pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pyramidal Convolution: Rethinking Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition
Authors: Ionut Cosmin Duta, Li Liu, Fan Zhu, Ling Shao
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Parsing, Semantic Segmentation, Video Classification, Video Recognition

This work introduces pyramidal convolution (PyConv), which is capable of processing the input at multiple filter scales. PyConv contains a pyramid of kernels, where each level involves different types of filters with varying size and depth, which are able to capture different levels of details in the scene. On top of these improved recognition capabilities, PyConv is also efficient and, with our formulation, it does not increase the computational cost and parameters compared to standard convolution. Moreover, it is very flexible and extensible, providing a large space of potential network architectures for different applications. PyConv has the potential to impact nearly every computer vision task and, in this work, we present different architectures based on PyConv for four main tasks on visual recognition: image classification, video action classification/recognition, object detection and semantic image segmentation/parsing. Our approach shows significant improvements over all these core tasks in comparison with the baselines. For instance, on image recognition, our 50-layers network outperforms in terms of recognition performance on ImageNet dataset its counterpart baseline ResNet with 152 layers, while having 2.39 times less parameters, 2.52 times lower computational complexity and more than 3 times less layers. On image segmentation, our novel framework sets a new state-of-the-art on the challenging ADE20K benchmark for scene parsing. Code is available at: https://github.com/iduta/pyconv
IQA: Interactive Query Construction in Semantic Question Answering Systems
Authors: Hamid Zafar, Mohnish Dubey, Jens Lehmann, Elena Demidova
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Semantic Question Answering (SQA) systems automatically interpret user questions expressed in a natural language in terms of semantic queries. This process involves uncertainty, such that the resulting queries do not always accurately match the user intent, especially for more complex and less common questions. In this article, we aim to empower users in guiding SQA systems towards the intended semantic queries through interaction. We introduce IQA - an interaction scheme for SQA pipelines. This scheme facilitates seamless integration of user feedback in the question answering process and relies on Option Gain - a novel metric that enables efficient and intuitive user interaction. Our evaluation shows that using the proposed scheme, even a small number of user interactions can lead to significant improvements in the performance of SQA systems.
Chaos may enhance expressivity in cerebellar granular layer
Authors: Keita Tokuda, Naoya Fujiwara, Akihito Sudo, Yuichi Katori
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Recent evidence suggests that Golgi cells in the cerebellar granular layer are densely connected to each other with massive gap junctions. Here, we propose that the massive gap junctions between the Golgi cells contribute to the representational complexity of the granular layer of the cerebellum by inducing chaotic dynamics. We construct a model of cerebellar granular layer with diffusion coupling through gap junctions between the Golgi cells, and evaluate the representational capability of the network with the reservoir computing framework. First, we show that the chaotic dynamics induced by diffusion coupling results in complex output patterns containing a wide range of frequency components. Second, the long non-recursive time series of the reservoir represents the passage of time from an external input. These properties of the reservoir enable mapping different spatial inputs into different temporal patterns.
Remote Sensing Image Scene Classification with Deep Neural Networks in JPEG 2000 Compressed Domain
Authors: Akshara Preethy Byju, Gencer Sumbul, Begüm Demir, Lorenzo Bruzzone
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Scene Classification

To reduce the storage requirements, remote sensing (RS) images are usually stored in compressed format. Existing scene classification approaches using deep neural networks (DNNs) require to fully decompress the images, which is a computationally demanding task in operational applications. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a novel approach to achieve scene classification in JPEG 2000 compressed RS images. The proposed approach consists of two main steps: i) approximation of the finer resolution sub-bands of reversible biorthogonal wavelet filters used in JPEG 2000; and ii) characterization of the high-level semantic content of approximated wavelet sub-bands and scene classification based on the learnt descriptors. This is achieved by taking codestreams associated with the coarsest resolution wavelet sub-band as input to approximate finer resolution sub-bands using a number of transposed convolutional layers. Then, a series of convolutional layers models the high-level semantic content of the approximated wavelet sub-band. Thus, the proposed approach models the multiresolution paradigm given in the JPEG 2000 compression algorithm in an end-to-end trainable unified neural network. In the classification stage, the proposed approach takes only the coarsest resolution wavelet sub-bands as input, thereby reducing the time required to apply decoding. Experimental results performed on two benchmark aerial image archives demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly reduces the computational time with similar classification accuracies when compared to traditional RS scene classification approaches (which requires full image decompression).
Memory Transformer
Authors: Mikhail S. Burtsev, Yuri Kuratov, Anton Peganov, Grigory V. Sapunov
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension, Text Summarization

