pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Contrastive Neighborhood Alignment
Authors: Pengkai Zhu, Zhaowei Cai, Yuanjun Xiong, Zhuowen Tu, Luis Goncalves, Vijay Mahadevan, Stefano Soatto
Date: 2022-01-06 00:00:00

We present Contrastive Neighborhood Alignment (CNA), a manifold learning approach to maintain the topology of learned features whereby data points that are mapped to nearby representations by the source (teacher) model are also mapped to neighbors by the target (student) model. The target model aims to mimic the local structure of the source representation space using a contrastive loss. CNA is an unsupervised learning algorithm that does not require ground-truth labels for the individual samples. CNA is illustrated in three scenarios: manifold learning, where the model maintains the local topology of the original data in a dimension-reduced space; model distillation, where a small student model is trained to mimic a larger teacher; and legacy model update, where an older model is replaced by a more powerful one. Experiments show that CNA is able to capture the manifold in a high-dimensional space and improves performance compared to the competing methods in their domains.
Incremental Object Grounding Using Scene Graphs
Authors: John Seon Keun Yi, Yoonwoo Kim, Sonia Chernova
Date: 2022-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Object grounding tasks aim to locate the target object in an image through verbal communications. Understanding human command is an important process needed for effective human-robot communication. However, this is challenging because human commands can be ambiguous and erroneous. This paper aims to disambiguate the human's referring expressions by allowing the agent to ask relevant questions based on semantic data obtained from scene graphs. We test if our agent can use relations between objects from a scene graph to ask semantically relevant questions that can disambiguate the original user command. In this paper, we present Incremental Grounding using Scene Graphs (IGSG), a disambiguation model that uses semantic data from an image scene graph and linguistic structures from a language scene graph to ground objects based on human command. Compared to the baseline, IGSG shows promising results in complex real-world scenes where there are multiple identical target objects. IGSG can effectively disambiguate ambiguous or wrong referring expressions by asking disambiguating questions back to the user.
Flow-Guided Sparse Transformer for Video Deblurring
Authors: Jing Lin, Yuanhao Cai, Xiaowan Hu, Haoqian Wang, Youliang Yan, Xueyi Zou, Henghui Ding, Yulun Zhang, Radu Timofte, Luc van Gool
Date: 2022-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Deblurring

Exploiting similar and sharper scene patches in spatio-temporal neighborhoods is critical for video deblurring. However, CNN-based methods show limitations in capturing long-range dependencies and modeling non-local self-similarity. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Flow-Guided Sparse Transformer (FGST), for video deblurring. In FGST, we customize a self-attention module, Flow-Guided Sparse Window-based Multi-head Self-Attention (FGSW-MSA). For each $query$ element on the blurry reference frame, FGSW-MSA enjoys the guidance of the estimated optical flow to globally sample spatially sparse yet highly related $key$ elements corresponding to the same scene patch in neighboring frames. Besides, we present a Recurrent Embedding (RE) mechanism to transfer information from past frames and strengthen long-range temporal dependencies. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed FGST outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on both DVD and GOPRO datasets and even yields more visually pleasing results in real video deblurring. Code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/linjing7/VR-Baseline
Memory-guided Image De-raining Using Time-Lapse Data
Authors: Jaehoon Cho, Seungryong Kim, Kwanghoon Sohn
Date: 2022-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

This paper addresses the problem of single image de-raining, that is, the task of recovering clean and rain-free background scenes from a single image obscured by a rainy artifact. Although recent advances adopt real-world time-lapse data to overcome the need for paired rain-clean images, they are limited to fully exploit the time-lapse data. The main cause is that, in terms of network architectures, they could not capture long-term rain streak information in the time-lapse data during training owing to the lack of memory components. To address this problem, we propose a novel network architecture based on a memory network that explicitly helps to capture long-term rain streak information in the time-lapse data. Our network comprises the encoder-decoder networks and a memory network. The features extracted from the encoder are read and updated in the memory network that contains several memory items to store rain streak-aware feature representations. With the read/update operation, the memory network retrieves relevant memory items in terms of the queries, enabling the memory items to represent the various rain streaks included in the time-lapse data. To boost the discriminative power of memory features, we also present a novel background selective whitening (BSW) loss for capturing only rain streak information in the memory network by erasing the background information. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach.
NeuralMLS: Geometry-Aware Control Point Deformation
Authors: Meitar Shechter, Rana Hanocka, Gal Metzer, Raja Giryes, Daniel Cohen-Or
Date: 2022-01-05 00:00:00

