pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards real-time object recognition and pose estimation in point clouds
Authors: Marlon Marcon, Olga Regina Pereira Bellon, Luciano Silva
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Recognition, Pose Estimation

Object recognition and 6DoF pose estimation are quite challenging tasks in computer vision applications. Despite efficiency in such tasks, standard methods deliver far from real-time processing rates. This paper presents a novel pipeline to estimate a fine 6DoF pose of objects, applied to realistic scenarios in real-time. We split our proposal into three main parts. Firstly, a Color feature classification leverages the use of pre-trained CNN color features trained on the ImageNet for object detection. A Feature-based registration module conducts a coarse pose estimation, and finally, a Fine-adjustment step performs an ICP-based dense registration. Our proposal achieves, in the best case, an accuracy performance of almost 83\% on the RGB-D Scenes dataset. Regarding processing time, the object detection task is done at a frame processing rate up to 90 FPS, and the pose estimation at almost 14 FPS in a full execution strategy. We discuss that due to the proposal's modularity, we could let the full execution occurs only when necessary and perform a scheduled execution that unlocks real-time processing, even for multitask situations.
FFCI: A Framework for Interpretable Automatic Evaluation of Summarization
Authors: Fajri Koto, Timothy Baldwin, Jey Han Lau
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence, STS

In this paper, we propose FFCI, a framework for fine-grained summarization evaluation that comprises four elements: faithfulness (degree of factual consistency with the source), focus (precision of summary content relative to the reference), coverage (recall of summary content relative to the reference), and inter-sentential coherence (document fluency between adjacent sentences). We construct a novel dataset for focus, coverage, and inter-sentential coherence, and develop automatic methods for evaluating each of the four dimensions of FFCI based on cross-comparison of evaluation metrics and model-based evaluation methods, including question answering (QA) approaches, semantic textual similarity (STS), next-sentence prediction (NSP), and scores derived from 19 pre-trained language models. We then apply the developed metrics in evaluating a broad range of summarization models across two datasets, with some surprising findings.
Deformed Implicit Field: Modeling 3D Shapes with Learned Dense Correspondence
Authors: Yu Deng, Jiaolong Yang, Xin Tong
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1

We propose a novel Deformed Implicit Field (DIF) representation for modeling 3D shapes of a category and generating dense correspondences among shapes. With DIF, a 3D shape is represented by a template implicit field shared across the category, together with a 3D deformation field and a correction field dedicated for each shape instance. Shape correspondences can be easily established using their deformation fields. Our neural network, dubbed DIF-Net, jointly learns a shape latent space and these fields for 3D objects belonging to a category without using any correspondence or part label. The learned DIF-Net can also provides reliable correspondence uncertainty measurement reflecting shape structure discrepancy. Experiments show that DIF-Net not only produces high-fidelity 3D shapes but also builds high-quality dense correspondences across different shapes. We also demonstrate several applications such as texture transfer and shape editing, where our method achieves compelling results that cannot be achieved by previous methods.
Descriptor-Free Multi-View Region Matching for Instance-Wise 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Takuma Doi, Fumio Okura, Toshiki Nagahara, Yasuyuki Matsushita, Yasushi Yagi
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper proposes a multi-view extension of instance segmentation without relying on texture or shape descriptor matching. Multi-view instance segmentation becomes challenging for scenes with repetitive textures and shapes, e.g., plant leaves, due to the difficulty of multi-view matching using texture or shape descriptors. To this end, we propose a multi-view region matching method based on epipolar geometry, which does not rely on any feature descriptors. We further show that the epipolar region matching can be easily integrated into instance segmentation and effective for instance-wise 3D reconstruction. Experiments demonstrate the improved accuracy of multi-view instance matching and the 3D reconstruction compared to the baseline methods.
Relation Clustering in Narrative Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Simone Mellace, K Vani, Alessandro Antonucci
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Descriptive, Knowledge Graphs, Relation

When coping with literary texts such as novels or short stories, the extraction of structured information in the form of a knowledge graph might be hindered by the huge number of possible relations between the entities corresponding to the characters in the novel and the consequent hurdles in gathering supervised information about them. Such issue is addressed here as an unsupervised task empowered by transformers: relational sentences in the original text are embedded (with SBERT) and clustered in order to merge together semantically similar relations. All the sentences in the same cluster are finally summarized (with BART) and a descriptive label extracted from the summary. Preliminary tests show that such clustering might successfully detect similar relations, and provide a valuable preprocessing for semi-supervised approaches.
Combination of interval-valued belief structures based on belief entropy
Authors: Miao Qin, Yongchuan Tang
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

