pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pseudo-supervised Deep Subspace Clustering
Authors: Juncheng Lv, Zhao Kang, Xiao Lu, Zenglin Xu
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Decoder

Auto-Encoder (AE)-based deep subspace clustering (DSC) methods have achieved impressive performance due to the powerful representation extracted using deep neural networks while prioritizing categorical separability. However, self-reconstruction loss of an AE ignores rich useful relation information and might lead to indiscriminative representation, which inevitably degrades the clustering performance. It is also challenging to learn high-level similarity without feeding semantic labels. Another unsolved problem facing DSC is the huge memory cost due to $n\times n$ similarity matrix, which is incurred by the self-expression layer between an encoder and decoder. To tackle these problems, we use pairwise similarity to weigh the reconstruction loss to capture local structure information, while a similarity is learned by the self-expression layer. Pseudo-graphs and pseudo-labels, which allow benefiting from uncertain knowledge acquired during network training, are further employed to supervise similarity learning. Joint learning and iterative training facilitate to obtain an overall optimal solution. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. By combining with the $k$-nearest neighbors algorithm, we further show that our method can address the large-scale and out-of-sample problems.
An Empirical Study of the Effects of Sample-Mixing Methods for Efficient Training of Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Makoto Takamoto, Yusuke Morishita
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00

It is well-known that training of generative adversarial networks (GANs) requires huge iterations before the generator's providing good-quality samples. Although there are several studies to tackle this problem, there is still no universal solution. In this paper, we investigated the effect of sample mixing methods, that is, Mixup, CutMix, and newly proposed Smoothed Regional Mix (SRMix), to alleviate this problem. The sample-mixing methods are known to enhance the accuracy and robustness in the wide range of classification problems, and can naturally be applicable to GANs because the role of the discriminator can be interpreted as the classification between real and fake samples. We also proposed a new formalism applying the sample-mixing methods to GANs with the saturated losses which do not have a clear "label" of real and fake. We performed a vast amount of numerical experiments using LSUN and CelebA datasets. The results showed that Mixup and SRMix improved the quality of the generated images in terms of FID in most cases, in particular, SRMix showed the best improvement in most cases. Our analysis indicates that the mixed-samples can provide different properties from the vanilla fake samples, and the mixing pattern strongly affects the decision of the discriminators. The generated images of Mixup have good high-level feature but low-level feature is not so impressible. On the other hand, CutMix showed the opposite tendency. Our SRMix showed the middle tendency, that is, showed good high and low level features. We believe that our finding provides a new perspective to accelerate the GANs convergence and improve the quality of generated samples.
M-Net with Bidirectional ConvLSTM for Cup and Disc Segmentation in Fundus Images
Authors: Maleeha Khalid Khan, Syed Muhammad Anwar
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation

Glaucoma is a severe eye disease that is known to deteriorate optic never fibers, causing cup size to increase, which could result in permanent loss of vision. Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness after cataract, but glaucoma being more dangerous as it is not curable. Early diagnoses and treatment of glaucoma can help to slow the progression of glaucoma and its damages. For the detection of glaucoma, the Cup to Disc ratio (CDR) provides significant information. The CDR depends heavily on the accurate segmentation of cup and disc regions. In this paper, we have proposed a modified M-Net with bidirectional convolution long short-term memory (LSTM), based on joint cup and disc segmentation. The proposed network combines features of encoder and decoder, with bidirectional LSTM. Our proposed model segments cup and disc regions based on which the abnormalities in cup to disc ratio can be observed. The proposed model is tested on REFUGE2 data, where our model achieves a dice score of 0.92 for optic disc and an accuracy of 98.99% in segmenting cup and disc regions
Efficient time stepping for numerical integration using reinforcement learning
Authors: Michael Dellnitz, Eyke Hüllermeier, Marvin Lücke, Sina Ober-Blöbaum, Christian Offen, Sebastian Peitz, Karlson Pfannschmidt
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Numerical Integration, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Many problems in science and engineering require an efficient numerical approximation of integrals or solutions to differential equations. For systems with rapidly changing dynamics, an equidistant discretization is often inadvisable as it either results in prohibitively large errors or computational effort. To this end, adaptive schemes, such as solvers based on Runge--Kutta pairs, have been developed which adapt the step size based on local error estimations at each step. While the classical schemes apply very generally and are highly efficient on regular systems, they can behave sub-optimal when an inefficient step rejection mechanism is triggered by structurally complex systems such as chaotic systems. To overcome these issues, we propose a method to tailor numerical schemes to the problem class at hand. This is achieved by combining simple, classical quadrature rules or ODE solvers with data-driven time-stepping controllers. Compared with learning solution operators to ODEs directly, it generalises better to unseen initial data as our approach employs classical numerical schemes as base methods. At the same time it can make use of identified structures of a problem class and, therefore, outperforms state-of-the-art adaptive schemes. Several examples demonstrate superior efficiency. Source code is available at https://github.com/lueckem/quadrature-ML.
Query Driven-Graph Neural Networks for Community Search: From Non-Attributed, Attributed, to Interactive Attributed
Authors: Yuli Jiang, Yu Rong, Hong Cheng, Xin Huang, Kangfei Zhao, Junzhou Huang
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Community Search, Graph Clustering, Graph Embedding, Graph Neural Network

