pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Input Similarity from the Neural Network Perspective
Authors: Guillaume Charpiat, Nicolas Girard, Loris Felardos, Yuliya Tarabalka
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Denoising, Image Registration

We first exhibit a multimodal image registration task, for which a neural network trained on a dataset with noisy labels reaches almost perfect accuracy, far beyond noise variance. This surprising auto-denoising phenomenon can be explained as a noise averaging effect over the labels of similar input examples. This effect theoretically grows with the number of similar examples; the question is then to define and estimate the similarity of examples. We express a proper definition of similarity, from the neural network perspective, i.e. we quantify how undissociable two inputs $A$ and $B$ are, taking a machine learning viewpoint: how much a parameter variation designed to change the output for $A$ would impact the output for $B$ as well? We study the mathematical properties of this similarity measure, and show how to use it on a trained network to estimate sample density, in low complexity, enabling new types of statistical analysis for neural networks. We analyze data by retrieving samples perceived as similar by the network, and are able to quantify the denoising effect without requiring true labels. We also propose, during training, to enforce that examples known to be similar should also be seen as similar by the network, and notice speed-up training effects for certain datasets.
Simple Agent, Complex Environment: Efficient Reinforcement Learning with Agent States
Authors: Shi Dong, Benjamin Van Roy, Zhengyuan Zhou
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Representation Learning

We design a simple reinforcement learning (RL) agent that implements an optimistic version of $Q$-learning and establish through regret analysis that this agent can operate with some level of competence in any environment. While we leverage concepts from the literature on provably efficient RL, we consider a general agent-environment interface and provide a novel agent design and analysis. This level of generality positions our results to inform the design of future agents for operation in complex real environments. We establish that, as time progresses, our agent performs competitively relative to policies that require longer times to evaluate. The time it takes to approach asymptotic performance is polynomial in the complexity of the agent's state representation and the time required to evaluate the best policy that the agent can represent. Notably, there is no dependence on the complexity of the environment. The ultimate per-period performance loss of the agent is bounded by a constant multiple of a measure of distortion introduced by the agent's state representation. This work is the first to establish that an algorithm approaches this asymptotic condition within a tractable time frame.
SensPick: Sense Picking for Word Sense Disambiguation
Authors: SM Zobaed, Md Enamul Haque, Md Fazle Rabby, Mohsen Amini Salehi
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Word Sense Disambiguation

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods identify the most suitable meaning of a word with respect to the usage of that word in a specific context. Neural network-based WSD approaches rely on a sense-annotated corpus since they do not utilize lexical resources. In this study, we utilize both context and related gloss information of a target word to model the semantic relationship between the word and the set of glosses. We propose SensPick, a type of stacked bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network to perform the WSD task. The experimental evaluation demonstrates that SensPick outperforms traditional and state-of-the-art models on most of the benchmark datasets with a relative improvement of 3.5% in F-1 score. While the improvement is not significant, incorporating semantic relationships brings SensPick in the leading position compared to others.
Locally Free Weight Sharing for Network Width Search
Authors: Xiu Su, Shan You, Tao Huang, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, ChangShui Zhang, Chang Xu
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

Searching for network width is an effective way to slim deep neural networks with hardware budgets. With this aim, a one-shot supernet is usually leveraged as a performance evaluator to rank the performance \wrt~different width. Nevertheless, current methods mainly follow a manually fixed weight sharing pattern, which is limited to distinguish the performance gap of different width. In this paper, to better evaluate each width, we propose a locally free weight sharing strategy (CafeNet) accordingly. In CafeNet, weights are more freely shared, and each width is jointly indicated by its base channels and free channels, where free channels are supposed to loCAte FrEely in a local zone to better represent each width. Besides, we propose to further reduce the search space by leveraging our introduced FLOPs-sensitive bins. As a result, our CafeNet can be trained stochastically and get optimized within a min-min strategy. Extensive experiments on ImageNet, CIFAR-10, CelebA and MS COCO dataset have verified our superiority comparing to other state-of-the-art baselines. For example, our method can further boost the benchmark NAS network EfficientNet-B0 by 0.41\% via searching its width more delicately.
Policy Augmentation: An Exploration Strategy for Faster Convergence of Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Authors: Arash Mahyari
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Matrix Completion, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Despite advancements in deep reinforcement learning algorithms, developing an effective exploration strategy is still an open problem. Most existing exploration strategies either are based on simple heuristics, or require the model of the environment, or train additional deep neural networks to generate imagination-augmented paths. In this paper, a revolutionary algorithm, called Policy Augmentation, is introduced. Policy Augmentation is based on a newly developed inductive matrix completion method. The proposed algorithm augments the values of unexplored state-action pairs, helping the agent take actions that will result in high-value returns while the agent is in the early episodes. Training deep reinforcement learning algorithms with high-value rollouts leads to the faster convergence of deep reinforcement learning algorithms. Our experiments show the superior performance of Policy Augmentation. The code can be found at: https://github.com/arashmahyari/PolicyAugmentation.
Patterns, predictions, and actions: A story about machine learning
Authors: Moritz Hardt, Benjamin Recht
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sequential Decision Making