This paper investigates the issues of combination and normalization of interval-valued belief structures within the framework of Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. Existing approaches are reviewed and thoroughly analyzed. The advantages and drawbacks of previous approach are presented. A new optimality approach based on uncertainty measure is developed, where the problem of combining interval-valued belief structures degenerates into combining basic probability assignments. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the rationality of the proposed approach.
Progressively Stacking 2.0: A Multi-stage Layerwise Training Method for BERT Training Speedup
Authors: Cheng Yang, Shengnan Wang, Chao Yang, Yuechuan Li, Ru He, Jingqiao Zhang
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

Pre-trained language models, such as BERT, have achieved significant accuracy gain in many natural language processing tasks. Despite its effectiveness, the huge number of parameters makes training a BERT model computationally very challenging. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-stage layerwise training (MSLT) approach to reduce the training time of BERT. We decompose the whole training process into several stages. The training is started from a small model with only a few encoder layers and we gradually increase the depth of the model by adding new encoder layers. At each stage, we only train the top (near the output layer) few encoder layers which are newly added. The parameters of the other layers which have been trained in the previous stages will not be updated in the current stage. In BERT training, the backward computation is much more time-consuming than the forward computation, especially in the distributed training setting in which the backward computation time further includes the communication time for gradient synchronization. In the proposed training strategy, only top few layers participate in backward computation, while most layers only participate in forward computation. Hence both the computation and communication efficiencies are greatly improved. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve more than 110% training speedup without significant performance degradation.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Resource Constrained Multiclass Scheduling in Wireless Networks
Authors: Apostolos Avranas, Marios Kountouris, Philippe Ciblat
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

The problem of resource constrained scheduling in a dynamic and heterogeneous wireless setting is considered here. In our setup, the available limited bandwidth resources are allocated in order to serve randomly arriving service demands, which in turn belong to different classes in terms of payload data requirement, delay tolerance, and importance/priority. In addition to heterogeneous traffic, another major challenge stems from random service rates due to time-varying wireless communication channels. Various approaches for scheduling and resource allocation can be used, ranging from simple greedy heuristics and constrained optimization to combinatorics. Those methods are tailored to specific network or application configuration and are usually suboptimal. To this purpose, we resort to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and propose a distributional Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm combined with Deep Sets to tackle the aforementioned problem. Furthermore, we present a novel way to use a Dueling Network, which leads to further performance improvement. Our proposed algorithm is tested on both synthetic and real data, showing consistent gains against state-of-the-art conventional methods from combinatorics, optimization, and scheduling metrics.
CoRe: An Efficient Coarse-refined Training Framework for BERT
Authors: Cheng Yang, Shengnan Wang, Yuechuan Li, Chao Yang, Ming Yan, Jingqiao Zhang, Fangquan Lin
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

In recent years, BERT has made significant breakthroughs on many natural language processing tasks and attracted great attentions. Despite its accuracy gains, the BERT model generally involves a huge number of parameters and needs to be trained on massive datasets, so training such a model is computationally very challenging and time-consuming. Hence, training efficiency should be a critical issue. In this paper, we propose a novel coarse-refined training framework named CoRe to speed up the training of BERT. Specifically, we decompose the training process of BERT into two phases. In the first phase, by introducing fast attention mechanism and decomposing the large parameters in the feed-forward network sub-layer, we construct a relaxed BERT model which has much less parameters and much lower model complexity than the original BERT, so the relaxed model can be quickly trained. In the second phase, we transform the trained relaxed BERT model into the original BERT and further retrain the model. Thanks to the desired initialization provided by the relaxed model, the retraining phase requires much less training steps, compared with training an original BERT model from scratch with a random initialization. Experimental results show that the proposed CoRe framework can greatly reduce the training time without reducing the performance.
An Improved Transfer Model: Randomized Transferable Machine
Authors: Pengfei Wei, Xinghua Qu, Yew Soon Ong, Zejun Ma
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Transfer Learning

