pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-label classification of promotions in digital leaflets using textual and visual information
Authors: Roberto Arroyo, David Jiménez-Cabello, Javier Martínez-Cebrián
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: EcomNLP (COLING) 2020 12
Tasks: General Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, text-classification, Text Classification

Product descriptions in e-commerce platforms contain detailed and valuable information about retailers assortment. In particular, coding promotions within digital leaflets are of great interest in e-commerce as they capture the attention of consumers by showing regular promotions for different products. However, this information is embedded into images, making it difficult to extract and process for downstream tasks. In this paper, we present an end-to-end approach that classifies promotions within digital leaflets into their corresponding product categories using both visual and textual information. Our approach can be divided into three key components: 1) region detection, 2) text recognition and 3) text classification. In many cases, a single promotion refers to multiple product categories, so we introduce a multi-label objective in the classification head. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for two separated tasks: 1) image-based detection of the descriptions for each individual promotion and 2) multi-label classification of the product categories using the text from the product descriptions. We train and evaluate our models using a private dataset composed of images from digital leaflets obtained by Nielsen. Results show that we consistently outperform the proposed baseline by a large margin in all the experiments.
Contour Primitive of Interest Extraction Network Based on One-Shot Learning for Object-Agnostic Vision Measurement
Authors: Fangbo Qin, Jie Qin, Siyu Huang, De Xu
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, One-Shot Learning, Robot Manipulation

Image contour based vision measurement is widely applied in robot manipulation and industrial automation. It is appealing to realize object-agnostic vision system, which can be conveniently reused for various types of objects. We propose the contour primitive of interest extraction network (CPieNet) based on the one-shot learning framework. First, CPieNet is featured by that its contour primitive of interest (CPI) output, a designated regular contour part lying on a specified object, provides the essential geometric information for vision measurement. Second, CPieNet has the one-shot learning ability, utilizing a support sample to assist the perception of the novel object. To realize lower-cost training, we generate support-query sample pairs from unpaired online public images, which cover a wide range of object categories. To obtain single-pixel wide contour for precise measurement, the Gabor-filters based non-maximum suppression is designed to thin the raw contour. For the novel CPI extraction task, we built the Object Contour Primitives dataset using online public images, and the Robotic Object Contour Measurement dataset using a camera mounted on a robot. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated by a series of experiments.
Automated Human Activity Recognition by Colliding Bodies Optimization-based Optimal Feature Selection with Recurrent Neural Network
Authors: Pankaj Khatiwada, Ayan Chatterjee, Matrika Subedi
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, feature selection, Human Activity Recognition

In smart healthcare, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is considered to be an efficient model in pervasive computation from sensor readings. The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) in the home or community helps the people in providing independent care and enhanced living quality. However, many AAL models were restricted using many factors that include computational cost and system complexity. Moreover, the HAR concept has more relevance because of its applications. Hence, this paper tempts to implement the HAR system using deep learning with the data collected from smart sensors that are publicly available in the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository (UCI). The proposed model involves three processes: (1) Data collection, (b) Optimal feature selection, (c) Recognition. The data gathered from the benchmark repository is initially subjected to optimal feature selection that helps to select the most significant features. The proposed optimal feature selection is based on a new meta-heuristic algorithm called Colliding Bodies Optimization (CBO). An objective function derived by the recognition accuracy is used for accomplishing the optimal feature selection. Here, the deep learning model called Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is used for activity recognition. The proposed model on the concerned benchmark dataset outperforms existing learning methods, providing high performance compared to the conventional models.
A method for escaping limit cycles in training GANs
Authors: Li Keke, Yang Xinmin
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00

This paper mainly conducts further research to alleviate the issue of limit cycling behavior in training generative adversarial networks (GANs) through the proposed predictive centripetal acceleration algorithm (PCAA). Specifically, we first derive the upper and lower bounds on the last-iterate convergence rates of PCAA for the general bilinear game, with the upper bound notably improving upon previous results. Then, we combine PCAA with the adaptive moment estimation algorithm (Adam) to propose PCAA-Adam, a practical approach for training GANs. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through experiments conducted on bilinear games, multivariate Gaussian distributions, and the CelebA dataset, respectively.
YOdar: Uncertainty-based Sensor Fusion for Vehicle Detection with Camera and Radar Sensors
Authors: Kamil Kowol, Matthias Rottmann, Stefan Bracke, Hanno Gottschalk
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Sensor Fusion, vehicle detection

