pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Novel DNN Training Framework via Data Sampling and Multi-Task Optimization
Authors: Boyu Zhang, A. K. Qin, Hong Pan, Timos Sellis
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Transfer Learning

Conventional DNN training paradigms typically rely on one training set and one validation set, obtained by partitioning an annotated dataset used for training, namely gross training set, in a certain way. The training set is used for training the model while the validation set is used to estimate the generalization performance of the trained model as the training proceeds to avoid over-fitting. There exist two major issues in this paradigm. Firstly, the validation set may hardly guarantee an unbiased estimate of generalization performance due to potential mismatching with test data. Secondly, training a DNN corresponds to solve a complex optimization problem, which is prone to getting trapped into inferior local optima and thus leads to undesired training results. To address these issues, we propose a novel DNN training framework. It generates multiple pairs of training and validation sets from the gross training set via random splitting, trains a DNN model of a pre-specified structure on each pair while making the useful knowledge (e.g., promising network parameters) obtained from one model training process to be transferred to other model training processes via multi-task optimization, and outputs the best, among all trained models, which has the overall best performance across the validation sets from all pairs. The knowledge transfer mechanism featured in this new framework can not only enhance training effectiveness by helping the model training process to escape from local optima but also improve on generalization performance via implicit regularization imposed on one model training process from other model training processes. We implement the proposed framework, parallelize the implementation on a GPU cluster, and apply it to train several widely used DNN models. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over the conventional training paradigm.
Consistent Structured Prediction with Max-Min Margin Markov Networks
Authors: Alex Nowak-Vila, Francis Bach, Alessandro Rudi
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Binary Classification, Generalization Bounds, Multi-class Classification, Prediction, Structured Prediction

Max-margin methods for binary classification such as the support vector machine (SVM) have been extended to the structured prediction setting under the name of max-margin Markov networks ($M^3N$), or more generally structural SVMs. Unfortunately, these methods are statistically inconsistent when the relationship between inputs and labels is far from deterministic. We overcome such limitations by defining the learning problem in terms of a "max-min" margin formulation, naming the resulting method max-min margin Markov networks ($M^4N$). We prove consistency and finite sample generalization bounds for $M^4N$ and provide an explicit algorithm to compute the estimator. The algorithm achieves a generalization error of $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ for a total cost of $O(n)$ projection-oracle calls (which have at most the same cost as the max-oracle from $M^3N$). Experiments on multi-class classification, ordinal regression, sequence prediction and ranking demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Human-centered collaborative robots with deep reinforcement learning
Authors: Ali Ghadirzadeh, Xi Chen, Wenjie Yin, Zhengrong Yi, Mårten Björkman, Danica Kragic
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present a reinforcement learning based framework for human-centered collaborative systems. The framework is proactive and balances the benefits of timely actions with the risk of taking improper actions by minimizing the total time spent to complete the task. The framework is learned end-to-end in an unsupervised fashion addressing the perception uncertainties and decision making in an integrated manner. The framework is shown to provide more fluent coordination between human and robot partners on an example task of packaging compared to alternatives for which perception and decision-making systems are learned independently, using supervised learning. The foremost benefit of the proposed approach is that it allows for fast adaptation to new human partners and tasks since tedious annotation of motion data is avoided and the learning is performed on-line.
Efficient Proximal Mapping of the 1-path-norm of Shallow Networks
Authors: Fabian Latorre, Paul Rolland, Nadav Hallak, Volkan Cevher
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00

We demonstrate two new important properties of the 1-path-norm of shallow neural networks. First, despite its non-smoothness and non-convexity it allows a closed form proximal operator which can be efficiently computed, allowing the use of stochastic proximal-gradient-type methods for regularized empirical risk minimization. Second, when the activation functions is differentiable, it provides an upper bound on the Lipschitz constant of the network. Such bound is tighter than the trivial layer-wise product of Lipschitz constants, motivating its use for training networks robust to adversarial perturbations. In practical experiments we illustrate the advantages of using the proximal mapping and we compare the robustness-accuracy trade-off induced by the 1-path-norm, L1-norm and layer-wise constraints on the Lipschitz constant (Parseval networks).
DeepOPF: A Feasibility-Optimized Deep Neural Network Approach for AC Optimal Power Flow Problems
Authors: Xiang Pan, Minghua Chen, Tianyu Zhao, Steven H. Low
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00

