pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Spectral Compressive Imaging Reconstruction Using Convolution and Contextual Transformer
Authors: Lishun Wang, Zongliang Wu, Yong Zhong, Xin Yuan
Date: 2022-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

Spectral compressive imaging (SCI) is able to encode the high-dimensional hyperspectral image to a 2D measurement, and then uses algorithms to reconstruct the spatio-spectral data-cube. At present, the main bottleneck of SCI is the reconstruction algorithm, and the state-of-the-art (SOTA) reconstruction methods generally face the problem of long reconstruction time and/or poor detail recovery. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid network module, namely CCoT (Convolution and Contextual Transformer) block, which can acquire the inductive bias ability of convolution and the powerful modeling ability of transformer simultaneously,and is conducive to improving the quality of reconstruction to restore fine details. We integrate the proposed CCoT block into deep unfolding framework based on the generalized alternating projection algorithm, and further propose the GAP-CCoT network. Through the experiments of extensive synthetic and real data, our proposed model achieves higher reconstruction quality ($>$2dB in PSNR on simulated benchmark datasets) and shorter running time than existing SOTA algorithms by a large margin. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/ucaswangls/GAP-CCoT.
A Survey on RGB-D Datasets
Authors: Alexandre Lopes, Roberto Souza, Helio Pedrini
Date: 2022-01-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: arXiv 2022 1
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Survey

RGB-D data is essential for solving many problems in computer vision. Hundreds of public RGB-D datasets containing various scenes, such as indoor, outdoor, aerial, driving, and medical, have been proposed. These datasets are useful for different applications and are fundamental for addressing classic computer vision tasks, such as monocular depth estimation. This paper reviewed and categorized image datasets that include depth information. We gathered 203 datasets that contain accessible data and grouped them into three categories: scene/objects, body, and medical. We also provided an overview of the different types of sensors, depth applications, and we examined trends and future directions of the usage and creation of datasets containing depth data, and how they can be applied to investigate the development of generalizable machine learning models in the monocular depth estimation field.
Real-World Graph Convolution Networks (RW-GCNs) for Action Recognition in Smart Video Surveillance
Authors: Justin Sanchez, Christopher Neff, Hamed Tabkhi
Date: 2022-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Action recognition is a key algorithmic part of emerging on-the-edge smart video surveillance and security systems. Skeleton-based action recognition is an attractive approach which, instead of using RGB pixel data, relies on human pose information to classify appropriate actions. However, existing algorithms often assume ideal conditions that are not representative of real-world limitations, such as noisy input, latency requirements, and edge resource constraints. To address the limitations of existing approaches, this paper presents Real-World Graph Convolution Networks (RW-GCNs), an architecture-level solution for meeting the domain constraints of Real World Skeleton-based Action Recognition. Inspired by the presence of feedback connections in the human visual cortex, RW-GCNs leverage attentive feedback augmentation on existing near state-of-the-art (SotA) Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolution Networks (ST-GCNs). The ST-GCNs' design choices are derived from information theory-centric principles to address both the spatial and temporal noise typically encountered in end-to-end real-time and on-the-edge smart video systems. Our results demonstrate RW-GCNs' ability to serve these applications by achieving a new SotA accuracy on the NTU-RGB-D-120 dataset at 94.1%, and achieving 32X less latency than baseline ST-GCN applications while still achieving 90.4% accuracy on the Northwestern UCLA dataset in the presence of spatial keypoint noise. RW-GCNs further show system scalability by running on the 10X cost effective NVIDIA Jetson Nano (as opposed to NVIDIA Xavier NX), while still maintaining a respectful range of throughput (15.6 to 5.5 Actions per Second) on the resource constrained device. The code is available here: https://github.com/TeCSAR-UNCC/RW-GCN.
Learning Hierarchical Graph Representation for Image Manipulation Detection
Authors: Wenyan Pan, Zhili Zhou, Miaogen Ling, Xin Geng, Q. M. Jonathan Wu
Date: 2022-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Image Manipulation, Image Manipulation Detection, Representation Learning