In this work, we present an uncertainty-based method for sensor fusion with camera and radar data. The outputs of two neural networks, one processing camera and the other one radar data, are combined in an uncertainty aware manner. To this end, we gather the outputs and corresponding meta information for both networks. For each predicted object, the gathered information is post-processed by a gradient boosting method to produce a joint prediction of both networks. In our experiments we combine the YOLOv3 object detection network with a customized $1D$ radar segmentation network and evaluate our method on the nuScenes dataset. In particular we focus on night scenes, where the capability of object detection networks based on camera data is potentially handicapped. Our experiments show, that this approach of uncertainty aware fusion, which is also of very modular nature, significantly gains performance compared to single sensor baselines and is in range of specifically tailored deep learning based fusion approaches.
Rotation-Invariant Local-to-Global Representation Learning for 3D Point Cloud
Authors: Seohyun Kim, Jaeyoo Park, Bohyung Han
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: 3D Object Recognition, Data Augmentation, Object Recognition, Representation Learning

We propose a local-to-global representation learning algorithm for 3D point cloud data, which is appropriate to handle various geometric transformations, especially rotation, without explicit data augmentation with respect to the transformations. Our model takes advantage of multi-level abstraction based on graph convolutional neural networks, which constructs a descriptor hierarchy to encode rotation-invariant shape information of an input object in a bottom-up manner. The descriptors in each level are obtained from a neural network based on a graph via stochastic sampling of 3D points, which is effective in making the learned representations robust to the variations of input data. The proposed algorithm presents the state-of-the-art performance on the rotation-augmented 3D object recognition and segmentation benchmarks, and we further analyze its characteristics through comprehensive ablative experiments.
Batch Normalization Increases Adversarial Vulnerability and Decreases Adversarial Transferability: A Non-Robust Feature Perspective
Authors: Philipp Benz, Chaoning Zhang, In So Kweon
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Batch normalization (BN) has been widely used in modern deep neural networks (DNNs) due to improved convergence. BN is observed to increase the model accuracy while at the cost of adversarial robustness. There is an increasing interest in the ML community to understand the impact of BN on DNNs, especially related to the model robustness. This work attempts to understand the impact of BN on DNNs from a non-robust feature perspective. Straightforwardly, the improved accuracy can be attributed to the better utilization of useful features. It remains unclear whether BN mainly favors learning robust features (RFs) or non-robust features (NRFs). Our work presents empirical evidence that supports that BN shifts a model towards being more dependent on NRFs. To facilitate the analysis of such a feature robustness shift, we propose a framework for disentangling robust usefulness into robustness and usefulness. Extensive analysis under the proposed framework yields valuable insight on the DNN behavior regarding robustness, e.g. DNNs first mainly learn RFs and then NRFs. The insight that RFs transfer better than NRFs, further inspires simple techniques to strengthen transfer-based black-box attacks.
A Simple and Efficient Tensor Calculus for Machine Learning
Authors: Sören Laue, Matthias Mitterreiter, Joachim Giesen
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Computing derivatives of tensor expressions, also known as tensor calculus, is a fundamental task in machine learning. A key concern is the efficiency of evaluating the expressions and their derivatives that hinges on the representation of these expressions. Recently, an algorithm for computing higher order derivatives of tensor expressions like Jacobians or Hessians has been introduced that is a few orders of magnitude faster than previous state-of-the-art approaches. Unfortunately, the approach is based on Ricci notation and hence cannot be incorporated into automatic differentiation frameworks from deep learning like TensorFlow, PyTorch, autograd, or JAX that use the simpler Einstein notation. This leaves two options, to either change the underlying tensor representation in these frameworks or to develop a new, provably correct algorithm based on Einstein notation. Obviously, the first option is impractical. Hence, we pursue the second option. Here, we show that using Ricci notation is not necessary for an efficient tensor calculus and develop an equally efficient method for the simpler Einstein notation. It turns out that turning to Einstein notation enables further improvements that lead to even better efficiency. The methods that are described in this paper have been implemented in the online tool www.MatrixCalculus.org for computing derivatives of matrix and tensor expressions. An extended abstract of this paper appeared as "A Simple and Efficient Tensor Calculus", AAAI 2020.
A ground-truth dataset and classification model for detecting bots in GitHub issue and PR comments
Authors: Mehdi Golzadeh, Alexandre Decan, Damien Legay, Tom Mens
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Bots are frequently used in Github repositories to automate repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. They communicate with human actors through comments. While detecting their presence is important for many reasons, no large and representative ground-truth dataset is available, nor are classification models to detect and validate bots on the basis of such a dataset. This paper proposes a ground-truth dataset, based on a manual analysis with high interrater agreement, of pull request and issue comments in 5,000 distinct Github accounts of which 527 have been identified as bots. Using this dataset we propose an automated classification model to detect bots, taking as main features the number of empty and non-empty comments of each account, the number of comment patterns, and the inequality between comments within comment patterns. We obtained a very high weighted average precision, recall and F1-score of 0.98 on a test set containing 40% of the data. We integrated the classification model into an open source command-line tool to allow practitioners to detect which accounts in a given Github repository actually correspond to bots.
CD-UAP: Class Discriminative Universal Adversarial Perturbation
Authors: Chaoning Zhang, Philipp Benz, Tooba Imtiaz, In So Kweon
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00

