pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Wild ToFu: Improving Range and Quality of Indirect Time-of-Flight Depth with RGB Fusion in Challenging Environments
Authors: HyunJun Jung, Nikolas Brasch, Ales Leonardis, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction

Indirect Time-of-Flight (I-ToF) imaging is a widespread way of depth estimation for mobile devices due to its small size and affordable price. Previous works have mainly focused on quality improvement for I-ToF imaging especially curing the effect of Multi Path Interference (MPI). These investigations are typically done in specifically constrained scenarios at close distance, indoors and under little ambient light. Surprisingly little work has investigated I-ToF quality improvement in real-life scenarios where strong ambient light and far distances pose difficulties due to an extreme amount of induced shot noise and signal sparsity, caused by the attenuation with limited sensor power and light scattering. In this work, we propose a new learning based end-to-end depth prediction network which takes noisy raw I-ToF signals as well as an RGB image and fuses their latent representation based on a multi step approach involving both implicit and explicit alignment to predict a high quality long range depth map aligned to the RGB viewpoint. We test our approach on challenging real-world scenes and show more than 40% RMSE improvement on the final depth map compared to the baseline approach.
Dilated convolution with learnable spacings
Authors: Ismail Khalfaoui-Hassani, Thomas Pellegrini, Timothée Masquelier
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Recent works indicate that convolutional neural networks (CNN) need large receptive fields (RF) to compete with visual transformers and their attention mechanism. In CNNs, RFs can simply be enlarged by increasing the convolution kernel sizes. Yet the number of trainable parameters, which scales quadratically with the kernel's size in the 2D case, rapidly becomes prohibitive, and the training is notoriously difficult. This paper presents a new method to increase the RF size without increasing the number of parameters. The dilated convolution (DC) has already been proposed for the same purpose. DC can be seen as a convolution with a kernel that contains only a few non-zero elements placed on a regular grid. Here we present a new version of the DC in which the spacings between the non-zero elements, or equivalently their positions, are no longer fixed but learnable via backpropagation thanks to an interpolation technique. We call this method "Dilated Convolution with Learnable Spacings" (DCLS) and generalize it to the n-dimensional convolution case. However, our main focus here will be on the 2D case. We first tried our approach on ResNet50: we drop-in replaced the standard convolutions with DCLS ones, which increased the accuracy of ImageNet1k classification at iso-parameters, but at the expense of the throughput. Next, we used the recent ConvNeXt state-of-the-art convolutional architecture and drop-in replaced the depthwise convolutions with DCLS ones. This not only increased the accuracy of ImageNet1k classification but also of typical downstream and robustness tasks, again at iso-parameters but this time with negligible cost on throughput, as ConvNeXt uses separable convolutions. Conversely, classic DC led to poor performance with both ResNet50 and ConvNeXt. The code of the method is available at: https://github.com/K-H-Ismail/Dilated-Convolution-with-Learnable-Spacings-PyTorch.
A coarse space acceleration of deep-DDM
Authors: Valentin Mercier, Serge Gratton, Pierre Boudier
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00

The use of deep learning methods for solving PDEs is a field in full expansion. In particular, Physical Informed Neural Networks, that implement a sampling of the physical domain and use a loss function that penalizes the violation of the partial differential equation, have shown their great potential. Yet, to address large scale problems encountered in real applications and compete with existing numerical methods for PDEs, it is important to design parallel algorithms with good scalability properties. In the vein of traditional domain decomposition methods (DDM), we consider the recently proposed deep-ddm approach. We present an extension of this method that relies on the use of a coarse space correction, similarly to what is done in traditional DDM solvers. Our investigations shows that the coarse correction is able to alleviate the deterioration of the convergence of the solver when the number of subdomains is increased thanks to an instantaneous information exchange between subdomains at each iteration. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach induces a remarkable acceleration of the original deep-ddm method, at a reduced additional computational cost.
Flexible Networks for Learning Physical Dynamics of Deformable Objects
Authors: Jinhyung Park, Dohae Lee, In-Kwon Lee
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Future prediction