High percentage penetrations of renewable energy generations introduce significant uncertainty into power systems. It requires grid operators to solve alternative current optimal power flow (AC-OPF) problems more frequently for economical and reliable operation in both transmission and distribution grids. In this paper, we develop a Deep Neural Network (DNN) approach, called DeepOPF, for solving AC-OPF problems in a fraction of the time used by conventional solvers. A key difficulty for applying machine learning techniques for solving AC-OPF problems lies in ensuring that the obtained solutions respect the equality and inequality physical and operational constraints. Generalized the 2-stage procedure in [1], [2], DeepOPF first trains a DNN model to predict a set of independent operating variables and then directly compute the remaining dependable ones by solving power flow equations. Such an approach not only preserves the power-flow balance equality constraints but also reduces the number of variables to predict by the DNN, cutting down the number of neurons and training data needed. DeepOPF then employs a penalty approach with a zero-order gradient estimation technique in the training process to preserve the remaining inequality constraints. As another contribution, we drive a condition for tuning the size of the DNN according to the desired approximation accuracy, which measures the DNN generalization capability. It provides theoretical justification for using DNN to solve the AC-OPF problem. Simulation results of IEEE 30/118/300-bus and a synthetic 2000-bus test cases show that DeepOPF speeds up the computing time by up to two orders of magnitude as compared to a state-of-the-art solver, at the expense of $<$0.1% cost difference.
PGD-UNet: A Position-Guided Deformable Network for Simultaneous Segmentation of Organs and Tumors
Authors: Ziqiang Li, Hong Pan, Yaping Zhu, A. K. Qin
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Position, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Precise segmentation of organs and tumors plays a crucial role in clinical applications. It is a challenging task due to the irregular shapes and various sizes of organs and tumors as well as the significant class imbalance between the anatomy of interest (AOI) and the background region. In addition, in most situation tumors and normal organs often overlap in medical images, but current approaches fail to delineate both tumors and organs accurately. To tackle such challenges, we propose a position-guided deformable UNet, namely PGD-UNet, which exploits the spatial deformation capabilities of deformable convolution to deal with the geometric transformation of both organs and tumors. Position information is explicitly encoded into the network to enhance the capabilities of deformation. Meanwhile, we introduce a new pooling module to preserve position information lost in conventional max-pooling operation. Besides, due to unclear boundaries between different structures as well as the subjectivity of annotations, labels are not necessarily accurate for medical image segmentation tasks. It may cause the overfitting of the trained network due to label noise. To address this issue, we formulate a novel loss function to suppress the influence of potential label noise on the training process. Our method was evaluated on two challenging segmentation tasks and achieved very promising segmentation accuracy in both tasks.
Rethinking Channel Dimensions for Efficient Model Design
Authors: Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun, Byeongho Heo, Youngjoon Yoo
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, model, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Designing an efficient model within the limited computational cost is challenging. We argue the accuracy of a lightweight model has been further limited by the design convention: a stage-wise configuration of the channel dimensions, which looks like a piecewise linear function of the network stage. In this paper, we study an effective channel dimension configuration towards better performance than the convention. To this end, we empirically study how to design a single layer properly by analyzing the rank of the output feature. We then investigate the channel configuration of a model by searching network architectures concerning the channel configuration under the computational cost restriction. Based on the investigation, we propose a simple yet effective channel configuration that can be parameterized by the layer index. As a result, our proposed model following the channel parameterization achieves remarkable performance on ImageNet classification and transfer learning tasks including COCO object detection, COCO instance segmentation, and fine-grained classifications. Code and ImageNet pretrained models are available at https://github.com/clovaai/rexnet.
Data Augmenting Contrastive Learning of Speech Representations in the Time Domain
Authors: Eugene Kharitonov, Morgane Rivière, Gabriel Synnaeve, Lior Wolf, Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré, Matthijs Douze, Emmanuel Dupoux
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Representation Learning

Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC), based on predicting future segments of speech based on past segments is emerging as a powerful algorithm for representation learning of speech signal. However, it still under-performs other methods on unsupervised evaluation benchmarks. Here, we introduce WavAugment, a time-domain data augmentation library and find that applying augmentation in the past is generally more efficient and yields better performances than other methods. We find that a combination of pitch modification, additive noise and reverberation substantially increase the performance of CPC (relative improvement of 18-22%), beating the reference Libri-light results with 600 times less data. Using an out-of-domain dataset, time-domain data augmentation can push CPC to be on par with the state of the art on the Zero Speech Benchmark 2017. We also show that time-domain data augmentation consistently improves downstream limited-supervision phoneme classification tasks by a factor of 12-15% relative.
ADD: Analytically Differentiable Dynamics for Multi-Body Systems with Frictional Contact
Authors: Moritz Geilinger, David Hahn, Jonas Zehnder, Moritz Bächer, Bernhard Thomaszewski, Stelian Coros
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning, parameter estimation, Self-Supervised Learning

