pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Group-CAM: Group Score-Weighted Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks
Authors: Qinglong Zhang, Lu Rao, YuBin Yang
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose an efficient saliency map generation method, called Group score-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Group-CAM), which adopts the "split-transform-merge" strategy to generate saliency maps. Specifically, for an input image, the class activations are firstly split into groups. In each group, the sub-activations are summed and de-noised as an initial mask. After that, the initial masks are transformed with meaningful perturbations and then applied to preserve sub-pixels of the input (i.e., masked inputs), which are then fed into the network to calculate the confidence scores. Finally, the initial masks are weighted summed to form the final saliency map, where the weights are confidence scores produced by the masked inputs. Group-CAM is efficient yet effective, which only requires dozens of queries to the network while producing target-related saliency maps. As a result, Group-CAM can be served as an effective data augment trick for fine-tuning the networks. We comprehensively evaluate the performance of Group-CAM on common-used benchmarks, including deletion and insertion tests on ImageNet-1k, and pointing game tests on COCO2017. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Group-CAM achieves better visual performance than the current state-of-the-art explanation approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/wofmanaf/Group-CAM.
Generative-Adversarial-Networks-based Ghost Recognition
Authors: Yuchen He, Yibing Chen, Sheng Luo, Hui Chen, Jianxing Li, Zhuo Xu
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

Nowadays, target recognition technique plays an important role in many fields. However, the current target image information based methods suffer from the influence of image quality and the time cost of image reconstruction. In this paper, we propose a novel imaging-free target recognition method combining ghost imaging (GI) and generative adversarial networks (GAN). Based on the mechanism of GI, a set of random speckles sequence is employed to illuminate target, and a bucket detector without resolution is utilized to receive echo signal. The bucket signal sequence formed after continuous detections is constructed into a bucket signal array, which is regarded as the sample of GAN. Then, conditional GAN is used to map bucket signal array and target category. In practical application, the speckles sequence in training step is employed to illuminate target, and the bucket signal array is input GAN for recognition. The proposed method can improve the problems caused by conventional recognition methods that based on target image information, and provide a certain turbulence-free ability. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method achieves promising performance.
Searching for waveforms on spatially-filtered epileptic ECoG
Authors: Carlos H. Mendoza-Cardenas, Austin J. Brockmeier
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Seizure prediction

Seizures are one of the defining symptoms in patients with epilepsy, and due to their unannounced occurrence, they can pose a severe risk for the individual that suffers it. New research efforts are showing a promising future for the prediction and preemption of imminent seizures, and with those efforts, a vast and diverse set of features have been proposed for seizure prediction algorithms. However, the data-driven discovery of nonsinusoidal waveforms for seizure prediction is lacking in the literature, which is in stark contrast with recent works that show the close connection between the waveform morphology of neural oscillations and the physiology and pathophysiology of the brain, and especially its use in effectively discriminating between normal and abnormal oscillations in electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings of epileptic patients. Here, we explore a scalable, energy-guided waveform search strategy on spatially-projected continuous multi-day ECoG data sets. Our work shows that data-driven waveform learning methods have the potential to not only contribute features with predictive power for seizure prediction, but also to facilitate the discovery of oscillatory patterns that could contribute to our understanding of the pathophysiology and etiology of seizures.
Hierarchical Deep CNN Feature Set-Based Representation Learning for Robust Cross-Resolution Face Recognition
Authors: Guangwei Gao, Yi Yu, Jian Yang, Guo-Jun Qi, Meng Yang
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Representation Learning

