pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Weakly-Labeled Rand Index
Authors: Dylan Stewart, Anna Hampton, Alina Zare, Jeff Dale, James Keller
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) surveys produce imagery with large regions of transition between seabed types. Due to these regions, it is difficult to label and segment the imagery and, furthermore, challenging to score the image segmentations appropriately. While there are many approaches to quantify performance in standard crisp segmentation schemes, drawing hard boundaries in remote sensing imagery where gradients and regions of uncertainty exist is inappropriate. These cases warrant weak labels and an associated appropriate scoring approach. In this paper, a labeling approach and associated modified version of the Rand index for weakly-labeled data is introduced to address these issues. Results are evaluated with the new index and compared to traditional segmentation evaluation methods. Experimental results on a SAS data set containing must-link and cannot-link labels show that our Weakly-Labeled Rand index scores segmentations appropriately in reference to qualitative performance and is more suitable than traditional quantitative metrics for scoring weakly-labeled data.
Domain Adaptive Egocentric Person Re-identification
Authors: Ankit Choudhary, Deepak Mishra, Arnab Karmakar
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification, Style Transfer

Person re-identification (re-ID) in first-person (egocentric) vision is a fairly new and unexplored problem. With the increase of wearable video recording devices, egocentric data becomes readily available, and person re-identification has the potential to benefit greatly from this. However, there is a significant lack of large scale structured egocentric datasets for person re-identification, due to the poor video quality and lack of individuals in most of the recorded content. Although a lot of research has been done in person re-identification based on fixed surveillance cameras, these do not directly benefit egocentric re-ID. Machine learning models trained on the publicly available large scale re-ID datasets cannot be applied to egocentric re-ID due to the dataset bias problem. The proposed algorithm makes use of neural style transfer (NST) that incorporates a variant of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to utilize the benefits of both fixed camera vision and first-person vision. NST generates images having features from both egocentric datasets and fixed camera datasets, that are fed through a VGG-16 network trained on a fixed-camera dataset for feature extraction. These extracted features are then used to re-identify individuals. The fixed camera dataset Market-1501 and the first-person dataset EGO Re-ID are applied for this work and the results are on par with the present re-identification models in the egocentric domain.
From Hand-Perspective Visual Information to Grasp Type Probabilities: Deep Learning via Ranking Labels
Authors: Mo Han, Sezen Ya{ğ}mur Günay, İlkay Yıldız, Paolo Bonato, Cagdas D. Onal, Taşkın Padır, Gunar Schirner, Deniz Erdo{ğ}muş
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00

Limb deficiency severely affects the daily lives of amputees and drives efforts to provide functional robotic prosthetic hands to compensate this deprivation. Convolutional neural network-based computer vision control of the prosthetic hand has received increased attention as a method to replace or complement physiological signals due to its reliability by training visual information to predict the hand gesture. Mounting a camera into the palm of a prosthetic hand is proved to be a promising approach to collect visual data. However, the grasp type labelled from the eye and hand perspective may differ as object shapes are not always symmetric. Thus, to represent this difference in a realistic way, we employed a dataset containing synchronous images from eye- and hand- view, where the hand-perspective images are used for training while the eye-view images are only for manual labelling. Electromyogram (EMG) activity and movement kinematics data from the upper arm are also collected for multi-modal information fusion in future work. Moreover, in order to include human-in-the-loop control and combine the computer vision with physiological signal inputs, instead of making absolute positive or negative predictions, we build a novel probabilistic classifier according to the Plackett-Luce model. To predict the probability distribution over grasps, we exploit the statistical model over label rankings to solve the permutation domain problems via a maximum likelihood estimation, utilizing the manually ranked lists of grasps as a new form of label. We indicate that the proposed model is applicable to the most popular and productive convolutional neural network frameworks.
Risk Aware Optimization of Water Sensor Placement
Authors: Antonio Candelieri, Andrea Ponti, Francesco Archetti
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00

Optimal sensor placement (SP) usually minimizes an impact measure, such as the amount of contaminated water or the number of inhabitants affected before detection. The common choice is to minimize the minimum detection time (MDT) averaged over a set of contamination events, with contaminant injected at a different location. Given a SP, propagation is simulated through a hydraulic software model of the network to obtain spatio-temporal concentrations and the average MDT. Searching for an optimal SP is NP-hard: even for mid-size networks, efficient search methods are required, among which evolutionary approaches are often used. A bi-objective formalization is proposed: minimizing the average MDT and its standard deviation, that is the risk to detect some contamination event too late than the average MDT. We propose a data structure (sort of spatio-temporal heatmap) collecting simulation outcomes for every SP and particularly suitable for evolutionary optimization. Indeed, the proposed data structure enabled a convergence analysis of a population-based algorithm, leading to the identification of indicators for detecting problem-specific converge issues which could be generalized to other similar problems. We used Pymoo, a recent Python framework flexible enough to incorporate our problem specific termination criterion. Results on a benchmark and a real-world network are presented.
Injecting Knowledge in Data-driven Vehicle Trajectory Predictors
Authors: Mohammadhossein Bahari, Ismail Nejjar, Alexandre Alahi
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control, Trajectory Prediction