Given one or more query vertices, Community Search (CS) aims to find densely intra-connected and loosely inter-connected structures containing query vertices. Attributed Community Search (ACS), a related problem, is more challenging since it finds communities with both cohesive structures and homogeneous vertex attributes. However, most methods for the CS task rely on inflexible pre-defined structures and studies for ACS treat each attribute independently. Moreover, the most popular ACS strategies decompose ACS into two separate sub-problems, i.e., the CS task and subsequent attribute filtering task. However, in real-world graphs, the community structure and the vertex attributes are closely correlated to each other. This correlation is vital for the ACS problem. In this paper, we propose Graph Neural Network models for both CS and ACS problems, i.e., Query Driven-GNN and Attributed Query Driven-GNN. In QD-GNN, we combine the local query-dependent structure and global graph embedding. In order to extend QD-GNN to handle attributes, we model vertex attributes as a bipartite graph and capture the relation between attributes by constructing GNNs on this bipartite graph. With a Feature Fusion operator, AQD-GNN processes the structure and attribute simultaneously and predicts communities according to each attributed query. Experiments on real-world graphs with ground-truth communities demonstrate that the proposed models outperform existing CS and ACS algorithms in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. More recently, an interactive setting for CS is proposed that allows users to adjust the predicted communities. We further verify our approaches under the interactive setting and extend to the attributed context. Our method achieves 2.37% and 6.29% improvements in F1-score than the state-of-the-art model without attributes and with attributes respectively.
PDO-eS2CNNs: Partial Differential Operator Based Equivariant Spherical CNNs
Authors: Zhengyang Shen, Tiancheng Shen, Zhouchen Lin, Jinwen Ma
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Spherical signals exist in many applications, e.g., planetary data, LiDAR scans and digitalization of 3D objects, calling for models that can process spherical data effectively. It does not perform well when simply projecting spherical data into the 2D plane and then using planar convolution neural networks (CNNs), because of the distortion from projection and ineffective translation equivariance. Actually, good principles of designing spherical CNNs are avoiding distortions and converting the shift equivariance property in planar CNNs to rotation equivariance in the spherical domain. In this work, we use partial differential operators (PDOs) to design a spherical equivariant CNN, PDO-eS2CNN, which is exactly rotation equivariant in the continuous domain. We then discretize PDO-eS2CNNs, and analyze the equivariance error resulted from discretization. This is the first time that the equivariance error is theoretically analyzed in the spherical domain. In experiments, PDO-eS2CNNs show greater parameter efficiency and outperform other spherical CNNs significantly on several tasks.
SiT: Self-supervised vIsion Transformer
Authors: Sara Atito, Muhammad Awais, Josef Kittler
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning methods are gaining increasing traction in computer vision due to their recent success in reducing the gap with supervised learning. In natural language processing (NLP) self-supervised learning and transformers are already the methods of choice. The recent literature suggests that the transformers are becoming increasingly popular also in computer vision. So far, the vision transformers have been shown to work well when pretrained either using a large scale supervised data or with some kind of co-supervision, e.g. in terms of teacher network. These supervised pretrained vision transformers achieve very good results in downstream tasks with minimal changes. In this work we investigate the merits of self-supervised learning for pretraining image/vision transformers and then using them for downstream classification tasks. We propose Self-supervised vIsion Transformers (SiT) and discuss several self-supervised training mechanisms to obtain a pretext model. The architectural flexibility of SiT allows us to use it as an autoencoder and work with multiple self-supervised tasks seamlessly. We show that a pretrained SiT can be finetuned for a downstream classification task on small scale datasets, consisting of a few thousand images rather than several millions. The proposed approach is evaluated on standard datasets using common protocols. The results demonstrate the strength of the transformers and their suitability for self-supervised learning. We outperformed existing self-supervised learning methods by large margin. We also observed that SiT is good for few shot learning and also showed that it is learning useful representation by simply training a linear classifier on top of the learned features from SiT. Pretraining, finetuning, and evaluation codes will be available under: https://github.com/Sara-Ahmed/SiT.
Open Domain Generalization with Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning
Authors: Yang Shu, Zhangjie Cao, Chenyu Wang, Jianmin Wang, Mingsheng Long
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Meta-Learning

