective can lead to a significant degradation on at least one of the other objectives. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective knee point identification method based on trade-off utility, dubbed KPITU, to help decision makers identify knee points from a given set of trade-off solutions. The basic idea of KPITU is to sequentially validate whether a solution is a knee point or not by comparing its trade-off utility with others within its neighbourhood. In particular, a solution is a knee point if and only if it has the best trade-off utility among its neighbours. Moreover, we implement a GPU version of KPITU that carries out the knee point identification in a parallel manner. This GPU version reduces the worst-case complexity from quadratic to linear. To validate the effectiveness of KPITU, we compare its performance with five state-of-the-art knee point identification methods on 134 test problem instances. Empirical results fully demonstrate the outstanding performance of KPITU especially on problems with many local knee points. At the end, we further validate the usefulness of KPITU for guiding EMO algorithms to search for knee points on the fly during the evolutionary process.
Component-wise Adaptive Trimming For Robust Mixture Regression
Authors: Wennan Chang, Xinyu Zhou, Yong Zang, Chi Zhang, Sha Cao
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Outlier Detection, parameter estimation, regression

Parameter estimation of mixture regression model using the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is highly sensitive to outliers. Here we propose a fast and efficient robust mixture regression algorithm, called Component-wise Adaptive Trimming (CAT) method. We consider simultaneous outlier detection and robust parameter estimation to minimize the effect of outlier contamination. Robust mixture regression has many important applications including in human cancer genomics data, where the population often displays strong heterogeneity added by unwanted technological perturbations. Existing robust mixture regression methods suffer from outliers as they either conduct parameter estimation in the presence of outliers, or rely on prior knowledge of the level of outlier contamination. CAT was implemented in the framework of classification expectation maximization, under which a natural definition of outliers could be derived. It implements a least trimmed squares (LTS) approach within each exclusive mixing component, where the robustness issue could be transformed from the mixture case to simple linear regression case. The high breakdown point of the LTS approach allows us to avoid the pre-specification of trimming parameter. Compared with multiple existing algorithms, CAT is the most competitive one that can handle and adaptively trim off outliers as well as heavy tailed noise, in different scenarios of simulated data and real genomic data. CAT has been implemented in an R package `RobMixReg' available in CRAN.
A Novel Confidence-Based Algorithm for Structured Bandits
Authors: Andrea Tirinzoni, Alessandro Lazaric, Marcello Restelli
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00

We study finite-armed stochastic bandits where the rewards of each arm might be correlated to those of other arms. We introduce a novel phased algorithm that exploits the given structure to build confidence sets over the parameters of the true bandit problem and rapidly discard all sub-optimal arms. In particular, unlike standard bandit algorithms with no structure, we show that the number of times a suboptimal arm is selected may actually be reduced thanks to the information collected by pulling other arms. Furthermore, we show that, in some structures, the regret of an anytime extension of our algorithm is uniformly bounded over time. For these constant-regret structures, we also derive a matching lower bound. Finally, we demonstrate numerically that our approach better exploits certain structures than existing methods.
Revisiting Street-to-Aerial View Image Geo-localization and Orientation Estimation
Authors: Sijie Zhu, Taojiannan Yang, Chen Chen
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: geo-localization, Metric Learning

Street-to-aerial image geo-localization, which matches a query street-view image to the GPS-tagged aerial images in a reference set, has attracted increasing attention recently. In this paper, we revisit this problem and point out the ignored issue about image alignment information. We show that the performance of a simple Siamese network is highly dependent on the alignment setting and the comparison of previous works can be unfair if they have different assumptions. Instead of focusing on the feature extraction under the alignment assumption, we show that improvements in metric learning techniques significantly boost the performance regardless of the alignment. Without leveraging the alignment information, our pipeline outperforms previous works on both panorama and cropped datasets. Furthermore, we conduct visualization to help understand the learned model and the effect of alignment information using Grad-CAM. With our discovery on the approximate rotation-invariant activation maps, we propose a novel method to estimate the orientation/alignment between a pair of cross-view images with unknown alignment information. It achieves state-of-the-art results on the CVUSA dataset.
Subgradient Regularized Multivariate Convex Regression at Scale
Authors: Wenyu Chen, Rahul Mazumder
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

