pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ASAP: A Chinese Review Dataset Towards Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis and Rating Prediction
Authors: Jiahao Bu, Lei Ren, Shuang Zheng, Yang Yang, Jingang Wang, Fuzheng Zhang, Wei Wu
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Aspect Category Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis has attracted increasing attention in e-commerce. The sentiment polarities underlying user reviews are of great value for business intelligence. Aspect category sentiment analysis (ACSA) and review rating prediction (RP) are two essential tasks to detect the fine-to-coarse sentiment polarities. %Considering the sentiment of the aspects(ACSA) and the overall review rating(RP) simultaneously has the potential to improve the overall performance. ACSA and RP are highly correlated and usually employed jointly in real-world e-commerce scenarios. While most public datasets are constructed for ACSA and RP separately, which may limit the further exploitation of both tasks. To address the problem and advance related researches, we present a large-scale Chinese restaurant review dataset \textbf{ASAP} including $46,730$ genuine reviews from a leading online-to-offline (O2O) e-commerce platform in China. Besides a $5$-star scale rating, each review is manually annotated according to its sentiment polarities towards $18$ pre-defined aspect categories. We hope the release of the dataset could shed some light on the fields of sentiment analysis. Moreover, we propose an intuitive yet effective joint model for ACSA and RP. Experimental results demonstrate that the joint model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both tasks.
Symbolic Reinforcement Learning for Safe RAN Control
Authors: Alexandros Nikou, Anusha Mujumdar, Marin Orlic, Aneta Vulgarakis Feljan
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper, we demonstrate a Symbolic Reinforcement Learning (SRL) architecture for safe control in Radio Access Network (RAN) applications. In our automated tool, a user can select a high-level safety specifications expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to shield an RL agent running in a given cellular network with aim of optimizing network performance, as measured through certain Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). In the proposed architecture, network safety shielding is ensured through model-checking techniques over combined discrete system models (automata) that are abstracted through reinforcement learning. We demonstrate the user interface (UI) helping the user set intent specifications to the architecture and inspect the difference in allowed and blocked actions.
DebIE: A Platform for Implicit and Explicit Debiasing of Word Embedding Spaces
Authors: Niklas Friedrich, Anne Lauscher, Simone Paolo Ponzetto, Goran Glavaš
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: Fairness, Word Embeddings

Recent research efforts in NLP have demonstrated that distributional word vector spaces often encode stereotypical human biases, such as racism and sexism. With word representations ubiquitously used in NLP models and pipelines, this raises ethical issues and jeopardizes the fairness of language technologies. While there exists a large body of work on bias measures and debiasing methods, to date, there is no platform that would unify these research efforts and make bias measuring and debiasing of representation spaces widely accessible. In this work, we present DebIE, the first integrated platform for (1) measuring and (2) mitigating bias in word embeddings. Given an (i) embedding space (users can choose between the predefined spaces or upload their own) and (ii) a bias specification (users can choose between existing bias specifications or create their own), DebIE can (1) compute several measures of implicit and explicit bias and modify the embedding space by executing two (mutually composable) debiasing models. DebIE's functionality can be accessed through four different interfaces: (a) a web application, (b) a desktop application, (c) a REST-ful API, and (d) as a command-line application. DebIE is available at: debie.informatik.uni-mannheim.de.
Bump Hunting in Latent Space
Authors: Blaž Bortolato, Barry M. Dillon, Jernej F. Kamenik, Aleks Smolkovič
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection could be crucial in future analyses searching for rare phenomena in large datasets, as for example collected at the LHC. To this end, we introduce a physics inspired variational autoencoder (VAE) architecture which performs competitively and robustly on the LHC Olympics Machine Learning Challenge datasets. We demonstrate how embedding some physical observables directly into the VAE latent space, while at the same time keeping the classifier manifestly agnostic to them, can help to identify and characterise features in measured spectra as caused by the presence of anomalies in a dataset.
Privacy-preserving Object Detection
Authors: Peiyang He, Charlie Griffin, Krzysztof Kacprzyk, Artjom Joosen, Michael Collyer, Aleksandar Shtedritski, Yuki M. Asano
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Privacy Preserving

Privacy considerations and bias in datasets are quickly becoming high-priority issues that the computer vision community needs to face. So far, little attention has been given to practical solutions that do not involve collection of new datasets. In this work, we show that for object detection on COCO, both anonymizing the dataset by blurring faces, as well as swapping faces in a balanced manner along the gender and skin tone dimension, can retain object detection performances while preserving privacy and partially balancing bias.
Preprint: Norm Loss: An efficient yet effective regularization method for deep neural networks
Authors: Theodoros Georgiou, Sebastian Schmitt, Thomas Bäck, Wei Chen, Michael Lew
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00

