pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Simpler Does It: Generating Semantic Labels with Objectness Guidance
Authors: Md Amirul Islam, Matthew Kowal, Sen Jia, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Neil D. B. Bruce
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Object, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Existing weakly or semi-supervised semantic segmentation methods utilize image or box-level supervision to generate pseudo-labels for weakly labeled images. However, due to the lack of strong supervision, the generated pseudo-labels are often noisy near the object boundaries, which severely impacts the network's ability to learn strong representations. To address this problem, we present a novel framework that generates pseudo-labels for training images, which are then used to train a segmentation model. To generate pseudo-labels, we combine information from: (i) a class agnostic objectness network that learns to recognize object-like regions, and (ii) either image-level or bounding box annotations. We show the efficacy of our approach by demonstrating how the objectness network can naturally be leveraged to generate object-like regions for unseen categories. We then propose an end-to-end multi-task learning strategy, that jointly learns to segment semantics and objectness using the generated pseudo-labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high quality of our generated pseudo-labels and effectiveness of the proposed framework in a variety of domains. Our approach achieves better or competitive performance compared to existing weakly-supervised and semi-supervised methods.
AI-Based Detection, Classification and Prediction/Prognosis in Medical Imaging: Towards Radiophenomics
Authors: Fereshteh Yousefirizi, Pierre Decazes, Amine Amyar, Su Ruan, Babak Saboury, Arman Rahmim
Date: 2021-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis, Translation

Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have significant potential to enable effective, robust and automated image phenotyping including identification of subtle patterns. AI-based detection searches the image space to find the regions of interest based on patterns and features. There is a spectrum of tumor histologies from benign to malignant that can be identified by AI-based classification approaches using image features. The extraction of minable information from images gives way to the field of radiomics and can be explored via explicit (handcrafted/engineered) and deep radiomics frameworks. Radiomics analysis has the potential to be utilized as a noninvasive technique for the accurate characterization of tumors to improve diagnosis and treatment monitoring. This work reviews AI-based techniques, with a special focus on oncological PET and PET/CT imaging, for different detection, classification, and prediction/prognosis tasks. We also discuss needed efforts to enable the translation of AI techniques to routine clinical workflows, and potential improvements and complementary techniques such as the use of natural language processing on electronic health records and neuro-symbolic AI techniques.
Constrained Mean Shift for Representation Learning
Authors: Ajinkya Tejankar, Soroush Abbasi Koohpayegani, Hamed Pirsiavash
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

We are interested in representation learning from labeled or unlabeled data. Inspired by recent success of self-supervised learning (SSL), we develop a non-contrastive representation learning method that can exploit additional knowledge. This additional knowledge may come from annotated labels in the supervised setting or an SSL model from another modality in the SSL setting. Our main idea is to generalize the mean-shift algorithm by constraining the search space of nearest neighbors, resulting in semantically purer representations. Our method simply pulls the embedding of an instance closer to its nearest neighbors in a search space that is constrained using the additional knowledge. By leveraging this non-contrastive loss, we show that the supervised ImageNet-1k pretraining with our method results in better transfer performance as compared to the baselines. Further, we demonstrate that our method is relatively robust to label noise. Finally, we show that it is possible to use the noisy constraint across modalities to train self-supervised video models.
Fine-Grained Control of Artistic Styles in Image Generation
Authors: Xin Miao, Huayan Wang, Jun Fu, Jiayi Liu, Shen Wang, Zhenyu Liao
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Recent advances in generative models and adversarial training have enabled artificially generating artworks in various artistic styles. It is highly desirable to gain more control over the generated style in practice. However, artistic styles are unlike object categories -- there are a continuous spectrum of styles distinguished by subtle differences. Few works have been explored to capture the continuous spectrum of styles and apply it to a style generation task. In this paper, we propose to achieve this by embedding original artwork examples into a continuous style space. The style vectors are fed to the generator and discriminator to achieve fine-grained control. Our method can be used with common generative adversarial networks (such as StyleGAN). Experiments show that our method not only precisely controls the fine-grained artistic style but also improves image quality over vanilla StyleGAN as measured by FID.
1st Place Solution for the UVO Challenge on Image-based Open-World Segmentation 2021
Authors: Yuming Du, Wen Guo, Yang Xiao, Vincent Lepetit
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We describe our two-stage instance segmentation framework we use to compete in the challenge. The first stage of our framework consists of an object detector, which generates object proposals in the format of bounding boxes. Then, the images and the detected bounding boxes are fed to the second stage, where a segmentation network is applied to segment the objects in the bounding boxes. We train all our networks in a class-agnostic way. Our approach achieves the first place in the UVO 2021 Image-based Open-World Segmentation Challenge.
Evaluating and Improving Interactions with Hazy Oracles
Authors: Stephan J. Lemmer, Jason J. Corso
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Tracking, Referring Expression, Referring Expression Comprehension, Video Object Tracking, Visual Dialog, Visual Question Answering (VQA), World Knowledge