We present a differentiable dynamics solver that is able to handle frictional contact for rigid and deformable objects within a unified framework. Through a principled mollification of normal and tangential contact forces, our method circumvents the main difficulties inherent to the non-smooth nature of frictional contact. We combine this new contact model with fully-implicit time integration to obtain a robust and efficient dynamics solver that is analytically differentiable. In conjunction with adjoint sensitivity analysis, our formulation enables gradient-based optimization with adaptive trade-offs between simulation accuracy and smoothness of objective function landscapes. We thoroughly analyse our approach on a set of simulation examples involving rigid bodies, visco-elastic materials, and coupled multi-body systems. We furthermore showcase applications of our differentiable simulator to parameter estimation for deformable objects, motion planning for robotic manipulation, trajectory optimization for compliant walking robots, as well as efficient self-supervised learning of control policies.
RGB-D-based Framework to Acquire, Visualize and Measure the Human Body for Dietetic Treatments
Authors: Andrés Fuster-Guilló, Jorge Azorín-López, Marcelo Saval-Calvo, Juan Miguel Castillo-Zaragoza, Nahuel Garcia-DUrso, Robert B. Fisher
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00

This research aims to improve dietetic-nutritional treatment using state-of-the-art RGB-D sensors and virtual reality (VR) technology. Recent studies show that adherence to treatment can be improved using multimedia technologies. However, there are few studies using 3D data and VR technologies for this purpose. On the other hand, obtaining 3D measurements of the human body and analyzing them over time (4D) in patients undergoing dietary treatment is a challenging field. The main contribution of the work is to provide a framework to study the effect of 4D body model visualization on adherence to obesity treatment. The system can obtain a complete 3D model of a body using low-cost technology, allowing future straightforward transference with sufficient accuracy and realistic visualization, enabling the analysis of the evolution (4D) of the shape during the treatment of obesity. The 3D body models will be used for studying the effect of visualization on adherence to obesity treatment using 2D and VR devices. Moreover, we will use the acquired 3D models to obtain measurements of the body. An analysis of the accuracy of the proposed methods for obtaining measurements with both synthetic and real objects has been carried out.
PerceptionGAN: Real-world Image Construction from Provided Text through Perceptual Understanding
Authors: Kanish Garg, Ajeet Kumar Singh, Dorien Herremans, Brejesh lall
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Image Generation

Generating an image from a provided descriptive text is quite a challenging task because of the difficulty in incorporating perceptual information (object shapes, colors, and their interactions) along with providing high relevancy related to the provided text. Current methods first generate an initial low-resolution image, which typically has irregular object shapes, colors, and interaction between objects. This initial image is then improved by conditioning on the text. However, these methods mainly address the problem of using text representation efficiently in the refinement of the initially generated image, while the success of this refinement process depends heavily on the quality of the initially generated image, as pointed out in the DM-GAN paper. Hence, we propose a method to provide good initialized images by incorporating perceptual understanding in the discriminator module. We improve the perceptual information at the first stage itself, which results in significant improvement in the final generated image. In this paper, we have applied our approach to the novel StackGAN architecture. We then show that the perceptual information included in the initial image is improved while modeling image distribution at multiple stages. Finally, we generated realistic multi-colored images conditioned by text. These images have good quality along with containing improved basic perceptual information. More importantly, the proposed method can be integrated into the pipeline of other state-of-the-art text-based-image-generation models to generate initial low-resolution images. We also worked on improving the refinement process in StackGAN by augmenting the third stage of the generator-discriminator pair in the StackGAN architecture. Our experimental analysis and comparison with the state-of-the-art on a large but sparse dataset MS COCO further validate the usefulness of our proposed approach.
Learning to search efficiently for causally near-optimal treatments
Authors: Samuel Håkansson, Viktor Lindblom, Omer Gottesman, Fredrik D. Johansson
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Causal Inference, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Finding an effective medical treatment often requires a search by trial and error. Making this search more efficient by minimizing the number of unnecessary trials could lower both costs and patient suffering. We formalize this problem as learning a policy for finding a near-optimal treatment in a minimum number of trials using a causal inference framework. We give a model-based dynamic programming algorithm which learns from observational data while being robust to unmeasured confounding. To reduce time complexity, we suggest a greedy algorithm which bounds the near-optimality constraint. The methods are evaluated on synthetic and real-world healthcare data and compared to model-free reinforcement learning. We find that our methods compare favorably to the model-free baseline while offering a more transparent trade-off between search time and treatment efficacy.
MPLP: Learning a Message Passing Learning Protocol
Authors: Ettore Randazzo, Eyvind Niklasson, Alexander Mordvintsev
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00