Feature-based transfer is one of the most effective methodologies for transfer learning. Existing studies usually assume that the learned new feature representation is \emph{domain-invariant}, and thus train a transfer model $\mathcal{M}$ on the source domain. In this paper, we consider a more realistic scenario where the new feature representation is suboptimal and small divergence still exists across domains. We propose a new transfer model called Randomized Transferable Machine (RTM) to handle such small divergence of domains. Specifically, we work on the new source and target data learned from existing feature-based transfer methods. The key idea is to enlarge source training data populations by randomly corrupting the new source data using some noises, and then train a transfer model $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$ that performs well on all the corrupted source data populations. In principle, the more corruptions are made, the higher the probability of the new target data can be covered by the constructed source data populations, and thus better transfer performance can be achieved by $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$. An ideal case is with infinite corruptions, which however is infeasible in reality. We develop a marginalized solution that enables to train an $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$ without conducting any corruption but equivalent to be trained using infinite source noisy data populations. We further propose two instantiations of $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$, which theoretically show the transfer superiority over the conventional transfer model $\mathcal{M}$. More importantly, both instantiations have closed-form solutions, leading to a fast and efficient training process. Experiments on various real-world transfer tasks show that RTM is a promising transfer model.
Temporal-Channel Transformer for 3D Lidar-Based Video Object Detection in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Zhenxun Yuan, Xiao Song, Lei Bai, Wengang Zhou, Zhe Wang, Wanli Ouyang
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Decoder, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Video Object Detection

The strong demand of autonomous driving in the industry has lead to strong interest in 3D object detection and resulted in many excellent 3D object detection algorithms. However, the vast majority of algorithms only model single-frame data, ignoring the temporal information of the sequence of data. In this work, we propose a new transformer, called Temporal-Channel Transformer, to model the spatial-temporal domain and channel domain relationships for video object detecting from Lidar data. As a special design of this transformer, the information encoded in the encoder is different from that in the decoder, i.e. the encoder encodes temporal-channel information of multiple frames while the decoder decodes the spatial-channel information for the current frame in a voxel-wise manner. Specifically, the temporal-channel encoder of the transformer is designed to encode the information of different channels and frames by utilizing the correlation among features from different channels and frames. On the other hand, the spatial decoder of the transformer will decode the information for each location of the current frame. Before conducting the object detection with detection head, the gate mechanism is deployed for re-calibrating the features of current frame, which filters out the object irrelevant information by repetitively refine the representation of target frame along with the up-sampling process. Experimental results show that we achieve the state-of-the-art performance in grid voxel-based 3D object detection on the nuScenes benchmark.
Manipulating Medical Image Translation with Manifold Disentanglement
Authors: Siyu Liu, Jason A. Dowling, Craig Engstrom, Peter B. Greer, Stuart Crozier, Shekhar S. Chandra
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Generative Adversarial Network, Translation

Medical image translation (e.g. CT to MR) is a challenging task as it requires I) faithful translation of domain-invariant features (e.g. shape information of anatomical structures) and II) realistic synthesis of target-domain features (e.g. tissue appearance in MR). In this work, we propose Manifold Disentanglement Generative Adversarial Network (MDGAN), a novel image translation framework that explicitly models these two types of features. It employs a fully convolutional generator to model domain-invariant features, and it uses style codes to separately model target-domain features as a manifold. This design aims to explicitly disentangle domain-invariant features and domain-specific features while gaining individual control of both. The image translation process is formulated as a stylisation task, where the input is "stylised" (translated) into diverse target-domain images based on style codes sampled from the learnt manifold. We test MDGAN for multi-modal medical image translation, where we create two domain-specific manifold clusters on the manifold to translate segmentation maps into pseudo-CT and pseudo-MR images, respectively. We show that by traversing a path across the MR manifold cluster, the target output can be manipulated while still retaining the shape information from the input.
Multi-task MR Imaging with Iterative Teacher Forcing and Re-weighted Deep Learning
Authors: Kehan Qi, Yu Gong, Xinfeng Liu, Xin Liu, Hairong Zheng, Shanshan Wang
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Noises, artifacts, and loss of information caused by the magnetic resonance (MR) reconstruction may compromise the final performance of the downstream applications. In this paper, we develop a re-weighted multi-task deep learning method to learn prior knowledge from the existing big dataset and then utilize them to assist simultaneous MR reconstruction and segmentation from the under-sampled k-space data. The multi-task deep learning framework is equipped with two network sub-modules, which are integrated and trained by our designed iterative teacher forcing scheme (ITFS) under the dynamic re-weighted loss constraint (DRLC). The ITFS is designed to avoid error accumulation by injecting the fully-sampled data into the training process. The DRLC is proposed to dynamically balance the contributions from the reconstruction and segmentation sub-modules so as to co-prompt the multi-task accuracy. The proposed method has been evaluated on two open datasets and one in vivo in-house dataset and compared to six state-of-the-art methods. Results show that the proposed method possesses encouraging capabilities for simultaneous and accurate MR reconstruction and segmentation.
Frequency Domain Image Translation: More Photo-realistic, Better Identity-preserving
Authors: Mu Cai, Hong Zhang, Huijuan Huang, Qichuan Geng, Yixuan Li, Gao Huang
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Image Generation, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Image-to-image translation has been revolutionized with GAN-based methods. However, existing methods lack the ability to preserve the identity of the source domain. As a result, synthesized images can often over-adapt to the reference domain, losing important structural characteristics and suffering from suboptimal visual quality. To solve these challenges, we propose a novel frequency domain image translation (FDIT) framework, exploiting frequency information for enhancing the image generation process. Our key idea is to decompose the image into low-frequency and high-frequency components, where the high-frequency feature captures object structure akin to the identity. Our training objective facilitates the preservation of frequency information in both pixel space and Fourier spectral space. We broadly evaluate FDIT across five large-scale datasets and multiple tasks including image translation and GAN inversion. Extensive experiments and ablations show that FDIT effectively preserves the identity of the source image, and produces photo-realistic images. FDIT establishes state-of-the-art performance, reducing the average FID score by 5.6% compared to the previous best method.
Eigenvalue-corrected Natural Gradient Based on a New Approximation
Authors: Kai-Xin Gao, Xiao-Lei Liu, Zheng-Hai Huang, Min Wang, Shuangling Wang, Zidong Wang, Dachuan Xu, Fan Yu
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

