pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Joint Object Detection and Multi-Object Tracking with Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Yongxin Wang, Kris Kitani, Xinshuo Weng
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking

Object detection and data association are critical components in multi-object tracking (MOT) systems. Despite the fact that the two components are dependent on each other, prior works often design detection and data association modules separately which are trained with separate objectives. As a result, one cannot back-propagate the gradients and optimize the entire MOT system, which leads to sub-optimal performance. To address this issue, recent works simultaneously optimize detection and data association modules under a joint MOT framework, which has shown improved performance in both modules. In this work, we propose a new instance of joint MOT approach based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). The key idea is that GNNs can model relations between variable-sized objects in both the spatial and temporal domains, which is essential for learning discriminative features for detection and data association. Through extensive experiments on the MOT15/16/17/20 datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our GNN-based joint MOT approach and show state-of-the-art performance for both detection and MOT tasks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yongxinw/GSDT
Variational Orthogonal Features
Authors: David R. Burt, Carl Edward Rasmussen, Mark van der Wilk
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

Sparse stochastic variational inference allows Gaussian process models to be applied to large datasets. The per iteration computational cost of inference with this method is $\mathcal{O}(\tilde{N}M^2+M^3),$ where $\tilde{N}$ is the number of points in a minibatch and $M$ is the number of `inducing features', which determine the expressiveness of the variational family. Several recent works have shown that for certain priors, features can be defined that remove the $\mathcal{O}(M^3)$ cost of computing a minibatch estimate of an evidence lower bound (ELBO). This represents a significant computational savings when $M\gg \tilde{N}$. We present a construction of features for any stationary prior kernel that allow for computation of an unbiased estimator to the ELBO using $T$ Monte Carlo samples in $\mathcal{O}(\tilde{N}T+M^2T)$ and in $\mathcal{O}(\tilde{N}T+MT)$ with an additional approximation. We analyze the impact of this additional approximation on inference quality.
Deep Reinforcement Learning Control for Radar Detection and Tracking in Congested Spectral Environments
Authors: Charles E. Thornton, Mark A. Kozy, R. Michael Buehrer, Anthony F. Martone, Kelly D. Sherbondy
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, dynamic non-cooperative coexistence between a cognitive pulsed radar and a nearby communications system is addressed by applying nonlinear value function approximation via deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL) to develop a policy for optimal radar performance. The radar learns to vary the bandwidth and center frequency of its linear frequency modulated (LFM) waveforms to mitigate mutual interference with other systems and improve target detection performance while also maintaining sufficient utilization of the available frequency bands required for a fine range resolution. We demonstrate that our approach, based on the Deep Q-Learning (DQL) algorithm, enhances important radar metrics, including SINR and bandwidth utilization, more effectively than policy iteration or sense-and-avoid (SAA) approaches in a variety of realistic coexistence environments. We also extend the DQL-based approach to incorporate Double Q-learning and a recurrent neural network to form a Double Deep Recurrent Q-Network (DDRQN). We demonstrate the DDRQN results in favorable performance and stability compared to DQL and policy iteration. Finally, we demonstrate the practicality of our proposed approach through a discussion of experiments performed on a software defined radar (SDRadar) prototype system. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed Deep RL approach significantly improves radar detection performance in congested spectral environments when compared to policy iteration and SAA.
Spectral Bias and Task-Model Alignment Explain Generalization in Kernel Regression and Infinitely Wide Neural Networks
Authors: Abdulkadir Canatar, Blake Bordelon, Cengiz Pehlevan
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Inductive Bias, regression

Generalization beyond a training dataset is a main goal of machine learning, but theoretical understanding of generalization remains an open problem for many models. The need for a new theory is exacerbated by recent observations in deep neural networks where overparameterization leads to better performance, contradicting the conventional wisdom from classical statistics. In this paper, we investigate generalization error for kernel regression, which, besides being a popular machine learning method, also includes infinitely overparameterized neural networks trained with gradient descent. We use techniques from statistical mechanics to derive an analytical expression for generalization error applicable to any kernel or data distribution. We present applications of our theory to real and synthetic datasets, and for many kernels including those that arise from training deep neural networks in the infinite-width limit. We elucidate an inductive bias of kernel regression to explain data with "simple functions", which are identified by solving a kernel eigenfunction problem on the data distribution. This notion of simplicity allows us to characterize whether a kernel is compatible with a learning task, facilitating good generalization performance from a small number of training examples. We show that more data may impair generalization when noisy or not expressible by the kernel, leading to non-monotonic learning curves with possibly many peaks. To further understand these phenomena, we turn to the broad class of rotation invariant kernels, which is relevant to training deep neural networks in the infinite-width limit, and present a detailed mathematical analysis of them when data is drawn from a spherically symmetric distribution and the number of input dimensions is large.
The Macroeconomy as a Random Forest
Authors: Philippe Goulet Coulombe
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