A single universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) can be added to all natural images to change most of their predicted class labels. It is of high practical relevance for an attacker to have flexible control over the targeted classes to be attacked, however, the existing UAP method attacks samples from all classes. In this work, we propose a new universal attack method to generate a single perturbation that fools a target network to misclassify only a chosen group of classes, while having limited influence on the remaining classes. Since the proposed attack generates a universal adversarial perturbation that is discriminative to targeted and non-targeted classes, we term it class discriminative universal adversarial perturbation (CD-UAP). We propose one simple yet effective algorithm framework, under which we design and compare various loss function configurations tailored for the class discriminative universal attack. The proposed approach has been evaluated with extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets. Additionally, our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for the original task of UAP attacking all classes, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.
COMETA: A Corpus for Medical Entity Linking in the Social Media
Authors: Marco Basaldella, Fangyu Liu, Ehsan Shareghi, Nigel Collier
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Diversity, Entity Linking

Whilst there has been growing progress in Entity Linking (EL) for general language, existing datasets fail to address the complex nature of health terminology in layman's language. Meanwhile, there is a growing need for applications that can understand the public's voice in the health domain. To address this we introduce a new corpus called COMETA, consisting of 20k English biomedical entity mentions from Reddit expert-annotated with links to SNOMED CT, a widely-used medical knowledge graph. Our corpus satisfies a combination of desirable properties, from scale and coverage to diversity and quality, that to the best of our knowledge has not been met by any of the existing resources in the field. Through benchmark experiments on 20 EL baselines from string- to neural-based models we shed light on the ability of these systems to perform complex inference on entities and concepts under 2 challenging evaluation scenarios. Our experimental results on COMETA illustrate that no golden bullet exists and even the best mainstream techniques still have a significant performance gap to fill, while the best solution relies on combining different views of data.
Stochastic parameterization with VARX processes
Authors: Nick Verheul, Daan Crommelin
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00

In this study we investigate a data-driven stochastic methodology to parameterize small-scale features in a prototype multiscale dynamical system, the Lorenz '96 (L96) model. We propose to model the small-scale features using a vector autoregressive process with exogenous variable (VARX), estimated from given sample data. To reduce the number of parameters of the VARX we impose a diagonal structure on its coefficient matrices. We apply the VARX to two different configurations of the 2-layer L96 model, one with common parameter choices giving unimodal invariant probability distributions for the L96 model variables, and one with non-standard parameters giving trimodal distributions. We show through various statistical criteria that the proposed VARX performs very well for the unimodal configuration, while keeping the number of parameters linear in the number of model variables. We also show that the parameterization performs accurately for the very challenging trimodal L96 configuration by allowing for a dense (non-diagonal) VARX covariance matrix.
Proximal Policy Optimization with Relative Pearson Divergence
Authors: Taisuke Kobayashi
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