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing tasks. The self-attention architecture allows transformer to combine information from all elements of a sequence into context-aware representations. However, information about the context is stored mostly in the same element-wise representations. This might limit the processing of properties related to the sequence as a whole more difficult. Adding trainable memory to selectively store local as well as global representations of a sequence is a promising direction to improve the Transformer model. Memory-augmented neural networks (MANNs) extend traditional neural architectures with general-purpose memory for representations. MANNs have demonstrated the capability to learn simple algorithms like Copy or Reverse and can be successfully trained via backpropagation on diverse tasks from question answering to language modeling outperforming RNNs and LSTMs of comparable complexity. In this work, we propose and study few extensions of the Transformer baseline (1) by adding memory tokens to store non-local representations, (2) creating memory bottleneck for the global information, (3) controlling memory update with dedicated layer. We evaluate these memory augmented Transformers and demonstrate that presence of memory positively correlates with the model performance for machine translation and language modelling tasks. Augmentation of pre-trained masked language model with memory tokens shows mixed results for tasks from GLUE benchmark. Visualization of attention patterns over the memory suggest that it improves the model's ability to process a global context.
Neuro-Symbolic Visual Reasoning: Disentangling "Visual" from "Reasoning"
Authors: Saeed Amizadeh, Hamid Palangi, Oleksandr Polozov, Yichen Huang, Kazuhito Koishida
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Graph Generation, Question Answering, Representation Learning, Scene Graph Generation, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Visual Reasoning

Visual reasoning tasks such as visual question answering (VQA) require an interplay of visual perception with reasoning about the question semantics grounded in perception. However, recent advances in this area are still primarily driven by perception improvements (e.g. scene graph generation) rather than reasoning. Neuro-symbolic models such as Neural Module Networks bring the benefits of compositional reasoning to VQA, but they are still entangled with visual representation learning, and thus neural reasoning is hard to improve and assess on its own. To address this, we propose (1) a framework to isolate and evaluate the reasoning aspect of VQA separately from its perception, and (2) a novel top-down calibration technique that allows the model to answer reasoning questions even with imperfect perception. To this end, we introduce a differentiable first-order logic formalism for VQA that explicitly decouples question answering from visual perception. On the challenging GQA dataset, this framework is used to perform in-depth, disentangled comparisons between well-known VQA models leading to informative insights regarding the participating models as well as the task.
Sarcasm Detection in Tweets with BERT and GloVe Embeddings
Authors: Akshay Khatri, Pranav P, Dr. Anand Kumar M
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Sarcasm Detection

Sarcasm is a form of communication in whichthe person states opposite of what he actually means. It is ambiguous in nature. In this paper, we propose using machine learning techniques with BERT and GloVe embeddings to detect sarcasm in tweets. The dataset is preprocessed before extracting the embeddings. The proposed model also uses the context in which the user is reacting to along with his actual response.
Improving Query Safety at Pinterest
Authors: Abhijit Mahabal, Yinrui Li, Rajat Raina, Daniel Sun, Revati Mahajan, Jure Leskovec
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Query recommendations in search engines is a double edged sword, with undeniable benefits but potential of harm. Identifying unsafe queries is necessary to protect users from inappropriate query suggestions. However, identifying these is non-trivial because of the linguistic diversity resulting from large vocabularies, social-group-specific slang and typos, and because the inappropriateness of a term depends on the context. Here we formulate the problem as query-set expansion, where we are given a small and potentially biased seed set and the aim is to identify a diverse set of semantically related queries. We present PinSets, a system for query-set expansion, which applies a simple yet powerful mechanism to search user sessions, expanding a tiny seed set into thousands of related queries at nearly perfect precision, deep into the tail, along with explanations that are easy to interpret. PinSets owes its high quality expansion to using a hybrid of textual and behavioral techniques (i.e., treating queries both as compositional and as black boxes). Experiments show that, for the domain of drugs-related queries, PinSets expands 20 seed queries into 15,670 positive training examples at over 99\% precision. The generated expansions have diverse vocabulary and correctly handles words with ambiguous safety. PinSets decreased unsafe query suggestions at Pinterest by 90\%.
G-image Segmentation: Similarity-preserving Fuzzy C-Means with Spatial Information Constraint in Wavelet Space
Authors: Cong Wang, Witold Pedrycz, Zhiwu Li, Mengchu Zhou, Shuzhi Sam Ge
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