We present a novel method for learning the weights of an artificial neural network - a Message Passing Learning Protocol (MPLP). In MPLP, we abstract every operations occurring in ANNs as independent agents. Each agent is responsible for ingesting incoming multidimensional messages from other agents, updating its internal state, and generating multidimensional messages to be passed on to neighbouring agents. We demonstrate the viability of MPLP as opposed to traditional gradient-based approaches on simple feed-forward neural networks, and present a framework capable of generalizing to non-traditional neural network architectures. MPLP is meta learned using end-to-end gradient-based meta-optimisation. We further discuss the observed properties of MPLP and hypothesize its applicability on various fields of deep learning.
Structure Adaptive Algorithms for Stochastic Bandits
Authors: Rémy Degenne, Han Shao, Wouter M. Koolen
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

We study reward maximisation in a wide class of structured stochastic multi-armed bandit problems, where the mean rewards of arms satisfy some given structural constraints, e.g. linear, unimodal, sparse, etc. Our aim is to develop methods that are flexible (in that they easily adapt to different structures), powerful (in that they perform well empirically and/or provably match instance-dependent lower bounds) and efficient in that the per-round computational burden is small. We develop asymptotically optimal algorithms from instance-dependent lower-bounds using iterative saddle-point solvers. Our approach generalises recent iterative methods for pure exploration to reward maximisation, where a major challenge arises from the estimation of the sub-optimality gaps and their reciprocals. Still we manage to achieve all the above desiderata. Notably, our technique avoids the computational cost of the full-blown saddle point oracle employed by previous work, while at the same time enabling finite-time regret bounds. Our experiments reveal that our method successfully leverages the structural assumptions, while its regret is at worst comparable to that of vanilla UCB.
Project PIAF: Building a Native French Question-Answering Dataset
Authors: Rachel Keraron, Guillaume Lancrenon, Mathilde Bras, Frédéric Allary, Gilles Moyse, Thomas Scialom, Edmundo-Pavel Soriano-Morales, Jacopo Staiano
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Question Answering

Motivated by the lack of data for non-English languages, in particular for the evaluation of downstream tasks such as Question Answering, we present a participatory effort to collect a native French Question Answering Dataset. Furthermore, we describe and publicly release the annotation tool developed for our collection effort, along with the data obtained and preliminary baselines.
Iterative Bounding Box Annotation for Object Detection
Authors: Bishwo Adhikari, Heikki Huttunen
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Manual annotation of bounding boxes for object detection in digital images is tedious, and time and resource consuming. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic method for efficient bounding box annotation. The method trains the object detector iteratively on small batches of labeled images and learns to propose bounding boxes for the next batch, after which the human annotator only needs to correct possible errors. We propose an experimental setup for simulating the human actions and use it for comparing different iteration strategies, such as the order in which the data is presented to the annotator. We experiment on our method with three datasets and show that it can reduce the human annotation effort significantly, saving up to 75% of total manual annotation work.
A deep primal-dual proximal network for image restoration
Authors: Mingyuan Jiu, Nelly Pustelnik
Date: 2020-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Image restoration remains a challenging task in image processing. Numerous methods tackle this problem, often solved by minimizing a non-smooth penalized co-log-likelihood function. Although the solution is easily interpretable with theoretic guarantees, its estimation relies on an optimization process that can take time. Considering the research effort in deep learning for image classification and segmentation, this class of methods offers a serious alternative to perform image restoration but stays challenging to solve inverse problems. In this work, we design a deep network, named DeepPDNet, built from primal-dual proximal iterations associated with the minimization of a standard penalized likelihood with an analysis prior, allowing us to take advantage of both worlds. We reformulate a specific instance of the Condat-Vu primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) algorithm as a deep network with fixed layers. The learned parameters are both the PDHG algorithm step-sizes and the analysis linear operator involved in the penalization (including the regularization parameter). These parameters are allowed to vary from a layer to another one. Two different learning strategies: "Full learning" and "Partial learning" are proposed, the first one is the most efficient numerically while the second one relies on standard constraints ensuring convergence in the standard PDHG iterations. Moreover, global and local sparse analysis prior are studied to seek a better feature representation. We apply the proposed methods to image restoration on the MNIST and BSD68 datasets and to single image super-resolution on the BSD100 and SET14 datasets. Extensive results show that the proposed DeepPDNet demonstrates excellent performance on the MNIST and the more complex BSD68, BSD100, and SET14 datasets for image restoration and single image super-resolution task.