Learning the physical dynamics of deformable objects with particle-based representation has been the objective of many computational models in machine learning. While several state-of-the-art models have achieved this objective in simulated environments, most existing models impose a precondition, such that the input is a sequence of ordered point sets. That is, the order of the points in each point set must be the same across the entire input sequence. This precondition restrains the model from generalizing to real-world data, which is considered to be a sequence of unordered point sets. In this paper, we propose a model named time-wise PointNet (TP-Net) that solves this problem by directly consuming a sequence of unordered point sets to infer the future state of a deformable object with particle-based representation. Our model consists of a shared feature extractor that extracts global features from each input point set in parallel and a prediction network that aggregates and reasons on these features for future prediction. The key concept of our approach is that we use global features rather than local features to achieve invariance to input permutations and ensure the stability and scalability of our model. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance with real-time prediction speed in both synthetic dataset and real-world dataset. In addition, we provide quantitative and qualitative analysis on why our approach is more effective and efficient than existing approaches.
RFGAN: RF-Based Human Synthesis
Authors: Cong Yu, Zhi Wu, Dongheng Zhang, Zhi Lu, Yang Hu, Yan Chen
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00

This paper demonstrates human synthesis based on the Radio Frequency (RF) signals, which leverages the fact that RF signals can record human movements with the signal reflections off the human body. Different from existing RF sensing works that can only perceive humans roughly, this paper aims to generate fine-grained optical human images by introducing a novel cross-modal RFGAN model. Specifically, we first build a radio system equipped with horizontal and vertical antenna arrays to transceive RF signals. Since the reflected RF signals are processed as obscure signal projection heatmaps on the horizontal and vertical planes, we design a RF-Extractor with RNN in RFGAN for RF heatmap encoding and combining to obtain the human activity information. Then we inject the information extracted by the RF-Extractor and RNN as the condition into GAN using the proposed RF-based adaptive normalizations. Finally, we train the whole model in an end-to-end manner. To evaluate our proposed model, we create two cross-modal datasets (RF-Walk & RF-Activity) that contain thousands of optical human activity frames and corresponding RF signals. Experimental results show that the RFGAN can generate target human activity frames using RF signals. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to generate optical images based on RF signals.
Shrub Ensembles for Online Classification
Authors: Sebastian Buschjäger, Sibylle Hess, Katharina Morik
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Online learning algorithms have become a ubiquitous tool in the machine learning toolbox and are frequently used in small, resource-constraint environments. Among the most successful online learning methods are Decision Tree (DT) ensembles. DT ensembles provide excellent performance while adapting to changes in the data, but they are not resource efficient. Incremental tree learners keep adding new nodes to the tree but never remove old ones increasing the memory consumption over time. Gradient-based tree learning, on the other hand, requires the computation of gradients over the entire tree which is costly for even moderately sized trees. In this paper, we propose a novel memory-efficient online classification ensemble called shrub ensembles for resource-constraint systems. Our algorithm trains small to medium-sized decision trees on small windows and uses stochastic proximal gradient descent to learn the ensemble weights of these `shrubs'. We provide a theoretical analysis of our algorithm and include an extensive discussion on the behavior of our approach in the online setting. In a series of 2~959 experiments on 12 different datasets, we compare our method against 8 state-of-the-art methods. Our Shrub Ensembles retain an excellent performance even when only little memory is available. We show that SE offers a better accuracy-memory trade-off in 7 of 12 cases, while having a statistically significant better performance than most other methods. Our implementation is available under https://github.com/sbuschjaeger/se-online .
Low-rank Tensor Decomposition for Compression of Convolutional Neural Networks Using Funnel Regularization
Authors: Bo-Shiuan Chu, Che-Rung Lee
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization, Model Compression, Tensor Decomposition

Tensor decomposition is one of the fundamental technique for model compression of deep convolution neural networks owing to its ability to reveal the latent relations among complex structures. However, most existing methods compress the networks layer by layer, which cannot provide a satisfactory solution to achieve global optimization. In this paper, we proposed a model reduction method to compress the pre-trained networks using low-rank tensor decomposition of the convolution layers. Our method is based on the optimization techniques to select the proper ranks of decomposed network layers. A new regularization method, called funnel function, is proposed to suppress the unimportant factors during the compression, so the proper ranks can be revealed much easier. The experimental results show that our algorithm can reduce more model parameters than other tensor compression methods. For ResNet18 with ImageNet2012, our reduced model can reach more than twi times speed up in terms of GMAC with merely 0.7% Top-1 accuracy drop, which outperforms most existing methods in both metrics.
Hybrid Self-Attention NEAT: A novel evolutionary approach to improve the NEAT algorithm
Authors: Saman Khamesian, Hamed Malek
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Evolutionary Algorithms

