pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Temporal Stochastic Softmax for 3D CNNs: An Application in Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Théo Ayral, Marco Pedersoli, Simon Bacon, Eric Granger
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Training deep learning models for accurate spatiotemporal recognition of facial expressions in videos requires significant computational resources. For practical reasons, 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (3D CNNs) are usually trained with relatively short clips randomly extracted from videos. However, such uniform sampling is generally sub-optimal because equal importance is assigned to each temporal clip. In this paper, we present a strategy for efficient video-based training of 3D CNNs. It relies on softmax temporal pooling and a weighted sampling mechanism to select the most relevant training clips. The proposed softmax strategy provides several advantages: a reduced computational complexity due to efficient clip sampling, and an improved accuracy since temporal weighting focuses on more relevant clips during both training and inference. Experimental results obtained with the proposed method on several facial expression recognition benchmarks show the benefits of focusing on more informative clips in training videos. In particular, our approach improves performance and computational cost by reducing the impact of inaccurate trimming and coarse annotation of videos, and heterogeneous distribution of visual information across time.
Uses and Abuses of the Cross-Entropy Loss: Case Studies in Modern Deep Learning
Authors: Elliott Gordon-Rodriguez, Gabriel Loaiza-Ganem, Geoff Pleiss, John P. Cunningham
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop ICBINB 2020 12

Modern deep learning is primarily an experimental science, in which empirical advances occasionally come at the expense of probabilistic rigor. Here we focus on one such example; namely the use of the categorical cross-entropy loss to model data that is not strictly categorical, but rather takes values on the simplex. This practice is standard in neural network architectures with label smoothing and actor-mimic reinforcement learning, amongst others. Drawing on the recently discovered continuous-categorical distribution, we propose probabilistically-inspired alternatives to these models, providing an approach that is more principled and theoretically appealing. Through careful experimentation, including an ablation study, we identify the potential for outperformance in these models, thereby highlighting the importance of a proper probabilistic treatment, as well as illustrating some of the failure modes thereof.
Classification of Polarimetric SAR Images Using Compact Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Mete Ahishali, Serkan Kiranyaz, Turker Ince, Moncef Gabbouj
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Classification of polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) images is an active research area with a major role in environmental applications. The traditional Machine Learning (ML) methods proposed in this domain generally focus on utilizing highly discriminative features to improve the classification performance, but this task is complicated by the well-known "curse of dimensionality" phenomena. Other approaches based on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have certain limitations and drawbacks, such as high computational complexity, an unfeasibly large training set with ground-truth labels, and special hardware requirements. In this work, to address the limitations of traditional ML and deep CNN based methods, a novel and systematic classification framework is proposed for the classification of PolSAR images, based on a compact and adaptive implementation of CNNs using a sliding-window classification approach. The proposed approach has three advantages. First, there is no requirement for an extensive feature extraction process. Second, it is computationally efficient due to utilized compact configurations. In particular, the proposed compact and adaptive CNN model is designed to achieve the maximum classification accuracy with minimum training and computational complexity. This is of considerable importance considering the high costs involved in labelling in PolSAR classification. Finally, the proposed approach can perform classification using smaller window sizes than deep CNNs. Experimental evaluations have been performed over the most commonly-used four benchmark PolSAR images: AIRSAR L-Band and RADARSAT-2 C-Band data of San Francisco Bay and Flevoland areas. Accordingly, the best obtained overall accuracies range between 92.33 - 99.39% for these benchmark study sites.
Encoding large scale cosmological structure with Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Marion Ullmo, Aurélien Decelle, Nabila Aghanim
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00