We introduce NeuralMLS, a space-based deformation technique, guided by a set of displaced control points. We leverage the power of neural networks to inject the underlying shape geometry into the deformation parameters. The goal of our technique is to enable a realistic and intuitive shape deformation. Our method is built upon moving least-squares (MLS), since it minimizes a weighted sum of the given control point displacements. Traditionally, the influence of each control point on every point in space (i.e., the weighting function) is defined using inverse distance heuristics. In this work, we opt to learn the weighting function, by training a neural network on the control points from a single input shape, and exploit the innate smoothness of neural networks. Our geometry-aware control point deformation is agnostic to the surface representation and quality; it can be applied to point clouds or meshes, including non-manifold and disconnected surface soups. We show that our technique facilitates intuitive piecewise smooth deformations, which are well suited for manufactured objects. We show the advantages of our approach compared to existing surface and space-based deformation techniques, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Towards realistic symmetry-based completion of previously unseen point clouds
Authors: Taras Rumezhak, Oles Dobosevych, Rostyslav Hryniv, Vladyslav Selotkin, Volodymyr Karpiv, Mykola Maksymenko
Date: 2022-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Point Cloud Completion

3D scanning is a complex multistage process that generates a point cloud of an object typically containing damaged parts due to occlusions, reflections, shadows, scanner motion, specific properties of the object surface, imperfect reconstruction algorithms, etc. Point cloud completion is specifically designed to fill in the missing parts of the object and obtain its high-quality 3D representation. The existing completion approaches perform well on the academic datasets with a predefined set of object classes and very specific types of defects; however, their performance drops significantly in the real-world settings and degrades even further on previously unseen object classes. We propose a novel framework that performs well on symmetric objects, which are ubiquitous in man-made environments. Unlike learning-based approaches, the proposed framework does not require training data and is capable of completing non-critical damages occurring in customer 3D scanning process using e.g. Kinect, time-of-flight, or structured light scanners. With thorough experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art efficiency in point cloud completion of real-world customer scans. We benchmark the framework performance on two types of datasets: properly augmented existing academic dataset and the actual 3D scans of various objects.
Multi-Grid Redundant Bounding Box Annotation for Accurate Object Detection
Authors: Solomon Negussie Tesema, El-Bay Bourennane
Date: 2022-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Modern leading object detectors are either two-stage or one-stage networks repurposed from a deep CNN-based backbone classifier network. YOLOv3 is one such very-well known state-of-the-art one-shot detector that takes in an input image and divides it into an equal-sized grid matrix. The grid cell having the center of an object is the one responsible for detecting the particular object. This paper presents a new mathematical approach that assigns multiple grids per object for accurately tight-fit bounding box prediction. We also propose an effective offline copy-paste data augmentation for object detection. Our proposed method significantly outperforms some current state-of-the-art object detectors with a prospect for further better performance.
Lumbar Bone Mineral Density Estimation from Chest X-ray Images: Anatomy-aware Attentive Multi-ROI Modeling
Authors: Fakai Wang, Kang Zheng, Le Lu, Jing Xiao, Min Wu, Chang-Fu Kuo, Shun Miao
Date: 2022-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Density Estimation

Osteoporosis is a common chronic metabolic bone disease often under-diagnosed and under-treated due to the limited access to bone mineral density (BMD) examinations, e.g. via Dual-energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA). This paper proposes a method to predict BMD from Chest X-ray (CXR), one of the most commonly accessible and low-cost medical imaging examinations. Our method first automatically detects Regions of Interest (ROIs) of local CXR bone structures. Then a multi-ROI deep model with transformer encoder is developed to exploit both local and global information in the chest X-ray image for accurate BMD estimation. Our method is evaluated on 13719 CXR patient cases with ground truth BMD measured by the gold standard DXA. The model predicted BMD has a strong correlation with the ground truth (Pearson correlation coefficient 0.894 on lumbar 1). When applied in osteoporosis screening, it achieves a high classification performance (average AUC of 0.968). As the first effort of using CXR scans to predict the BMD, the proposed algorithm holds strong potential for early osteoporosis screening and public health promotion.
POCO: Point Convolution for Surface Reconstruction
Authors: Alexandre Boulch, Renaud Marlet
Date: 2022-01-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Surface Reconstruction