Vehicle trajectory prediction tasks have been commonly tackled from two distinct perspectives: either with knowledge-driven methods or more recently with data-driven ones. On the one hand, we can explicitly implement domain-knowledge or physical priors such as anticipating that vehicles will follow the middle of the roads. While this perspective leads to feasible outputs, it has limited performance due to the difficulty to hand-craft complex interactions in urban environments. On the other hand, recent works use data-driven approaches which can learn complex interactions from the data leading to superior performance. However, generalization, \textit{i.e.}, having accurate predictions on unseen data, is an issue leading to unrealistic outputs. In this paper, we propose to learn a "Realistic Residual Block" (RRB), which effectively connects these two perspectives. Our RRB takes any off-the-shelf knowledge-driven model and finds the required residuals to add to the knowledge-aware trajectory. Our proposed method outputs realistic predictions by confining the residual range and taking into account its uncertainty. We also constrain our output with Model Predictive Control (MPC) to satisfy kinematic constraints. Using a publicly available dataset, we show that our method outperforms previous works in terms of accuracy and generalization to new scenes. We will release our code and data split here: https://github.com/vita-epfl/RRB.
Quantifying Ignorance in Individual-Level Causal-Effect Estimates under Hidden Confounding
Authors: Andrew Jesson, Sören Mindermann, Yarin Gal, Uri Shalit
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00

We study the problem of learning conditional average treatment effects (CATE) from high-dimensional, observational data with unobserved confounders. Unobserved confounders introduce ignorance -- a level of unidentifiability -- about an individual's response to treatment by inducing bias in CATE estimates. We present a new parametric interval estimator suited for high-dimensional data, that estimates a range of possible CATE values when given a predefined bound on the level of hidden confounding. Further, previous interval estimators do not account for ignorance about the CATE associated with samples that may be underrepresented in the original study, or samples that violate the overlap assumption. Our interval estimator also incorporates model uncertainty so that practitioners can be made aware of out-of-distribution data. We prove that our estimator converges to tight bounds on CATE when there may be unobserved confounding, and assess it using semi-synthetic, high-dimensional datasets.
Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Procedural Content Generation
Authors: Linus Gisslén, Andy Eakins, Camilo Gordillo, Joakim Bergdahl, Konrad Tollmar
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present a new approach ARLPCG: Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Procedural Content Generation, which procedurally generates and tests previously unseen environments with an auxiliary input as a control variable. Training RL agents over novel environments is a notoriously difficult task. One popular approach is to procedurally generate different environments to increase the generalizability of the trained agents. ARLPCG instead deploys an adversarial model with one PCG RL agent (called Generator) and one solving RL agent (called Solver). The Generator receives a reward signal based on the Solver's performance, which encourages the environment design to be challenging but not impossible. To further drive diversity and control of the environment generation, we propose using auxiliary inputs for the Generator. The benefit is two-fold: Firstly, the Solver achieves better generalization through the Generator's generated challenges. Secondly, the trained Generator can be used as a creator of novel environments that, together with the Solver, can be shown to be solvable. We create two types of 3D environments to validate our model, representing two popular game genres: a third-person platformer and a racing game. In these cases, we shows that ARLPCG has a significantly better solve ratio, and that the auxiliary inputs renders the levels creation controllable to a certain degree. For a video compilation of the results please visit https://youtu.be/z7q2PtVsT0I.
Relationship-based Neural Baby Talk
Authors: Fan Fu, TingTing Xie, Ioannis Patras, Sepehr Jalali
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Caption Generation, Graph Attention

