pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Social Relation Inference with Concise Interaction Graph and Discriminative Scene Representation
Authors: Xiaotian Yu, Hanling Yi, Yi Yu, Ling Xing, Shiliang Zhang, Xiaoyu Wang
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, domain classification, Relation, Scene Classification

There has been a recent surge of research interest in attacking the problem of social relation inference based on images. Existing works classify social relations mainly by creating complicated graphs of human interactions, or learning the foreground and/or background information of persons and objects, but ignore holistic scene context. The holistic scene refers to the functionality of a place in images, such as dinning room, playground and office. In this paper, by mimicking human understanding on images, we propose an approach of \textbf{PR}actical \textbf{I}nference in \textbf{S}ocial r\textbf{E}lation (PRISE), which concisely learns interactive features of persons and discriminative features of holistic scenes. Technically, we develop a simple and fast relational graph convolutional network to capture interactive features of all persons in one image. To learn the holistic scene feature, we elaborately design a contrastive learning task based on image scene classification. To further boost the performance in social relation inference, we collect and distribute a new large-scale dataset, which consists of about 240 thousand unlabeled images. The extensive experimental results show that our novel learning framework significantly beats the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., PRISE achieves 6.8$\%$ improvement for domain classification in PIPA dataset.
Creating Powerful and Interpretable Models with Regression Networks
Authors: Lachlan O'Neill, Simon Angus, Satya Borgohain, Nader Chmait, David L. Dowe
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

As the discipline has evolved, research in machine learning has been focused more and more on creating more powerful neural networks, without regard for the interpretability of these networks. Such "black-box models" yield state-of-the-art results, but we cannot understand why they make a particular decision or prediction. Sometimes this is acceptable, but often it is not. We propose a novel architecture, Regression Networks, which combines the power of neural networks with the understandability of regression analysis. While some methods for combining these exist in the literature, our architecture generalizes these approaches by taking interactions into account, offering the power of a dense neural network without forsaking interpretability. We demonstrate that the models exceed the state-of-the-art performance of interpretable models on several benchmark datasets, matching the power of a dense neural network. Finally, we discuss how these techniques can be generalized to other neural architectures, such as convolutional and recurrent neural networks.
Towards Understanding the Impact of Real-Time AI-Powered Educational Dashboards (RAED) on Providing Guidance to Instructors
Authors: Ajay Kulkarni
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00

The objectives of this ongoing research are to build Real-Time AI-Powered Educational Dashboard (RAED) as a decision support tool for instructors, and to measure its impact on them while making decisions. Current developments in AI can be combined with the educational dashboards to make them AI-Powered. Thus, AI can help in providing recommendations based on the students' performances. AI-Powered educational dashboards can also assist instructors in tracking real-time student activities. In this ongoing research, our aim is to develop the AI component as well as improve the existing design component of the RAED. Further, we will conduct experiments to study its impact on instructors, and understand how much they trust RAED to guide them while making decisions. This paper elaborates on the ongoing research and future direction.
Difficulty-Aware Machine Translation Evaluation
Authors: Runzhe Zhan, Xuebo Liu, Derek F. Wong, Lidia S. Chao
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

The high-quality translation results produced by machine translation (MT) systems still pose a huge challenge for automatic evaluation. Current MT evaluation pays the same attention to each sentence component, while the questions of real-world examinations (e.g., university examinations) have different difficulties and weightings. In this paper, we propose a novel difficulty-aware MT evaluation metric, expanding the evaluation dimension by taking translation difficulty into consideration. A translation that fails to be predicted by most MT systems will be treated as a difficult one and assigned a large weight in the final score function, and conversely. Experimental results on the WMT19 English-German Metrics shared tasks show that our proposed method outperforms commonly used MT metrics in terms of human correlation. In particular, our proposed method performs well even when all the MT systems are very competitive, which is when most existing metrics fail to distinguish between them. The source code is freely available at https://github.com/NLP2CT/Difficulty-Aware-MT-Evaluation.
Random vector functional link neural network based ensemble deep learning for short-term load forecasting
Authors: Ruobin Gao, Liang Du, P. N. Suganthan, Qin Zhou, Kum Fai Yuen
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Load Forecasting, Representation Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Electricity load forecasting is crucial for the power systems' planning and maintenance. However, its un-stationary and non-linear characteristics impose significant difficulties in anticipating future demand. This paper proposes a novel ensemble deep Random Vector Functional Link (edRVFL) network for electricity load forecasting. The weights of hidden layers are randomly initialized and kept fixed during the training process. The hidden layers are stacked to enforce deep representation learning. Then, the model generates the forecasts by ensembling the outputs of each layer. Moreover, we also propose to augment the random enhancement features by empirical wavelet transformation (EWT). The raw load data is decomposed by EWT in a walk-forward fashion, not introducing future data leakage problems in the decomposition process. Finally, all the sub-series generated by the EWT, including raw data, are fed into the edRVFL for forecasting purposes. The proposed model is evaluated on twenty publicly available time series from the Australian Energy Market Operator of the year 2020. The simulation results demonstrate the proposed model's superior performance over eleven forecasting methods in three error metrics and statistical tests on electricity load forecasting tasks.
Modelling and Reasoning Techniques for Context Aware Computing in Intelligent Transportation System
Authors: Swarnamugi. M, Chinnaiyan. R
Date: 2021-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, object-detection, Object Detection

