pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Evaluating Uncertainty Estimation Methods on 3D Semantic Segmentation of Point Clouds
Authors: Swaroop Bhandary K, Nico Hochgeschwender, Paul Plöger, Frank Kirchner, Matias Valdenegro-Toro
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Decision Making, Semantic Segmentation, Uncertainty Quantification

Deep learning models are extensively used in various safety critical applications. Hence these models along with being accurate need to be highly reliable. One way of achieving this is by quantifying uncertainty. Bayesian methods for UQ have been extensively studied for Deep Learning models applied on images but have been less explored for 3D modalities such as point clouds often used for Robots and Autonomous Systems. In this work, we evaluate three uncertainty quantification methods namely Deep Ensembles, MC-Dropout and MC-DropConnect on the DarkNet21Seg 3D semantic segmentation model and comprehensively analyze the impact of various parameters such as number of models in ensembles or forward passes, and drop probability values, on task performance and uncertainty estimate quality. We find that Deep Ensembles outperforms other methods in both performance and uncertainty metrics. Deep ensembles outperform other methods by a margin of 2.4% in terms of mIOU, 1.3% in terms of accuracy, while providing reliable uncertainty for decision making.
Visual Question Answering as a Multi-Task Problem
Authors: Amelia Elizabeth Pollard, Jonathan L. Shapiro
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Visual Question Answering(VQA) is a highly complex problem set, relying on many sub-problems to produce reasonable answers. In this paper, we present the hypothesis that Visual Question Answering should be viewed as a multi-task problem, and provide evidence to support this hypothesis. We demonstrate this by reformatting two commonly used Visual Question Answering datasets, COCO-QA and DAQUAR, into a multi-task format and train these reformatted datasets on two baseline networks, with one designed specifically to eliminate other possible causes for performance changes as a result of the reformatting. Though the networks demonstrated in this paper do not achieve strongly competitive results, we find that the multi-task approach to Visual Question Answering results in increases in performance of 5-9% against the single-task formatting, and that the networks reach convergence much faster than in the single-task case. Finally we discuss possible reasons for the observed difference in performance, and perform additional experiments which rule out causes not associated with the learning of the dataset as a multi-task problem.
ProtoryNet - Interpretable Text Classification Via Prototype Trajectories
Authors: Dat Hong, Tong Wang, Stephen S. Baek
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

We propose a novel interpretable deep neural network for text classification, called ProtoryNet, based on a new concept of prototype trajectories. Motivated by the prototype theory in modern linguistics, ProtoryNet makes a prediction by finding the most similar prototype for each sentence in a text sequence and feeding an RNN backbone with the proximity of each sentence to the corresponding active prototype. The RNN backbone then captures the temporal pattern of the prototypes, which we refer to as prototype trajectories. Prototype trajectories enable intuitive and fine-grained interpretation of the reasoning process of the RNN model, in resemblance to how humans analyze texts. We also design a prototype pruning procedure to reduce the total number of prototypes used by the model for better interpretability. Experiments on multiple public data sets show that ProtoryNet is more accurate than the baseline prototype-based deep neural net and reduces the performance gap compared to state-of-the-art black-box models. In addition, after prototype pruning, the resulting ProtoryNet models only need less than or around 20 prototypes for all datasets, which significantly benefits interpretability. Furthermore, we report a survey result indicating that human users find ProtoryNet more intuitive and easier to understand than other prototype-based methods.
Learning Expectation of Label Distribution for Facial Age and Attractiveness Estimation
Authors: Bin-Bin Gao, Xin-Xin Liu, Hong-Yu Zhou, Jianxin Wu, Xin Geng
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Attractiveness Estimation, Attribute, image-classification

Facial attributes (\eg, age and attractiveness) estimation performance has been greatly improved by using convolutional neural networks. However, existing methods have an inconsistency between the training objectives and the evaluation metric, so they may be suboptimal. In addition, these methods always adopt image classification or face recognition models with a large amount of parameters, which carry expensive computation cost and storage overhead. In this paper, we firstly analyze the essential relationship between two state-of-the-art methods (Ranking-CNN and DLDL) and show that the Ranking method is in fact learning label distribution implicitly. This result thus firstly unifies two existing popular state-of-the-art methods into the DLDL framework. Second, in order to alleviate the inconsistency and reduce resource consumption, we design a lightweight network architecture and propose a unified framework which can jointly learn facial attribute distribution and regress attribute value. The effectiveness of our approach has been demonstrated on both facial age and attractiveness estimation tasks. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art results using the single model with 36$\times$ fewer parameters and 3$\times$ faster inference speed on facial age/attractiveness estimation. Moreover, our method can achieve comparable results as the state-of-the-art even though the number of parameters is further reduced to 0.9M (3.8MB disk storage).
End-to-end Interpretable Learning of Non-blind Image Deblurring
Authors: Thomas Eboli, Jian Sun, Jean Ponce
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Blind Image Deblurring, Deblurring, Image Deblurring

