pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enabling Image Recognition on Constrained Devices Using Neural Network Pruning and a CycleGAN
Authors: August Lidfelt, Daniel Isaksson, Ludwig Hedlund, Simon Åberg, Markus Borg, Erik Larsson
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Pruning

Smart cameras are increasingly used in surveillance solutions in public spaces. Contemporary computer vision applications can be used to recognize events that require intervention by emergency services. Smart cameras can be mounted in locations where citizens feel particularly unsafe, e.g., pathways and underpasses with a history of incidents. One promising approach for smart cameras is edge AI, i.e., deploying AI technology on IoT devices. However, implementing resource-demanding technology such as image recognition using deep neural networks (DNN) on constrained devices is a substantial challenge. In this paper, we explore two approaches to reduce the need for compute in contemporary image recognition in an underpass. First, we showcase successful neural network pruning, i.e., we retain comparable classification accuracy with only 1.1\% of the neurons remaining from the state-of-the-art DNN architecture. Second, we demonstrate how a CycleGAN can be used to transform out-of-distribution images to the operational design domain. We posit that both pruning and CycleGANs are promising enablers for efficient edge AI in smart cameras.
Unsupervised Partial Point Set Registration via Joint Shape Completion and Registration
Authors: Xiang Li, Lingjing Wang, Yi Fang
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

We propose a self-supervised method for partial point set registration. While recent proposed learning-based methods have achieved impressive registration performance on the full shape observations, these methods mostly suffer from performance degradation when dealing with partial shapes. To bridge the performance gaps between partial point set registration with full point set registration, we proposed to incorporate a shape completion network to benefit the registration process. To achieve this, we design a latent code for each pair of shapes, which can be regarded as a geometric encoding of the target shape. By doing so, our model does need an explicit feature embedding network to learn the feature encodings. More importantly, both our shape completion network and the point set registration network take the shared latent codes as input, which are optimized along with the parameters of two decoder networks in the training process. Therefore, the point set registration process can thus benefit from the joint optimization process of latent codes, which are enforced to represent the information of full shape instead of partial ones. In the inference stage, we fix the network parameter and optimize the latent codes to get the optimal shape completion and registration results. Our proposed method is pure unsupervised and does not need any ground truth supervision. Experiments on the ModelNet40 dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our model for partial point set registration.
UPB at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Propaganda Detection with Domain-Specific Trained BERT
Authors: Andrei Paraschiv, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Mihai Dascalu
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2020
Tasks: Articles, Propaganda detection, Propaganda span identification

Manipulative and misleading news have become a commodity for some online news outlets and these news have gained a significant impact on the global mindset of people. Propaganda is a frequently employed manipulation method having as goal to influence readers by spreading ideas meant to distort or manipulate their opinions. This paper describes our participation in the SemEval-2020, Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles competition. Our approach considers specializing a pre-trained BERT model on propagandistic and hyperpartisan news articles, enabling it to create more adequate representations for the two subtasks, namely propaganda Span Identification (SI) and propaganda Technique Classification (TC). Our proposed system achieved a F1-score of 46.060% in subtask SI, ranking 5th in the leaderboard from 36 teams and a micro-averaged F1 score of 54.302% for subtask TC, ranking 19th from 32 teams.
Attribute-conditioned Layout GAN for Automatic Graphic Design
Authors: Jianan Li, Jimei Yang, Jianming Zhang, Chang Liu, Christina Wang, Tingfa Xu
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Layout Generation

Modeling layout is an important first step for graphic design. Recently, methods for generating graphic layouts have progressed, particularly with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, the problem of specifying the locations and sizes of design elements usually involves constraints with respect to element attributes, such as area, aspect ratio and reading-order. Automating attribute conditional graphic layouts remains a complex and unsolved problem. In this paper, we introduce Attribute-conditioned Layout GAN to incorporate the attributes of design elements for graphic layout generation by forcing both the generator and the discriminator to meet attribute conditions. Due to the complexity of graphic designs, we further propose an element dropout method to make the discriminator look at partial lists of elements and learn their local patterns. In addition, we introduce various loss designs following different design principles for layout optimization. We demonstrate that the proposed method can synthesize graphic layouts conditioned on different element attributes. It can also adjust well-designed layouts to new sizes while retaining elements' original reading-orders. The effectiveness of our method is validated through a user study.
Fair and accurate age prediction using distribution aware data curation and augmentation
Authors: Yushi Cao, David Berend, Palina Tolmach, Guy Amit, Moshe Levy, Yang Liu, Asaf Shabtai, Yuval Elovici
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Data Augmentation, Diversity, Face Recognition, Fairness, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Prediction