This graduate textbook on machine learning tells a story of how patterns in data support predictions and consequential actions. Starting with the foundations of decision making, we cover representation, optimization, and generalization as the constituents of supervised learning. A chapter on datasets as benchmarks examines their histories and scientific bases. Self-contained introductions to causality, the practice of causal inference, sequential decision making, and reinforcement learning equip the reader with concepts and tools to reason about actions and their consequences. Throughout, the text discusses historical context and societal impact. We invite readers from all backgrounds; some experience with probability, calculus, and linear algebra suffices.
Detecting Localized Adversarial Examples: A Generic Approach using Critical Region Analysis
Authors: Fengting Li, Xuankai Liu, Xiaoli Zhang, Qi Li, Kun Sun, Kang Li
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, image-classification, Image Classification

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been applied in a wide range of applications,e.g.,face recognition and image classification; however,they are vulnerable to adversarial examples. By adding a small amount of imperceptible perturbations,an attacker can easily manipulate the outputs of a DNN. Particularly,the localized adversarial examples only perturb a small and contiguous region of the target object,so that they are robust and effective in both digital and physical worlds. Although the localized adversarial examples have more severe real-world impacts than traditional pixel attacks,they have not been well addressed in the literature. In this paper,we propose a generic defense system called TaintRadar to accurately detect localized adversarial examples via analyzing critical regions that have been manipulated by attackers. The main idea is that when removing critical regions from input images,the ranking changes of adversarial labels will be larger than those of benign labels. Compared with existing defense solutions,TaintRadar can effectively capture sophisticated localized partial attacks, e.g.,the eye-glasses attack,while not requiring additional training or fine-tuning of the original model's structure. Comprehensive experiments have been conducted in both digital and physical worlds to verify the effectiveness and robustness of our defense.
Concealer: SGX-based Secure, Volume Hiding, and Verifiable Processing of Spatial Time-Series Datasets
Authors: Peeyush Gupta, Sharad Mehrotra, Shantanu Sharma, Nalini Venkatasubramanian, Guoxi Wang
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

This paper proposes a system, entitled Concealer that allows sharing time-varying spatial data (e.g., as produced by sensors) in encrypted form to an untrusted third-party service provider to provide location-based applications (involving aggregation queries over selected regions over time windows) to users. Concealer exploits carefully selected encryption techniques to use indexes supported by database systems and combines ways to add fake tuples in order to realize an efficient system that protects against leakage based on output-size. Thus, the design of Concealer overcomes two limitations of existing symmetric searchable encryption (SSE) techniques: (i) it avoids the need of specialized data structures that limit usability/practicality of SSE in large scale deployments, and (ii) it avoids information leakages based on the output-size, which may leak data distributions. Experimental results validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms over a spatial time-series dataset (collected from a smart space) and TPC-H datasets, each of 136 Million rows, the size of which prior approaches have not scaled to.
Advanced Ore Mine Optimisation under Uncertainty Using Evolution
Authors: William Reid, Aneta Neumann, Simon Ratcliffe, Frank Neumann
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00

In this paper, we investigate the impact of uncertainty in advanced ore mine optimisation. We consider Maptek's software system Evolution which optimizes extraction sequences based on evolutionary computation techniques and quantify the uncertainty of the obtained solutions with respect to the ore deposit based on predictions obtained by ensembles of neural networks. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of staging on the obtained optimized solutions and discuss a wide range of components for this large scale stochastic optimisation problem which allow to mitigate the uncertainty in the ore deposit while maintaining high profitability.
Driver2vec: Driver Identification from Automotive Data
Authors: Jingbo Yang, Ruge Zhao, Meixian Zhu, David Hallac, Jaka Sodnik, Jure Leskovec
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Driver Identification, Triplet

