pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
When and How to Lift the Lockdown? Global COVID-19 Scenario Analysis and Policy Assessment using Compartmental Gaussian Processes
Authors: Zhaozhi Qian, Ahmed M. Alaa, Mihaela van der Schaar
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: counterfactual, Gaussian Processes, Variational Inference

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic has led many countries to impose unprecedented lockdown measures in order to slow down the outbreak. Questions on whether governments have acted promptly enough, and whether lockdown measures can be lifted soon have since been central in public discourse. Data-driven models that predict COVID-19 fatalities under different lockdown policy scenarios are essential for addressing these questions and informing governments on future policy directions. To this end, this paper develops a Bayesian model for predicting the effects of COVID-19 lockdown policies in a global context -- we treat each country as a distinct data point, and exploit variations of policies across countries to learn country-specific policy effects. Our model utilizes a two-layer Gaussian process (GP) prior -- the lower layer uses a compartmental SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infected, Recovered) model as a prior mean function with "country-and-policy-specific" parameters that capture fatality curves under "counterfactual" policies within each country, whereas the upper layer is shared across all countries, and learns lower-layer SEIR parameters as a function of a country's features and its policy indicators. Our model combines the solid mechanistic foundations of SEIR models (Bayesian priors) with the flexible data-driven modeling and gradient-based optimization routines of machine learning (Bayesian posteriors) -- i.e., the entire model is trained end-to-end via stochastic variational inference. We compare the projections of COVID-19 fatalities by our model with other models listed by the Center for Disease Control (CDC), and provide scenario analyses for various lockdown and reopening strategies highlighting their impact on COVID-19 fatalities.
A global method to identify trees outside of closed-canopy forests with medium-resolution satellite imagery
Authors: John Brandt, Fred Stolle
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00

Scattered trees outside of dense, closed-canopy forests are very important for carbon sequestration, supporting livelihoods, maintaining ecosystem integrity, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. In contrast to trees inside of closed-canopy forests, not much is known about the spatial extent and distribution of scattered trees at a global scale. Due to the cost of high-resolution satellite imagery, global monitoring systems rely on medium-resolution satellites to monitor land use. Here we present a globally consistent method to identify trees with canopy diameters greater than three meters with medium-resolution optical and radar imagery. Biweekly cloud-free, pan-sharpened 10 meter Sentinel-2 optical imagery and Sentinel-1 radar imagery are used to train a fully convolutional network, consisting of a convolutional gated recurrent unit layer and a feature pyramid attention layer. Tested across more than 215,000 Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 pixels distributed from -60 to +60 latitude, the proposed model exceeds 75% user's and producer's accuracy identifying trees in hectares with a low to medium density (less than 40%) of tree cover, and 95% user's and producer's accuracy in hectares with dense (greater than 40%) tree cover. The proposed method increases the accuracy of monitoring tree presence in areas with sparse and scattered tree cover (less than 40%) by as much as 20%, and reduces commission and omission error in mountainous and very cloudy regions by nearly half. When applied across large, heterogeneous landscapes, the results demonstrate potential to map trees in high detail and accuracy over diverse landscapes across the globe. This information is important for understanding current land cover and can be used to detect changes in land cover such as agroforestry, buffer zones around biological hotspots, and expansion or encroachment of forests.
A Biologically Inspired Feature Enhancement Framework for Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Zhongwu Xie, Weipeng Cao, Xi-Zhao Wang, Zhong Ming, Jingjing Zhang, Jiyong Zhang
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-Shot Learning

Most of the Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) algorithms currently use pre-trained models as their feature extractors, which are usually trained on the ImageNet data set by using deep neural networks. The richness of the feature information embedded in the pre-trained models can help the ZSL model extract more useful features from its limited training samples. However, sometimes the difference between the training data set of the current ZSL task and the ImageNet data set is too large, which may lead to the use of pre-trained models has no obvious help or even negative impact on the performance of the ZSL model. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a biologically inspired feature enhancement framework for ZSL. Specifically, we design a dual-channel learning framework that uses auxiliary data sets to enhance the feature extractor of the ZSL model and propose a novel method to guide the selection of the auxiliary data sets based on the knowledge of biological taxonomy. Extensive experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively improve the generalization ability of the ZSL model and achieve state-of-the-art results on three benchmark ZSL tasks. We also explained the experimental phenomena through the way of feature visualization.
Towards Better Graph Representation: Two-Branch Collaborative Graph Neural Networks for Multimodal Marketing Intention Detection
Authors: Lu Zhang, Jian Zhang, Zhibin Li, Jingsong Xu
Date: 2020-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Classification, Marketing