Convolutional neural network training can suffer from diverse issues like exploding or vanishing gradients, scaling-based weight space symmetry and covariant-shift. In order to address these issues, researchers develop weight regularization methods and activation normalization methods. In this work we propose a weight soft-regularization method based on the Oblique manifold. The proposed method uses a loss function which pushes each weight vector to have a norm close to one, i.e. the weight matrix is smoothly steered toward the so-called Oblique manifold. We evaluate our method on the very popular CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet 2012 datasets using two state-of-the-art architectures, namely the ResNet and wide-ResNet. Our method introduces negligible computational overhead and the results show that it is competitive to the state-of-the-art and in some cases superior to it. Additionally, the results are less sensitive to hyperparameter settings such as batch size and regularization factor.
An unsupervised deep learning framework for medical image denoising
Authors: Swati Rai, Jignesh S. Bhatt, S. K. Patra
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Denoising, Dictionary Learning, GPU, Image Denoising, Medical Image Denoising

Medical image acquisition is often intervented by unwanted noise that corrupts the information content. This paper introduces an unsupervised medical image denoising technique that learns noise characteristics from the available images and constructs denoised images. It comprises of two blocks of data processing, viz., patch-based dictionaries that indirectly learn the noise and residual learning (RL) that directly learns the noise. The model is generalized to account for both 2D and 3D images considering different medical imaging instruments. The images are considered one-by-one from the stack of MRI/CT images as well as the entire stack is considered, and decomposed into overlapping image/volume patches. These patches are given to the patch-based dictionary learning to learn noise characteristics via sparse representation while given to the RL part to directly learn the noise properties. K-singular value decomposition (K-SVD) algorithm for sparse representation is used for training patch-based dictionaries. On the other hand, residue in the patches is trained using the proposed deep residue network. Iterating on these two parts, an optimum noise characterization for each image/volume patch is captured and in turn it is subtracted from the available respective image/volume patch. The obtained denoised image/volume patches are finally assembled to a denoised image or 3D stack. We provide an analysis of the proposed approach with other approaches. Experiments on MRI/CT datasets are run on a GPU-based supercomputer and the comparative results show that the proposed algorithm preserves the critical information in the images as well as improves the visual quality of the images.
PointFlow: Flowing Semantics Through Points for Aerial Image Segmentation
Authors: Xiangtai Li, Hao He, Xia Li, Duo Li, Guangliang Cheng, Jianping Shi, Lubin Weng, Yunhai Tong, Zhouchen Lin
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Aerial Image Segmentation is a particular semantic segmentation problem and has several challenging characteristics that general semantic segmentation does not have. There are two critical issues: The one is an extremely foreground-background imbalanced distribution, and the other is multiple small objects along with the complex background. Such problems make the recent dense affinity context modeling perform poorly even compared with baselines due to over-introduced background context. To handle these problems, we propose a point-wise affinity propagation module based on the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) framework, named PointFlow. Rather than dense affinity learning, a sparse affinity map is generated upon selected points between the adjacent features, which reduces the noise introduced by the background while keeping efficiency. In particular, we design a dual point matcher to select points from the salient area and object boundaries, respectively. Experimental results on three different aerial segmentation datasets suggest that the proposed method is more effective and efficient than state-of-the-art general semantic segmentation methods. Especially, our methods achieve the best speed and accuracy trade-off on three aerial benchmarks. Further experiments on three general semantic segmentation datasets prove the generality of our method. Code will be provided in (https: //github.com/lxtGH/PFSegNets).
WenLan: Bridging Vision and Language by Large-Scale Multi-Modal Pre-Training
Authors: Yuqi Huo, Manli Zhang, Guangzhen Liu, Haoyu Lu, Yizhao Gao, Guoxing Yang, Jingyuan Wen, Heng Zhang, Baogui Xu, Weihao Zheng, Zongzheng Xi, Yueqian Yang, Anwen Hu, Jinming Zhao, Ruichen Li, Yida Zhao, Liang Zhang, Yuqing Song, Xin Hong, Wanqing Cui, Danyang Hou, Yingyan Li, Junyi Li, Peiyu Liu, Zheng Gong, Chuhao Jin, Yuchong Sun, ShiZhe Chen, Zhiwu Lu, Zhicheng Dou, Qin Jin, Yanyan Lan, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ruihua Song, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, GPU, Image Captioning, Image Retrieval, Image-to-Text Retrieval