G-images refer to image data defined on irregular graph domains. This work elaborates a similarity-preserving Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) algorithm for G-image segmentation and aims to develop techniques and tools for segmenting G-images. To preserve the membership similarity between an arbitrary image pixel and its neighbors, a Kullback-Leibler divergence term on membership partition is introduced as a part of FCM. As a result, similarity-preserving FCM is developed by considering spatial information of image pixels for its robustness enhancement. Due to superior characteristics of a wavelet space, the proposed FCM is performed in this space rather than Euclidean one used in conventional FCM to secure its high robustness. Experiments on synthetic and real-world G-images demonstrate that it indeed achieves higher robustness and performance than the state-of-the-art FCM algorithms. Moreover, it requires less computation than most of them.
Functional differentiations in evolutionary reservoir computing networks
Authors: Yutaka Yamaguti, Ichiro Tsuda
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

We propose an extended reservoir computer that shows the functional differentiation of neurons. The reservoir computer is developed to enable changing of the internal reservoir using evolutionary dynamics, and we call it an evolutionary reservoir computer. To develop neuronal units to show specificity, depending on the input information, the internal dynamics should be controlled to produce contracting dynamics after expanding dynamics. Expanding dynamics magnifies the difference of input information, while contracting dynamics contributes to forming clusters of input information, thereby producing multiple attractors. The simultaneous appearance of both dynamics indicates the existence of chaos. In contrast, sequential appearance of these dynamics during finite time intervals may induce functional differentiations. In this paper, we show how specific neuronal units are yielded in the evolutionary reservoir computer.
Blind Descent: A Prequel to Gradient Descent
Authors: Akshat Gupta, Prasad N R
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00

We describe an alternative learning method for neural networks, which we call Blind Descent. By design, Blind Descent does not face problems like exploding or vanishing gradients. In Blind Descent, gradients are not used to guide the learning process. In this paper, we present Blind Descent as a more fundamental learning process compared to gradient descent. We also show that gradient descent can be seen as a specific case of the Blind Descent algorithm. We also train two neural network architectures, a multilayer perceptron and a convolutional neural network, using the most general Blind Descent algorithm to demonstrate a proof of concept.
Federated Learning Meets Multi-objective Optimization
Authors: Zeou Hu, Kiarash Shaloudegi, Guojun Zhang, Yao-Liang Yu
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Federated Learning

Federated learning has emerged as a promising, massively distributed way to train a joint deep model over large amounts of edge devices while keeping private user data strictly on device. In this work, motivated from ensuring fairness among users and robustness against malicious adversaries, we formulate federated learning as multi-objective optimization and propose a new algorithm FedMGDA+ that is guaranteed to converge to Pareto stationary solutions. FedMGDA+ is simple to implement, has fewer hyperparameters to tune, and refrains from sacrificing the performance of any participating user. We establish the convergence properties of FedMGDA+ and point out its connections to existing approaches. Extensive experiments on a variety of datasets confirm that FedMGDA+ compares favorably against state-of-the-art.
Recovering Accurate Labeling Information from Partially Valid Data for Effective Multi-Label Learning
Authors: Xi-Ming Li, Yang Wang
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Label Learning, valid

Partial Multi-label Learning (PML) aims to induce the multi-label predictor from datasets with noisy supervision, where each training instance is associated with several candidate labels but only partially valid. To address the noisy issue, the existing PML methods basically recover the ground-truth labels by leveraging the ground-truth confidence of the candidate label, \ie the likelihood of a candidate label being a ground-truth one. However, they neglect the information from non-candidate labels, which potentially contributes to the ground-truth label recovery. In this paper, we propose to recover the ground-truth labels, \ie estimating the ground-truth confidences, from the label enrichment, composed of the relevance degrees of candidate labels and irrelevance degrees of non-candidate labels. Upon this observation, we further develop a novel two-stage PML method, namely \emph{\underline{P}artial \underline{M}ulti-\underline{L}abel \underline{L}earning with \underline{L}abel \underline{E}nrichment-\underline{R}ecovery} (\baby), where in the first stage, it estimates the label enrichment with unconstrained label propagation, then jointly learns the ground-truth confidence and multi-label predictor given the label enrichment. Experimental results validate that \baby outperforms the state-of-the-art PML methods.
Paying more attention to snapshots of Iterative Pruning: Improving Model Compression via Ensemble Distillation
Authors: Duong H. Le, Trung-Nhan Vo, Nam Thoai
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: BMVC 2020 8
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Network Pruning