Recently a type of neural networks called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has been proposed as a solution for fast generation of simulation-like datasets, in an attempt to bypass heavy computations and expensive cosmological simulations to run in terms of time and computing power. In the present work, we build and train a GAN to look further into the strengths and limitations of such an approach. We then propose a novel method in which we make use of a trained GAN to construct a simple autoencoder (AE) as a first step towards building a predictive model. Both the GAN and AE are trained on images issued from two types of N-body simulations, namely 2D and 3D simulations. We find that the GAN successfully generates new images that are statistically consistent with the images it was trained on. We then show that the AE manages to efficiently extract information from simulation images, satisfyingly inferring the latent encoding of the GAN to generate an image with similar large scale structures.
Perception Improvement for Free: Exploring Imperceptible Black-box Adversarial Attacks on Image Classification
Authors: Yongwei Wang, Mingquan Feng, Rabab Ward, Z. Jane Wang, Lanjun Wang
Date: 2020-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. White-box adversarial attacks can fool neural networks with small adversarial perturbations, especially for large size images. However, keeping successful adversarial perturbations imperceptible is especially challenging for transfer-based black-box adversarial attacks. Often such adversarial examples can be easily spotted due to their unpleasantly poor visual qualities, which compromises the threat of adversarial attacks in practice. In this study, to improve the image quality of black-box adversarial examples perceptually, we propose structure-aware adversarial attacks by generating adversarial images based on psychological perceptual models. Specifically, we allow higher perturbations on perceptually insignificant regions, while assigning lower or no perturbation on visually sensitive regions. In addition to the proposed spatial-constrained adversarial perturbations, we also propose a novel structure-aware frequency adversarial attack method in the discrete cosine transform (DCT) domain. Since the proposed attacks are independent of the gradient estimation, they can be directly incorporated with existing gradient-based attacks. Experimental results show that, with the comparable attack success rate (ASR), the proposed methods can produce adversarial examples with considerably improved visual quality for free. With the comparable perceptual quality, the proposed approaches achieve higher attack success rates: particularly for the frequency structure-aware attacks, the average ASR improves more than 10% over the baseline attacks.
Deep Neural Mobile Networking
Authors: Chaoyun Zhang
Date: 2020-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering

The next generation of mobile networks is set to become increasingly complex, as these struggle to accommodate tremendous data traffic demands generated by ever-more connected devices that have diverse performance requirements in terms of throughput, latency, and reliability. This makes monitoring and managing the multitude of network elements intractable with existing tools and impractical for traditional machine learning algorithms that rely on hand-crafted feature engineering. In this context, embedding machine intelligence into mobile networks becomes necessary, as this enables systematic mining of valuable information from mobile big data and automatically uncovering correlations that would otherwise have been too difficult to extract by human experts. In particular, deep learning based solutions can automatically extract features from raw data, without human expertise. The performance of artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved in other domains draws unprecedented interest from both academia and industry in employing deep learning approaches to address technical challenges in mobile networks. This thesis attacks important problems in the mobile networking area from various perspectives by harnessing recent advances in deep neural networks.
Towards Interpretable Natural Language Understanding with Explanations as Latent Variables
Authors: Wangchunshu Zhou, Jinyi Hu, HANLIN ZHANG, Xiaodan Liang, Maosong Sun, Chenyan Xiong, Jian Tang
Date: 2020-10-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Explanation Generation, Natural Language Understanding

Recently generating natural language explanations has shown very promising results in not only offering interpretable explanations but also providing additional information and supervision for prediction. However, existing approaches usually require a large set of human annotated explanations for training while collecting a large set of explanations is not only time consuming but also expensive. In this paper, we develop a general framework for interpretable natural language understanding that requires only a small set of human annotated explanations for training. Our framework treats natural language explanations as latent variables that model the underlying reasoning process of a neural model. We develop a variational EM framework for optimization where an explanation generation module and an explanation-augmented prediction module are alternatively optimized and mutually enhance each other. Moreover, we further propose an explanation-based self-training method under this framework for semi-supervised learning. It alternates between assigning pseudo-labels to unlabeled data and generating new explanations to iteratively improve each other. Experiments on two natural language understanding tasks demonstrate that our framework can not only make effective predictions in both supervised and semi-supervised settings, but also generate good natural language explanation.
Learning to Communicate and Correct Pose Errors
Authors: Nicholas Vadivelu, Mengye Ren, James Tu, Jingkang Wang, Raquel Urtasun
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Forecasting, object-detection, Object Detection

Learned communication makes multi-agent systems more effective by aggregating distributed information. However, it also exposes individual agents to the threat of erroneous messages they might receive. In this paper, we study the setting proposed in V2VNet, where nearby self-driving vehicles jointly perform object detection and motion forecasting in a cooperative manner. Despite a huge performance boost when the agents solve the task together, the gain is quickly diminished in the presence of pose noise since the communication relies on spatial transformations. Hence, we propose a novel neural reasoning framework that learns to communicate, to estimate potential errors, and finally, to reach a consensus about those errors. Experiments confirm that our proposed framework significantly improves the robustness of multi-agent self-driving perception and motion forecasting systems under realistic and severe localization noise.
A Systematic Comparison of Encrypted Machine Learning Solutions for Image Classification
Authors: Veneta Haralampieva, Daniel Rueckert, Jonathan Passerat-Palmbach
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Privacy Preserving