Many AI systems integrate sensor inputs, world knowledge, and human-provided information to perform inference. While such systems often treat the human input as flawless, humans are better thought of as hazy oracles whose input may be ambiguous or outside of the AI system's understanding. In such situations it makes sense for the AI system to defer its inference while it disambiguates the human-provided information by, for example, asking the human to rephrase the query. Though this approach has been considered in the past, current work is typically limited to application-specific methods and non-standardized human experiments. We instead introduce and formalize a general notion of deferred inference. Using this formulation, we then propose a novel evaluation centered around the Deferred Error Volume (DEV) metric, which explicitly considers the tradeoff between error reduction and the additional human effort required to achieve it. We demonstrate this new formalization and an innovative deferred inference method on the disparate tasks of Single-Target Video Object Tracking and Referring Expression Comprehension, ultimately reducing error by up to 48% without any change to the underlying model or its parameters.
CoFi: Coarse-to-Fine ICP for LiDAR Localization in an Efficient Long-lasting Point Cloud Map
Authors: Yecheng Lyu, Xinming Huang, Ziming Zhang
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

LiDAR odometry and localization has attracted increasing research interest in recent years. In the existing works, iterative closest point (ICP) is widely used since it is precise and efficient. Due to its non-convexity and its local iterative strategy, however, ICP-based method easily falls into local optima, which in turn calls for a precise initialization. In this paper, we propose CoFi, a Coarse-to-Fine ICP algorithm for LiDAR localization. Specifically, the proposed algorithm down-samples the input point sets under multiple voxel resolution, and gradually refines the transformation from the coarse point sets to the fine-grained point sets. In addition, we propose a map based LiDAR localization algorithm that extracts semantic feature points from the LiDAR frames and apply CoFi to estimate the pose on an efficient point cloud map. With the help of the Cylinder3D algorithm for LiDAR scan semantic segmentation, the proposed CoFi localization algorithm demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI odometry benchmark, with significant improvement over the literature.
Cascaded Cross MLP-Mixer GANs for Cross-View Image Translation
Authors: Bin Ren, Hao Tang, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Translation

It is hard to generate an image at target view well for previous cross-view image translation methods that directly adopt a simple encoder-decoder or U-Net structure, especially for drastically different views and severe deformation cases. To ease this problem, we propose a novel two-stage framework with a new Cascaded Cross MLP-Mixer (CrossMLP) sub-network in the first stage and one refined pixel-level loss in the second stage. In the first stage, the CrossMLP sub-network learns the latent transformation cues between image code and semantic map code via our novel CrossMLP blocks. Then the coarse results are generated progressively under the guidance of those cues. Moreover, in the second stage, we design a refined pixel-level loss that eases the noisy semantic label problem with more reasonable regularization in a more compact fashion for better optimization. Extensive experimental results on Dayton~\cite{vo2016localizing} and CVUSA~\cite{workman2015wide} datasets show that our method can generate significantly better results than state-of-the-art methods. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Amazingren/CrossMLP.
Hand-Object Contact Prediction via Motion-Based Pseudo-Labeling and Guided Progressive Label Correction
Authors: Takuma Yagi, Md Tasnimul Hasan, Yoichi Sato
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Every hand-object interaction begins with contact. Despite predicting the contact state between hands and objects is useful in understanding hand-object interactions, prior methods on hand-object analysis have assumed that the interacting hands and objects are known, and were not studied in detail. In this study, we introduce a video-based method for predicting contact between a hand and an object. Specifically, given a video and a pair of hand and object tracks, we predict a binary contact state (contact or no-contact) for each frame. However, annotating a large number of hand-object tracks and contact labels is costly. To overcome the difficulty, we propose a semi-supervised framework consisting of (i) automatic collection of training data with motion-based pseudo-labels and (ii) guided progressive label correction (gPLC), which corrects noisy pseudo-labels with a small amount of trusted data. We validated our framework's effectiveness on a newly built benchmark dataset for hand-object contact prediction and showed superior performance against existing baseline methods. Code and data are available at https://github.com/takumayagi/hand_object_contact_prediction.
Cross-Sim-NGF: FFT-Based Global Rigid Multimodal Alignment of Image Volumes using Normalized Gradient Fields
Authors: Johan Öfverstedt, Joakim Lindblad, Nataša Sladoje
Date: 2021-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization

Multimodal image alignment involves finding spatial correspondences between volumes varying in appearance and structure. Automated alignment methods are often based on local optimization that can be highly sensitive to their initialization. We propose a global optimization method for rigid multimodal 3D image alignment, based on a novel efficient algorithm for computing similarity of normalized gradient fields (NGF) in the frequency domain. We validate the method experimentally on a dataset comprised of 20 brain volumes acquired in four modalities (T1w, Flair, CT, [18F] FDG PET), synthetically displaced with known transformations. The proposed method exhibits excellent performance on all six possible modality combinations, and outperforms all four reference methods by a large margin. The method is fast; a 3.4Mvoxel global rigid alignment requires approximately 40 seconds of computation, and the proposed algorithm outperforms a direct algorithm for the same task by more than three orders of magnitude. Open-source implementation is provided.
On games and simulators as a platform for development of artificial intelligence for command and control
Authors: Vinicius G. Goecks, Nicholas Waytowich, Derrik E. Asher, Song Jun Park, Mark Mittrick, John Richardson, Manuel Vindiola, Anne Logie, Mark Dennison, Theron Trout, Priya Narayanan, Alexander Kott
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Real-Time Strategy Games, Starcraft, Starcraft II

Games and simulators can be a valuable platform to execute complex multi-agent, multiplayer, imperfect information scenarios with significant parallels to military applications: multiple participants manage resources and make decisions that command assets to secure specific areas of a map or neutralize opposing forces. These characteristics have attracted the artificial intelligence (AI) community by supporting development of algorithms with complex benchmarks and the capability to rapidly iterate over new ideas. The success of artificial intelligence algorithms in real-time strategy games such as StarCraft II have also attracted the attention of the military research community aiming to explore similar techniques in military counterpart scenarios. Aiming to bridge the connection between games and military applications, this work discusses past and current efforts on how games and simulators, together with the artificial intelligence algorithms, have been adapted to simulate certain aspects of military missions and how they might impact the future battlefield. This paper also investigates how advances in virtual reality and visual augmentation systems open new possibilities in human interfaces with gaming platforms and their military parallels.
Survival-oriented embeddings for improving accessibility to complex data structures
Authors: Tobias Weber, Michael Ingrisch, Matthias Fabritius, Bernd Bischl, David Rügamer
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Prognosis, Survival Analysis

Deep learning excels in the analysis of unstructured data and recent advancements allow to extend these techniques to survival analysis. In the context of clinical radiology, this enables, e.g., to relate unstructured volumetric images to a risk score or a prognosis of life expectancy and support clinical decision making. Medical applications are, however, associated with high criticality and consequently, neither medical personnel nor patients do usually accept black box models as reason or basis for decisions. Apart from averseness to new technologies, this is due to missing interpretability, transparency and accountability of many machine learning methods. We propose a hazard-regularized variational autoencoder that supports straightforward interpretation of deep neural architectures in the context of survival analysis, a field highly relevant in healthcare. We apply the proposed approach to abdominal CT scans of patients with liver tumors and their corresponding survival times.
Transformer Acceleration with Dynamic Sparse Attention
Authors: Liu Liu, Zheng Qu, Zhaodong Chen, Yufei Ding, Yuan Xie
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00

Transformers are the mainstream of NLP applications and are becoming increasingly popular in other domains such as Computer Vision. Despite the improvements in model quality, the enormous computation costs make Transformers difficult at deployment, especially when the sequence length is large in emerging applications. Processing attention mechanism as the essential component of Transformer is the bottleneck of execution due to the quadratic complexity. Prior art explores sparse patterns in attention to support long sequence modeling, but those pieces of work are on static or fixed patterns. We demonstrate that the sparse patterns are dynamic, depending on input sequences. Thus, we propose the Dynamic Sparse Attention (DSA) that can efficiently exploit the dynamic sparsity in the attention of Transformers. Compared with other methods, our approach can achieve better trade-offs between accuracy and model complexity. Moving forward, we identify challenges and provide solutions to implement DSA on existing hardware (GPUs) and specialized hardware in order to achieve practical speedup and efficiency improvements for Transformer execution.
One-Shot Transfer Learning of Physics-Informed Neural Networks
Authors: Shaan Desai, Marios Mattheakis, Hayden Joy, Pavlos Protopapas, Stephen Roberts
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Solving differential equations efficiently and accurately sits at the heart of progress in many areas of scientific research, from classical dynamical systems to quantum mechanics. There is a surge of interest in using Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to tackle such problems as they provide numerous benefits over traditional numerical approaches. Despite their potential benefits for solving differential equations, transfer learning has been under explored. In this study, we present a general framework for transfer learning PINNs that results in one-shot inference for linear systems of both ordinary and partial differential equations. This means that highly accurate solutions to many unknown differential equations can be obtained instantaneously without retraining an entire network. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed deep learning approach by solving several real-world problems, such as first- and second-order linear ordinary equations, the Poisson equation, and the time-dependent Schrodinger complex-value partial differential equation.
Actor-critic is implicitly biased towards high entropy optimal policies
Authors: Yuzheng Hu, Ziwei Ji, Matus Telgarsky
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We show that the simplest actor-critic method -- a linear softmax policy updated with TD through interaction with a linear MDP, but featuring no explicit regularization or exploration -- does not merely find an optimal policy, but moreover prefers high entropy optimal policies. To demonstrate the strength of this bias, the algorithm not only has no regularization, no projections, and no exploration like $\epsilon$-greedy, but is moreover trained on a single trajectory with no resets. The key consequence of the high entropy bias is that uniform mixing assumptions on the MDP, which exist in some form in all prior work, can be dropped: the implicit regularization of the high entropy bias is enough to ensure that all chains mix and an optimal policy is reached with high probability. As auxiliary contributions, this work decouples concerns between the actor and critic by writing the actor update as an explicit mirror descent, provides tools to uniformly bound mixing times within KL balls of policy space, and provides a projection-free TD analysis with its own implicit bias which can be run from an unmixed starting distribution.
Modeling the AC Power Flow Equations with Optimally Compact Neural Networks: Application to Unit Commitment
Authors: Alyssa Kody, Samuel Chevalier, Spyros Chatzivasileiadis, Daniel Molzahn
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00