We present new large-scale algorithms for fitting a subgradient regularized multivariate convex regression function to $n$ samples in $d$ dimensions -- a key problem in shape constrained nonparametric regression with applications in statistics, engineering and the applied sciences. The infinite-dimensional learning task can be expressed via a convex quadratic program (QP) with $O(nd)$ decision variables and $O(n^2)$ constraints. While instances with $n$ in the lower thousands can be addressed with current algorithms within reasonable runtimes, solving larger problems (e.g., $n\approx 10^4$ or $10^5$) is computationally challenging. To this end, we present an active set type algorithm on the dual QP. For computational scalability, we allow for approximate optimization of the reduced sub-problems; and propose randomized augmentation rules for expanding the active set. We derive novel computational guarantees for our algorithms. We demonstrate that our framework can approximately solve instances of the subgradient regularized convex regression problem with $n=10^5$ and $d=10$ within minutes; and shows strong computational performance compared to earlier approaches.
Evolution of Cooperative Hunting in Artificial Multi-layered Societies
Authors: Honglin Bao, Wolfgang Banzhaf
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00

The complexity of cooperative behavior is a crucial issue in multiagent-based social simulation. In this paper, an agent-based model is proposed to study the evolution of cooperative hunting behaviors in an artificial society. In this model, the standard hunting game of stag is modified into a new situation with social hierarchy and penalty. The agent society is divided into multiple layers with supervisors and subordinates. In each layer, the society is divided into multiple clusters. A supervisor controls all subordinates in a cluster locally. Subordinates interact with rivals through reinforcement learning, and report learning information to their corresponding supervisor. Supervisors process the reported information through repeated affiliation-based aggregation and by information exchange with other supervisors, then pass down the reprocessed information to subordinates as guidance. Subordinates, in turn, update learning information according to guidance, following the "win stay, lose shift" strategy. Experiments are carried out to test the evolution of cooperation in this closed-loop semi-supervised emergent system with different parameters. We also study the variations and phase transitions in this game setting.
PhyAAt: Physiology of Auditory Attention to Speech Dataset
Authors: Nikesh Bajaj, Jesús Requena Carrión, Francesco Bellotti
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Attention Score Prediction, Brain Computer Interface, LWR Classification, Noise Level Prediction, Semanticity prediction

Auditory attention to natural speech is a complex brain process. Its quantification from physiological signals can be valuable to improving and widening the range of applications of current brain-computer-interface systems, however it remains a challenging task. In this article, we present a dataset of physiological signals collected from an experiment on auditory attention to natural speech. In this experiment, auditory stimuli consisting of reproductions of English sentences in different auditory conditions were presented to 25 non-native participants, who were asked to transcribe the sentences. During the experiment, 14 channel electroencephalogram, galvanic skin response, and photoplethysmogram signals were collected from each participant. Based on the number of correctly transcribed words, an attention score was obtained for each auditory stimulus presented to subjects. A strong correlation ($p<<0.0001$) between the attention score and the auditory conditions was found. We also formulate four different predictive tasks involving the collected dataset and develop a feature extraction framework. The results for each predictive task are obtained using a Support Vector Machine with spectral features, and are better than chance level. The dataset has been made publicly available for further research, along with a python library - phyaat to facilitate the preprocessing, modeling, and reproduction of the results presented in this paper. The dataset and other resources are shared on webpage - https://phyaat.github.io.
Hierarchical Feature Embedding for Attribute Recognition
Authors: Jie Yang, Jiarou Fan, Yiru Wang, Yige Wang, Weihao Gan, Lin Liu, Wei Wu
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Attribute