Leveraging datasets available to learn a model with high generalization ability to unseen domains is important for computer vision, especially when the unseen domain's annotated data are unavailable. We study a novel and practical problem of Open Domain Generalization (OpenDG), which learns from different source domains to achieve high performance on an unknown target domain, where the distributions and label sets of each individual source domain and the target domain can be different. The problem can be generally applied to diverse source domains and widely applicable to real-world applications. We propose a Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning framework to learn open-domain generalizable representations. We augment domains on both feature-level by a new Dirichlet mixup and label-level by distilled soft-labeling, which complements each domain with missing classes and other domain knowledge. We conduct meta-learning over domains by designing new meta-learning tasks and losses to preserve domain unique knowledge and generalize knowledge across domains simultaneously. Experiment results on various multi-domain datasets demonstrate that the proposed Domain-Augmented Meta-Learning (DAML) outperforms prior methods for unseen domain recognition.
A Simple Geometric Method for Cross-Lingual Linguistic Transformations with Pre-trained Autoencoders
Authors: Maarten De Raedt, Fréderic Godin, Pieter Buteneers, Chris Develder, Thomas Demeester
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Decoder, Sentence

Powerful sentence encoders trained for multiple languages are on the rise. These systems are capable of embedding a wide range of linguistic properties into vector representations. While explicit probing tasks can be used to verify the presence of specific linguistic properties, it is unclear whether the vector representations can be manipulated to indirectly steer such properties. For efficient learning, we investigate the use of a geometric mapping in embedding space to transform linguistic properties, without any tuning of the pre-trained sentence encoder or decoder. We validate our approach on three linguistic properties using a pre-trained multilingual autoencoder and analyze the results in both monolingual and cross-lingual settings.
Contextual Semi-Supervised Learning: An Approach To Leverage Air-Surveillance and Untranscribed ATC Data in ASR Systems
Authors: Juan Zuluaga-Gomez, Iuliia Nigmatulina, Amrutha Prasad, Petr Motlicek, Karel Veselý, Martin Kocour, Igor Szöke
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Management, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Air traffic management and specifically air-traffic control (ATC) rely mostly on voice communications between Air Traffic Controllers (ATCos) and pilots. In most cases, these voice communications follow a well-defined grammar that could be leveraged in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technologies. The callsign used to address an airplane is an essential part of all ATCo-pilot communications. We propose a two-steps approach to add contextual knowledge during semi-supervised training to reduce the ASR system error rates at recognizing the part of the utterance that contains the callsign. Initially, we represent in a WFST the contextual knowledge (i.e. air-surveillance data) of an ATCo-pilot communication. Then, during Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) the contextual knowledge is added by second-pass decoding (i.e. lattice re-scoring). Results show that `unseen domains' (e.g. data from airports not present in the supervised training data) are further aided by contextual SSL when compared to standalone SSL. For this task, we introduce the Callsign Word Error Rate (CA-WER) as an evaluation metric, which only assesses ASR performance of the spoken callsign in an utterance. We obtained a 32.1% CA-WER relative improvement applying SSL with an additional 17.5% CA-WER improvement by adding contextual knowledge during SSL on a challenging ATC-based test set gathered from LiveATC.
Atrous Residual Interconnected Encoder to Attention Decoder Framework for Vertebrae Segmentation via 3D Volumetric CT Images
Authors: Wenqiang Li, YM Tang, Ziyang Wang, KM Yu, Sandy To
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Decoder, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Automatic medical image segmentation based on Computed Tomography (CT) has been widely applied for computer-aided surgery as a prerequisite. With the development of deep learning technologies, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have shown robust performance in automated semantic segmentation of medical images. However, semantic segmentation algorithms based on DCNNs still meet the challenges of feature loss between encoder and decoder, multi-scale object, restricted field of view of filters, and lack of medical image data. This paper proposes a novel algorithm for automated vertebrae segmentation via 3D volumetric spine CT images. The proposed model is based on the structure of encoder to decoder, using layer normalization to optimize mini-batch training performance. To address the concern of the information loss between encoder and decoder, we designed an Atrous Residual Path to pass more features from encoder to decoder instead of an easy shortcut connection. The proposed model also applied the attention module in the decoder part to extract features from variant scales. The proposed model is evaluated on a publicly available dataset by a variety of metrics. The experimental results show that our model achieves competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art medical semantic segmentation methods.
HindSight: A Graph-Based Vision Model Architecture For Representing Part-Whole Hierarchies
Authors: Muhammad AbdurRafae
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, image-classification, Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection

This paper presents a model architecture for encoding the representations of part-whole hierarchies in images in form of a graph. The idea is to divide the image into patches of different levels and then treat all of these patches as nodes for a fully connected graph. A dynamic feature extraction module is used to extract feature representations from these patches in each graph iteration. This enables us to learn a rich graph representation of the image that encompasses the inherent part-whole hierarchical information. Utilizing proper self-supervised training techniques, such a model can be trained as a general purpose vision encoder model which can then be used for various vision related downstream tasks (e.g., Image Classification, Object Detection, Image Captioning, etc.).
Few-Shot Action Recognition with Compromised Metric via Optimal Transport
Authors: Su Lu, Han-Jia Ye, De-Chuan Zhan
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Few-Shot action recognition, Few Shot Action Recognition, Few-Shot Image Classification, Few-Shot Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

Although vital to computer vision systems, few-shot action recognition is still not mature despite the wide research of few-shot image classification. Popular few-shot learning algorithms extract a transferable embedding from seen classes and reuse it on unseen classes by constructing a metric-based classifier. One main obstacle to applying these algorithms in action recognition is the complex structure of videos. Some existing solutions sample frames from a video and aggregate their embeddings to form a video-level representation, neglecting important temporal relations. Others perform an explicit sequence matching between two videos and define their distance as matching cost, imposing too strong restrictions on sequence ordering. In this paper, we propose Compromised Metric via Optimal Transport (CMOT) to combine the advantages of these two solutions. CMOT simultaneously considers semantic and temporal information in videos under Optimal Transport framework, and is discriminative for both content-sensitive and ordering-sensitive tasks. In detail, given two videos, we sample segments from them and cast the calculation of their distance as an optimal transport problem between two segment sequences. To preserve the inherent temporal ordering information, we additionally amend the ground cost matrix by penalizing it with the positional distance between a pair of segments. Empirical results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of CMOT.
Does Your Dermatology Classifier Know What It Doesn't Know? Detecting the Long-Tail of Unseen Conditions
Authors: Abhijit Guha Roy, Jie Ren, Shekoofeh Azizi, Aaron Loh, Vivek Natarajan, Basil Mustafa, Nick Pawlowski, Jan Freyberg, YuAn Liu, Zach Beaver, Nam Vo, Peggy Bui, Samantha Winter, Patricia MacWilliams, Greg S. Corrado, Umesh Telang, Yun Liu, Taylan Cemgil, Alan Karthikesalingam, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Jim Winkens
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Outlier Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Representation Learning

We develop and rigorously evaluate a deep learning based system that can accurately classify skin conditions while detecting rare conditions for which there is not enough data available for training a confident classifier. We frame this task as an out-of-distribution (OOD) detection problem. Our novel approach, hierarchical outlier detection (HOD) assigns multiple abstention classes for each training outlier class and jointly performs a coarse classification of inliers vs. outliers, along with fine-grained classification of the individual classes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the HOD loss in conjunction with modern representation learning approaches (BiT, SimCLR, MICLe) and explore different ensembling strategies for further improving the results. We perform an extensive subgroup analysis over conditions of varying risk levels and different skin types to investigate how the OOD detection performance changes over each subgroup and demonstrate the gains of our framework in comparison to baselines. Finally, we introduce a cost metric to approximate downstream clinical impact. We use this cost metric to compare the proposed method against a baseline system, thereby making a stronger case for the overall system effectiveness in a real-world deployment scenario.
Speech Denoising Without Clean Training Data: A Noise2Noise Approach
Authors: Madhav Mahesh Kashyap, Anuj Tambwekar, Krishnamoorthy Manohara, S Natarajan
Date: 2021-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Denoising, Denoising, Self-Supervised Learning, Speech Denoising, Speech Enhancement

This paper tackles the problem of the heavy dependence of clean speech data required by deep learning based audio-denoising methods by showing that it is possible to train deep speech denoising networks using only noisy speech samples. Conventional wisdom dictates that in order to achieve good speech denoising performance, there is a requirement for a large quantity of both noisy speech samples and perfectly clean speech samples, resulting in a need for expensive audio recording equipment and extremely controlled soundproof recording studios. These requirements pose significant challenges in data collection, especially in economically disadvantaged regions and for low resource languages. This work shows that speech denoising deep neural networks can be successfully trained utilizing only noisy training audio. Furthermore it is revealed that such training regimes achieve superior denoising performance over conventional training regimes utilizing clean training audio targets, in cases involving complex noise distributions and low Signal-to-Noise ratios (high noise environments). This is demonstrated through experiments studying the efficacy of our proposed approach over both real-world noises and synthetic noises using the 20 layered Deep Complex U-Net architecture.