Non-blind image deblurring is typically formulated as a linear least-squares problem regularized by natural priors on the corresponding sharp picture's gradients, which can be solved, for example, using a half-quadratic splitting method with Richardson fixed-point iterations for its least-squares updates and a proximal operator for the auxiliary variable updates. We propose to precondition the Richardson solver using approximate inverse filters of the (known) blur and natural image prior kernels. Using convolutions instead of a generic linear preconditioner allows extremely efficient parameter sharing across the image, and leads to significant gains in accuracy and/or speed compared to classical FFT and conjugate-gradient methods. More importantly, the proposed architecture is easily adapted to learning both the preconditioner and the proximal operator using CNN embeddings. This yields a simple and efficient algorithm for non-blind image deblurring which is fully interpretable, can be learned end to end, and whose accuracy matches or exceeds the state of the art, quite significantly, in the non-uniform case.
Disentangled Graph Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Xiang Wang, Hongye Jin, An Zhang, Xiangnan He, Tong Xu, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Disentanglement

Learning informative representations of users and items from the interaction data is of crucial importance to collaborative filtering (CF). Present embedding functions exploit user-item relationships to enrich the representations, evolving from a single user-item instance to the holistic interaction graph. Nevertheless, they largely model the relationships in a uniform manner, while neglecting the diversity of user intents on adopting the items, which could be to pass time, for interest, or shopping for others like families. Such uniform approach to model user interests easily results in suboptimal representations, failing to model diverse relationships and disentangle user intents in representations. In this work, we pay special attention to user-item relationships at the finer granularity of user intents. We hence devise a new model, Disentangled Graph Collaborative Filtering (DGCF), to disentangle these factors and yield disentangled representations. Specifically, by modeling a distribution over intents for each user-item interaction, we iteratively refine the intent-aware interaction graphs and representations. Meanwhile, we encourage independence of different intents. This leads to disentangled representations, effectively distilling information pertinent to each intent. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, and DGCF achieves significant improvements over several state-of-the-art models like NGCF, DisenGCN, and MacridVAE. Further analyses offer insights into the advantages of DGCF on the disentanglement of user intents and interpretability of representations. Our codes are available in https://github.com/xiangwang1223/disentangled_graph_collaborative_filtering.
Explainable Deep One-Class Classification
Authors: Philipp Liznerski, Lukas Ruff, Robert A. Vandermeulen, Billy Joe Franks, Marius Kloft, Klaus-Robert Müller
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Classification, General Classification, One-Class Classification, Outlier Detection

Deep one-class classification variants for anomaly detection learn a mapping that concentrates nominal samples in feature space causing anomalies to be mapped away. Because this transformation is highly non-linear, finding interpretations poses a significant challenge. In this paper we present an explainable deep one-class classification method, Fully Convolutional Data Description (FCDD), where the mapped samples are themselves also an explanation heatmap. FCDD yields competitive detection performance and provides reasonable explanations on common anomaly detection benchmarks with CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. On MVTec-AD, a recent manufacturing dataset offering ground-truth anomaly maps, FCDD sets a new state of the art in the unsupervised setting. Our method can incorporate ground-truth anomaly maps during training and using even a few of these (~5) improves performance significantly. Finally, using FCDD's explanations we demonstrate the vulnerability of deep one-class classification models to spurious image features such as image watermarks.
Collaborative Learning for Faster StyleGAN Embedding
Authors: Shanyan Guan, Ying Tai, Bingbing Ni, Feida Zhu, Feiyue Huang, Xiaokang Yang
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00

The latent code of the recent popular model StyleGAN has learned disentangled representations thanks to the multi-layer style-based generator. Embedding a given image back to the latent space of StyleGAN enables wide interesting semantic image editing applications. Although previous works are able to yield impressive inversion results based on an optimization framework, which however suffers from the efficiency issue. In this work, we propose a novel collaborative learning framework that consists of an efficient embedding network and an optimization-based iterator. On one hand, with the progress of training, the embedding network gives a reasonable latent code initialization for the iterator. On the other hand, the updated latent code from the iterator in turn supervises the embedding network. In the end, high-quality latent code can be obtained efficiently with a single forward pass through our embedding network. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our work.
Learning to Discover Multi-Class Attentional Regions for Multi-Label Image Recognition
Authors: Bin-Bin Gao, Hong-Yu Zhou
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, image-classification, Multi-Label Classification, Multi-Label Image Classification, Multi-Label Image Recognition