Deep learning-based facial recognition systems have experienced increased media attention due to exhibiting unfair behavior. Large enterprises, such as IBM, shut down their facial recognition and age prediction systems as a consequence. Age prediction is an especially difficult application with the issue of fairness remaining an open research problem (e.g., predicting age for different ethnicity equally accurate). One of the main causes of unfair behavior in age prediction methods lies in the distribution and diversity of the training data. In this work, we present two novel approaches for dataset curation and data augmentation in order to increase fairness through balanced feature curation and increase diversity through distribution aware augmentation. To achieve this, we introduce out-of-distribution detection to the facial recognition domain which is used to select the data most relevant to the deep neural network's (DNN) task when balancing the data among age, ethnicity, and gender. Our approach shows promising results. Our best-trained DNN model outperformed all academic and industrial baselines in terms of fairness by up to 4.92 times and also enhanced the DNN's ability to generalize outperforming Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure public cloud systems by 31.88% and 10.95%, respectively.
Results of multi-agent system and ontology to manage ideas and represent knowledge in a challenge of creativity
Authors: Pedro Barrios, Davy Monticolo, Sahbi Sidhom
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This article is about an intelligent system to support ideas management as a result of a multi-agent system used in a distributed system with heterogeneous information as ideas and knowledge, after the results about an ontology to describe the meaning of these ideas. The intelligent system assists participants of the creativity workshop to manage their ideas and consequently proposing an ontology dedicated to ideas. During the creative workshop many creative activities and collaborative creative methods are used by roles immersed in this creativity workshop event where they share knowledge. The collaboration of these roles is physically distant, their interactions might be synchrony or asynchrony, and the information of the ideas are heterogeneous, so we can say that the process is distributed. Those ideas are writing in natural language by participants which have a role and the ideas are heterogeneous since some of them are described by schema, text or scenario of use. This paper presents first, our MAS and second our Ontology design.
AFP-SRC: Identification of Antifreeze Proteins Using Sparse Representation Classifier
Authors: Shujaat Khan, Muhammad Usman, Abdul Wahab
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00

Species living in the extreme cold environment fight against the harsh conditions using antifreeze proteins (AFPs), that manipulates the freezing mechanism of water in more than one way. This amazing nature of AFP turns out to be extremely useful in several industrial and medical applications. The lack of similarity in their structure and sequence makes their prediction an arduous task and identifying them experimentally in the wet-lab is time-consuming and expensive. In this research, we propose a computational framework for the prediction of AFPs which is essentially based on a sample-specific classification method using the sparse reconstruction. A linear model and an over-complete dictionary matrix of known AFPs are used to predict a sparse class-label vector that provides a sample-association score. Delta-rule is applied for the reconstruction of two pseudo-samples using lower and upper parts of the sample-association vector and based on the minimum recovery score, class labels are assigned. We compare our approach with contemporary methods on a standard dataset and the proposed method is found to outperform in terms of Balanced accuracy and Youden's index. The MATLAB implementation of the proposed method is available at the author's GitHub page (\{https://github.com/Shujaat123/AFP-SRC}{https://github.com/Shujaat123/AFP-SRC}).
Capacity-Approaching Autoencoders for Communications
Authors: Nunzio A. Letizia, Andrea M. Tonello
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

The autoencoder concept has fostered the reinterpretation and the design of modern communication systems. It consists of an encoder, a channel, and a decoder block which modify their internal neural structure in an end-to-end learning fashion. However, the current approach to train an autoencoder relies on the use of the cross-entropy loss function. This approach can be prone to overfitting issues and often fails to learn an optimal system and signal representation (code). In addition, less is known about the autoencoder ability to design channel capacity-approaching codes, i.e., codes that maximize the input-output information under a certain power constraint. The task being even more formidable for an unknown channel for which the capacity is unknown and therefore it has to be learnt. In this paper, we address the challenge of designing capacity-approaching codes by incorporating the presence of the communication channel into a novel loss function for the autoencoder training. In particular, we exploit the mutual information between the transmitted and received signals as a regularization term in the cross-entropy loss function, with the aim of controlling the amount of information stored. By jointly maximizing the mutual information and minimizing the cross-entropy, we propose a methodology that a) computes an estimate of the channel capacity and b) constructs an optimal coded signal approaching it. Several simulation results offer evidence of the potentiality of the proposed method.
Image Conditioned Keyframe-Based Video Summarization Using Object Detection
Authors: Neeraj Baghel, Suresh C. Raikwar, Charul Bhatnagar
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Video Summarization