The recent remarkable progress of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) stands on regularization of policy for stable and efficient learning. A popular method, named proximal policy optimization (PPO), has been introduced for this purpose. PPO clips density ratio of the latest and baseline policies with a threshold, while its minimization target is unclear. As another problem of PPO, the symmetric threshold is given numerically while the density ratio itself is in asymmetric domain, thereby causing unbalanced regularization of the policy. This paper therefore proposes a new variant of PPO by considering a regularization problem of relative Pearson (RPE) divergence, so-called PPO-RPE. This regularization yields the clear minimization target, which constrains the latest policy to the baseline one. Through its analysis, the intuitive threshold-based design consistent with the asymmetry of the threshold and the domain of density ratio can be derived. Through four benchmark tasks, PPO-RPE performed as well as or better than the conventional methods in terms of the task performance by the learned policy.
Double Targeted Universal Adversarial Perturbations
Authors: Philipp Benz, Chaoning Zhang, Tooba Imtiaz, In So Kweon
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Despite their impressive performance, deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which makes it challenging for them to be deployed in security-sensitive applications, such as autonomous driving. Image-dependent perturbations can fool a network for one specific image, while universal adversarial perturbations are capable of fooling a network for samples from all classes without selection. We introduce a double targeted universal adversarial perturbations (DT-UAPs) to bridge the gap between the instance-discriminative image-dependent perturbations and the generic universal perturbations. This universal perturbation attacks one targeted source class to sink class, while having a limited adversarial effect on other non-targeted source classes, for avoiding raising suspicions. Targeting the source and sink class simultaneously, we term it double targeted attack (DTA). This provides an attacker with the freedom to perform precise attacks on a DNN model while raising little suspicion. We show the effectiveness of the proposed DTA algorithm on a wide range of datasets and also demonstrate its potential as a physical attack.
Less is more: Faster and better music version identification with embedding distillation
Authors: Furkan Yesiler, Joan Serrà, Emilia Gómez
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Retrieval

Version identification systems aim to detect different renditions of the same underlying musical composition (loosely called cover songs). By learning to encode entire recordings into plain vector embeddings, recent systems have made significant progress in bridging the gap between accuracy and scalability, which has been a key challenge for nearly two decades. In this work, we propose to further narrow this gap by employing a set of data distillation techniques that reduce the embedding dimensionality of a pre-trained state-of-the-art model. We compare a wide range of techniques and propose new ones, from classical dimensionality reduction to more sophisticated distillation schemes. With those, we obtain 99% smaller embeddings that, moreover, yield up to a 3% accuracy increase. Such small embeddings can have an important impact in retrieval time, up to the point of making a real-world system practical on a standalone laptop.
Don't Trigger Me! A Triggerless Backdoor Attack Against Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Ahmed Salem, Michael Backes, Yang Zhang
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack

Backdoor attack against deep neural networks is currently being profoundly investigated due to its severe security consequences. Current state-of-the-art backdoor attacks require the adversary to modify the input, usually by adding a trigger to it, for the target model to activate the backdoor. This added trigger not only increases the difficulty of launching the backdoor attack in the physical world, but also can be easily detected by multiple defense mechanisms. In this paper, we present the first triggerless backdoor attack against deep neural networks, where the adversary does not need to modify the input for triggering the backdoor. Our attack is based on the dropout technique. Concretely, we associate a set of target neurons that are dropped out during model training with the target label. In the prediction phase, the model will output the target label when the target neurons are dropped again, i.e., the backdoor attack is launched. This triggerless feature of our attack makes it practical in the physical world. Extensive experiments show that our triggerless backdoor attack achieves a perfect attack success rate with a negligible damage to the model's utility.
Variational Intrinsic Control Revisited
Authors: Taehwan Kwon
Date: 2020-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we revisit variational intrinsic control (VIC), an unsupervised reinforcement learning method for finding the largest set of intrinsic options available to an agent. In the original work by Gregor et al. (2016), two VIC algorithms were proposed: one that represents the options explicitly, and the other that does it implicitly. We show that the intrinsic reward used in the latter is subject to bias in stochastic environments, causing convergence to suboptimal solutions. To correct this behavior and achieve the maximal empowerment, we propose two methods respectively based on the transitional probability model and Gaussian mixture model. We substantiate our claims through rigorous mathematical derivations and experimental analyses.