Multi-label image recognition is a practical and challenging task compared to single-label image classification. However, previous works may be suboptimal because of a great number of object proposals or complex attentional region generation modules. In this paper, we propose a simple but efficient two-stream framework to recognize multi-category objects from global image to local regions, similar to how human beings perceive objects. To bridge the gap between global and local streams, we propose a multi-class attentional region module which aims to make the number of attentional regions as small as possible and keep the diversity of these regions as high as possible. Our method can efficiently and effectively recognize multi-class objects with an affordable computation cost and a parameter-free region localization module. Over three benchmarks on multi-label image classification, we create new state-of-the-art results with a single model only using image semantics without label dependency. In addition, the effectiveness of the proposed method is extensively demonstrated under different factors such as global pooling strategy, input size and network architecture. Code has been made available at~\url{https://github.com/gaobb/MCAR}.
Differentiable Causal Discovery from Interventional Data
Authors: Philippe Brouillard, Sébastien Lachapelle, Alexandre Lacoste, Simon Lacoste-Julien, Alexandre Drouin
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Causal Discovery

Learning a causal directed acyclic graph from data is a challenging task that involves solving a combinatorial problem for which the solution is not always identifiable. A new line of work reformulates this problem as a continuous constrained optimization one, which is solved via the augmented Lagrangian method. However, most methods based on this idea do not make use of interventional data, which can significantly alleviate identifiability issues. This work constitutes a new step in this direction by proposing a theoretically-grounded method based on neural networks that can leverage interventional data. We illustrate the flexibility of the continuous-constrained framework by taking advantage of expressive neural architectures such as normalizing flows. We show that our approach compares favorably to the state of the art in a variety of settings, including perfect and imperfect interventions for which the targeted nodes may even be unknown.
Video Prediction via Example Guidance
Authors: Jingwei Xu, Huazhe Xu, Bingbing Ni, Xiaokang Yang, Trevor Darrell
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Prediction, Video Prediction

In video prediction tasks, one major challenge is to capture the multi-modal nature of future contents and dynamics. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective framework that can efficiently predict plausible future states. The key insight is that the potential distribution of a sequence could be approximated with analogous ones in a repertoire of training pool, namely, expert examples. By further incorporating a novel optimization scheme into the training procedure, plausible predictions can be sampled efficiently from distribution constructed from the retrieved examples. Meanwhile, our method could be seamlessly integrated with existing stochastic predictive models; significant enhancement is observed with comprehensive experiments in both quantitative and qualitative aspects. We also demonstrate the generalization ability to predict the motion of unseen class, i.e., without access to corresponding data during training phase.
Deep Fence Estimation using Stereo Guidance and Adversarial Learning
Authors: Paritosh Mittal, Shankar M Venkatesan, Viswanath Veera, Aloknath De
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00

People capture memorable images of events and exhibits that are often occluded by a wire mesh loosely termed as fence. Recent works in removing fence have limited performance due to the difficulty in initial fence segmentation. This work aims to accurately segment fence using a novel fence guidance mask (FM) generated from stereo image pair. This binary guidance mask contains deterministic cues about the structure of fence and is given as additional input to the deep fence estimation model. We also introduce a directional connectivity loss (DCL), which is used alongside adversarial loss to precisely detect thin wires. Experimental results obtained on real world scenarios demonstrate the superiority of proposed method over state-of-the-art techniques.
Learning Utilities and Equilibria in Non-Truthful Auctions
Authors: Hu Fu, Tao Lin
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

In non-truthful auctions, agents' utility for a strategy depends on the strategies of the opponents and also the prior distribution over their private types; the set of Bayes Nash equilibria generally has an intricate dependence on the prior. Using the First Price Auction as our main demonstrating example, we show that $\tilde O(n / \epsilon^2)$ samples from the prior with $n$ agents suffice for an algorithm to learn the interim utilities for all monotone bidding strategies. As a consequence, this number of samples suffice for learning all approximate equilibria. We give almost matching (up to polylog factors) lower bound on the sample complexity for learning utilities. We also consider a setting where agents must pay a search cost to discover their own types. Drawing on a connection between this setting and the first price auction, discovered recently by Kleinberg et al. (2016), we show that $\tilde O(n / \epsilon^2)$ samples suffice for utilities and equilibria to be estimated in a near welfare-optimal descending auction in this setting. En route, we improve the sample complexity bound, recently obtained by Guo et al. (2021), for the Pandora's Box problem, which is a classical model for sequential consumer search.
Qualitative Analysis of Monte Carlo Dropout
Authors: Ronald Seoh
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00