The emergence of Internet of Things technology and recent advancement in sensor networks enabled transportation systems to a new dimension called Intelligent Transportation System. Due to increased usage of vehicles and communication among entities in road traffic scenarios, the amount of raw data generation in Intelligent Transportation System is huge. This raw data are to be processed to infer contextual information and provide new services related to different modes of road transport such as traffic signal management, accident prediction, object detection etc. To understand the importance of context, this article aims to study context awareness in the Intelligent Transportation System. We present a review on prominent applications developed in the literature concerning context awareness in the intelligent transportation system. The objective of this research paper is to highlight context and its features in ITS and to address the applicability of modelling techniques and reasoning approaches in Intelligent Transportation System. Also to shed light on impact of Internet of Things and machine learning in Intelligent Transportation System development.
Towards robust vision by multi-task learning on monkey visual cortex
Authors: Shahd Safarani, Arne Nix, Konstantin Willeke, Santiago A. Cadena, Kelli Restivo, George Denfield, Andreas S. Tolias, Fabian H. Sinz
Date: 2021-07-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-Task Learning, Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Deep neural networks set the state-of-the-art across many tasks in computer vision, but their generalization ability to image distortions is surprisingly fragile. In contrast, the mammalian visual system is robust to a wide range of perturbations. Recent work suggests that this generalization ability can be explained by useful inductive biases encoded in the representations of visual stimuli throughout the visual cortex. Here, we successfully leveraged these inductive biases with a multi-task learning approach: we jointly trained a deep network to perform image classification and to predict neural activity in macaque primary visual cortex (V1). We measured the out-of-distribution generalization abilities of our network by testing its robustness to image distortions. We found that co-training on monkey V1 data leads to increased robustness despite the absence of those distortions during training. Additionally, we showed that our network's robustness is very close to that of an Oracle network where parts of the architecture are directly trained on noisy images. Our results also demonstrated that the network's representations become more brain-like as their robustness improves. Using a novel constrained reconstruction analysis, we investigated what makes our brain-regularized network more robust. We found that our co-trained network is more sensitive to content than noise when compared to a Baseline network that we trained for image classification alone. Using DeepGaze-predicted saliency maps for ImageNet images, we found that our monkey co-trained network tends to be more sensitive to salient regions in a scene, reminiscent of existing theories on the role of V1 in the detection of object borders and bottom-up saliency. Overall, our work expands the promising research avenue of transferring inductive biases from the brain, and provides a novel analysis of the effects of our transfer.
Survey of Recent Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Algorithms Utilizing Centralized Training
Authors: Piyush K. Sharma, Rolando Fernandez, Erin Zaroukian, Michael Dorothy, Anjon Basak, Derrik E. Asher
Date: 2021-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Survey

Much work has been dedicated to the exploration of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) paradigms implementing a centralized learning with decentralized execution (CLDE) approach to achieve human-like collaboration in cooperative tasks. Here, we discuss variations of centralized training and describe a recent survey of algorithmic approaches. The goal is to explore how different implementations of information sharing mechanism in centralized learning may give rise to distinct group coordinated behaviors in multi-agent systems performing cooperative tasks.
Batch Active Learning at Scale
Authors: Gui Citovsky, Giulia Desalvo, Claudio Gentile, Lazaros Karydas, Anand Rajagopalan, Afshin Rostamizadeh, Sanjiv Kumar
Date: 2021-07-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Active Learning, Diversity