With increasing focus on privacy protection, alternative methods to identify vehicle operator without the use of biometric identifiers have gained traction for automotive data analysis. The wide variety of sensors installed on modern vehicles enable autonomous driving, reduce accidents and improve vehicle handling. On the other hand, the data these sensors collect reflect drivers' habit. Drivers' use of turn indicators, following distance, rate of acceleration, etc. can be transformed to an embedding that is representative of their behavior and identity. In this paper, we develop a deep learning architecture (Driver2vec) to map a short interval of driving data into an embedding space that represents the driver's behavior to assist in driver identification. We develop a custom model that leverages performance gains of temporal convolutional networks, embedding separation power of triplet loss and classification accuracy of gradient boosting decision trees. Trained on a dataset of 51 drivers provided by Nervtech, Driver2vec is able to accurately identify the driver from a short 10-second interval of sensor data, achieving an average pairwise driver identification accuracy of 83.1% from this 10-second interval, which is remarkably higher than performance obtained in previous studies. We then analyzed performance of Driver2vec to show that its performance is consistent across scenarios and that modeling choices are sound.
Culture-inspired Multi-modal Color Palette Generation and Colorization: A Chinese Youth Subculture Case
Authors: Yufan Li, Jinggang Zhuo, Ling Fan, Harry Jiannan Wang
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Colorization, Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Color is an essential component of graphic design, acting not only as a visual factor but also carrying cultural implications. However, existing research on algorithmic color palette generation and colorization largely ignores the cultural aspect. In this paper, we contribute to this line of research by first constructing a unique color dataset inspired by a specific culture, i.e., Chinese Youth Subculture (CYS), which is an vibrant and trending cultural group especially for the Gen Z population. We show that the colors used in CYS have special aesthetic and semantic characteristics that are different from generic color theory. We then develop an interactive multi-modal generative framework to create CYS-styled color palettes, which can be used to put a CYS twist on images using our automatic colorization model. Our framework is illustrated via a demo system designed with the human-in-the-loop principle that constantly provides feedback to our algorithms. User studies are also conducted to evaluate our generation results.
Sequential vessel segmentation via deep channel attention network
Authors: Dongdong Hao, Song Ding, Linwei Qiu, Yisong Lv, Baowei Fei, Yueqi Zhu, Binjie Qin
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

This paper develops a novel encoder-decoder deep network architecture which exploits the several contextual frames of 2D+t sequential images in a sliding window centered at current frame to segment 2D vessel masks from the current frame. The architecture is equipped with temporal-spatial feature extraction in encoder stage, feature fusion in skip connection layers and channel attention mechanism in decoder stage. In the encoder stage, a series of 3D convolutional layers are employed to hierarchically extract temporal-spatial features. Skip connection layers subsequently fuse the temporal-spatial feature maps and deliver them to the corresponding decoder stages. To efficiently discriminate vessel features from the complex and noisy backgrounds in the XCA images, the decoder stage effectively utilizes channel attention blocks to refine the intermediate feature maps from skip connection layers for subsequently decoding the refined features in 2D ways to produce the segmented vessel masks. Furthermore, Dice loss function is implemented to train the proposed deep network in order to tackle the class imbalance problem in the XCA data due to the wide distribution of complex background artifacts. Extensive experiments by comparing our method with other state-of-the-art algorithms demonstrate the proposed method's superior performance over other methods in terms of the quantitative metrics and visual validation. The source codes are at https://github.com/Binjie-Qin/SVS-net
FLOP: Federated Learning on Medical Datasets using Partial Networks
Authors: Qian Yang, Jianyi Zhang, Weituo Hao, Gregory Spell, Lawrence Carin
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Federated Learning

The outbreak of COVID-19 Disease due to the novel coronavirus has caused a shortage of medical resources. To aid and accelerate the diagnosis process, automatic diagnosis of COVID-19 via deep learning models has recently been explored by researchers across the world. While different data-driven deep learning models have been developed to mitigate the diagnosis of COVID-19, the data itself is still scarce due to patient privacy concerns. Federated Learning (FL) is a natural solution because it allows different organizations to cooperatively learn an effective deep learning model without sharing raw data. However, recent studies show that FL still lacks privacy protection and may cause data leakage. We investigate this challenging problem by proposing a simple yet effective algorithm, named \textbf{F}ederated \textbf{L}earning \textbf{o}n Medical Datasets using \textbf{P}artial Networks (FLOP), that shares only a partial model between the server and clients. Extensive experiments on benchmark data and real-world healthcare tasks show that our approach achieves comparable or better performance while reducing the privacy and security risks. Of particular interest, we conduct experiments on the COVID-19 dataset and find that our FLOP algorithm can allow different hospitals to collaboratively and effectively train a partially shared model without sharing local patients' data.
VINS: Visual Search for Mobile User Interface Design
Authors: Sara Bunian, Kai Li, Chaima Jemmali, Casper Harteveld, Yun Fu, Magy Seif El-Nasr
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, object-detection, Object Detection, Retrieval