Understanding interactions between objects in an image is an important element for generating captions. In this paper, we propose a relationship-based neural baby talk (R-NBT) model to comprehensively investigate several types of pairwise object interactions by encoding each image via three different relationship-based graph attention networks (GATs). We study three main relationships: \textit{spatial relationships} to explore geometric interactions, \textit{semantic relationships} to extract semantic interactions, and \textit{implicit relationships} to capture hidden information that could not be modelled explicitly as above. We construct three relationship graphs with the objects in an image as nodes, and the mutual relationships of pairwise objects as edges. By exploring features of neighbouring regions individually via GATs, we integrate different types of relationships into visual features of each node. Experiments on COCO dataset show that our proposed R-NBT model outperforms state-of-the-art models trained on COCO dataset in three image caption generation tasks.
HANDS: A Multimodal Dataset for Modeling Towards Human Grasp Intent Inference in Prosthetic Hands
Authors: Mo Han, Sezen Ya{ğ}mur Günay, Gunar Schirner, Taşkın Padır, Deniz Erdo{ğ}muş
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning

Upper limb and hand functionality is critical to many activities of daily living and the amputation of one can lead to significant functionality loss for individuals. From this perspective, advanced prosthetic hands of the future are anticipated to benefit from improved shared control between a robotic hand and its human user, but more importantly from the improved capability to infer human intent from multimodal sensor data to provide the robotic hand perception abilities regarding the operational context. Such multimodal sensor data may include various environment sensors including vision, as well as human physiology and behavior sensors including electromyography and inertial measurement units. A fusion methodology for environmental state and human intent estimation can combine these sources of evidence in order to help prosthetic hand motion planning and control. In this paper, we present a dataset of this type that was gathered with the anticipation of cameras being built into prosthetic hands, and computer vision methods will need to assess this hand-view visual evidence in order to estimate human intent. Specifically, paired images from human eye-view and hand-view of various objects placed at different orientations have been captured at the initial state of grasping trials, followed by paired video, EMG and IMU from the arm of the human during a grasp, lift, put-down, and retract style trial structure. For each trial, based on eye-view images of the scene showing the hand and object on a table, multiple humans were asked to sort in decreasing order of preference, five grasp types appropriate for the object in its given configuration relative to the hand. The potential utility of paired eye-view and hand-view images was illustrated by training a convolutional neural network to process hand-view images in order to predict eye-view labels assigned by humans.
Machine-learning based methodologies for 3d x-ray measurement, characterization and optimization for buried structures in advanced ic packages
Authors: Ramanpreet S Pahwa, Soon Wee Ho, Ren Qin, Richard Chang, Oo Zaw Min, Wang Jie, Vempati Srinivasa Rao, Tin Lay Nwe, Yanjing Yang, Jens Timo Neumann, Ramani Pichumani, Thomas Gregorich
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, BIG-bench Machine Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

For over 40 years lithographic silicon scaling has driven circuit integration and performance improvement in the semiconductor industry. As silicon scaling slows down, the industry is increasingly dependent on IC package technologies to contribute to further circuit integration and performance improvements. This is a paradigm shift and requires the IC package industry to reduce the size and increase the density of internal interconnects on a scale which has never been done before. Traditional package characterization and process optimization relies on destructive techniques such as physical cross-sections and delayering to extract data from internal package features. These destructive techniques are not practical with today's advanced packages. In this paper we will demonstrate how data acquired non-destructively with a 3D X-ray microscope can be enhanced and optimized using machine learning, and can then be used to measure, characterize and optimize the design and production of buried interconnects in advanced IC packages. Test vehicles replicating 2.5D and HBM construction were designed and fabricated, and digital data was extracted from these test vehicles using 3D X-ray and machine learning techniques. The extracted digital data was used to characterize and optimize the design and production of the interconnects and demonstrates a superior alternative to destructive physical analysis. We report an mAP of 0.96 for 3D object detection, a dice score of 0.92 for 3D segmentation, and an average of 2.1um error for 3D metrology on the test dataset. This paper is the first part of a multi-part report.
Semantic Models for the First-stage Retrieval: A Comprehensive Review
Authors: Jiafeng Guo, Yinqiong Cai, Yixing Fan, Fei Sun, Ruqing Zhang, Xueqi Cheng
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval

Multi-stage ranking pipelines have been a practical solution in modern search systems, where the first-stage retrieval is to return a subset of candidate documents, and latter stages attempt to re-rank those candidates. Unlike re-ranking stages going through quick technique shifts during past decades, the first-stage retrieval has long been dominated by classical term-based models. Unfortunately, these models suffer from the vocabulary mismatch problem, which may block re-ranking stages from relevant documents at the very beginning. Therefore, it has been a long-term desire to build semantic models for the first-stage retrieval that can achieve high recall efficiently. Recently, we have witnessed an explosive growth of research interests on the first-stage semantic retrieval models. We believe it is the right time to survey current status, learn from existing methods, and gain some insights for future development. In this paper, we describe the current landscape of the first-stage retrieval models under a unified framework to clarify the connection between classical term-based retrieval methods, early semantic retrieval methods and neural semantic retrieval methods. Moreover, we identify some open challenges and envision some future directions, with the hope of inspiring more researches on these important yet less investigated topics.
Deeply Unsupervised Patch Re-Identification for Pre-training Object Detectors
Authors: Jian Ding, Enze Xie, Hang Xu, Chenhan Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Ping Luo, Gui-Song Xia
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning, Unsupervised Pre-training