I develop Macroeconomic Random Forest (MRF), an algorithm adapting the canonical Machine Learning (ML) tool to flexibly model evolving parameters in a linear macro equation. Its main output, Generalized Time-Varying Parameters (GTVPs), is a versatile device nesting many popular nonlinearities (threshold/switching, smooth transition, structural breaks/change) and allowing for sophisticated new ones. The approach delivers clear forecasting gains over numerous alternatives, predicts the 2008 drastic rise in unemployment, and performs well for inflation. Unlike most ML-based methods, MRF is directly interpretable -- via its GTVPs. For instance, the successful unemployment forecast is due to the influence of forward-looking variables (e.g., term spreads, housing starts) nearly doubling before every recession. Interestingly, the Phillips curve has indeed flattened, and its might is highly cyclical.
Conditional independence testing via weighted partial copulas and nearest neighbors
Authors: Pascal Bianchi, Kevin Elgui, François Portier
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

This paper introduces the \textit{weighted partial copula} function for testing conditional independence. The proposed test procedure results from these two ingredients: (i) the test statistic is an explicit Cramer-von Mises transformation of the \textit{weighted partial copula}, (ii) the regions of rejection are computed using a bootstrap procedure which mimics conditional independence by generating samples from the product measure of the estimated conditional marginals. Under conditional independence, the weak convergence of the \textit{weighted partial copula proces}s is established when the marginals are estimated using a smoothed local linear estimator. Finally, an experimental section demonstrates that the proposed test has competitive power compared to recent state-of-the-art methods such as kernel-based test.
Min-Mid-Max Scaling, Limits of Agreement, and Agreement Score
Authors: Veli Safak
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

In this paper, I solve a 60-year old question posed by Cohen's seminal paper (1960) and offer an agreement measure centered around the chance-expected agreement while isolating marginally forced agreement and disagreement. To achieve this, I formulate the minimum feasible agreement given row and column marginals by devising a new algorithm that minimizes the sum of diagonals in contingency tables. Based on this result, I also formulate the lower limit of the most common agreement measure-Cohen's kappa. Finally, I study the lower limit of maximum feasible agreement and devise two statistics of distribution similarity for agreement analysis.
Fast, Optimal, and Targeted Predictions using Parametrized Decision Analysis
Authors: Daniel R. Kowal
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Nutrition, Prediction, Variable Selection

Prediction is critical for decision-making under uncertainty and lends validity to statistical inference. With targeted prediction, the goal is to optimize predictions for specific decision tasks of interest, which we represent via functionals. Although classical decision analysis extracts predictions from a Bayesian model, these predictions are often difficult to interpret and slow to compute. Instead, we design a class of parametrized actions for Bayesian decision analysis that produce optimal, scalable, and simple targeted predictions. For a wide variety of action parametrizations and loss functions--including linear actions with sparsity constraints for targeted variable selection--we derive a convenient representation of the optimal targeted prediction that yields efficient and interpretable solutions. Customized out-of-sample predictive metrics are developed to evaluate and compare among targeted predictors. Through careful use of the posterior predictive distribution, we introduce a procedure that identifies a set of near-optimal, or acceptable targeted predictors, which provide unique insights into the features and level of complexity needed for accurate targeted prediction. Simulations demonstrate excellent prediction, estimation, and variable selection capabilities. Targeted predictions are constructed for physical activity data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to better predict and understand the characteristics of intraday physical activity.
The principles of adaptation in organisms and machines II: Thermodynamics of the Bayesian brain
Authors: Hideaki Shimazaki
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

