pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Planning with Incomplete Information in Quantified Answer Set Programming
Authors: Jorge Fandinno, François Laferrière, Javier Romero, Torsten Schaub, Tran Cao Son
Date: 2021-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

We present a general approach to planning with incomplete information in Answer Set Programming (ASP). More precisely, we consider the problems of conformant and conditional planning with sensing actions and assumptions. We represent planning problems using a simple formalism where logic programs describe the transition function between states, the initial states and the goal states. For solving planning problems, we use Quantified Answer Set Programming (QASP), an extension of ASP with existential and universal quantifiers over atoms that is analogous to Quantified Boolean Formulas (QBFs). We define the language of quantified logic programs and use it to represent the solutions to different variants of conformant and conditional planning. On the practical side, we present a translation-based QASP solver that converts quantified logic programs into QBFs and then executes a QBF solver, and we evaluate experimentally the approach on conformant and conditional planning benchmarks. Under consideration for acceptance in TPLP.
Near-Optimal Reviewer Splitting in Two-Phase Paper Reviewing and Conference Experiment Design
Authors: Steven Jecmen, Hanrui Zhang, Ryan Liu, Fei Fang, Vincent Conitzer, Nihar B. Shah
Date: 2021-08-13 00:00:00

Many scientific conferences employ a two-phase paper review process, where some papers are assigned additional reviewers after the initial reviews are submitted. Many conferences also design and run experiments on their paper review process, where some papers are assigned reviewers who provide reviews under an experimental condition. In this paper, we consider the question: how should reviewers be divided between phases or conditions in order to maximize total assignment similarity? We make several contributions towards answering this question. First, we prove that when the set of papers requiring additional review is unknown, a simplified variant of this problem is NP-hard. Second, we empirically show that across several datasets pertaining to real conference data, dividing reviewers between phases/conditions uniformly at random allows an assignment that is nearly as good as the oracle optimal assignment. This uniformly random choice is practical for both the two-phase and conference experiment design settings. Third, we provide explanations of this phenomenon by providing theoretical bounds on the suboptimality of this random strategy under certain natural conditions. From these easily-interpretable conditions, we provide actionable insights to conference program chairs about whether a random reviewer split is suitable for their conference.
Reassessing the Limitations of CNN Methods for Camera Pose Regression
Authors: Tony Ng, Adrian Lopez-Rodriguez, Vassileios Balntas, Krystian Mikolajczyk
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, regression, Retrieval

In this paper, we address the problem of camera pose estimation in outdoor and indoor scenarios. In comparison to the currently top-performing methods that rely on 2D to 3D matching, we propose a model that can directly regress the camera pose from images with significantly higher accuracy than existing methods of the same class. We first analyse why regression methods are still behind the state-of-the-art, and we bridge the performance gap with our new approach. Specifically, we propose a way to overcome the biased training data by a novel training technique, which generates poses guided by a probability distribution from the training set for synthesising new training views. Lastly, we evaluate our approach on two widely used benchmarks and show that it achieves significantly improved performance compared to prior regression-based methods, retrieval techniques as well as 3D pipelines with local feature matching.
Who's Waldo? Linking People Across Text and Images
Authors: Claire Yuqing Cui, Apoorv Khandelwal, Yoav Artzi, Noah Snavely, Hadar Averbuch-Elor
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Person-centric Visual Grounding

We present a task and benchmark dataset for person-centric visual grounding, the problem of linking between people named in a caption and people pictured in an image. In contrast to prior work in visual grounding, which is predominantly object-based, our new task masks out the names of people in captions in order to encourage methods trained on such image-caption pairs to focus on contextual cues (such as rich interactions between multiple people), rather than learning associations between names and appearances. To facilitate this task, we introduce a new dataset, Who's Waldo, mined automatically from image-caption data on Wikimedia Commons. We propose a Transformer-based method that outperforms several strong baselines on this task, and are releasing our data to the research community to spur work on contextual models that consider both vision and language.
Real-time Human-Centric Segmentation for Complex Video Scenes
Authors: Ran Yu, Chenyu Tian, Weihao Xia, Xinyuan Zhao, Haoqian Wang, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Instance Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Instance Segmentation