Cross-resolution face recognition (CRFR), which is important in intelligent surveillance and biometric forensics, refers to the problem of matching a low-resolution (LR) probe face image against high-resolution (HR) gallery face images. Existing shallow learning-based and deep learning-based methods focus on mapping the HR-LR face pairs into a joint feature space where the resolution discrepancy is mitigated. However, little works consider how to extract and utilize the intermediate discriminative features from the noisy LR query faces to further mitigate the resolution discrepancy due to the resolution limitations. In this study, we desire to fully exploit the multi-level deep convolutional neural network (CNN) feature set for robust CRFR. In particular, our contributions are threefold. (i) To learn more robust and discriminative features, we desire to adaptively fuse the contextual features from different layers. (ii) To fully exploit these contextual features, we design a feature set-based representation learning (FSRL) scheme to collaboratively represent the hierarchical features for more accurate recognition. Moreover, FSRL utilizes the primitive form of feature maps to keep the latent structural information, especially in noisy cases. (iii) To further promote the recognition performance, we desire to fuse the hierarchical recognition outputs from different stages. Meanwhile, the discriminability from different scales can also be fully integrated. By exploiting these advantages, the efficiency of the proposed method can be delivered. Experimental results on several face datasets have verified the superiority of the presented algorithm to the other competitive CRFR approaches.
Autism Spectrum Disorder Screening Using Discriminative Brain Sub-Networks: An Entropic Approach
Authors: Mohammad Amin, Farshad Safaei
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Autism is one of the most important neurological disorders which leads to problems in a person's social interactions. Improvement of brain imaging technologies and techniques help us to build brain structural and functional networks. Finding networks topology pattern in each of the groups (autism and healthy control) can aid us to achieve an autism disorder screening model. In the present study, we have utilized the genetic algorithm to extract a discriminative sub-network that represents differences between two groups better. In the fitness evaluation phase, for each sub-network, a machine learning model was trained using various entropy features of the sub-network and its performance was measured. Proper model performance implies extracting a good discriminative sub-network. Network entropies can be used as network topological descriptors. The evaluation results indicate the acceptable performance of the proposed screening method based on extracted discriminative sub-networks and the machine learning models succeeded in obtaining a maximum accuracy of 73.1% in structural networks of the UCLA dataset, 82.2% in functional networks of the UCLA dataset, and 66.1% in functional networks of ABIDE datasets.
OTCE: A Transferability Metric for Cross-Domain Cross-Task Representations
Authors: Yang Tan, Yang Li, Shao-Lun Huang
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Model Selection, Transfer Learning

Transfer learning across heterogeneous data distributions (a.k.a. domains) and distinct tasks is a more general and challenging problem than conventional transfer learning, where either domains or tasks are assumed to be the same. While neural network based feature transfer is widely used in transfer learning applications, finding the optimal transfer strategy still requires time-consuming experiments and domain knowledge. We propose a transferability metric called Optimal Transport based Conditional Entropy (OTCE), to analytically predict the transfer performance for supervised classification tasks in such cross-domain and cross-task feature transfer settings. Our OTCE score characterizes transferability as a combination of domain difference and task difference, and explicitly evaluates them from data in a unified framework. Specifically, we use optimal transport to estimate domain difference and the optimal coupling between source and target distributions, which is then used to derive the conditional entropy of the target task (task difference). Experiments on the largest cross-domain dataset DomainNet and Office31 demonstrate that OTCE shows an average of 21% gain in the correlation with the ground truth transfer accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. We also investigate two applications of the OTCE score including source model selection and multi-source feature fusion.
Model Predictive Actor-Critic: Accelerating Robot Skill Acquisition with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Andrew S. Morgan, Daljeet Nandha, Georgia Chalvatzaki, Carlo D'Eramo, Aaron M. Dollar, Jan Peters
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Model Predictive Control, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Substantial advancements to model-based reinforcement learning algorithms have been impeded by the model-bias induced by the collected data, which generally hurts performance. Meanwhile, their inherent sample efficiency warrants utility for most robot applications, limiting potential damage to the robot and its environment during training. Inspired by information theoretic model predictive control and advances in deep reinforcement learning, we introduce Model Predictive Actor-Critic (MoPAC), a hybrid model-based/model-free method that combines model predictive rollouts with policy optimization as to mitigate model bias. MoPAC leverages optimal trajectories to guide policy learning, but explores via its model-free method, allowing the algorithm to learn more expressive dynamics models. This combination guarantees optimal skill learning up to an approximation error and reduces necessary physical interaction with the environment, making it suitable for real-robot training. We provide extensive results showcasing how our proposed method generally outperforms current state-of-the-art and conclude by evaluating MoPAC for learning on a physical robotic hand performing valve rotation and finger gaiting--a task that requires grasping, manipulation, and then regrasping of an object.
Universal Representation Learning from Multiple Domains for Few-shot Classification
Authors: Wei-Hong Li, Xialei Liu, Hakan Bilen
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Image Classification, General Classification, Representation Learning