Unsupervised pre-training aims at learning transferable features that are beneficial for downstream tasks. However, most state-of-the-art unsupervised methods concentrate on learning global representations for image-level classification tasks instead of discriminative local region representations, which limits their transferability to region-level downstream tasks, such as object detection. To improve the transferability of pre-trained features to object detection, we present Deeply Unsupervised Patch Re-ID (DUPR), a simple yet effective method for unsupervised visual representation learning. The patch Re-ID task treats individual patch as a pseudo-identity and contrastively learns its correspondence in two views, enabling us to obtain discriminative local features for object detection. Then the proposed patch Re-ID is performed in a deeply unsupervised manner, appealing to object detection, which usually requires multilevel feature maps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DUPR outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised pre-trainings and even the ImageNet supervised pre-training on various downstream tasks related to object detection.
Reliability-Aware Quantization for Anti-Aging NPUs
Authors: Sami Salamin, Georgios Zervakis, Ourania Spantidi, Iraklis Anagnostopoulos, Jörg Henkel, Hussam Amrouch
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Transistor aging is one of the major concerns that challenges designers in advanced technologies. It profoundly degrades the reliability of circuits during its lifetime as it slows down transistors resulting in errors due to timing violations unless large guardbands are included, which leads to considerable performance losses. When it comes to Neural Processing Units (NPUs), where increasing the inference speed is the primary goal, such performance losses cannot be tolerated. In this work, we are the first to propose a reliability-aware quantization to eliminate aging effects in NPUs while completely removing guardbands. Our technique delivers a graceful inference accuracy degradation over time while compensating for the aging-induced delay increase of the NPU. Our evaluation, over ten state-of-the-art neural network architectures trained on the ImageNet dataset, demonstrates that for an entire lifetime of 10 years, the average accuracy loss is merely 3%. In the meantime, our technique achieves 23% higher performance due to the elimination of the aging guardband.
PyRCN: A Toolbox for Exploration and Application of Reservoir Computing Networks
Authors: Peter Steiner, Azarakhsh Jalalvand, Simon Stone, Peter Birkholz
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Prediction

Reservoir Computing Networks (RCNs) belong to a group of machine learning techniques that project the input space non-linearly into a high-dimensional feature space, where the underlying task can be solved linearly. Popular variants of RCNs are capable of solving complex tasks equivalently to widely used deep neural networks, but with a substantially simpler training paradigm based on linear regression. In this paper, we show how to uniformly describe RCNs with small and clearly defined building blocks, and we introduce the Python toolbox PyRCN (Python Reservoir Computing Networks) for optimizing, training and analyzing RCNs on arbitrarily large datasets. The tool is based on widely-used scientific packages and complies with the scikit-learn interface specification. It provides a platform for educational and exploratory analyses of RCNs, as well as a framework to apply RCNs on complex tasks including sequence processing. With a small number of building blocks, the framework allows the implementation of numerous different RCN architectures. We provide code examples on how to set up RCNs for time series prediction and for sequence classification tasks. PyRCN is around ten times faster than reference toolboxes on a benchmark task while requiring substantially less boilerplate code.
Detecting quantum entanglement with unsupervised learning
Authors: YiWei Chen, Yu Pan, Guofeng Zhang, Shuming Cheng
Date: 2021-03-08 00:00:00

Quantum properties, such as entanglement and coherence, are indispensable resources in various quantum information processing tasks. However, there still lacks an efficient and scalable way to detecting these useful features, especially for high-dimensional and multipartite quantum systems. In this work, we exploit the convexity of samples without the desired quantum features and design an unsupervised machine learning method to detect the presence of such features as anomalies. Particularly, in the context of entanglement detection, we propose a complex-valued neural network composed of pseudo-siamese network and generative adversarial net, and then train it with only separable states to construct non-linear witnesses for entanglement. It is shown via numerical examples, ranging from two-qubit to ten-qubit systems, that our network is able to achieve high detection accuracy which is above 97.5% on average.Moreover, it is capable of revealing rich structures of entanglement, such as partial entanglement among subsystems. Our results are readily applicable to the detection of other quantum resources such as Bell nonlocality and steerability, and thus our work could provide a powerful tool to extract quantum features hidden in multipartite quantum data.