Implicit neural networks have been successfully used for surface reconstruction from point clouds. However, many of them face scalability issues as they encode the isosurface function of a whole object or scene into a single latent vector. To overcome this limitation, a few approaches infer latent vectors on a coarse regular 3D grid or on 3D patches, and interpolate them to answer occupancy queries. In doing so, they loose the direct connection with the input points sampled on the surface of objects, and they attach information uniformly in space rather than where it matters the most, i.e., near the surface. Besides, relying on fixed patch sizes may require discretization tuning. To address these issues, we propose to use point cloud convolutions and compute latent vectors at each input point. We then perform a learning-based interpolation on nearest neighbors using inferred weights. Experiments on both object and scene datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms other methods on most classical metrics, producing finer details and better reconstructing thinner volumes. The code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/POCO.
Learning Semantic Ambiguities for Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Celina Hanouti, Hervé Le Borgne
Date: 2022-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims at recognizing classes for which no visual sample is available at training time. To address this issue, one can rely on a semantic description of each class. A typical ZSL model learns a mapping between the visual samples of seen classes and the corresponding semantic descriptions, in order to do the same on unseen classes at test time. State of the art approaches rely on generative models that synthesize visual features from the prototype of a class, such that a classifier can then be learned in a supervised manner. However, these approaches are usually biased towards seen classes whose visual instances are the only one that can be matched to a given class prototype. We propose a regularization method that can be applied to any conditional generative-based ZSL method, by leveraging only the semantic class prototypes. It learns to synthesize discriminative features for possible semantic description that are not available at training time, that is the unseen ones. The approach is evaluated for ZSL and GZSL on four datasets commonly used in the literature, either in inductive and transductive settings, with results on-par or above state of the art approaches.
Revisiting Deep Subspace Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Kowshik Thopalli, Jayaraman J Thiagarajan, Rushil Anirudh, Pavan K Turaga
Date: 2022-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Representation Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer and adapt knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. Traditionally, subspace-based methods form an important class of solutions to this problem. Despite their mathematical elegance and tractability, these methods are often found to be ineffective at producing domain-invariant features with complex, real-world datasets. Motivated by the recent advances in representation learning with deep networks, this paper revisits the use of subspace alignment for UDA and proposes a novel adaptation algorithm that consistently leads to improved generalization. In contrast to existing adversarial training-based DA methods, our approach isolates feature learning and distribution alignment steps, and utilizes a primary-auxiliary optimization strategy to effectively balance the objectives of domain invariance and model fidelity. While providing a significant reduction in target data and computational requirements, our subspace-based DA performs competitively and sometimes even outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on several standard UDA benchmarks. Furthermore, subspace alignment leads to intrinsically well-regularized models that demonstrate strong generalization even in the challenging partial DA setting. Finally, the design of our UDA framework inherently supports progressive adaptation to new target domains at test-time, without requiring retraining of the model from scratch. In summary, powered by powerful feature learners and an effective optimization strategy, we establish subspace-based DA as a highly effective approach for visual recognition.
Learning Audio-Visual Speech Representation by Masked Multimodal Cluster Prediction
Authors: Bowen Shi, Wei-Ning Hsu, Kushal Lakhotia, Abdelrahman Mohamed
Date: 2022-01-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Lipreading, Lip Reading, Representation Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Representation Learning

Video recordings of speech contain correlated audio and visual information, providing a strong signal for speech representation learning from the speaker's lip movements and the produced sound. We introduce Audio-Visual Hidden Unit BERT (AV-HuBERT), a self-supervised representation learning framework for audio-visual speech, which masks multi-stream video input and predicts automatically discovered and iteratively refined multimodal hidden units. AV-HuBERT learns powerful audio-visual speech representation benefiting both lip-reading and automatic speech recognition. On the largest public lip-reading benchmark LRS3 (433 hours), AV-HuBERT achieves 32.5% WER with only 30 hours of labeled data, outperforming the former state-of-the-art approach (33.6%) trained with a thousand times more transcribed video data (31K hours). The lip-reading WER is further reduced to 26.9% when using all 433 hours of labeled data from LRS3 and combined with self-training. Using our audio-visual representation on the same benchmark for audio-only speech recognition leads to a 40% relative WER reduction over the state-of-the-art performance (1.3% vs 2.3%). Our code and models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/av_hubert
Eye Know You Too: A DenseNet Architecture for End-to-end Eye Movement Biometrics
Authors: Dillon Lohr, Oleg V Komogortsev
Date: 2022-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series Analysis

Eye movement biometrics (EMB) is a relatively recent behavioral biometric modality that may have the potential to become the primary authentication method in virtual- and augmented-reality devices due to their emerging use of eye-tracking sensors to enable foveated rendering techniques. However, existing EMB models have yet to demonstrate levels of performance that would be acceptable for real-world use. Deep learning approaches to EMB have largely employed plain convolutional neural networks (CNNs), but there have been many milestone improvements to convolutional architectures over the years including residual networks (ResNets) and densely connected convolutional networks (DenseNets). The present study employs a DenseNet architecture for end-to-end EMB and compares the proposed model against the most relevant prior works. The proposed technique not only outperforms the previous state of the art, but is also the first to approach a level of authentication performance that would be acceptable for real-world use.
Grokking: Generalization Beyond Overfitting on Small Algorithmic Datasets
Authors: Alethea Power, Yuri Burda, Harri Edwards, Igor Babuschkin, Vedant Misra
Date: 2022-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