Most existing video tasks related to "human" focus on the segmentation of salient humans, ignoring the unspecified others in the video. Few studies have focused on segmenting and tracking all humans in a complex video, including pedestrians and humans of other states (e.g., seated, riding, or occluded). In this paper, we propose a novel framework, abbreviated as HVISNet, that segments and tracks all presented people in given videos based on a one-stage detector. To better evaluate complex scenes, we offer a new benchmark called HVIS (Human Video Instance Segmentation), which comprises 1447 human instance masks in 805 high-resolution videos in diverse scenes. Extensive experiments show that our proposed HVISNet outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy at a real-time inference speed (30 FPS), especially on complex video scenes. We also notice that using the center of the bounding box to distinguish different individuals severely deteriorates the segmentation accuracy, especially in heavily occluded conditions. This common phenomenon is referred to as the ambiguous positive samples problem. To alleviate this problem, we propose a mechanism named Inner Center Sampling to improve the accuracy of instance segmentation. Such a plug-and-play inner center sampling mechanism can be incorporated in any instance segmentation models based on a one-stage detector to improve the performance. In particular, it gains 4.1 mAP improvement on the state-of-the-art method in the case of occluded humans. Code and data are available at https://github.com/IIGROUP/HVISNet.
Masked Face Recognition Challenge: The WebFace260M Track Report
Authors: Zheng Zhu, Guan Huang, Jiankang Deng, Yun Ye, JunJie Huang, Xinze Chen, Jiagang Zhu, Tian Yang, Jia Guo, Jiwen Lu, Dalong Du, Jie zhou
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

According to WHO statistics, there are more than 204,617,027 confirmed COVID-19 cases including 4,323,247 deaths worldwide till August 12, 2021. During the coronavirus epidemic, almost everyone wears a facial mask. Traditionally, face recognition approaches process mostly non-occluded faces, which include primary facial features such as the eyes, nose, and mouth. Removing the mask for authentication in airports or laboratories will increase the risk of virus infection, posing a huge challenge to current face recognition systems. Due to the sudden outbreak of the epidemic, there are yet no publicly available real-world masked face recognition (MFR) benchmark. To cope with the above-mentioned issue, we organize the Face Bio-metrics under COVID Workshop and Masked Face Recognition Challenge in ICCV 2021. Enabled by the ultra-large-scale WebFace260M benchmark and the Face Recognition Under Inference Time conStraint (FRUITS) protocol, this challenge (WebFace260M Track) aims to push the frontiers of practical MFR. Since public evaluation sets are mostly saturated or contain noise, a new test set is gathered consisting of elaborated 2,478 celebrities and 60,926 faces. Meanwhile, we collect the world-largest real-world masked test set. In the first phase of WebFace260M Track, 69 teams (total 833 solutions) participate in the challenge and 49 teams exceed the performance of our baseline. There are second phase of the challenge till October 1, 2021 and on-going leaderboard. We will actively update this report in the future.
Improving Self-supervised Learning with Hardness-aware Dynamic Curriculum Learning: An Application to Digital Pathology
Authors: Chetan L Srinidhi, Anne L Martel
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has recently shown tremendous potential to learn generic visual representations useful for many image analysis tasks. Despite their notable success, the existing SSL methods fail to generalize to downstream tasks when the number of labeled training instances is small or if the domain shift between the transfer domains is significant. In this paper, we attempt to improve self-supervised pretrained representations through the lens of curriculum learning by proposing a hardness-aware dynamic curriculum learning (HaDCL) approach. To improve the robustness and generalizability of SSL, we dynamically leverage progressive harder examples via easy-to-hard and hard-to-very-hard samples during mini-batch downstream fine-tuning. We discover that by progressive stage-wise curriculum learning, the pretrained representations are significantly enhanced and adaptable to both in-domain and out-of-domain distribution data. We performed extensive validation on three histology benchmark datasets on both patch-wise and slide-level classification problems. Our curriculum based fine-tuning yields a significant improvement over standard fine-tuning, with a minimum improvement in area-under-the-curve (AUC) score of 1.7% and 2.2% on in-domain and out-of-domain distribution data, respectively. Further, we empirically show that our approach is more generic and adaptable to any SSL methods and does not impose any additional overhead complexity. Besides, we also outline the role of patch-based versus slide-based curriculum learning in histopathology to provide practical insights into the success of curriculum based fine-tuning of SSL methods. Code is released at https://github.com/srinidhiPY/ICCV-CDPATH2021-ID-8
Learning Skeletal Graph Neural Networks for Hard 3D Pose Estimation
Authors: Ailing Zeng, Xiao Sun, Lei Yang, Nanxuan Zhao, Minhao Liu, Qiang Xu
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Pose Estimation, Action Recognition, graph construction, Pose Estimation, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Various deep learning techniques have been proposed to solve the single-view 2D-to-3D pose estimation problem. While the average prediction accuracy has been improved significantly over the years, the performance on hard poses with depth ambiguity, self-occlusion, and complex or rare poses is still far from satisfactory. In this work, we target these hard poses and present a novel skeletal GNN learning solution. To be specific, we propose a hop-aware hierarchical channel-squeezing fusion layer to effectively extract relevant information from neighboring nodes while suppressing undesired noises in GNN learning. In addition, we propose a temporal-aware dynamic graph construction procedure that is robust and effective for 3D pose estimation. Experimental results on the Human3.6M dataset show that our solution achieves 10.3\% average prediction accuracy improvement and greatly improves on hard poses over state-of-the-art techniques. We further apply the proposed technique on the skeleton-based action recognition task and also achieve state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/ailingzengzzz/Skeletal-GNN.
MMChat: Multi-Modal Chat Dataset on Social Media
Authors: Yinhe Zheng, Guanyi Chen, Xin Liu, Jian Sun
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Dialogue Generation