In this paper, we look at the problem of few-shot classification that aims to learn a classifier for previously unseen classes and domains from few labeled samples. Recent methods use adaptation networks for aligning their features to new domains or select the relevant features from multiple domain-specific feature extractors. In this work, we propose to learn a single set of universal deep representations by distilling knowledge of multiple separately trained networks after co-aligning their features with the help of adapters and centered kernel alignment. We show that the universal representations can be further refined for previously unseen domains by an efficient adaptation step in a similar spirit to distance learning methods. We rigorously evaluate our model in the recent Meta-Dataset benchmark and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms the previous methods while being more efficient. Our code will be available at https://github.com/VICO-UoE/URL.
Self-Imitation Learning by Planning
Authors: Sha Luo, Hamidreza Kasaei, Lambert Schomaker
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Motion Planning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Imitation learning (IL) enables robots to acquire skills quickly by transferring expert knowledge, which is widely adopted in reinforcement learning (RL) to initialize exploration. However, in long-horizon motion planning tasks, a challenging problem in deploying IL and RL methods is how to generate and collect massive, broadly distributed data such that these methods can generalize effectively. In this work, we solve this problem using our proposed approach called {self-imitation learning by planning (SILP)}, where demonstration data are collected automatically by planning on the visited states from the current policy. SILP is inspired by the observation that successfully visited states in the early reinforcement learning stage are collision-free nodes in the graph-search based motion planner, so we can plan and relabel robot's own trials as demonstrations for policy learning. Due to these self-generated demonstrations, we relieve the human operator from the laborious data preparation process required by IL and RL methods in solving complex motion planning tasks. The evaluation results show that our SILP method achieves higher success rates and enhances sample efficiency compared to selected baselines, and the policy learned in simulation performs well in a real-world placement task with changing goals and obstacles.
Deep Learning with robustness to missing data: A novel approach to the detection of COVID-19
Authors: Erdi Çallı, Keelin Murphy, Steef Kurstjens, Tijs Samson, Robert Herpers, Henk Smits, Matthieu Rutten, Bram van Ginneken
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

In the context of the current global pandemic and the limitations of the RT-PCR test, we propose a novel deep learning architecture, DFCN (Denoising Fully Connected Network). Since medical facilities around the world differ enormously in what laboratory tests or chest imaging may be available, DFCN is designed to be robust to missing input data. An ablation study extensively evaluates the performance benefits of the DFCN as well as its robustness to missing inputs. Data from 1088 patients with confirmed RT-PCR results are obtained from two independent medical facilities. The data includes results from 27 laboratory tests and a chest x-ray scored by a deep learning model. Training and test datasets are taken from different medical facilities. Data is made publicly available. The performance of DFCN in predicting the RT-PCR result is compared with 3 related architectures as well as a Random Forest baseline. All models are trained with varying levels of masked input data to encourage robustness to missing inputs. Missing data is simulated at test time by masking inputs randomly. DFCN outperforms all other models with statistical significance using random subsets of input data with 2-27 available inputs. When all 28 inputs are available DFCN obtains an AUC of 0.924, higher than any other model. Furthermore, with clinically meaningful subsets of parameters consisting of just 6 and 7 inputs respectively, DFCN achieves higher AUCs than any other model, with values of 0.909 and 0.919.
3D3L: Deep Learned 3D Keypoint Detection and Description for LiDARs
Authors: Dominic Streiff, Lukas Bernreiter, Florian Tschopp, Marius Fehr, Roland Siegwart
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Keypoint Detection

With the advent of powerful, light-weight 3D LiDARs, they have become the hearth of many navigation and SLAM algorithms on various autonomous systems. Pointcloud registration methods working with unstructured pointclouds such as ICP are often computationally expensive or require a good initial guess. Furthermore, 3D feature-based registration methods have never quite reached the robustness of 2D methods in visual SLAM. With the continuously increasing resolution of LiDAR range images, these 2D methods not only become applicable but should exploit the illumination-independent modalities that come with it, such as depth and intensity. In visual SLAM, deep learned 2D features and descriptors perform exceptionally well compared to traditional methods. In this publication, we use a state-of-the-art 2D feature network as a basis for 3D3L, exploiting both intensity and depth of LiDAR range images to extract powerful 3D features. Our results show that these keypoints and descriptors extracted from LiDAR scan images outperform state-of-the-art on different benchmark metrics and allow for robust scan-to-scan alignment as well as global localization.
Model Order Reduction based on Runge-Kutta Neural Network
Authors: Qinyu Zhuang, Juan Manuel Lorenzi, Hans-Joachim Bungartz, Dirk Hartmann
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Model Order Reduction (MOR) methods enable the generation of real-time-capable digital twins, which can enable various novel value streams in industry. While traditional projection-based methods are robust and accurate for linear problems, incorporating Machine Learning to deal with nonlinearity becomes a new choice for reducing complex problems. Such methods usually consist of two steps. The first step is dimension reduction by projection-based method, and the second is the model reconstruction by Neural Network. In this work, we apply some modifications for both steps respectively and investigate how they are impacted by testing with three simulation models. In all cases Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) is used for dimension reduction. For this step, the effects of generating the input snapshot database with constant input parameters is compared with time-dependent input parameters. For the model reconstruction step, two types of neural network architectures are compared: Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Runge-Kutta Neural Network (RKNN). The MLP learns the system state directly while RKNN learns the derivative of system state and predicts the new state as a Runge-Kutta integrator.
Bertinho: Galician BERT Representations
Authors: David Vilares, Marcos Garcia, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, GPU, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), POS, POS Tagging