This article reviews how organisms learn and recognize the world through the dynamics of neural networks from the perspective of Bayesian inference, and introduces a view on how such dynamics is described by the laws for the entropy of neural activity, a paradigm that we call thermodynamics of the Bayesian brain. The Bayesian brain hypothesis sees the stimulus-evoked activity of neurons as an act of constructing the Bayesian posterior distribution based on the generative model of the external world that an organism possesses. A closer look at the stimulus-evoked activity at early sensory cortices reveals that feedforward connections initially mediate the stimulus-response, which is later modulated by input from recurrent connections. Importantly, not the initial response, but the delayed modulation expresses animals' cognitive states such as awareness and attention regarding the stimulus. Using a simple generative model made of a spiking neural population, we reproduce the stimulus-evoked dynamics with the delayed feedback modulation as the process of the Bayesian inference that integrates the stimulus evidence and a prior knowledge with time-delay. We then introduce a thermodynamic view on this process based on the laws for the entropy of neural activity. This view elucidates that the process of the Bayesian inference works as the recently-proposed information-theoretic engine (neural engine, an analogue of a heat engine in thermodynamics), which allows us to quantify the perceptual capacity expressed in the delayed modulation in terms of entropy.
Frost filtered scale-invariant feature extraction and multilayer perceptron for hyperspectral image classification
Authors: G. Kalaiarasi, S. Maheswari
Date: 2020-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification plays a significant in the field of remote sensing due to its ability to provide spatial and spectral information. Due to the rapid development and increasing of hyperspectral remote sensing technology, many methods have been developed for HSI classification but still a lack of achieving the better performance. A Frost Filtered Scale-Invariant Feature Transformation based MultiLayer Perceptron Classification (FFSIFT-MLPC) technique is introduced for classifying the hyperspectral image with higher accuracy and minimum time consumption. The FFSIFT-MLPC technique performs three major processes, namely preprocessing, feature extraction and classification using multiple layers. Initially, the hyperspectral image is divided into number of spectral bands. These bands are given as input in the input layer of perceptron. Then the Frost filter is used in FFSIFT-MLPC technique for preprocessing the input bands which helps to remove the noise from hyper-spectral image at the first hidden layer. After preprocessing task, texture, color and object features of hyper-spectral image are extracted at second hidden layer using Gaussian distributive scale-invariant feature transform. At the third hidden layer, Euclidean distance is measured between the extracted features and testing features. Finally, feature matching is carried out at the output layer for hyper-spectral image classification. The classified outputs are resulted in terms of spectral bands (i.e., different colors). Experimental analysis is performed with PSNR, classification accuracy, false positive rate and classification time with number of spectral bands. The results evident that presented FFSIFT-MLPC technique improves the hyperspectral image classification accuracy, PSNR and minimizes false positive rate as well as classification time than the state-of-the-art methods.
Laplacian Mixture Model Point Based Registration
Authors: Mohammad Sadegh Majdi, Emad Fatemizadeh
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, model

Point base registration is an important part in many machine VISIOn applications, medical diagnostics, agricultural studies etc. The goal of point set registration is to find correspondences between different data sets and estimate the appropriate transformation that can map one set to another. Here we introduce a novel method for matching of different data sets based on Laplacian distribution. We consider the alignment of two point sets as probability density estimation problem. By using maximum likelihood methods we try to fit the Laplacian mixture model (LMM) centroids (source point set) to the data point set.
Drive-Net: Convolutional Network for Driver Distraction Detection
Authors: Mohammed S. Majdi, Sundaresh Ram, Jonathan T. Gill, Jeffery J. Rodriguez
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00

To help prevent motor vehicle accidents, there has been significant interest in finding an automated method to recognize signs of driver distraction, such as talking to passengers, fixing hair and makeup, eating and drinking, and using a mobile phone. In this paper, we present an automated supervised learning method called Drive-Net for driver distraction detection. Drive-Net uses a combination of a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a random decision forest for classifying images of a driver. We compare the performance of our proposed Drive-Net to two other popular machine-learning approaches: a recurrent neural network (RNN), and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). We test the methods on a publicly available database of images acquired under a controlled environment containing about 22425 images manually annotated by an expert. Results show that Drive-Net achieves a detection accuracy of 95%, which is 2% more than the best results obtained on the same database using other methods
RP2K: A Large-Scale Retail Product Dataset for Fine-Grained Image Classification
Authors: Jingtian Peng, Chang Xiao, YiFan Li
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Information Retrieval, Object Recognition, Retrieval

We introduce RP2K, a new large-scale retail product dataset for fine-grained image classification. Unlike previous datasets focusing on relatively few products, we collect more than 500,000 images of retail products on shelves belonging to 2000 different products. Our dataset aims to advance the research in retail object recognition, which has massive applications such as automatic shelf auditing and image-based product information retrieval. Our dataset enjoys following properties: (1) It is by far the largest scale dataset in terms of product categories. (2) All images are captured manually in physical retail stores with natural lightings, matching the scenario of real applications. (3) We provide rich annotations to each object, including the sizes, shapes and flavors/scents. We believe our dataset could benefit both computer vision research and retail industry. Our dataset is publicly available at https://www.pinlandata.com/rp2k_dataset.
AFDet: Anchor Free One Stage 3D Object Detection
Authors: Runzhou Ge, Zhuangzhuang Ding, Yihan Hu, Yu Wang, Sijia Chen, Li Huang, Yuan Li
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, GPU, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