Attribute recognition is a crucial but challenging task due to viewpoint changes, illumination variations and appearance diversities, etc. Most of previous work only consider the attribute-level feature embedding, which might perform poorly in complicated heterogeneous conditions. To address this problem, we propose a hierarchical feature embedding (HFE) framework, which learns a fine-grained feature embedding by combining attribute and ID information. In HFE, we maintain the inter-class and intra-class feature embedding simultaneously. Not only samples with the same attribute but also samples with the same ID are gathered more closely, which could restrict the feature embedding of visually hard samples with regard to attributes and improve the robustness to variant conditions. We establish this hierarchical structure by utilizing HFE loss consisted of attribute-level and ID-level constraints. We also introduce an absolute boundary regularization and a dynamic loss weight as supplementary components to help build up the feature embedding. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art results on two pedestrian attribute datasets and a facial attribute dataset.
Adversarial Attack on Hierarchical Graph Pooling Neural Networks
Authors: Haoteng Tang, Guixiang Ma, Yurong Chen, Lei Guo, Wei Wang, Bo Zeng, Liang Zhan
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Classification, General Classification, Graph Classification, Graph Representation Learning, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Recent years have witnessed the emergence and development of graph neural networks (GNNs), which have been shown as a powerful approach for graph representation learning in many tasks, such as node classification and graph classification. The research on the robustness of these models has also started to attract attentions in the machine learning field. However, most of the existing work in this area focus on the GNNs for node-level tasks, while little work has been done to study the robustness of the GNNs for the graph classification task. In this paper, we aim to explore the vulnerability of the Hierarchical Graph Pooling (HGP) Neural Networks, which are advanced GNNs that perform very well in the graph classification in terms of prediction accuracy. We propose an adversarial attack framework for this task. Specifically, we design a surrogate model that consists of convolutional and pooling operators to generate adversarial samples to fool the hierarchical GNN-based graph classification models. We set the preserved nodes by the pooling operator as our attack targets, and then we perturb the attack targets slightly to fool the pooling operator in hierarchical GNNs so that they will select the wrong nodes to preserve. We show the adversarial samples generated from multiple datasets by our surrogate model have enough transferability to attack current state-of-art graph classification models. Furthermore, we conduct the robust train on the target models and demonstrate that the retrained graph classification models are able to better defend against the attack from the adversarial samples. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on the adversarial attack against hierarchical GNN-based graph classification models.
Invariant 3D Shape Recognition using Predictive Modular Neural Networks
Authors: Vasileios Petridis
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Shape Recognition, Action Recognition, Dynamic Texture Recognition, Gesture Recognition, Incremental Learning, Relation

In this paper PREMONN (PREdictive MOdular Neural Networks) model/architecture is generalized to functions of two variables and to non-Euclidean spaces. It is presented in the context of 3D invariant shape recognition and texture recognition. PREMONN uses local relation, it is modular and exhibits incremental learning. The recognition process can start at any point on a shape or texture, so a reference point is not needed. Its local relation characteristic enables it to recognize shape and texture even in presence of occlusion. The analysis is mainly mathematical. However, we present some experimental results. The methods presented in this paper can be applied to many problems such as gesture recognition, action recognition, dynamic texture recognition etc.
Underwater object detection using Invert Multi-Class Adaboost with deep learning
Authors: Long Chen, Zhihua Liu, Lei Tong, Zheheng Jiang, ShengKe Wang, Junyu Dong, Huiyu Zhou
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection

In recent years, deep learning based methods have achieved promising performance in standard object detection. However, these methods lack sufficient capabilities to handle underwater object detection due to these challenges: (1) Objects in real applications are usually small and their images are blurry, and (2) images in the underwater datasets and real applications accompany heterogeneous noise. To address these two problems, we first propose a novel neural network architecture, namely Sample-WeIghted hyPEr Network (SWIPENet), for small object detection. SWIPENet consists of high resolution and semantic rich Hyper Feature Maps which can significantly improve small object detection accuracy. In addition, we propose a novel sample-weighted loss function which can model sample weights for SWIPENet, which uses a novel sample re-weighting algorithm, namely Invert Multi-Class Adaboost (IMA), to reduce the influence of noise on the proposed SWIPENet. Experiments on two underwater robot picking contest datasets URPC2017 and URPC2018 show that the proposed SWIPENet+IMA framework achieves better performance in detection accuracy against several state-of-the-art object detection approaches.
Self-supervised Robust Object Detectors from Partially Labelled Datasets
Authors: Mahdieh Abbasi, Denis Laurendeau, Christian Gagne
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In the object detection task, merging various datasets from similar contexts but with different sets of Objects of Interest (OoI) is an inexpensive way (in terms of labor cost) for crafting a large-scale dataset covering a wide range of objects. Moreover, merging datasets allows us to train one integrated object detector, instead of training several ones, which in turn resulting in the reduction of computational and time costs. However, merging the datasets from similar contexts causes samples with partial labeling as each constituent dataset is originally annotated for its own set of OoI and ignores to annotate those objects that are become interested after merging the datasets. With the goal of training \emph{one integrated robust object detector with high generalization performance}, we propose a training framework to overcome missing-label challenge of the merged datasets. More specifically, we propose a computationally efficient self-supervised framework to create on-the-fly pseudo-labels for the unlabeled positive instances in the merged dataset in order to train the object detector jointly on both ground truth and pseudo labels. We evaluate our proposed framework for training Yolo on a simulated merged dataset with missing rate $\approx\!48\%$ using VOC2012 and VOC2007. We empirically show that generalization performance of Yolo trained on both ground truth and the pseudo-labels created by our method is on average $4\%$ higher than the ones trained only with the ground truth labels of the merged dataset.
DartMinHash: Fast Sketching for Weighted Sets
Authors: Tobias Christiani
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Weighted minwise hashing is a standard dimensionality reduction technique with applications to similarity search and large-scale kernel machines. We introduce a simple algorithm that takes a weighted set $x \in \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}^{d}$ and computes $k$ independent minhashes in expected time $O(k \log k + \Vert x \Vert_{0}\log( \Vert x \Vert_1 + 1/\Vert x \Vert_1))$, improving upon the state-of-the-art BagMinHash algorithm (KDD '18) and representing the fastest weighted minhash algorithm for sparse data. Our experiments show running times that scale better with $k$ and $\Vert x \Vert_0$ compared to ICWS (ICDM '10) and BagMinhash, obtaining $10$x speedups in common use cases. Our approach also gives rise to a technique for computing fully independent locality-sensitive hash values for $(L, K)$-parameterized approximate near neighbor search under weighted Jaccard similarity in optimal expected time $O(LK + \Vert x \Vert_0)$, improving on prior work even in the case of unweighted sets.
ProAlignNet : Unsupervised Learning for Progressively Aligning Noisy Contours
Authors: VSR Veeravasarapu, Abhishek Goel, Deepak Mittal, Maneesh Singh
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00

Contour shape alignment is a fundamental but challenging problem in computer vision, especially when the observations are partial, noisy, and largely misaligned. Recent ConvNet-based architectures that were proposed to align image structures tend to fail with contour representation of shapes, mostly due to the use of proximity-insensitive pixel-wise similarity measures as loss functions in their training processes. This work presents a novel ConvNet, "ProAlignNet" that accounts for large scale misalignments and complex transformations between the contour shapes. It infers the warp parameters in a multi-scale fashion with progressively increasing complex transformations over increasing scales. It learns --without supervision-- to align contours, agnostic to noise and missing parts, by training with a novel loss function which is derived an upperbound of a proximity-sensitive and local shape-dependent similarity metric that uses classical Morphological Chamfer Distance Transform. We evaluate the reliability of these proposals on a simulated MNIST noisy contours dataset via some basic sanity check experiments. Next, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models in two real-world applications of (i) aligning geo-parcel data to aerial image maps and (ii) refining coarsely annotated segmentation labels. In both applications, the proposed models consistently perform superior to state-of-the-art methods.
Learning Joint Nonlinear Effects from Single-variable Interventions in the Presence of Hidden Confounders
Authors: Sorawit Saengkyongam, Ricardo Silva
Date: 2020-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

We propose an approach to estimate the effect of multiple simultaneous interventions in the presence of hidden confounders. To overcome the problem of hidden confounding, we consider the setting where we have access to not only the observational data but also sets of single-variable interventions in which each of the treatment variables is intervened on separately. We prove identifiability under the assumption that the data is generated from a nonlinear continuous structural causal model with additive Gaussian noise. In addition, we propose a simple parameter estimation method by pooling all the data from different regimes and jointly maximizing the combined likelihood. We also conduct comprehensive experiments to verify the identifiability result as well as to compare the performance of our approach against a baseline on both synthetic and real-world data.