This work provides a comprehensive review of existing frameworks based on secure computing techniques in the context of private image classification. The in-depth analysis of these approaches is followed by careful examination of their performance costs, in particular runtime and communication overhead. To further illustrate the practical considerations when using different privacy-preserving technologies, experiments were conducted using four state-of-the-art libraries implementing secure computing at the heart of the data science stack: PySyft and CrypTen supporting private inference via Secure Multi-Party Computation, TF-Trusted utilising Trusted Execution Environments and HE- Transformer relying on Homomorphic encryption. Our work aims to evaluate the suitability of these frameworks from a usability, runtime requirements and accuracy point of view. In order to better understand the gap between state-of-the-art protocols and what is currently available in practice for a data scientist, we designed three neural network architecture to obtain secure predictions via each of the four aforementioned frameworks. Two networks were evaluated on the MNIST dataset and one on the Malaria Cell image dataset. We observed satisfying performances for TF-Trusted and CrypTen and noted that all frameworks perfectly preserved the accuracy of the corresponding plaintext model.
Supervised PCA: A Multiobjective Approach
Authors: Alexander Ritchie, Laura Balzano, Daniel Kessler, Chandra S. Sripada, Clayton Scott
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Methods for supervised principal component analysis (SPCA) aim to incorporate label information into principal component analysis (PCA), so that the extracted features are more useful for a prediction task of interest. Prior work on SPCA has focused primarily on optimizing prediction error, and has neglected the value of maximizing variance explained by the extracted features. We propose a new method for SPCA that addresses both of these objectives jointly, and demonstrate empirically that our approach dominates existing approaches, i.e., outperforms them with respect to both prediction error and variation explained. Our approach accommodates arbitrary supervised learning losses and, through a statistical reformulation, provides a novel low-rank extension of generalized linear models.
Is Private Learning Possible with Instance Encoding?
Authors: Nicholas Carlini, Samuel Deng, Sanjam Garg, Somesh Jha, Saeed Mahloujifar, Mohammad Mahmoody, Shuang Song, Abhradeep Thakurta, Florian Tramer
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

A private machine learning algorithm hides as much as possible about its training data while still preserving accuracy. In this work, we study whether a non-private learning algorithm can be made private by relying on an instance-encoding mechanism that modifies the training inputs before feeding them to a normal learner. We formalize both the notion of instance encoding and its privacy by providing two attack models. We first prove impossibility results for achieving a (stronger) model. Next, we demonstrate practical attacks in the second (weaker) attack model on InstaHide, a recent proposal by Huang, Song, Li and Arora [ICML'20] that aims to use instance encoding for privacy.
Ontology-driven Event Type Classification in Images
Authors: Eric Müller-Budack, Matthias Springstein, Sherzod Hakimov, Kevin Mrutzek, Ralph Ewerth
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Event classification can add valuable information for semantic search and the increasingly important topic of fact validation in news. So far, only few approaches address image classification for newsworthy event types such as natural disasters, sports events, or elections. Previous work distinguishes only between a limited number of event types and relies on rather small datasets for training. In this paper, we present a novel ontology-driven approach for the classification of event types in images. We leverage a large number of real-world news events to pursue two objectives: First, we create an ontology based on Wikidata comprising the majority of event types. Second, we introduce a novel large-scale dataset that was acquired through Web crawling. Several baselines are proposed including an ontology-driven learning approach that aims to exploit structured information of a knowledge graph to learn relevant event relations using deep neural networks. Experimental results on existing as well as novel benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ontology-driven approach.
Learning to Infer Semantic Parameters for 3D Shape Editing
Authors: Fangyin Wei, Elena Sizikova, Avneesh Sud, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Thomas Funkhouser
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00

Many applications in 3D shape design and augmentation require the ability to make specific edits to an object's semantic parameters (e.g., the pose of a person's arm or the length of an airplane's wing) while preserving as much existing details as possible. We propose to learn a deep network that infers the semantic parameters of an input shape and then allows the user to manipulate those parameters. The network is trained jointly on shapes from an auxiliary synthetic template and unlabeled realistic models, ensuring robustness to shape variability while relieving the need to label realistic exemplars. At testing time, edits within the parameter space drive deformations to be applied to the original shape, which provides semantically-meaningful manipulation while preserving the details. This is in contrast to prior methods that either use autoencoders with a limited latent-space dimensionality, failing to preserve arbitrary detail, or drive deformations with purely-geometric controls, such as cages, losing the ability to update local part regions. Experiments with datasets of chairs, airplanes, and human bodies demonstrate that our method produces more natural edits than prior work.
MUSE: Textual Attributes Guided Portrait Painting Generation
Authors: Xiaodan Hu, Pengfei Yu, Kevin Knight, Heng Ji, Bo Li, Honghui Shi
Date: 2020-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