Incorporating multi-modal contexts in conversation is important for developing more engaging dialogue systems. In this work, we explore this direction by introducing MMChat: a large-scale Chinese multi-modal dialogue corpus (32.4M raw dialogues and 120.84K filtered dialogues). Unlike previous corpora that are crowd-sourced or collected from fictitious movies, MMChat contains image-grounded dialogues collected from real conversations on social media, in which the sparsity issue is observed. Specifically, image-initiated dialogues in common communications may deviate to some non-image-grounded topics as the conversation proceeds. To better investigate this issue, we manually annotate 100K dialogues from MMChat and further filter the corpus accordingly, which yields MMChat-hf. We develop a benchmark model to address the sparsity issue in dialogue generation tasks by adapting the attention routing mechanism on image features. Experiments demonstrate the usefulness of incorporating image features and the effectiveness of handling the sparsity of image features.
Escaping the Gradient Vanishing: Periodic Alternatives of Softmax in Attention Mechanism
Authors: Shulun Wang, Bin Liu, Feng Liu
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00

Softmax is widely used in neural networks for multiclass classification, gate structure and attention mechanisms. The statistical assumption that the input is normal distributed supports the gradient stability of Softmax. However, when used in attention mechanisms such as transformers, since the correlation scores between embeddings are often not normally distributed, the gradient vanishing problem appears, and we prove this point through experimental confirmation. In this work, we suggest that replacing the exponential function by periodic functions, and we delve into some potential periodic alternatives of Softmax from the view of value and gradient. Through experiments on a simply designed demo referenced to LeViT, our method is proved to be able to alleviate the gradient problem and yield substantial improvements compared to Softmax and its variants. Further, we analyze the impact of pre-normalization for Softmax and our methods through mathematics and experiments. Lastly, we increase the depth of the demo and prove the applicability of our method in deep structures.
Data Augmentation and CNN Classification For Automatic COVID-19 Diagnosis From CT-Scan Images On Small Dataset
Authors: Weijun Tan, Hongwei Guo
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, COVID-19 Diagnosis, Data Augmentation

We present an automatic COVID1-19 diagnosis framework from lung CT images. The focus is on signal processing and classification on small datasets with efforts putting into exploring data preparation and augmentation to improve the generalization capability of the 2D CNN classification models. We propose a unique and effective data augmentation method using multiple Hounsfield Unit (HU) normalization windows. In addition, the original slice image is cropped to exclude background, and a filter is applied to filter out closed-lung images. For the classification network, we choose to use 2D Densenet and Xception with the feature pyramid network (FPN). To further improve the classification accuracy, an ensemble of multiple CNN models and HU windows is used. On the training/validation dataset, we achieve a patient classification accuracy of 93.39%.
On the Importance of Encrypting Deep Features
Authors: Xingyang Ni, Heikki Huttunen, Esa Rahtu
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