Inspired by the fact that spreading and collecting information through the Internet becomes the norm, more and more people choose to post for-profit contents (images and texts) in social networks. Due to the difficulty of network censors, malicious marketing may be capable of harming society. Therefore, it is meaningful to detect marketing intentions online automatically. However, gaps between multimodal data make it difficult to fuse images and texts for content marketing detection. To this end, this paper proposes Two-Branch Collaborative Graph Neural Networks to collaboratively represent multimodal data by Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior graph classification performance for marketing intention detection.
Unbiased Deep Reinforcement Learning: A General Training Framework for Existing and Future Algorithms
Authors: Huihui Zhang, Wu Huang
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In recent years deep neural networks have been successfully applied to the domains of reinforcement learning \cite{bengio2009learning,krizhevsky2012imagenet,hinton2006reducing}. Deep reinforcement learning \cite{mnih2015human} is reported to have the advantage of learning effective policies directly from high-dimensional sensory inputs over traditional agents. However, within the scope of the literature, there is no fundamental change or improvement on the existing training framework. Here we propose a novel training framework that is conceptually comprehensible and potentially easy to be generalized to all feasible algorithms for reinforcement learning. We employ Monte-carlo sampling to achieve raw data inputs, and train them in batch to achieve Markov decision process sequences and synchronously update the network parameters instead of experience replay. This training framework proves to optimize the unbiased approximation of loss function whose estimation exactly matches the real probability distribution data inputs follow, and thus have overwhelming advantages of sample efficiency and convergence rate over existing deep reinforcement learning after evaluating it on both discrete action spaces and continuous control problems. Besides, we propose several algorithms embedded with our new framework to deal with typical discrete and continuous scenarios. These algorithms prove to be far more efficient than their original versions under the framework of deep reinforcement learning, and provide examples for existing and future algorithms to generalize to our new framework.
Intracranial Hemorrhage Detection Using Neural Network Based Methods With Federated Learning
Authors: Utkarsh Chandra Srivastava, Anshuman Singh, Dr. K. Sree Kumar
Date: 2020-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Federated Learning

Intracranial hemorrhage, bleeding that occurs inside the cranium, is a serious health problem requiring rapid and often intensive medical treatment. Such a condition is traditionally diagnosed by highly-trained specialists analyzing computed tomography (CT) scan of the patient and identifying the location and type of hemorrhage if one exists. We propose a neural network approach to find and classify the condition based upon the CT scan. The model architecture implements a time distributed convolutional network. We observed accuracy above 92% from such an architecture, provided enough data. We propose further extensions to our approach involving the deployment of federated learning. This would be helpful in pooling learned parameters without violating the inherent privacy of the data involved.
Development of a New Image-to-text Conversion System for Pashto, Farsi and Traditional Chinese
Authors: Marek Rychlik, Dwight Nwaigwe, Yan Han, Dylan Murphy
Date: 2020-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image to text, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Retrieval

We report upon the results of a research and prototype building project \emph{Worldly~OCR} dedicated to developing new, more accurate image-to-text conversion software for several languages and writing systems. These include the cursive scripts Farsi and Pashto, and Latin cursive scripts. We also describe approaches geared towards Traditional Chinese, which is non-cursive, but features an extremely large character set of 65,000 characters. Our methodology is based on Machine Learning, especially Deep Learning, and Data Science, and is directed towards vast quantities of original documents, exceeding a billion pages. The target audience of this paper is a general audience with interest in Digital Humanities or in retrieval of accurate full-text and metadata from digital images.
Scones: Towards Conversational Authoring of Sketches
Authors: Forrest Huang, Eldon Schoop, David Ha, John Canny
Date: 2020-05-12 00:00:00

Iteratively refining and critiquing sketches are crucial steps to developing effective designs. We introduce Scones, a mixed-initiative, machine-learning-driven system that enables users to iteratively author sketches from text instructions. Scones is a novel deep-learning-based system that iteratively generates scenes of sketched objects composed with semantic specifications from natural language. Scones exceeds state-of-the-art performance on a text-based scene modification task, and introduces a mask-conditioned sketching model that can generate sketches with poses specified by high-level scene information. In an exploratory user evaluation of Scones, participants reported enjoying an iterative drawing task with Scones, and suggested additional features for further applications. We believe Scones is an early step towards automated, intelligent systems that support human-in-the-loop applications for communicating ideas through sketching in art and design.
Synthetic Image Augmentation for Damage Region Segmentation using Conditional GAN with Structure Edge
Authors: Takato Yasuno, Michihiro Nakajima, Tomoharu Sekiguchi, Kazuhiro Noda, Kiyoshi Aoyanagi, Sakura Kato
Date: 2020-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Augmentation, Image-to-Image Translation