In this paper we propose to study generalization of neural networks on small algorithmically generated datasets. In this setting, questions about data efficiency, memorization, generalization, and speed of learning can be studied in great detail. In some situations we show that neural networks learn through a process of "grokking" a pattern in the data, improving generalization performance from random chance level to perfect generalization, and that this improvement in generalization can happen well past the point of overfitting. We also study generalization as a function of dataset size and find that smaller datasets require increasing amounts of optimization for generalization. We argue that these datasets provide a fertile ground for studying a poorly understood aspect of deep learning: generalization of overparametrized neural networks beyond memorization of the finite training dataset.
Learning Optimal Antenna Tilt Control Policies: A Contextual Linear Bandit Approach
Authors: Filippo Vannella, Alexandre Proutiere, Yassir Jedra, Jaeseong Jeong
Date: 2022-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

Controlling antenna tilts in cellular networks is imperative to reach an efficient trade-off between network coverage and capacity. In this paper, we devise algorithms learning optimal tilt control policies from existing data (in the so-called passive learning setting) or from data actively generated by the algorithms (the active learning setting). We formalize the design of such algorithms as a Best Policy Identification (BPI) problem in Contextual Linear Multi-Arm Bandits (CL-MAB). An arm represents an antenna tilt update; the context captures current network conditions; the reward corresponds to an improvement of performance, mixing coverage and capacity; and the objective is to identify, with a given level of confidence, an approximately optimal policy (a function mapping the context to an arm with maximal reward). For CL-MAB in both active and passive learning settings, we derive information-theoretical lower bounds on the number of samples required by any algorithm returning an approximately optimal policy with a given level of certainty, and devise algorithms achieving these fundamental limits. We apply our algorithms to the Remote Electrical Tilt (RET) optimization problem in cellular networks, and show that they can produce optimal tilt update policy using much fewer data samples than naive or existing rule-based learning algorithms.
Topological Representations of Local Explanations
Authors: Peter Xenopoulos, Gromit Chan, Harish Doraiswamy, Luis Gustavo Nonato, Brian Barr, Claudio Silva
Date: 2022-01-06 00:00:00

Local explainability methods -- those which seek to generate an explanation for each prediction -- are becoming increasingly prevalent due to the need for practitioners to rationalize their model outputs. However, comparing local explainability methods is difficult since they each generate outputs in various scales and dimensions. Furthermore, due to the stochastic nature of some explainability methods, it is possible for different runs of a method to produce contradictory explanations for a given observation. In this paper, we propose a topology-based framework to extract a simplified representation from a set of local explanations. We do so by first modeling the relationship between the explanation space and the model predictions as a scalar function. Then, we compute the topological skeleton of this function. This topological skeleton acts as a signature for such functions, which we use to compare different explanation methods. We demonstrate that our framework can not only reliably identify differences between explainability techniques but also provides stable representations. Then, we show how our framework can be used to identify appropriate parameters for local explainability methods. Our framework is simple, does not require complex optimizations, and can be broadly applied to most local explanation methods. We believe the practicality and versatility of our approach will help promote topology-based approaches as a tool for understanding and comparing explanation methods.
Classification of Long Sequential Data using Circular Dilated Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Lei Cheng, Ruslan Khalitov, Tong Yu, Zhirong Yang
Date: 2022-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Classification, Long-range modeling, Position, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Classification of long sequential data is an important Machine Learning task and appears in many application scenarios. Recurrent Neural Networks, Transformers, and Convolutional Neural Networks are three major techniques for learning from sequential data. Among these methods, Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCNs) which are scalable to very long sequences have achieved remarkable progress in time series regression. However, the performance of TCNs for sequence classification is not satisfactory because they use a skewed connection protocol and output classes at the last position. Such asymmetry restricts their performance for classification which depends on the whole sequence. In this work, we propose a symmetric multi-scale architecture called Circular Dilated Convolutional Neural Network (CDIL-CNN), where every position has an equal chance to receive information from other positions at the previous layers. Our model gives classification logits in all positions, and we can apply a simple ensemble learning to achieve a better decision. We have tested CDIL-CNN on various long sequential datasets. The experimental results show that our method has superior performance over many state-of-the-art approaches.