Video summarization plays an important role in selecting keyframe for understanding a video. Traditionally, it aims to find the most representative and diverse contents (or frames) in a video for short summaries. Recently, query-conditioned video summarization has been introduced, which considers user queries to learn more user-oriented summaries and its preference. However, there are obstacles in text queries for user subjectivity and finding similarity between the user query and input frames. In this work, (i) Image is introduced as a query for user preference (ii) a mathematical model is proposed to minimize redundancy based on the loss function & summary variance and (iii) the similarity score between the query image and input video to obtain the summarized video. Furthermore, the Object-based Query Image (OQI) dataset has been introduced, which contains the query images. The proposed method has been validated using UT Egocentric (UTE) dataset. The proposed model successfully resolved the issues of (i) user preference, (ii) recognize important frames and selecting that keyframe in daily life videos, with different illumination conditions. The proposed method achieved 57.06% average F1-Score for UTE dataset and outperforms the existing state-of-theart by 11.01%. The process time is 7.81 times faster than actual time of video Experiments on a recently proposed UTE dataset show the efficiency of the proposed method
PiaNet: A pyramid input augmented convolutional neural network for GGO detection in 3D lung CT scans
Authors: Weihua Liu, Xiabi Liua, Xiongbiao Luo, Murong Wang, Guanghui Han, Xinming Zhao, Zheng Zhu
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Data Augmentation, Transfer Learning

This paper proposes a new convolutional neural network with multiscale processing for detecting ground-glass opacity (GGO) nodules in 3D computed tomography (CT) images, which is referred to as PiaNet for short. PiaNet consists of a feature-extraction module and a prediction module. The former module is constructed by introducing pyramid multiscale source connections into a contracting-expanding structure. The latter module includes a bounding-box regressor and a classifier that are employed to simultaneously recognize GGO nodules and estimate bounding boxes at multiple scales. To train the proposed PiaNet, a two-stage transfer learning strategy is developed. In the first stage, the feature-extraction module is embedded into a classifier network that is trained on a large data set of GGO and non-GGO patches, which are generated by performing data augmentation from a small number of annotated CT scans. In the second stage, the pretrained feature-extraction module is loaded into PiaNet, and then PiaNet is fine-tuned using the annotated CT scans. We evaluate the proposed PiaNet on the LIDC-IDRI data set. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts, including the Subsolid CAD and Aidence systems and S4ND and GA-SSD methods. PiaNet achieves a sensitivity of 91.75% with only one false positive per scan
GTEA: Inductive Representation Learning on Temporal Interaction Graphs via Temporal Edge Aggregation
Authors: Siyue Xie, Yiming Li, Da Sun Handason Tam, Xiaxin Liu, Qiu Fang Ying, Wing Cheong Lau, Dah Ming Chiu, Shou Zhi Chen
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Learning, Node Classification, Representation Learning, Time Series Analysis

In this paper, we propose the Graph Temporal Edge Aggregation (GTEA) framework for inductive learning on Temporal Interaction Graphs (TIGs). Different from previous works, GTEA models the temporal dynamics of interaction sequences in the continuous-time space and simultaneously takes advantage of both rich node and edge/ interaction attributes in the graph. Concretely, we integrate a sequence model with a time encoder to learn pairwise interactional dynamics between two adjacent nodes.This helps capture complex temporal interactional patterns of a node pair along the history, which generates edge embeddings that can be fed into a GNN backbone. By aggregating features of neighboring nodes and the corresponding edge embeddings, GTEA jointly learns both topological and temporal dependencies of a TIG. In addition, a sparsity-inducing self-attention scheme is incorporated for neighbor aggregation, which highlights more important neighbors and suppresses trivial noises for GTEA. By jointly optimizing the sequence model and the GNN backbone, GTEA learns more comprehensive node representations capturing both temporal and graph structural characteristics. Extensive experiments on five large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of GTEA over other inductive models.
Community detection in networks using graph embeddings
Authors: Aditya Tandon, Aiiad Albeshri, Vijey Thayananthan, Wadee Alhalabi, Filippo Radicchi, Santo Fortunato
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Community Detection, Graph Embedding, Link Prediction, Node Classification

Graph embedding methods are becoming increasingly popular in the machine learning community, where they are widely used for tasks such as node classification and link prediction. Embedding graphs in geometric spaces should aid the identification of network communities as well, because nodes in the same community should be projected close to each other in the geometric space, where they can be detected via standard data clustering algorithms. In this paper, we test the ability of several graph embedding techniques to detect communities on benchmark graphs. We compare their performance against that of traditional community detection algorithms. We find that the performance is comparable, if the parameters of the embedding techniques are suitably chosen. However, the optimal parameter set varies with the specific features of the benchmark graphs, like their size, whereas popular community detection algorithms do not require any parameter. So it is not possible to indicate beforehand good parameter sets for the analysis of real networks. This finding, along with the high computational cost of embedding a network and grouping the points, suggests that, for community detection, current embedding techniques do not represent an improvement over network clustering algorithms.
End-to-end Learning for OFDM: From Neural Receivers to Pilotless Communication
Authors: Fayçal Ait Aoudia, Jakob Hoydis
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00