In this report, we present qualitative analysis of Monte Carlo (MC) dropout method for measuring model uncertainty in neural network (NN) models. We first consider the sources of uncertainty in NNs, and briefly review Bayesian Neural Networks (BNN), the group of Bayesian approaches to tackle uncertainties in NNs. After presenting mathematical formulation of MC dropout, we proceed to suggesting potential benefits and associated costs for using MC dropout in typical NN models, with the results from our experiments.
Ensemble Regression Models for Software Development Effort Estimation: A Comparative Study
Authors: Halcyon D. P. Carvalho, Marília N. C. A. Lima, Wylliams B. Santos, Roberta A. de A. Fagunde
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, regression

As demand for computer software continually increases, software scope and complexity become higher than ever. The software industry is in real need of accurate estimates of the project under development. Software development effort estimation is one of the main processes in software project management. However, overestimation and underestimation may cause the software industry loses. This study determines which technique has better effort prediction accuracy and propose combined techniques that could provide better estimates. Eight different ensemble models to estimate effort with Ensemble Models were compared with each other base on the predictive accuracy on the Mean Absolute Residual (MAR) criterion and statistical tests. The results have indicated that the proposed ensemble models, besides delivering high efficiency in contrast to its counterparts, and produces the best responses for software project effort estimation. Therefore, the proposed ensemble models in this study will help the project managers working with development quality software.
Synergistic saliency and depth prediction for RGB-D saliency detection
Authors: Yue Wang, Yuke Li, James H. Elder, Huchuan Lu, Runmin Wu, Lu Zhang
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Saliency Detection

Depth information available from an RGB-D camera can be useful in segmenting salient objects when figure/ground cues from RGB channels are weak. This has motivated the development of several RGB-D saliency datasets and algorithms that use all four channels of the RGB-D data for both training and inference. Unfortunately, existing RGB-D saliency datasets are small, which may lead to overfitting and limited generalization for diverse scenarios. Here we propose a semi-supervised system for RGB-D saliency detection that can be trained on smaller RGB-D saliency datasets without saliency ground truth, while also make effective joint use of a large RGB saliency dataset with saliency ground truth together. To generalize our method on RGB-D saliency datasets, a novel prediction-guided cross-refinement module which jointly estimates both saliency and depth by mutual refinement between two respective tasks, and an adversarial learning approach are employed. Critically, our system does not require saliency ground-truth for the RGB-D datasets, which saves the massive human labor for hand labeling, and does not require the depth data for inference, allowing the method to be used for the much broader range of applications where only RGB data are available. Evaluation on seven RGB-D datasets demonstrates that even without saliency ground truth for RGB-D datasets and using only the RGB data of RGB-D datasets at inference, our semi-supervised system performs favorable against state-of-the-art fully-supervised RGB-D saliency detection methods that use saliency ground truth for RGB-D datasets at training and depth data at inference on two largest testing datasets. Our approach also achieves comparable results on other popular RGB-D saliency benchmarks.
Improving auto-encoder novelty detection using channel attention and entropy minimization
Authors: Miao Tian, Dongyan Guo, Ying Cui, Xiang Pan, Sheng-Yong Chen
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Novelty Detection

Novelty detection is a important research area which mainly solves the classification problem of inliers which usually consists of normal samples and outliers composed of abnormal samples. Auto-encoder is often used for novelty detection. However, the generalization ability of the auto-encoder may cause the undesirable reconstruction of abnormal elements and reduce the identification ability of the model. To solve the problem, we focus on the perspective of better reconstructing the normal samples as well as retaining the unique information of normal samples to improve the performance of auto-encoder for novelty detection. Firstly, we introduce attention mechanism into the task. Under the action of attention mechanism, auto-encoder can pay more attention to the representation of inlier samples through adversarial training. Secondly, we apply the information entropy into the latent layer to make it sparse and constrain the expression of diversity. Experimental results on three public datasets show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance compared with previous popular approaches.
Stochastic Variational Bayesian Inference for a Nonlinear Forward Model
Authors: Michael A. Chappell, Martin S. Craig, Mark W. Woolrich
Date: 2020-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Variational Bayes (VB) has been used to facilitate the calculation of the posterior distribution in the context of Bayesian inference of the parameters of nonlinear models from data. Previously an analytical formulation of VB has been derived for nonlinear model inference on data with additive gaussian noise as an alternative to nonlinear least squares. Here a stochastic solution is derived that avoids some of the approximations required of the analytical formulation, offering a solution that can be more flexibly deployed for nonlinear model inference problems. The stochastic VB solution was used for inference on a biexponential toy case and the algorithmic parameter space explored, before being deployed on real data from a magnetic resonance imaging study of perfusion. The new method was found to achieve comparable parameter recovery to the analytic solution and be competitive in terms of computational speed despite being reliant on sampling.