Network pruning is one of the most dominant methods for reducing the heavy inference cost of deep neural networks. Existing methods often iteratively prune networks to attain high compression ratio without incurring significant loss in performance. However, we argue that conventional methods for retraining pruned networks (i.e., using small, fixed learning rate) are inadequate as they completely ignore the benefits from snapshots of iterative pruning. In this work, we show that strong ensembles can be constructed from snapshots of iterative pruning, which achieve competitive performance and vary in network structure. Furthermore, we present simple, general and effective pipeline that generates strong ensembles of networks during pruning with large learning rate restarting, and utilizes knowledge distillation with those ensembles to improve the predictive power of compact models. In standard image classification benchmarks such as CIFAR and Tiny-Imagenet, we advance state-of-the-art pruning ratio of structured pruning by integrating simple l1-norm filters pruning into our pipeline. Specifically, we reduce 75-80% of total parameters and 65-70% MACs of numerous variants of ResNet architectures while having comparable or better performance than that of original networks. Code associate with this paper is made publicly available at https://github.com/lehduong/kesi.
Unsupervised Vehicle Re-identification with Progressive Adaptation
Authors: Jinjia Peng, Yang Wang, Huibing Wang, Zhao Zhang, Xianping Fu, Meng Wang
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Vehicle Re-Identification, Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle re-identification (reID) aims at identifying vehicles across different non-overlapping cameras views. The existing methods heavily relied on well-labeled datasets for ideal performance, which inevitably causes fateful drop due to the severe domain bias between the training domain and the real-world scenes; worse still, these approaches required full annotations, which is labor-consuming. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel progressive adaptation learning method for vehicle reID, named PAL, which infers from the abundant data without annotations. For PAL, a data adaptation module is employed for source domain, which generates the images with similar data distribution to unlabeled target domain as ``pseudo target samples''. These pseudo samples are combined with the unlabeled samples that are selected by a dynamic sampling strategy to make training faster. We further proposed a weighted label smoothing (WLS) loss, which considers the similarity between samples with different clusters to balance the confidence of pseudo labels. Comprehensive experimental results validate the advantages of PAL on both VehicleID and VeRi-776 dataset.
Generating Adjacency-Constrained Subgoals in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Tianren Zhang, Shangqi Guo, Tian Tan, Xiaolin Hu, Feng Chen
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Goal-conditioned hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) is a promising approach for scaling up reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. However, it often suffers from training inefficiency as the action space of the high-level, i.e., the goal space, is often large. Searching in a large goal space poses difficulties for both high-level subgoal generation and low-level policy learning. In this paper, we show that this problem can be effectively alleviated by restricting the high-level action space from the whole goal space to a $k$-step adjacent region of the current state using an adjacency constraint. We theoretically prove that the proposed adjacency constraint preserves the optimal hierarchical policy in deterministic MDPs, and show that this constraint can be practically implemented by training an adjacency network that can discriminate between adjacent and non-adjacent subgoals. Experimental results on discrete and continuous control tasks show that incorporating the adjacency constraint improves the performance of state-of-the-art HRL approaches in both deterministic and stochastic environments.
Predicting Temporal Sets with Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Le Yu, Leilei Sun, Bowen Du, Chuanren Liu, Hui Xiong, Weifeng Lv
Date: 2020-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Time Series Analysis

Given a sequence of sets, where each set contains an arbitrary number of elements, the problem of temporal sets prediction aims to predict the elements in the subsequent set. In practice, temporal sets prediction is much more complex than predictive modelling of temporal events and time series, and is still an open problem. Many possible existing methods, if adapted for the problem of temporal sets prediction, usually follow a two-step strategy by first projecting temporal sets into latent representations and then learning a predictive model with the latent representations. The two-step approach often leads to information loss and unsatisfactory prediction performance. In this paper, we propose an integrated solution based on the deep neural networks for temporal sets prediction. A unique perspective of our approach is to learn element relationship by constructing set-level co-occurrence graph and then perform graph convolutions on the dynamic relationship graphs. Moreover, we design an attention-based module to adaptively learn the temporal dependency of elements and sets. Finally, we provide a gated updating mechanism to find the hidden shared patterns in different sequences and fuse both static and dynamic information to improve the prediction performance. Experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate that our approach can achieve competitive performances even with a portion of the training data and can outperform existing methods with a significant margin.