The ability to train complex and highly effective models often requires an abundance of training data, which can easily become a bottleneck in cost, time, and computational resources. Batch active learning, which adaptively issues batched queries to a labeling oracle, is a common approach for addressing this problem. The practical benefits of batch sampling come with the downside of less adaptivity and the risk of sampling redundant examples within a batch -- a risk that grows with the batch size. In this work, we analyze an efficient active learning algorithm, which focuses on the large batch setting. In particular, we show that our sampling method, which combines notions of uncertainty and diversity, easily scales to batch sizes (100K-1M) several orders of magnitude larger than used in previous studies and provides significant improvements in model training efficiency compared to recent baselines. Finally, we provide an initial theoretical analysis, proving label complexity guarantees for a related sampling method, which we show is approximately equivalent to our sampling method in specific settings.
Incorporation of Deep Neural Network & Reinforcement Learning with Domain Knowledge
Authors: Aryan Karn, Ashutosh Acharya
Date: 2021-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present a study of the manners by which Domain information has been incorporated when building models with Neural Networks. Integrating space data is uniquely important to the development of Knowledge understanding model, as well as other fields that aid in understanding information by utilizing the human-machine interface and Reinforcement Learning. On numerous such occasions, machine-based model development may profit essentially from the human information on the world encoded in an adequately exact structure. This paper inspects expansive ways to affect encode such information as sensible and mathematical limitations and portrays methods and results that came to a couple of subcategories under all of those methodologies.
DCT2net: an interpretable shallow CNN for image denoising
Authors: Sébastien Herbreteau, Charles Kervrann
Date: 2021-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

This work tackles the issue of noise removal from images, focusing on the well-known DCT image denoising algorithm. The latter, stemming from signal processing, has been well studied over the years. Though very simple, it is still used in crucial parts of state-of-the-art "traditional" denoising algorithms such as BM3D. Since a few years however, deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) have outperformed their traditional counterparts, making signal processing methods less attractive. In this paper, we demonstrate that a DCT denoiser can be seen as a shallow CNN and thereby its original linear transform can be tuned through gradient descent in a supervised manner, improving considerably its performance. This gives birth to a fully interpretable CNN called DCT2net. To deal with remaining artifacts induced by DCT2net, an original hybrid solution between DCT and DCT2net is proposed combining the best that these two methods can offer; DCT2net is selected to process non-stationary image patches while DCT is optimal for piecewise smooth patches. Experiments on artificially noisy images demonstrate that two-layer DCT2net provides comparable results to BM3D and is as fast as DnCNN algorithm composed of more than a dozen of layers.
Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs
Authors: Andrew Jaegle, Sebastian Borgeaud, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Carl Doersch, Catalin Ionescu, David Ding, Skanda Koppula, Daniel Zoran, Andrew Brock, Evan Shelhamer, Olivier Hénaff, Matthew M. Botvinick, Andrew Zisserman, Oriol Vinyals, Joāo Carreira
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Starcraft, Starcraft II

A central goal of machine learning is the development of systems that can solve many problems in as many data domains as possible. Current architectures, however, cannot be applied beyond a small set of stereotyped settings, as they bake in domain & task assumptions or scale poorly to large inputs or outputs. In this work, we propose Perceiver IO, a general-purpose architecture that handles data from arbitrary settings while scaling linearly with the size of inputs and outputs. Our model augments the Perceiver with a flexible querying mechanism that enables outputs of various sizes and semantics, doing away with the need for task-specific architecture engineering. The same architecture achieves strong results on tasks spanning natural language and visual understanding, multi-task and multi-modal reasoning, and StarCraft II. As highlights, Perceiver IO outperforms a Transformer-based BERT baseline on the GLUE language benchmark despite removing input tokenization and achieves state-of-the-art performance on Sintel optical flow estimation with no explicit mechanisms for multiscale correspondence.
Out-of-Core Surface Reconstruction via Global $TGV$ Minimization
Authors: Nikolai Poliarnyi
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, GPU, Surface Reconstruction

We present an out-of-core variational approach for surface reconstruction from a set of aligned depth maps. Input depth maps are supposed to be reconstructed from regular photos or/and can be a representation of terrestrial LIDAR point clouds. Our approach is based on surface reconstruction via total generalized variation minimization ($TGV$) because of its strong visibility-based noise-filtering properties and GPU-friendliness. Our main contribution is an out-of-core OpenCL-accelerated adaptation of this numerical algorithm which can handle arbitrarily large real-world scenes with scale diversity.
On the Efficacy of Small Self-Supervised Contrastive Models without Distillation Signals
Authors: Haizhou Shi, Youcai Zhang, Siliang Tang, Wenjie Zhu, Yaqian Li, Yandong Guo, Yueting Zhuang
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Contrastive Learning, Knowledge Distillation