This article presents a "Hybrid Self-Attention NEAT" method to improve the original NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm in high-dimensional inputs. Although the NEAT algorithm has shown a significant result in different challenging tasks, as input representations are high dimensional, it cannot create a well-tuned network. Our study addresses this limitation by using self-attention as an indirect encoding method to select the most important parts of the input. In addition, we improve its overall performance with the help of a hybrid method to evolve the final network weights. The main conclusion is that Hybrid Self- Attention NEAT can eliminate the restriction of the original NEAT. The results indicate that in comparison with evolutionary algorithms, our model can get comparable scores in Atari games with raw pixels input with a much lower number of parameters.
QKSA: Quantum Knowledge Seeking Agent -- resource-optimized reinforcement learning using quantum process tomography
Authors: Aritra Sarkar, Zaid Al-Ars, Harshitta Gandhi, Koen Bertels
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this research, we extend the universal reinforcement learning (URL) agent models of artificial general intelligence to quantum environments. The utility function of a classical exploratory stochastic Knowledge Seeking Agent, KL-KSA, is generalized to distance measures from quantum information theory on density matrices. Quantum process tomography (QPT) algorithms form the tractable subset of programs for modeling environmental dynamics. The optimal QPT policy is selected based on a mutable cost function based on algorithmic complexity as well as computational resource complexity. Instead of Turing machines, we estimate the cost metrics on a high-level language to allow realistic experimentation. The entire agent design is encapsulated in a self-replicating quine which mutates the cost function based on the predictive value of the optimal policy choosing scheme. Thus, multiple agents with pareto-optimal QPT policies evolve using genetic programming, mimicking the development of physical theories each with different resource trade-offs. This formal framework is termed Quantum Knowledge Seeking Agent (QKSA). Despite its importance, few quantum reinforcement learning models exist in contrast to the current thrust in quantum machine learning. QKSA is the first proposal for a framework that resembles the classical URL models. Similar to how AIXI-tl is a resource-bounded active version of Solomonoff universal induction, QKSA is a resource-bounded participatory observer framework to the recently proposed algorithmic information-based reconstruction of quantum mechanics. QKSA can be applied for simulating and studying aspects of quantum information theory. Specifically, we demonstrate that it can be used to accelerate quantum variational algorithms which include tomographic reconstruction as its integral subroutine.
Saliency Diversified Deep Ensemble for Robustness to Adversaries
Authors: Alex Bogun, Dimche Kostadinov, Damian Borth
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: AAAI Workshop AdvML 2022 2
Tasks: Diversity

Deep learning models have shown incredible performance on numerous image recognition, classification, and reconstruction tasks. Although very appealing and valuable due to their predictive capabilities, one common threat remains challenging to resolve. A specifically trained attacker can introduce malicious input perturbations to fool the network, thus causing potentially harmful mispredictions. Moreover, these attacks can succeed when the adversary has full access to the target model (white-box) and even when such access is limited (black-box setting). The ensemble of models can protect against such attacks but might be brittle under shared vulnerabilities in its members (attack transferability). To that end, this work proposes a novel diversity-promoting learning approach for the deep ensembles. The idea is to promote saliency map diversity (SMD) on ensemble members to prevent the attacker from targeting all ensemble members at once by introducing an additional term in our learning objective. During training, this helps us minimize the alignment between model saliencies to reduce shared member vulnerabilities and, thus, increase ensemble robustness to adversaries. We empirically show a reduced transferability between ensemble members and improved performance compared to the state-of-the-art ensemble defense against medium and high strength white-box attacks. In addition, we demonstrate that our approach combined with existing methods outperforms state-of-the-art ensemble algorithms for defense under white-box and black-box attacks.
Decision-Focused Learning: Through the Lens of Learning to Rank
Authors: Jayanta Mandi, Víctor Bucarey, Maxime Mulamba, Tias Guns
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Decision Making, Learning-To-Rank

In the last years decision-focused learning framework, also known as predict-and-optimize, have received increasing attention. In this setting, the predictions of a machine learning model are used as estimated cost coefficients in the objective function of a discrete combinatorial optimization problem for decision making. Decision-focused learning proposes to train the ML models, often neural network models, by directly optimizing the quality of decisions made by the optimization solvers. Based on a recent work that proposed a noise contrastive estimation loss over a subset of the solution space, we observe that decision-focused learning can more generally be seen as a learning-to-rank problem, where the goal is to learn an objective function that ranks the feasible points correctly. This observation is independent of the optimization method used and of the form of the objective function. We develop pointwise, pairwise and listwise ranking loss functions, which can be differentiated in closed form given a subset of solutions. We empirically investigate the quality of our generic methods compared to existing decision-focused learning approaches with competitive results. Furthermore, controlling the subset of solutions allows controlling the runtime considerably, with limited effect on regret.
Handwritten Mathematical Expression Recognition via Attention Aggregation based Bi-directional Mutual Learning
Authors: Xiaohang Bian, Bo Qin, Xiaozhe Xin, Jianwu Li, Xuefeng Su, Yanfeng Wang
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decoder, Handwritten Mathmatical Expression Recognition, Transfer Learning