Previous studies have demonstrated that end-to-end learning enables significant shaping gains over additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channels. However, its benefits have not yet been quantified over realistic wireless channel models. This work aims to fill this gap by exploring the gains of end-to-end learning over a frequency- and time-selective fading channel using orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). With imperfect channel knowledge at the receiver, the shaping gains observed on AWGN channels vanish. Nonetheless, we identify two other sources of performance improvements. The first comes from a neural network (NN)-based receiver operating over a large number of subcarriers and OFDM symbols which allows to significantly reduce the number of orthogonal pilots without loss of bit error rate (BER). The second comes from entirely eliminating orthognal pilots by jointly learning a neural receiver together with either superimposed pilots (SIPs), linearly combined with conventional quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), or an optimized constellation geometry. The learned geometry works for a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), Doppler and delay spreads, has zero mean and does hence not contain any form of superimposed pilots. Both schemes achieve the same BER as the pilot-based baseline with around 7% higher throughput. Thus, we believe that a jointly learned transmitter and receiver are a very interesting component for beyond-5G communication systems which could remove the need and associated control overhead for demodulation reference signals (DMRSs).
The AIQ Meta-Testbed: Pragmatically Bridging Academic AI Testing and Industrial Q Needs
Authors: Markus Borg
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00

AI solutions seem to appear in any and all application domains. As AI becomes more pervasive, the importance of quality assurance increases. Unfortunately, there is no consensus on what artificial intelligence means and interpretations range from simple statistical analysis to sentient humanoid robots. On top of that, quality is a notoriously hard concept to pinpoint. What does this mean for AI quality? In this paper, we share our working definition and a pragmatic approach to address the corresponding quality assurance with a focus on testing. Finally, we present our ongoing work on establishing the AIQ Meta-Testbed.
Hierarchical Roofline Performance Analysis for Deep Learning Applications
Authors: Charlene Yang, Yunsong Wang, Steven Farrell, Thorsten Kurth, Samuel Williams
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, GPU, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents a practical methodology for collecting performance data necessary to conduct hierarchical Roofline analysis on NVIDIA GPUs. It discusses the extension of the Empirical Roofline Toolkit for broader support of a range of data precisions and Tensor Core support and introduces a Nsight Compute based method to accurately collect application performance information. This methodology allows for automated machine characterization and application characterization for Roofline analysis across the entire memory hierarchy on NVIDIA GPUs, and it is validated by a complex deep learning application used for climate image segmentation. We use two versions of the code, in TensorFlow and PyTorch respectively, to demonstrate the use and effectiveness of this methodology. We highlight how the application utilizes the compute and memory capabilities on the GPU and how the implementation and performance differ in two deep learning frameworks.
Visually Analyzing and Steering Zero Shot Learning
Authors: Saroj Sahoo, Matthew Berger
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-Shot Learning

We propose a visual analytics system to help a user analyze and steer zero-shot learning models. Zero-shot learning has emerged as a viable scenario for categorizing data that consists of no labeled examples, and thus a promising approach to minimize data annotation from humans. However, it is challenging to understand where zero-shot learning fails, the cause of such failures, and how a user can modify the model to prevent such failures. Our visualization system is designed to help users diagnose and understand mispredictions in such models, so that they may gain insight on the behavior of a model when applied to data associated with categories not seen during training. Through usage scenarios, we highlight how our system can help a user improve performance in zero-shot learning.
Novel and Effective CNN-Based Binarization for Historically Degraded As-built Drawing Maps
Authors: Kuo-Liang Chung, De-Wei Hsieh
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization

Binarizing historically degraded as-built drawing (HDAD) maps is a new challenging job, especially in terms of removing the three artifacts, namely noise, the yellowing areas, and the folded lines, while preserving the foreground components well. In this paper, we first propose a semi-automatic labeling method to create the HDAD-pair dataset of which each HDAD-pair consists of one HDAD map and its binarized HDAD map. Based on the created training HDAD-pair dataset, we propose a convolutional neural network-based (CNN-based) binarization method to produce high-quality binarized HDAD maps. Based on the testing HDAD maps, the thorough experimental data demonstrated that in terms of the accuracy, PSNR (peak-signal-to-noise-ratio), and the perceptual effect of the binarized HDAD maps, our method substantially outperforms the nine existing binarization methods. In addition, with similar accuracy, the experimental results demonstrated the significant execution-time reduction merit of our method relative to the retrained version of the state-of-the-art CNN-based binarization methods.