The objective of image manipulation detection is to identify and locate the manipulated regions in the images. Recent approaches mostly adopt the sophisticated Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to capture the tampering artifacts left in the images to locate the manipulated regions. However, these approaches ignore the feature correlations, i.e., feature inconsistencies, between manipulated regions and non-manipulated regions, leading to inferior detection performance. To address this issue, we propose a hierarchical Graph Convolutional Network (HGCN-Net), which consists of two parallel branches: the backbone network branch and the hierarchical graph representation learning (HGRL) branch for image manipulation detection. Specifically, the feature maps of a given image are extracted by the backbone network branch, and then the feature correlations within the feature maps are modeled as a set of fully-connected graphs for learning the hierarchical graph representation by the HGRL branch. The learned hierarchical graph representation can sufficiently capture the feature correlations across different scales, and thus it provides high discriminability for distinguishing manipulated and non-manipulated regions. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that the proposed HGCN-Net not only provides promising detection accuracy, but also achieves strong robustness under a variety of common image attacks in the task of image manipulation detection, compared to the state-of-the-arts.
Learning Temporally and Semantically Consistent Unpaired Video-to-video Translation Through Pseudo-Supervision From Synthetic Optical Flow
Authors: Kaihong Wang, Kumar Akash, Teruhisa Misu
Date: 2022-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation, Translation

Unpaired video-to-video translation aims to translate videos between a source and a target domain without the need of paired training data, making it more feasible for real applications. Unfortunately, the translated videos generally suffer from temporal and semantic inconsistency. To address this, many existing works adopt spatiotemporal consistency constraints incorporating temporal information based on motion estimation. However, the inaccuracies in the estimation of motion deteriorate the quality of the guidance towards spatiotemporal consistency, which leads to unstable translation. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm that regularizes the spatiotemporal consistency by synthesizing motions in input videos with the generated optical flow instead of estimating them. Therefore, the synthetic motion can be applied in the regularization paradigm to keep motions consistent across domains without the risk of errors in motion estimation. Thereafter, we utilize our unsupervised recycle and unsupervised spatial loss, guided by the pseudo-supervision provided by the synthetic optical flow, to accurately enforce spatiotemporal consistency in both domains. Experiments show that our method is versatile in various scenarios and achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating temporally and semantically consistent videos. Code is available at: https://github.com/wangkaihong/Unsup_Recycle_GAN/.
Parameter-free Online Test-time Adaptation
Authors: Malik Boudiaf, Romain Mueller, Ismail Ben Ayed, Luca Bertinetto
Date: 2022-01-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Test-time Adaptation

Training state-of-the-art vision models has become prohibitively expensive for researchers and practitioners. For the sake of accessibility and resource reuse, it is important to focus on adapting these models to a variety of downstream scenarios. An interesting and practical paradigm is online test-time adaptation, according to which training data is inaccessible, no labelled data from the test distribution is available, and adaptation can only happen at test time and on a handful of samples. In this paper, we investigate how test-time adaptation methods fare for a number of pre-trained models on a variety of real-world scenarios, significantly extending the way they have been originally evaluated. We show that they perform well only in narrowly-defined experimental setups and sometimes fail catastrophically when their hyperparameters are not selected for the same scenario in which they are being tested. Motivated by the inherent uncertainty around the conditions that will ultimately be encountered at test time, we propose a particularly "conservative" approach, which addresses the problem with a Laplacian Adjusted Maximum-likelihood Estimation (LAME) objective. By adapting the model's output (not its parameters), and solving our objective with an efficient concave-convex procedure, our approach exhibits a much higher average accuracy across scenarios than existing methods, while being notably faster and have a much lower memory footprint. The code is available at https://github.com/fiveai/LAME.
Perspective Transformation Layer
Authors: Nishan Khatri, Agnibh Dasgupta, Yucong Shen, Xin Zhong, Frank Y. Shih
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Incorporating geometric transformations that reflect the relative position changes between an observer and an object into computer vision and deep learning models has attracted much attention in recent years. However, the existing proposals mainly focus on the affine transformation that is insufficient to reflect such geometric position changes. Furthermore, current solutions often apply a neural network module to learn a single transformation matrix, which not only ignores the importance of multi-view analysis but also includes extra training parameters from the module apart from the transformation matrix parameters that increase the model complexity. In this paper, a perspective transformation layer is proposed in the context of deep learning. The proposed layer can learn homography, therefore reflecting the geometric positions between observers and objects. In addition, by directly training its transformation matrices, a single proposed layer can learn an adjustable number of multiple viewpoints without considering module parameters. The experiments and evaluations confirm the superiority of the proposed layer.
Transformers in Action: Weakly Supervised Action Segmentation
Authors: John Ridley, Huseyin Coskun, David Joseph Tan, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Segmentation