In this study, we analyze model inversion attacks with only two assumptions: feature vectors of user data are known, and a black-box API for inference is provided. On the one hand, limitations of existing studies are addressed by opting for a more practical setting. Experiments have been conducted on state-of-the-art models in person re-identification, and two attack scenarios (i.e., recognizing auxiliary attributes and reconstructing user data) are investigated. Results show that an adversary could successfully infer sensitive information even under severe constraints. On the other hand, it is advisable to encrypt feature vectors, especially for a machine learning model in production. As an alternative to traditional encryption methods such as AES, a simple yet effective method termed ShuffleBits is presented. More specifically, the binary sequence of each floating-point number gets shuffled. Deployed using the one-time pad scheme, it serves as a plug-and-play module that is applicable to any neural network, and the resulting model directly outputs deep features in encrypted form. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/nixingyang/ShuffleBits.
PIT: Position-Invariant Transform for Cross-FoV Domain Adaptation
Authors: Qiqi Gu, Qianyu Zhou, Minghao Xu, Zhengyang Feng, Guangliang Cheng, Xuequan Lu, Jianping Shi, Lizhuang Ma
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, object-detection, Object Detection, Position, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Cross-domain object detection and semantic segmentation have witnessed impressive progress recently. Existing approaches mainly consider the domain shift resulting from external environments including the changes of background, illumination or weather, while distinct camera intrinsic parameters appear commonly in different domains, and their influence for domain adaptation has been very rarely explored. In this paper, we observe that the Field of View (FoV) gap induces noticeable instance appearance differences between the source and target domains. We further discover that the FoV gap between two domains impairs domain adaptation performance under both the FoV-increasing (source FoV < target FoV) and FoV-decreasing cases. Motivated by the observations, we propose the \textbf{Position-Invariant Transform} (PIT) to better align images in different domains. We also introduce a reverse PIT for mapping the transformed/aligned images back to the original image space and design a loss re-weighting strategy to accelerate the training process. Our method can be easily plugged into existing cross-domain detection/segmentation frameworks while bringing about negligible computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can soundly boost the performance on both cross-domain object detection and segmentation for state-of-the-art techniques. Our code is available at https://github.com/sheepooo/PIT-Position-Invariant-Transform.
Vehicle-counting with Automatic Region-of-Interest and Driving-Trajectory detection
Authors: Malolan Vasu, Nelson Abreu, Raysa Vásquez, Christian López
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00

Vehicle counting systems can help with vehicle analysis and traffic incident detection. Unfortunately, most existing methods require some level of human input to identify the Region of interest (ROI), movements of interest, or to establish a reference point or line to count vehicles from traffic cameras. This work introduces a method to count vehicles from traffic videos that automatically identifies the ROI for the camera, as well as the driving trajectories of the vehicles. This makes the method feasible to use with Pan-Tilt-Zoom cameras, which are frequently used in developing countries. Preliminary results indicate that the proposed method achieves an average intersection over the union of 57.05% for the ROI and a mean absolute error of just 17.44% at counting vehicles of the traffic video cameras tested.
Semi-Supervised Siamese Network for Identifying Bad Data in Medical Imaging Datasets
Authors: Niamh Belton, Aonghus Lawlor, Kathleen M. Curran
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00

Noisy data present in medical imaging datasets can often aid the development of robust models that are equipped to handle real-world data. However, if the bad data contains insufficient anatomical information, it can have a severe negative effect on the model's performance. We propose a novel methodology using a semi-supervised Siamese network to identify bad data. This method requires only a small pool of 'reference' medical images to be reviewed by a non-expert human to ensure the major anatomical structures are present in the Field of View. The model trains on this reference set and identifies bad data by using the Siamese network to compute the distance between the reference set and all other medical images in the dataset. This methodology achieves an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.989 for identifying bad data. Code will be available at https://git.io/JYFuV.
Deep Self-Adaptive Hashing for Image Retrieval
Authors: Qinghong Lin, Xiaojun Chen, Qin Zhang, Shangxuan Tian, Yudong Chen
Date: 2021-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Hashing, Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Hashing technology has been widely used in image retrieval due to its computational and storage efficiency. Recently, deep unsupervised hashing methods have attracted increasing attention due to the high cost of human annotations in the real world and the superiority of deep learning technology. However, most deep unsupervised hashing methods usually pre-compute a similarity matrix to model the pairwise relationship in the pre-trained feature space. Then this similarity matrix would be used to guide hash learning, in which most of the data pairs are treated equivalently. The above process is confronted with the following defects: 1) The pre-computed similarity matrix is inalterable and disconnected from the hash learning process, which cannot explore the underlying semantic information. 2) The informative data pairs may be buried by the large number of less-informative data pairs. To solve the aforementioned problems, we propose a Deep Self-Adaptive Hashing (DSAH) model to adaptively capture the semantic information with two special designs: Adaptive Neighbor Discovery (AND) and Pairwise Information Content (PIC). Firstly, we adopt the AND to initially construct a neighborhood-based similarity matrix, and then refine this initial similarity matrix with a novel update strategy to further investigate the semantic structure behind the learned representation. Secondly, we measure the priorities of data pairs with PIC and assign adaptive weights to them, which is relies on the assumption that more dissimilar data pairs contain more discriminative information for hash learning. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that the above two technologies facilitate the deep hashing model to achieve superior performance.