Recently, social infrastructure is aging, and its predictive maintenance has become important issue. To monitor the state of infrastructures, bridge inspection is performed by human eye or bay drone. For diagnosis, primary damage region are recognized for repair targets. But, the degradation at worse level has rarely occurred, and the damage regions of interest are often narrow, so their ratio per image is extremely small pixel count, as experienced 0.6 to 1.5 percent. The both scarcity and imbalance property on the damage region of interest influences limited performance to detect damage. If additional data set of damaged images can be generated, it may enable to improve accuracy in damage region segmentation algorithm. We propose a synthetic augmentation procedure to generate damaged images using the image-to-image translation mapping from the tri-categorical label that consists the both semantic label and structure edge to the real damage image. We use the Sobel gradient operator to enhance structure edge. Actually, in case of bridge inspection, we apply the RC concrete structure with the number of 208 eye-inspection photos that rebar exposure have occurred, which are prepared 840 block images with size 224 by 224. We applied popular per-pixel segmentation algorithms such as the FCN-8s, SegNet, and DeepLabv3+Xception-v2. We demonstrates that re-training a data set added with synthetic augmentation procedure make higher accuracy based on indices the mean IoU, damage region of interest IoU, precision, recall, BF score when we predict test images.
Supervision and Source Domain Impact on Representation Learning: A Histopathology Case Study
Authors: Milad Sikaroudi, Amir Safarpoor, Benyamin Ghojogh, Sobhan Shafiei, Mark Crowley, H. R. Tizhoosh
Date: 2020-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Domain Generalization, Few-Shot Learning, Histopathological Image Classification, Metric Learning, Representation Learning, Triplet, whole slide images

As many algorithms depend on a suitable representation of data, learning unique features is considered a crucial task. Although supervised techniques using deep neural networks have boosted the performance of representation learning, the need for a large set of labeled data limits the application of such methods. As an example, high-quality delineations of regions of interest in the field of pathology is a tedious and time-consuming task due to the large image dimensions. In this work, we explored the performance of a deep neural network and triplet loss in the area of representation learning. We investigated the notion of similarity and dissimilarity in pathology whole-slide images and compared different setups from unsupervised and semi-supervised to supervised learning in our experiments. Additionally, different approaches were tested, applying few-shot learning on two publicly available pathology image datasets. We achieved high accuracy and generalization when the learned representations were applied to two different pathology datasets.
End-to-End Lane Marker Detection via Row-wise Classification
Authors: Seungwoo Yoo, Heeseok Lee, Heesoo Myeong, Sungrack Yun, Hyoungwoo Park, Janghoon Cho, Duck Hoon Kim
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, General Classification, Lane Detection

In autonomous driving, detecting reliable and accurate lane marker positions is a crucial yet challenging task. The conventional approaches for the lane marker detection problem perform a pixel-level dense prediction task followed by sophisticated post-processing that is inevitable since lane markers are typically represented by a collection of line segments without thickness. In this paper, we propose a method performing direct lane marker vertex prediction in an end-to-end manner, i.e., without any post-processing step that is required in the pixel-level dense prediction task. Specifically, we translate the lane marker detection problem into a row-wise classification task, which takes advantage of the innate shape of lane markers but, surprisingly, has not been explored well. In order to compactly extract sufficient information about lane markers which spread from the left to the right in an image, we devise a novel layer, which is utilized to successively compress horizontal components so enables an end-to-end lane marker detection system where the final lane marker positions are simply obtained via argmax operations in testing time. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which is on par or outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two popular lane marker detection benchmarks, i.e., TuSimple and CULane.
Multi-Fidelity Gaussian Process based Empirical Potential Development for Si:H Nanowires
Authors: Moonseop Kim, Huayi Yin, Guang Lin
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00

In material modeling, the calculation speed using the empirical potentials is fast compared to the first principle calculations, but the results are not as accurate as of the first principle calculations. First principle calculations are accurate but slow and very expensive to calculate. In this work, first, the H-H binding energy and H$_2$-H$_2$ interaction energy are calculated using the first principle calculations which can be applied to the Tersoff empirical potential. Second, the H-H parameters are estimated. After fitting H-H parameters, the mechanical properties are obtained. Finally, to integrate both the low-fidelity empirical potential data and the data from the high-fidelity first-principle calculations, the multi-fidelity Gaussian process regression is employed to predict the H-H binding energy and the H$_2$-H$_2$ interaction energy. Numerical results demonstrate the accuracy of the developed empirical potentials.
Deep Learning Based Vehicle Tracking System Using License Plate Detection And Recognition
Authors: Lalit Lakshmanan, Yash Vora, Raj Ghate
Date: 2020-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, License Plate Detection, Management, object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Scene Text Detection, Text Detection