High-efficiency point cloud 3D object detection operated on embedded systems is important for many robotics applications including autonomous driving. Most previous works try to solve it using anchor-based detection methods which come with two drawbacks: post-processing is relatively complex and computationally expensive; tuning anchor parameters is tricky. We are the first to address these drawbacks with an anchor free and Non-Maximum Suppression free one stage detector called AFDet. The entire AFDet can be processed efficiently on a CNN accelerator or a GPU with the simplified post-processing. Without bells and whistles, our proposed AFDet performs competitively with other one stage anchor-based methods on KITTI validation set and Waymo Open Dataset validation set.
Deep Learning of Unified Region, Edge, and Contour Models for Automated Image Segmentation
Authors: Ali Hatamizadeh
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Few-Shot Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Representation Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Image segmentation is a fundamental and challenging problem in computer vision with applications spanning multiple areas, such as medical imaging, remote sensing, and autonomous vehicles. Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have gained traction in the design of automated segmentation pipelines. Although CNN-based models are adept at learning abstract features from raw image data, their performance is dependent on the availability and size of suitable training datasets. Additionally, these models are often unable to capture the details of object boundaries and generalize poorly to unseen classes. In this thesis, we devise novel methodologies that address these issues and establish robust representation learning frameworks for fully-automatic semantic segmentation in medical imaging and mainstream computer vision. In particular, our contributions include (1) state-of-the-art 2D and 3D image segmentation networks for computer vision and medical image analysis, (2) an end-to-end trainable image segmentation framework that unifies CNNs and active contour models with learnable parameters for fast and robust object delineation, (3) a novel approach for disentangling edge and texture processing in segmentation networks, and (4) a novel few-shot learning model in both supervised settings and semi-supervised settings where synergies between latent and image spaces are leveraged to learn to segment images given limited training data.
iffDetector: Inference-aware Feature Filtering for Object Detection
Authors: Mingyuan Mao, Yuxin Tian, Baochang Zhang, Qixiang Ye, Wanquan Liu, Guodong Guo, David Doermann
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Modern CNN-based object detectors focus on feature configuration during training but often ignore feature optimization during inference. In this paper, we propose a new feature optimization approach to enhance features and suppress background noise in both the training and inference stages. We introduce a generic Inference-aware Feature Filtering (IFF) module that can easily be combined with modern detectors, resulting in our iffDetector. Unlike conventional open-loop feature calculation approaches without feedback, the IFF module performs closed-loop optimization by leveraging high-level semantics to enhance the convolutional features. By applying Fourier transform analysis, we demonstrate that the IFF module acts as a negative feedback that theoretically guarantees the stability of feature learning. IFF can be fused with CNN-based object detectors in a plug-and-play manner with negligible computational cost overhead. Experiments on the PASCAL VOC and MS COCO datasets demonstrate that our iffDetector consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods by significant margins\footnote{The test code and model are anonymously available in https://github.com/anonymous2020new/iffDetector }.
CIE XYZ Net: Unprocessing Images for Low-Level Computer Vision Tasks
Authors: Mahmoud Afifi, Abdelrahman Abdelhamed, Abdullah Abuolaim, Abhijith Punnappurath, Michael S. Brown
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Deblurring, Image Dehazing

Cameras currently allow access to two image states: (i) a minimally processed linear raw-RGB image state (i.e., raw sensor data) or (ii) a highly-processed nonlinear image state (e.g., sRGB). There are many computer vision tasks that work best with a linear image state, such as image deblurring and image dehazing. Unfortunately, the vast majority of images are saved in the nonlinear image state. Because of this, a number of methods have been proposed to "unprocess" nonlinear images back to a raw-RGB state. However, existing unprocessing methods have a drawback because raw-RGB images are sensor-specific. As a result, it is necessary to know which camera produced the sRGB output and use a method or network tailored for that sensor to properly unprocess it. This paper addresses this limitation by exploiting another camera image state that is not available as an output, but it is available inside the camera pipeline. In particular, cameras apply a colorimetric conversion step to convert the raw-RGB image to a device-independent space based on the CIE XYZ color space before they apply the nonlinear photo-finishing. Leveraging this canonical image state, we propose a deep learning framework, CIE XYZ Net, that can unprocess a nonlinear image back to the canonical CIE XYZ image. This image can then be processed by any low-level computer vision operator and re-rendered back to the nonlinear image. We demonstrate the usefulness of the CIE XYZ Net on several low-level vision tasks and show significant gains that can be obtained by this processing framework. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/mahmoudnafifi/CIE_XYZ_NET.