Using second-order optimization methods for training deep neural networks (DNNs) has attracted many researchers. A recently proposed method, Eigenvalue-corrected Kronecker Factorization (EKFAC) (George et al., 2018), proposes an interpretation of viewing natural gradient update as a diagonal method, and corrects the inaccurate re-scaling factor in the Kronecker-factored eigenbasis. Gao et al. (2020) considers a new approximation to the natural gradient, which approximates the Fisher information matrix (FIM) to a constant multiplied by the Kronecker product of two matrices and keeps the trace equal before and after the approximation. In this work, we combine the ideas of these two methods and propose Trace-restricted Eigenvalue-corrected Kronecker Factorization (TEKFAC). The proposed method not only corrects the inexact re-scaling factor under the Kronecker-factored eigenbasis, but also considers the new approximation method and the effective damping technique proposed in Gao et al. (2020). We also discuss the differences and relationships among the Kronecker-factored approximations. Empirically, our method outperforms SGD with momentum, Adam, EKFAC and TKFAC on several DNNs.
PCLs: Geometry-aware Neural Reconstruction of 3D Pose with Perspective Crop Layers
Authors: Frank Yu, Mathieu Salzmann, Pascal Fua, Helge Rhodin
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Camera Calibration

Local processing is an essential feature of CNNs and other neural network architectures - it is one of the reasons why they work so well on images where relevant information is, to a large extent, local. However, perspective effects stemming from the projection in a conventional camera vary for different global positions in the image. We introduce Perspective Crop Layers (PCLs) - a form of perspective crop of the region of interest based on the camera geometry - and show that accounting for the perspective consistently improves the accuracy of state-of-the-art 3D pose reconstruction methods. PCLs are modular neural network layers, which, when inserted into existing CNN and MLP architectures, deterministically remove the location-dependent perspective effects while leaving end-to-end training and the number of parameters of the underlying neural network unchanged. We demonstrate that PCL leads to improved 3D human pose reconstruction accuracy for CNN architectures that use cropping operations, such as spatial transformer networks (STN), and, somewhat surprisingly, MLPs used for 2D-to-3D keypoint lifting. Our conclusion is that it is important to utilize camera calibration information when available, for classical and deep-learning-based computer vision alike. PCL offers an easy way to improve the accuracy of existing 3D reconstruction networks by making them geometry aware. Our code is publicly available at github.com/yu-frank/PerspectiveCropLayers.
A methodology for co-constructing an interdisciplinary model: from model to survey, from survey to model
Authors: Elise Beck, Julie Dugdale, Carole Adam, Christelle Gaïdatzis, Julius Bañgate
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Survey

How should computer science and social science collaborate to build a common model? How should they proceed to gather data that is really useful to the modelling? How can they design a survey that is tailored to the target model? This paper aims to answer those crucial questions in the framework of a multidisciplinary research project. This research addresses the issue of co-constructing a model when several disciplines are involved, and is applied to modelling human behaviour immediately after an earthquake. The main contribution of the work is to propose a tool dedicated to multidisciplinary dialogue. It also proposes a reflexive analysis of the enriching intellectual process carried out by the different disciplines involved. Finally, from working with an anthropologist, a complementary view of the multidisciplinary process is given.