Multi-modal pre-training models have been intensively explored to bridge vision and language in recent years. However, most of them explicitly model the cross-modal interaction between image-text pairs, by assuming that there exists strong semantic correlation between the text and image modalities. Since this strong assumption is often invalid in real-world scenarios, we choose to implicitly model the cross-modal correlation for large-scale multi-modal pre-training, which is the focus of the Chinese project `WenLan' led by our team. Specifically, with the weak correlation assumption over image-text pairs, we propose a two-tower pre-training model called BriVL within the cross-modal contrastive learning framework. Unlike OpenAI CLIP that adopts a simple contrastive learning method, we devise a more advanced algorithm by adapting the latest method MoCo into the cross-modal scenario. By building a large queue-based dictionary, our BriVL can incorporate more negative samples in limited GPU resources. We further construct a large Chinese multi-source image-text dataset called RUC-CAS-WenLan for pre-training our BriVL model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the pre-trained BriVL model outperforms both UNITER and OpenAI CLIP on various downstream tasks.
Heterogeneous Information Network-based Interest Composition with Graph Neural Network for Recommendation
Authors: Dengcheng Yan, Wenxin Xie, Yiwen Zhang
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Recommendation Systems

Heterogeneous information networks (HINs) are widely applied to recommendation systems due to their capability of modeling various auxiliary information with meta-paths. However, existing HIN-based recommendation models usually fuse the information from various meta-paths by simple weighted sum or concatenation, which limits performance improvement because it lacks the capability of interest compositions among meta-paths. In this article, we propose an HIN-based Interest Composition model for Recommendation (HicRec). Specifically, user and item representations are learned with a graph neural network on both the graph structure and features in each meta-path, and a parameter sharing mechanism is utilized here to ensure that the user and item representations are in the same latent space. Then, users' interests in each item from each pair of related meta-paths are calculated by a combination of the user and item representations. The composed user interests are obtained by their single interest from both intra- and inter-meta-paths for recommendation. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world datasets and the results demonstrate that our proposed HicRec model outperforms the baselines.
PREPRINT: Comparison of deep learning and hand crafted features for mining simulation data
Authors: Theodoros Georgiou, Sebastian Schmitt, Thomas Bäck, Nan Pu, Wei Chen, Michael Lew
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations are a very important tool for many industrial applications, such as aerodynamic optimization of engineering designs like cars shapes, airplanes parts etc. The output of such simulations, in particular the calculated flow fields, are usually very complex and hard to interpret for realistic three-dimensional real-world applications, especially if time-dependent simulations are investigated. Automated data analysis methods are warranted but a non-trivial obstacle is given by the very large dimensionality of the data. A flow field typically consists of six measurement values for each point of the computational grid in 3D space and time (velocity vector values, turbulent kinetic energy, pressure and viscosity). In this paper we address the task of extracting meaningful results in an automated manner from such high dimensional data sets. We propose deep learning methods which are capable of processing such data and which can be trained to solve relevant tasks on simulation data, i.e. predicting drag and lift forces applied on an airfoil. We also propose an adaptation of the classical hand crafted features known from computer vision to address the same problem and compare a large variety of descriptors and detectors. Finally, we compile a large dataset of 2D simulations of the flow field around airfoils which contains 16000 flow fields with which we tested and compared approaches. Our results show that the deep learning-based methods, as well as hand crafted feature based approaches, are well-capable to accurately describe the content of the CFD simulation output on the proposed dataset.
Integrated Age Estimation Mechanism
Authors: Fan Li, Yongming Li, Pin Wang, Jie Xiao, Fang Yan, Xinke Li
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation

Machine-learning-based age estimation has received lots of attention. Traditional age estimation mechanism focuses estimation age error, but ignores that there is a deviation between the estimated age and real age due to disease. Pathological age estimation mechanism the author proposed before introduces age deviation to solve the above problem and improves classification capability of the estimated age significantly. However,it does not consider the age estimation error of the normal control (NC) group and results in a larger error between the estimated age and real age of NC group. Therefore, an integrated age estimation mechanism based on Decision-Level fusion of error and deviation orientation model is proposed to solve the problem.Firstly, the traditional age estimation and pathological age estimation mechanisms are weighted together.Secondly, their optimal weights are obtained by minimizing mean absolute error (MAE) between the estimated age and real age of normal people. In the experimental section, several representative age-related datasets are used for verification of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed age estimation mechanism achieves a good tradeoff effect of age estimation. It not only improves the classification ability of the estimated age, but also reduces the age estimation error of the NC group. In general, the proposed age estimation mechanism is effective. Additionally, the mechanism is a framework mechanism that can be used to construct different specific age estimation algorithms, contributing to relevant research.
Causal Learner: A Toolbox for Causal Structure and Markov Blanket Learning
Authors: Zhaolong Ling, Kui Yu, Yiwen Zhang, Lin Liu, Jiuyong Li
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00

Causal Learner is a toolbox for learning causal structure and Markov blanket (MB) from data. It integrates functions for generating simulated Bayesian network data, a set of state-of-the-art global causal structure learning algorithms, a set of state-of-the-art local causal structure learning algorithms, a set of state-of-the-art MB learning algorithms, and functions for evaluating algorithms. The data generation part of Causal Learner is written in R, and the rest of Causal Learner is written in MATLAB. Causal Learner aims to provide researchers and practitioners with an open-source platform for causal learning from data and for the development and evaluation of new causal learning algorithms. The Causal Learner project is available at http://bigdata.ahu.edu.cn/causal-learner.
Affect2MM: Affective Analysis of Multimedia Content Using Emotion Causality
Authors: Trisha Mittal, Puneet Mathur, Aniket Bera, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We present Affect2MM, a learning method for time-series emotion prediction for multimedia content. Our goal is to automatically capture the varying emotions depicted by characters in real-life human-centric situations and behaviors. We use the ideas from emotion causation theories to computationally model and determine the emotional state evoked in clips of movies. Affect2MM explicitly models the temporal causality using attention-based methods and Granger causality. We use a variety of components like facial features of actors involved, scene understanding, visual aesthetics, action/situation description, and movie script to obtain an affective-rich representation to understand and perceive the scene. We use an LSTM-based learning model for emotion perception. To evaluate our method, we analyze and compare our performance on three datasets, SENDv1, MovieGraphs, and the LIRIS-ACCEDE dataset, and observe an average of 10-15% increase in the performance over SOTA methods for all three datasets.
Calibrated and Partially Calibrated Semi-Generalized Homographies
Authors: Snehal Bhayani, Torsten Sattler, Daniel Barath, Patrik Beliansky, Janne Heikkila, Zuzana Kukelova
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Image-Based Localization

In this paper, we propose the first minimal solutions for estimating the semi-generalized homography given a perspective and a generalized camera. The proposed solvers use five 2D-2D image point correspondences induced by a scene plane. One of them assumes the perspective camera to be fully calibrated, while the other solver estimates the unknown focal length together with the absolute pose parameters. This setup is particularly important in structure-from-motion and image-based localization pipelines, where a new camera is localized in each step with respect to a set of known cameras and 2D-3D correspondences might not be available. As a consequence of a clever parametrization and the elimination ideal method, our approach only needs to solve a univariate polynomial of degree five or three. The proposed solvers are stable and efficient as demonstrated by a number of synthetic and real-world experiments.
Triple-cooperative Video Shadow Detection
Authors: Zhihao Chen, Liang Wan, Lei Zhu, Jia Shen, Huazhu Fu, Wennan Liu, Jing Qin
Date: 2021-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Saliency Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Shadow Detection, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation, Video Shadow Detection

Shadow detection in a single image has received significant research interest in recent years. However, much fewer works have been explored in shadow detection over dynamic scenes. The bottleneck is the lack of a well-established dataset with high-quality annotations for video shadow detection. In this work, we collect a new video shadow detection dataset, which contains 120 videos with 11, 685 frames, covering 60 object categories, varying lengths, and different motion/lighting conditions. All the frames are annotated with a high-quality pixel-level shadow mask. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first learning-oriented dataset for video shadow detection. Furthermore, we develop a new baseline model, named triple-cooperative video shadow detection network (TVSD-Net). It utilizes triple parallel networks in a cooperative manner to learn discriminative representations at intra-video and inter-video levels. Within the network, a dual gated co-attention module is proposed to constrain features from neighboring frames in the same video, while an auxiliary similarity loss is introduced to mine semantic information between different videos. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive study on ViSha, evaluating 12 state-of-the-art models (including single image shadow detectors, video object segmentation, and saliency detection methods). Experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms SOTA competitors.