Handwritten mathematical expression recognition aims to automatically generate LaTeX sequences from given images. Currently, attention-based encoder-decoder models are widely used in this task. They typically generate target sequences in a left-to-right (L2R) manner, leaving the right-to-left (R2L) contexts unexploited. In this paper, we propose an Attention aggregation based Bi-directional Mutual learning Network (ABM) which consists of one shared encoder and two parallel inverse decoders (L2R and R2L). The two decoders are enhanced via mutual distillation, which involves one-to-one knowledge transfer at each training step, making full use of the complementary information from two inverse directions. Moreover, in order to deal with mathematical symbols in diverse scales, an Attention Aggregation Module (AAM) is proposed to effectively integrate multi-scale coverage attentions. Notably, in the inference phase, given that the model already learns knowledge from two inverse directions, we only use the L2R branch for inference, keeping the original parameter size and inference speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the recognition accuracy of 56.85 % on CROHME 2014, 52.92 % on CROHME 2016, and 53.96 % on CROHME 2019 without data augmentation and model ensembling, substantially outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available in https://github.com/XH-B/ABM.
Pragmatic Implementation of Reinforcement Algorithms For Path Finding On Raspberry Pi
Authors: Serena Raju, Sherin Shibu, Riya Mol Raji, Joel Thomas
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance, Q-Learning

In this paper, pragmatic implementation of an indoor autonomous delivery system that exploits Reinforcement Learning algorithms for path planning and collision avoidance is audited. The proposed system is a cost-efficient approach that is implemented to facilitate a Raspberry Pi controlled four-wheel-drive non-holonomic robot map a grid. This approach computes and navigates the shortest path from a source key point to a destination key point to carry out the desired delivery. Q learning and Deep-Q learning are used to find the optimal path while avoiding collision with static obstacles. This work defines an approach to deploy these two algorithms on a robot. A novel algorithm to decode an array of directions into accurate movements in a certain action space is also proposed. The procedure followed to dispatch this system with the said requirements is described, ergo presenting our proof of concept for indoor autonomous delivery vehicles.
MESA: Offline Meta-RL for Safe Adaptation and Fault Tolerance
Authors: Michael Luo, Ashwin Balakrishna, Brijen Thananjeyan, Suraj Nair, Julian Ibarz, Jie Tan, Chelsea Finn, Ion Stoica, Ken Goldberg
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Meta-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Safe Exploration

Safe exploration is critical for using reinforcement learning (RL) in risk-sensitive environments. Recent work learns risk measures which measure the probability of violating constraints, which can then be used to enable safety. However, learning such risk measures requires significant interaction with the environment, resulting in excessive constraint violations during learning. Furthermore, these measures are not easily transferable to new environments. We cast safe exploration as an offline meta-RL problem, where the objective is to leverage examples of safe and unsafe behavior across a range of environments to quickly adapt learned risk measures to a new environment with previously unseen dynamics. We then propose MEta-learning for Safe Adaptation (MESA), an approach for meta-learning a risk measure for safe RL. Simulation experiments across 5 continuous control domains suggest that MESA can leverage offline data from a range of different environments to reduce constraint violations in unseen environments by up to a factor of 2 while maintaining task performance. See https://tinyurl.com/safe-meta-rl for code and supplementary material.
Question Answering Survey: Directions, Challenges, Datasets, Evaluation Matrices
Authors: Hariom A. Pandya, Brijesh S. Bhatt
Date: 2021-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Retrieval, Survey

The usage and amount of information available on the internet increase over the past decade. This digitization leads to the need for automated answering system to extract fruitful information from redundant and transitional knowledge sources. Such systems are designed to cater the most prominent answer from this giant knowledge source to the user query using natural language understanding (NLU) and thus eminently depends on the Question-answering(QA) field. Question answering involves but not limited to the steps like mapping of user question to pertinent query, retrieval of relevant information, finding the best suitable answer from the retrieved information etc. The current improvement of deep learning models evince compelling performance improvement in all these tasks. In this review work, the research directions of QA field are analyzed based on the type of question, answer type, source of evidence-answer, and modeling approach. This detailing followed by open challenges of the field like automatic question generation, similarity detection and, low resource availability for a language. In the end, a survey of available datasets and evaluation measures is presented.