Nonlinear power flow constraints render a variety of power system optimization problems computationally intractable. Emerging research shows, however, that the nonlinear AC power flow equations can be successfully modeled using Neural Networks (NNs). These NNs can be exactly transformed into Mixed Integer Linear Programs (MILPs) and embedded inside challenging optimization problems, thus replacing nonlinearities that are intractable for many applications with tractable piecewise linear approximations. Such approaches, though, suffer from an explosion of the number of binary variables needed to represent the NN. Accordingly, this paper develops a technique for training an "optimally compact" NN, i.e., one that can represent the power flow equations with a sufficiently high degree of accuracy while still maintaining a tractable number of binary variables. We show that the resulting NN model is more expressive than both the DC and linearized power flow approximations when embedded inside of a challenging optimization problem (i.e., the AC unit commitment problem).
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Control of Stochastic Partial Differential Equations
Authors: Erfan Pirmorad, Faraz Khoshbakhtian, Farnam Mansouri, Amir-Massoud Farahmand
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop DLDE 2021 12
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In many areas, such as the physical sciences, life sciences, and finance, control approaches are used to achieve a desired goal in complex dynamical systems governed by differential equations. In this work we formulate the problem of controlling stochastic partial differential equations (SPDE) as a reinforcement learning problem. We present a learning-based, distributed control approach for online control of a system of SPDEs with high dimensional state-action space using deep deterministic policy gradient method. We tested the performance of our method on the problem of controlling the stochastic Burgers' equation, describing a turbulent fluid flow in an infinitely large domain.
Principal Component Analysis versus Factor Analysis
Authors: Zenon Gniazdowski
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00

The article discusses selected problems related to both principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis (FA). In particular, both types of analysis were compared. A vector interpretation for both PCA and FA has also been proposed. The problem of determining the number of principal components in PCA and factors in FA was discussed in detail. A new criterion for determining the number of factors and principal components is discussed, which will allow to present most of the variance of each of the analyzed primary variables. An efficient algorithm for determining the number of factors in FA, which complies with this criterion, was also proposed. This algorithm was adapted to find the number of principal components in PCA. It was also proposed to modify the PCA algorithm using a new method of determining the number of principal components. The obtained results were discussed.
User-Level Private Learning via Correlated Sampling
Authors: Badih Ghazi, Ravi Kumar, Pasin Manurangsi
Date: 2021-10-21 00:00:00

Most works in learning with differential privacy (DP) have focused on the setting where each user has a single sample. In this work, we consider the setting where each user holds $m$ samples and the privacy protection is enforced at the level of each user's data. We show that, in this setting, we may learn with a much fewer number of users. Specifically, we show that, as long as each user receives sufficiently many samples, we can learn any privately learnable class via an $(\epsilon, \delta)$-DP algorithm using only $O(\log(1/\delta)/\epsilon)$ users. For $\epsilon$-DP algorithms, we show that we can learn using only $O_{\epsilon}(d)$ users even in the local model, where $d$ is the probabilistic representation dimension. In both cases, we show a nearly-matching lower bound on the number of users required. A crucial component of our results is a generalization of global stability [Bun et al., FOCS 2020] that allows the use of public randomness. Under this relaxed notion, we employ a correlated sampling strategy to show that the global stability can be boosted to be arbitrarily close to one, at a polynomial expense in the number of samples.