This paper presents a monolingual BERT model for Galician. We follow the recent trend that shows that it is feasible to build robust monolingual BERT models even for relatively low-resource languages, while performing better than the well-known official multilingual BERT (mBERT). More particularly, we release two monolingual Galician BERT models, built using 6 and 12 transformer layers, respectively; trained with limited resources (~45 million tokens on a single GPU of 24GB). We then provide an exhaustive evaluation on a number of tasks such as POS-tagging, dependency parsing and named entity recognition. For this purpose, all these tasks are cast in a pure sequence labeling setup in order to run BERT without the need to include any additional layers on top of it (we only use an output classification layer to map the contextualized representations into the predicted label). The experiments show that our models, especially the 12-layer one, outperform the results of mBERT in most tasks.
Improving Playtesting Coverage via Curiosity Driven Reinforcement Learning Agents
Authors: Camilo Gordillo, Joakim Bergdahl, Konrad Tollmar, Linus Gisslén
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

As modern games continue growing both in size and complexity, it has become more challenging to ensure that all the relevant content is tested and that any potential issue is properly identified and fixed. Attempting to maximize testing coverage using only human participants, however, results in a tedious and hard to orchestrate process which normally slows down the development cycle. Complementing playtesting via autonomous agents has shown great promise accelerating and simplifying this process. This paper addresses the problem of automatically exploring and testing a given scenario using reinforcement learning agents trained to maximize game state coverage. Each of these agents is rewarded based on the novelty of its actions, thus encouraging a curious and exploratory behaviour on a complex 3D scenario where previously proposed exploration techniques perform poorly. The curious agents are able to learn the complex navigation mechanics required to reach the different areas around the map, thus providing the necessary data to identify potential issues. Moreover, the paper also explores different visualization strategies and evaluates how to make better use of the collected data to drive design decisions and to recognize possible problems and oversights.
Active Structure Learning of Bayesian Networks in an Observational Setting
Authors: Noa Ben-David, Sivan Sabato
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

We study active structure learning of Bayesian networks in an observational setting, in which there are external limitations on the number of variable values that can be observed from the same sample. Random samples are drawn from the joint distribution of the network variables, and the algorithm iteratively selects which variables to observe in the next sample. We propose a new active learning algorithm for this setting, that finds with a high probability a structure with a score that is $\epsilon$-close to the optimal score. We show that for a class of distributions that we term stable, a sample complexity reduction of up to a factor of $\widetilde{\Omega}(d^3)$ can be obtained, where $d$ is the number of network variables. We further show that in the worst case, the sample complexity of the active algorithm is guaranteed to be almost the same as that of a naive baseline algorithm. To supplement the theoretical results, we report experiments that compare the performance of the new active algorithm to the naive baseline and demonstrate the sample complexity improvements. Code for the algorithm and for the experiments is provided at https://github.com/noabdavid/activeBNSL.
Interpretable Approximation of High-Dimensional Data
Authors: Daniel Potts, Michael Schmischke
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In this paper we apply the previously introduced approximation method based on the ANOVA (analysis of variance) decomposition and Grouped Transformations to synthetic and real data. The advantage of this method is the interpretability of the approximation, i.e., the ability to rank the importance of the attribute interactions or the variable couplings. Moreover, we are able to generate an attribute ranking to identify unimportant variables and reduce the dimensionality of the problem. We compare the method to other approaches on publicly available benchmark datasets.
Multi-frame Super-resolution from Noisy Data
Authors: Kireeti Bodduna, Joachim Weickert
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Frame Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Obtaining high resolution images from low resolution data with clipped noise is algorithmically challenging due to the ill-posed nature of the problem. So far such problems have hardly been tackled, and the few existing approaches use simplistic regularisers. We show the usefulness of two adaptive regularisers based on anisotropic diffusion ideas: Apart from evaluating the classical edge-enhancing anisotropic diffusion regulariser, we introduce a novel non-local one with one-sided differences and superior performance. It is termed sector diffusion. We combine it with all six variants of the classical super-resolution observational model that arise from permutations of its three operators for warping, blurring, and downsampling. Surprisingly, the evaluation in a practically relevant noisy scenario produces a different ranking than the one in the noise-free setting in our previous work (SSVM 2017).