Vehicle tracking is an integral part of intelligent traffic management systems. Previous implementations of vehicle tracking used Global Positioning System(GPS) based systems that gave location of the vehicle of an individual on their smartphones.The proposed system uses a novel approach to vehicle tracking using Vehicle License plate detection and recognition (VLPR) technique, which can be integrated on a large scale with traffic management systems. Initial methods of implementing VLPR used simple image processing techniques which were quite experimental and heuristic. With the onset of Deep learning and Computer Vision, one can create robust VLPR systems that can produce results close to human efficiency. Previous implementations, based on deep learning, made use of object detection and support vector machines for detection and a heuristic image processing based approach for recognition. The proposed system makes use of scene text detection model architecture for License plate detection and for recognition it uses the Optical character recognition engine (OCR) Tesseract. The proposed system obtained extraordinary results when it was tested on a highway video using NVIDIA Ge-force RTX 2080ti GPU, results were obtained at a speed of 30 frames per second with accuracy close to human.
Atom Search Optimization with Simulated Annealing -- a Hybrid Metaheuristic Approach for Feature Selection
Authors: Kushal Kanti Ghosh, Ritam Guha, Soulib Ghosh, Suman Kumar Bera, Ram Sarkar
Date: 2020-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Facial Emotion Recognition, feature selection, Handwritten Digit Recognition

'Hybrid meta-heuristics' is one of the most interesting recent trends in the field of optimization and feature selection (FS). In this paper, we have proposed a binary variant of Atom Search Optimization (ASO) and its hybrid with Simulated Annealing called ASO-SA techniques for FS. In order to map the real values used by ASO to the binary domain of FS, we have used two different transfer functions: S-shaped and V-shaped. We have hybridized this technique with a local search technique called, SA We have applied the proposed feature selection methods on 25 datasets from 4 different categories: UCI, Handwritten digit recognition, Text, non-text separation, and Facial emotion recognition. We have used 3 different classifiers (K-Nearest Neighbor, Multi-Layer Perceptron and Random Forest) for evaluating the strength of the selected featured by the binary ASO, ASO-SA and compared the results with some recent wrapper-based algorithms. The experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed method both in terms of classification accuracy and number of selected features.
Multi-Task Learning in Histo-pathology for Widely Generalizable Model
Authors: Jevgenij Gamper, Navid Alemi Kooohbanani, Nasir Rajpoot
Date: 2020-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Cancer Classification, Classification, General Classification, Instance Segmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Oral Cancer Classification, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this work we show preliminary results of deep multi-task learning in the area of computational pathology. We combine 11 tasks ranging from patch-wise oral cancer classification, one of the most prevalent cancers in the developing world, to multi-tissue nuclei instance segmentation and classification.
A Detailed Look At CNN-based Approaches In Facial Landmark Detection
Authors: Chih-Fan Hsu, Chia-Ching Lin, Ting-Yang Hung, Chin-Laung Lei, Kuan-Ta Chen
Date: 2020-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Landmark Detection

Facial landmark detection has been studied over decades. Numerous neural network (NN)-based approaches have been proposed for detecting landmarks, especially the convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approaches. In general, CNN-based approaches can be divided into regression and heatmap approaches. However, no research systematically studies the characteristics of different approaches. In this paper, we investigate both CNN-based approaches, generalize their advantages and disadvantages, and introduce a variation of the heatmap approach, a pixel-wise classification (PWC) model. To the best of our knowledge, using the PWC model to detect facial landmarks have not been comprehensively studied. We further design a hybrid loss function and a discrimination network for strengthening the landmarks' interrelationship implied in the PWC model to improve the detection accuracy without modifying the original model architecture. Six common facial landmark datasets, AFW, Helen, LFPW, 300-W, IBUG, and COFW are adopted to train or evaluate our model. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted and the result shows that the proposed model outperforms other models in all tested datasets.
SciANN: A Keras/Tensorflow wrapper for scientific computations and physics-informed deep learning using artificial neural networks
Authors: Ehsan Haghighat, Ruben Juanes
Date: 2020-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Transfer Learning

In this paper, we introduce SciANN, a Python package for scientific computing and physics-informed deep learning using artificial neural networks. SciANN uses the widely used deep-learning packages Tensorflow and Keras to build deep neural networks and optimization models, thus inheriting many of Keras's functionalities, such as batch optimization and model reuse for transfer learning. SciANN is designed to abstract neural network construction for scientific computations and solution and discovery of partial differential equations (PDE) using the physics-informed neural networks (PINN) architecture, therefore providing the flexibility to set up complex functional forms. We illustrate, in a series of examples, how the framework can be used for curve fitting on discrete data, and for solution and discovery of PDEs in strong and weak forms. We summarize the features currently available in SciANN, and also outline ongoing and future developments.