It is a consensus that small models perform quite poorly under the paradigm of self-supervised contrastive learning. Existing methods usually adopt a large off-the-shelf model to transfer knowledge to the small one via distillation. Despite their effectiveness, distillation-based methods may not be suitable for some resource-restricted scenarios due to the huge computational expenses of deploying a large model. In this paper, we study the issue of training self-supervised small models without distillation signals. We first evaluate the representation spaces of the small models and make two non-negligible observations: (i) the small models can complete the pretext task without overfitting despite their limited capacity and (ii) they universally suffer the problem of over clustering. Then we verify multiple assumptions that are considered to alleviate the over-clustering phenomenon. Finally, we combine the validated techniques and improve the baseline performances of five small architectures with considerable margins, which indicates that training small self-supervised contrastive models is feasible even without distillation signals. The code is available at \textit{https://github.com/WOWNICE/ssl-small}.
Neural Relighting and Expression Transfer On Video Portraits
Authors: Youjia Wang, Taotao Zhou, Minzhang Li, Teng Xu, Minye Wu, Lan Xu, Jingyi Yu
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Neural Rendering

Photo-realistic video portrait reenactment benefits virtual production and numerous VR/AR experiences. The task remains challenging as the reenacted expression should match the source while the lighting should be adjustable to new environments. We present a neural relighting and expression transfer technique to transfer the facial expressions from a source performer to a portrait video of a target performer while enabling dynamic relighting. Our approach employs 4D reflectance field learning, model-based facial performance capture and target-aware neural rendering. Specifically, given a short sequence of the target performer's OLAT, we apply a rendering-to-video translation network to first synthesize the OLAT result of new sequences with unseen expressions. We then design a semantic-aware facial normalization scheme along with a multi-frame multi-task learning strategy to encode the content, segmentation, and motion flows for reliably inferring the reflectance field. This allows us to simultaneously control facial expression and apply virtual relighting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our technique can robustly handle challenging expressions and lighting environments and produce results at a cinematographic quality.
Sparse-to-dense Feature Matching: Intra and Inter domain Cross-modal Learning in Domain Adaptation for 3D Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Duo Peng, Yinjie Lei, Wen Li, Pingping Zhang, Yulan Guo
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Domain Adaptation, Semantic Segmentation

Domain adaptation is critical for success when confronting with the lack of annotations in a new domain. As the huge time consumption of labeling process on 3D point cloud, domain adaptation for 3D semantic segmentation is of great expectation. With the rise of multi-modal datasets, large amount of 2D images are accessible besides 3D point clouds. In light of this, we propose to further leverage 2D data for 3D domain adaptation by intra and inter domain cross modal learning. As for intra-domain cross modal learning, most existing works sample the dense 2D pixel-wise features into the same size with sparse 3D point-wise features, resulting in the abandon of numerous useful 2D features. To address this problem, we propose Dynamic sparse-to-dense Cross Modal Learning (DsCML) to increase the sufficiency of multi-modality information interaction for domain adaptation. For inter-domain cross modal learning, we further advance Cross Modal Adversarial Learning (CMAL) on 2D and 3D data which contains different semantic content aiming to promote high-level modal complementarity. We evaluate our model under various multi-modality domain adaptation settings including day-to-night, country-to-country and dataset-to-dataset, brings large improvements over both uni-modal and multi-modal domain adaptation methods on all settings.
When Deep Learners Change Their Mind: Learning Dynamics for Active Learning
Authors: Javad Zolfaghari Bengar, Bogdan Raducanu, Joost Van de Weijer
Date: 2021-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Informativeness

Active learning aims to select samples to be annotated that yield the largest performance improvement for the learning algorithm. Many methods approach this problem by measuring the informativeness of samples and do this based on the certainty of the network predictions for samples. However, it is well-known that neural networks are overly confident about their prediction and are therefore an untrustworthy source to assess sample informativeness. In this paper, we propose a new informativeness-based active learning method. Our measure is derived from the learning dynamics of a neural network. More precisely we track the label assignment of the unlabeled data pool during the training of the algorithm. We capture the learning dynamics with a metric called label-dispersion, which is low when the network consistently assigns the same label to the sample during the training of the network and high when the assigned label changes frequently. We show that label-dispersion is a promising predictor of the uncertainty of the network, and show on two benchmark datasets that an active learning algorithm based on label-dispersion obtains excellent results.