We propose a novel approach, MUSE, to illustrate textual attributes visually via portrait generation. MUSE takes a set of attributes written in text, in addition to facial features extracted from a photo of the subject as input. We propose 11 attribute types to represent inspirations from a subject's profile, emotion, story, and environment. We propose a novel stacked neural network architecture by extending an image-to-image generative model to accept textual attributes. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods without using textual attributes, with Inception Score score increased by 6% and Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score decreased by 11%, respectively. We also propose a new attribute reconstruction metric to evaluate whether the generated portraits preserve the subject's attributes. Experiments show that our approach can accurately illustrate 78% textual attributes, which also help MUSE capture the subject in a more creative and expressive way.
Kinematics-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Object-Aware 3D Ego-Pose Estimation
Authors: Zhengyi Luo, Ryo Hachiuma, Ye Yuan, Shun Iwase, Kris M. Kitani
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object, Pose Estimation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), valid

We propose a method for incorporating object interaction and human body dynamics into the task of 3D ego-pose estimation using a head-mounted camera. We use a kinematics model of the human body to represent the entire range of human motion, and a dynamics model of the body to interact with objects inside a physics simulator. By bringing together object modeling, kinematics modeling, and dynamics modeling in a reinforcement learning (RL) framework, we enable object-aware 3D ego-pose estimation. We devise several representational innovations through the design of the state and action space to incorporate 3D scene context and improve pose estimation quality. We also construct a fine-tuning step to correct the drift and refine the estimated human-object interaction. This is the first work to estimate a physically valid 3D full-body interaction sequence with objects (e.g., chairs, boxes, obstacles) from egocentric videos. Experiments with both controlled and in-the-wild settings show that our method can successfully extract an object-conditioned 3D ego-pose sequence that is consistent with the laws of physics.
CenterFusion: Center-based Radar and Camera Fusion for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Ramin Nabati, Hairong Qi
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Vehicles, object-detection, Object Detection, Sensor Fusion

The perception system in autonomous vehicles is responsible for detecting and tracking the surrounding objects. This is usually done by taking advantage of several sensing modalities to increase robustness and accuracy, which makes sensor fusion a crucial part of the perception system. In this paper, we focus on the problem of radar and camera sensor fusion and propose a middle-fusion approach to exploit both radar and camera data for 3D object detection. Our approach, called CenterFusion, first uses a center point detection network to detect objects by identifying their center points on the image. It then solves the key data association problem using a novel frustum-based method to associate the radar detections to their corresponding object's center point. The associated radar detections are used to generate radar-based feature maps to complement the image features, and regress to object properties such as depth, rotation and velocity. We evaluate CenterFusion on the challenging nuScenes dataset, where it improves the overall nuScenes Detection Score (NDS) of the state-of-the-art camera-based algorithm by more than 12%. We further show that CenterFusion significantly improves the velocity estimation accuracy without using any additional temporal information. The code is available at https://github.com/mrnabati/CenterFusion .
Ellipse Detection and Localization with Applications to Knots in Sawn Lumber Images
Authors: Shenyi Pan, Shuxian Fan, Samuel W. K. Wong, James V. Zidek, Helge Rhodin
Date: 2020-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Region Proposal

While general object detection has seen tremendous progress, localization of elliptical objects has received little attention in the literature. Our motivating application is the detection of knots in sawn timber images, which is an important problem since the number and types of knots are visual characteristics that adversely affect the quality of sawn timber. We demonstrate how models can be tailored to the elliptical shape and thereby improve on general purpose detectors; more generally, elliptical defects are common in industrial production, such as enclosed air bubbles when casting glass or plastic. In this paper, we adapt the Faster R-CNN with its Region Proposal Network (RPN) to model elliptical objects with a Gaussian function, and extend the existing Gaussian Proposal Network (GPN) architecture by adding the region-of-interest pooling and regression branches, as well as using the Wasserstein distance as the loss function to predict the precise locations of elliptical objects. Our proposed method has promising results on the lumber knot dataset: knots are detected with an average intersection over union of 73.05%, compared to 63.63% for general purpose detectors. Specific to the lumber application, we also propose an algorithm to correct any misalignment in the raw timber images during scanning, and contribute the first open-source lumber knot dataset by labeling the elliptical knots in the preprocessed images.