Searching for relative mobile user interface (UI) design examples can aid interface designers in gaining inspiration and comparing design alternatives. However, finding such design examples is challenging, especially as current search systems rely on only text-based queries and do not consider the UI structure and content into account. This paper introduces VINS, a visual search framework, that takes as input a UI image (wireframe, high-fidelity) and retrieves visually similar design examples. We first survey interface designers to better understand their example finding process. We then develop a large-scale UI dataset that provides an accurate specification of the interface's view hierarchy (i.e., all the UI components and their specific location). By utilizing this dataset, we propose an object-detection based image retrieval framework that models the UI context and hierarchical structure. The framework achieves a mean Average Precision of 76.39\% for the UI detection and high performance in querying similar UI designs.
Task-Optimal Exploration in Linear Dynamical Systems
Authors: Andrew Wagenmaker, Max Simchowitz, Kevin Jamieson
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Exploration in unknown environments is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and control. In this work, we study task-guided exploration and determine what precisely an agent must learn about their environment in order to complete a particular task. Formally, we study a broad class of decision-making problems in the setting of linear dynamical systems, a class that includes the linear quadratic regulator problem. We provide instance- and task-dependent lower bounds which explicitly quantify the difficulty of completing a task of interest. Motivated by our lower bound, we propose a computationally efficient experiment-design based exploration algorithm. We show that it optimally explores the environment, collecting precisely the information needed to complete the task, and provide finite-time bounds guaranteeing that it achieves the instance- and task-optimal sample complexity, up to constant factors. Through several examples of the LQR problem, we show that performing task-guided exploration provably improves on exploration schemes which do not take into account the task of interest. Along the way, we establish that certainty equivalence decision making is instance- and task-optimal, and obtain the first algorithm for the linear quadratic regulator problem which is instance-optimal. We conclude with several experiments illustrating the effectiveness of our approach in practice.
Polarimetric Monocular Dense Mapping Using Relative Deep Depth Prior
Authors: Moein Shakeri, Shing Yan Loo, Hong Zhang
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00

This paper is concerned with polarimetric dense map reconstruction based on a polarization camera with the help of relative depth information as a prior. In general, polarization imaging is able to reveal information about surface normal such as azimuth and zenith angles, which can support the development of solutions to the problem of dense reconstruction, especially in texture-poor regions. However, polarimetric shape cues are ambiguous due to two types of polarized reflection (specular/diffuse). Although methods have been proposed to address this issue, they either are offline and therefore not practical in robotics applications, or use incomplete polarimetric cues, leading to sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we propose an online reconstruction method that uses full polarimetric cues available from the polarization camera. With our online method, we can propagate sparse depth values both along and perpendicular to iso-depth contours. Through comprehensive experiments on challenging image sequences, we demonstrate that our method is able to significantly improve the accuracy of the depthmap as well as increase its density, specially in regions of poor texture.
D2A U-Net: Automatic Segmentation of COVID-19 Lesions from CT Slices with Dilated Convolution and Dual Attention Mechanism
Authors: Xiangyu Zhao, Peng Zhang, Fan Song, Guangda Fan, Yangyang Sun, Yujia Wang, Zheyuan Tian, Luqi Zhang, Guanglei Zhang
Date: 2021-02-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Decoder, Lesion Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has caused great casualties and becomes almost the most urgent public health events worldwide. Computed tomography (CT) is a significant screening tool for COVID-19 infection, and automated segmentation of lung infection in COVID-19 CT images will greatly assist diagnosis and health care of patients. However, accurate and automatic segmentation of COVID-19 lung infections remains to be challenging. In this paper we propose a dilated dual attention U-Net (D2A U-Net) for COVID-19 lesion segmentation in CT slices based on dilated convolution and a novel dual attention mechanism to address the issues above. We introduce a dilated convolution module in model decoder to achieve large receptive field, which refines decoding process and contributes to segmentation accuracy. Also, we present a dual attention mechanism composed of two attention modules which are inserted to skip connection and model decoder respectively. The dual attention mechanism is utilized to refine feature maps and reduce semantic gap between different levels of the model. The proposed method has been evaluated on open-source dataset and outperforms cutting edges methods in semantic segmentation. Our proposed D2A U-Net with pretrained encoder achieves a Dice score of 0.7298 and recall score of 0.7071. Besides, we also build a simplified D2A U-Net without pretrained encoder to provide a fair comparison with other models trained from scratch, which still outperforms popular U-Net family models with a Dice score of 0.7047 and recall score of 0.6626. Our experiment results have shown that by introducing dilated convolution and dual attention mechanism, the number of false positives is significantly reduced, which improves sensitivity to COVID-19 lesions and subsequently brings significant increase to Dice score.