The video action segmentation task is regularly explored under weaker forms of supervision, such as transcript supervision, where a list of actions is easier to obtain than dense frame-wise labels. In this formulation, the task presents various challenges for sequence modeling approaches due to the emphasis on action transition points, long sequence lengths, and frame contextualization, making the task well-posed for transformers. Given developments enabling transformers to scale linearly, we demonstrate through our architecture how they can be applied to improve action alignment accuracy over the equivalent RNN-based models with the attention mechanism focusing around salient action transition regions. Additionally, given the recent focus on inference-time transcript selection, we propose a supplemental transcript embedding approach to select transcripts more quickly at inference-time. Furthermore, we subsequently demonstrate how this approach can also improve the overall segmentation performance. Finally, we evaluate our proposed methods across the benchmark datasets to better understand the applicability of transformers and the importance of transcript selection on this video-driven weakly-supervised task.
Disentanglement enables cross-domain Hippocampus Segmentation
Authors: John Kalkhof, Camila González, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2022-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Hippocampus, Segmentation

Limited amount of labelled training data are a common problem in medical imaging. This makes it difficult to train a well-generalised model and therefore often leads to failure in unknown domains. Hippocampus segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans is critical for the diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychatric disorders. Domain differences in contrast or shape can significantly affect segmentation. We address this issue by disentangling a T1-weighted MRI image into its content and domain. This separation enables us to perform a domain transfer and thus convert data from new sources into the training domain. This step thus simplifies the segmentation problem, resulting in higher quality segmentations. We achieve the disentanglement with the proposed novel methodology 'Content Domain Disentanglement GAN', and we propose to retrain the UNet on the transformed outputs to deal with GAN-specific artefacts. With these changes, we are able to improve performance on unseen domains by 6-13% and outperform state-of-the-art domain transfer methods.
Minimax Optimality (Probably) Doesn't Imply Distribution Learning for GANs
Authors: Sitan Chen, Jerry Li, Yuanzhi Li, Raghu Meka
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4

Arguably the most fundamental question in the theory of generative adversarial networks (GANs) is to understand to what extent GANs can actually learn the underlying distribution. Theoretical and empirical evidence suggests local optimality of the empirical training objective is insufficient. Yet, it does not rule out the possibility that achieving a true population minimax optimal solution might imply distribution learning. In this paper, we show that standard cryptographic assumptions imply that this stronger condition is still insufficient. Namely, we show that if local pseudorandom generators (PRGs) exist, then for a large family of natural continuous target distributions, there are ReLU network generators of constant depth and polynomial size which take Gaussian random seeds so that (i) the output is far in Wasserstein distance from the target distribution, but (ii) no polynomially large Lipschitz discriminator ReLU network can detect this. This implies that even achieving a population minimax optimal solution to the Wasserstein GAN objective is likely insufficient for distribution learning in the usual statistical sense. Our techniques reveal a deep connection between GANs and PRGs, which we believe will lead to further insights into the computational landscape of GANs.
Bridging the Language Gap: An Empirical Study of Bindings for Open Source Machine Learning Libraries Across Software Package Ecosystems
Authors: Hao Li, Cor-Paul Bezemer
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Open source machine learning (ML) libraries enable developers to integrate advanced ML functionality into their own applications. However, popular ML libraries, such as TensorFlow, are not available natively in all programming languages and software package ecosystems. Hence, developers who wish to use an ML library which is not available in their programming language or ecosystem of choice, may need to resort to using a so-called binding library (or binding). Bindings provide support across programming languages and package ecosystems for reusing a host library. For example, the Keras .NET binding provides support for the Keras library in the NuGet (.NET) ecosystem even though the Keras library was written in Python. In this paper, we collect 2,436 cross-ecosystem bindings for 546 ML libraries across 13 software package ecosystems by using an approach called BindFind, which can automatically identify bindings and link them to their host libraries. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth study of 133 cross-ecosystem bindings and their development for 40 popular open source ML libraries. Our findings reveal that the majority of ML library bindings are maintained by the community, with npm being the most popular ecosystem for these bindings. Our study also indicates that most bindings cover only a limited range of the host library's releases, often experience considerable delays in supporting new releases, and have widespread technical lag. Our findings highlight key factors to consider for developers integrating bindings for ML libraries and open avenues for researchers to further investigate bindings in software package ecosystems.
Invariant Representation Driven Neural Classifier for Anti-QCD Jet Tagging
Authors: Taoli Cheng, Aaron Courville
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Inductive Bias, Jet Tagging, Representation Learning

We leverage representation learning and the inductive bias in neural-net-based Standard Model jet classification tasks, to detect non-QCD signal jets. In establishing the framework for classification-based anomaly detection in jet physics, we demonstrate that, with a \emph{well-calibrated} and \emph{powerful enough feature extractor}, a well-trained \emph{mass-decorrelated} supervised Standard Model neural jet classifier can serve as a strong generic anti-QCD jet tagger for effectively reducing the QCD background. Imposing \emph{data-augmented} mass-invariance (and thus decoupling the dominant factor) not only facilitates background estimation, but also induces more substructure-aware representation learning. We are able to reach excellent tagging efficiencies for all the test signals considered. In the best case, we reach a background rejection rate of 51 and a significance improvement factor of 3.6 at 50 \% signal acceptance, with the jet mass decorrelated. This study indicates that supervised Standard Model jet classifiers have great potential in general new physics searches.
Low Regret Binary Sampling Method for Efficient Global Optimization of Univariate Functions
Authors: Kaan Gokcesu, Hakan Gokcesu
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization

In this work, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm for the problem of global optimization in univariate loss functions. For the performance evaluation, we study the cumulative regret of the algorithm instead of the simple regret between our best query and the optimal value of the objective function. Although our approach has similar regret results with the traditional lower-bounding algorithms such as the Piyavskii-Shubert method for the Lipschitz continuous or Lipschitz smooth functions, it has a major computational cost advantage. In Piyavskii-Shubert method, for certain types of functions, the query points may be hard to determine (as they are solutions to additional optimization problems). However, this issue is circumvented in our binary sampling approach, where the sampling set is predetermined irrespective of the function characteristics. For a search space of $[0,1]$, our approach has at most $L\log (3T)$ and $2.25H$ regret for $L$-Lipschitz continuous and $H$-Lipschitz smooth functions respectively. We also analytically extend our results for a broader class of functions that covers more complex regularity conditions.
Incompleteness of graph neural networks for points clouds in three dimensions
Authors: Sergey N. Pozdnyakov, Michele Ceriotti
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00

Graph neural networks (GNN) are very popular methods in machine learning and have been applied very successfully to the prediction of the properties of molecules and materials. First-order GNNs are well known to be incomplete, i.e., there exist graphs that are distinct but appear identical when seen through the lens of the GNN. More complicated schemes have thus been designed to increase their resolving power. Applications to molecules (and more generally, point clouds), however, add a geometric dimension to the problem. The most straightforward and prevalent approach to construct graph representation for molecules regards atoms as vertices in a graph and draws a bond between each pair of atoms within a chosen cutoff. Bonds can be decorated with the distance between atoms, and the resulting "distance graph NNs" (dGNN) have empirically demonstrated excellent resolving power and are widely used in chemical ML, with all known indistinguishable configurations being resolved in the fully-connected limit, which is equivalent to infinite or sufficiently large cutoff. Here we present a counterexample that proves that dGNNs are not complete even for the restricted case of fully-connected graphs induced by 3D atom clouds. We construct pairs of distinct point clouds whose associated graphs are, for any cutoff radius, equivalent based on a first-order Weisfeiler-Lehman test. This class of degenerate structures includes chemically-plausible configurations, both for isolated structures and for infinite structures that are periodic in 1, 2, and 3 dimensions. The existence of indistinguishable configurations sets an ultimate limit to the expressive power of some of the well-established GNN architectures for atomistic machine learning. Models that explicitly use angular or directional information in the description of atomic environments can resolve this class of degeneracies.
Synthesizing explainable counterfactual policies for algorithmic recourse with program synthesis
Authors: Giovanni De Toni, Bruno Lepri, Andrea Passerini
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Efficient Exploration, Program Synthesis

Being able to provide counterfactual interventions - sequences of actions we would have had to take for a desirable outcome to happen - is essential to explain how to change an unfavourable decision by a black-box machine learning model (e.g., being denied a loan request). Existing solutions have mainly focused on generating feasible interventions without providing explanations on their rationale. Moreover, they need to solve a separate optimization problem for each user. In this paper, we take a different approach and learn a program that outputs a sequence of explainable counterfactual actions given a user description and a causal graph. We leverage program synthesis techniques, reinforcement learning coupled with Monte Carlo Tree Search for efficient exploration, and rule learning to extract explanations for each recommended action. An experimental evaluation on synthetic and real-world datasets shows how our approach generates effective interventions by making orders of magnitude fewer queries to the black-box classifier with respect to existing solutions, with the additional benefit of complementing them with interpretable explanations.
Online, Informative MCMC Thinning with Kernelized Stein Discrepancy
Authors: Cole Hawkins, Alec Koppel, Zheng Zhang
Date: 2022-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

A fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference is efficient representation of a target distribution. Many non-parametric approaches do so by sampling a large number of points using variants of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). We propose an MCMC variant that retains only those posterior samples which exceed a KSD threshold, which we call KSD Thinning. We establish the convergence and complexity tradeoffs for several settings of KSD Thinning as a function of the KSD threshold parameter, sample size, and other problem parameters. Finally, we provide experimental comparisons against other online nonparametric Bayesian methods that generate low-complexity posterior representations, and observe superior consistency/complexity tradeoffs. Code is available at github.com/colehawkins/KSD-Thinning.