pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Devil's in the Details: Aligning Visual Clues for Conditional Embedding in Person Re-Identification
Authors: Fufu Yu, Xinyang Jiang, Yifei Gong, Shizhen Zhao, Xiaowei Guo, Wei-Shi Zheng, Feng Zheng, Xing Sun
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

Although Person Re-Identification has made impressive progress, difficult cases like occlusion, change of view-pointand similar clothing still bring great challenges. Besides overall visual features, matching and comparing detailed information is also essential for tackling these challenges. This paper proposes two key recognition patterns to better utilize the detail information of pedestrian images, that most of the existing methods are unable to satisfy. Firstly, Visual Clue Alignment requires the model to select and align decisive regions pairs from two images for pair-wise comparison, while existing methods only align regions with predefined rules like high feature similarity or same semantic labels. Secondly, the Conditional Feature Embedding requires the overall feature of a query image to be dynamically adjusted based on the gallery image it matches, while most of the existing methods ignore the reference images. By introducing novel techniques including correspondence attention module and discrepancy-based GCN, we propose an end-to-end ReID method that integrates both patterns into a unified framework, called CACE-Net((C)lue(A)lignment and (C)onditional (E)mbedding). The experiments show that CACE-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets.
Defending Against Multiple and Unforeseen Adversarial Videos
Authors: Shao-Yuan Lo, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, General Classification, Video Classification, Video Recognition

Adversarial robustness of deep neural networks has been actively investigated. However, most existing defense approaches are limited to a specific type of adversarial perturbations. Specifically, they often fail to offer resistance to multiple attack types simultaneously, i.e., they lack multi-perturbation robustness. Furthermore, compared to image recognition problems, the adversarial robustness of video recognition models is relatively unexplored. While several studies have proposed how to generate adversarial videos, only a handful of approaches about defense strategies have been published in the literature. In this paper, we propose one of the first defense strategies against multiple types of adversarial videos for video recognition. The proposed method, referred to as MultiBN, performs adversarial training on multiple adversarial video types using multiple independent batch normalization (BN) layers with a learning-based BN selection module. With a multiple BN structure, each BN brach is responsible for learning the distribution of a single perturbation type and thus provides more precise distribution estimations. This mechanism benefits dealing with multiple perturbation types. The BN selection module detects the attack type of an input video and sends it to the corresponding BN branch, making MultiBN fully automatic and allowing end-to-end training. Compared to present adversarial training approaches, the proposed MultiBN exhibits stronger multi-perturbation robustness against different and even unforeseen adversarial video types, ranging from Lp-bounded attacks and physically realizable attacks. This holds true on different datasets and target models. Moreover, we conduct an extensive analysis to study the properties of the multiple BN structure.
Improving Robustness to Model Inversion Attacks via Mutual Information Regularization
Authors: Tianhao Wang, Yuheng Zhang, Ruoxi Jia
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00

This paper studies defense mechanisms against model inversion (MI) attacks -- a type of privacy attacks aimed at inferring information about the training data distribution given the access to a target machine learning model. Existing defense mechanisms rely on model-specific heuristics or noise injection. While being able to mitigate attacks, existing methods significantly hinder model performance. There remains a question of how to design a defense mechanism that is applicable to a variety of models and achieves better utility-privacy tradeoff. In this paper, we propose the Mutual Information Regularization based Defense (MID) against MI attacks. The key idea is to limit the information about the model input contained in the prediction, thereby limiting the ability of an adversary to infer the private training attributes from the model prediction. Our defense principle is model-agnostic and we present tractable approximations to the regularizer for linear regression, decision trees, and neural networks, which have been successfully attacked by prior work if not attached with any defenses. We present a formal study of MI attacks by devising a rigorous game-based definition and quantifying the associated information leakage. Our theoretical analysis sheds light on the inefficacy of DP in defending against MI attacks, which has been empirically observed in several prior works. Our experiments demonstrate that MID leads to state-of-the-art performance for a variety of MI attacks, target models and datasets.
Graph Neural Network based Service Function Chaining for Automatic Network Control
Authors: DongNyeong Heo, Stanislav Lange, Hee-Gon Kim, Heeyoul Choi
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Graph Neural Network

Software-defined networking (SDN) and the network function virtualization (NFV) led to great developments in software based control technology by decreasing expenditures. Service function chaining (SFC) is an important technology to find efficient paths in network servers to process all of the requested virtualized network functions (VNF). However, SFC is challenging since it has to maintain high Quality of Service (QoS) even for complicated situations. Although some works have been conducted for such tasks with high-level intelligent models like deep neural networks (DNNs), those approaches are not efficient in utilizing the topology information of networks and cannot be applied to networks with dynamically changing topology since their models assume that the topology is fixed. In this paper, we propose a new neural network architecture for SFC, which is based on graph neural network (GNN) considering the graph-structured properties of network topology. The proposed SFC model consists of an encoder and a decoder, where the encoder finds the representation of the network topology, and then the decoder estimates probabilities of neighborhood nodes and their probabilities to process a VNF. In the experiments, our proposed architecture outperformed previous performances of DNN based baseline model. Moreover, the GNN based model can be applied to a new network topology without re-designing and re-training.
An Efficient Quantitative Approach for Optimizing Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Yuke Wang, Boyuan Feng, Xueqiao Peng, Yufei Ding
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection

With the increasing popularity of deep learning, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely applied in various domains, such as image classification and object detection, and achieve stunning success in terms of their high accuracy over the traditional statistical methods. To exploit the potential of CNN models, a huge amount of research and industry efforts have been devoted to optimizing CNNs. Among these endeavors, CNN architecture design has attracted tremendous attention because of its great potential of improving model accuracy or reducing model complexity. However, existing work either introduces repeated training overhead in the search process or lacks an interpretable metric to guide the design. To clear these hurdles, we propose 3D-Receptive Field (3DRF), an explainable and easy-to-compute metric, to estimate the quality of a CNN architecture and guide the search process of designs. To validate the effectiveness of 3DRF, we build a static optimizer to improve the CNN architectures at both the stage level and the kernel level. Our optimizer not only provides a clear and reproducible procedure but also mitigates unnecessary training efforts in the architecture search process. Extensive experiments and studies show that the models generated by our optimizer can achieve up to 5.47% accuracy improvement and up to 65.38% parameters deduction, compared with state-of-the-art CNN structures like MobileNet and ResNet.
Spectral Analysis Network for Deep Representation Learning and Image Clustering
Authors: Jinghua Wang, Adrian Hilton, Jianmin Jiang
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Image Clustering, Representation Learning

Deep representation learning is a crucial procedure in multimedia analysis and attracts increasing attention. Most of the popular techniques rely on convolutional neural network and require a large amount of labeled data in the training procedure. However, it is time consuming or even impossible to obtain the label information in some tasks due to cost limitation. Thus, it is necessary to develop unsupervised deep representation learning techniques. This paper proposes a new network structure for unsupervised deep representation learning based on spectral analysis, which is a popular technique with solid theory foundations. Compared with the existing spectral analysis methods, the proposed network structure has at least three advantages. Firstly, it can identify the local similarities among images in patch level and thus more robust against occlusion. Secondly, through multiple consecutive spectral analysis procedures, the proposed network can learn more clustering-friendly representations and is capable to reveal the deep correlations among data samples. Thirdly, it can elegantly integrate different spectral analysis procedures, so that each spectral analysis procedure can have their individual strengths in dealing with different data sample distributions. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods on various image clustering tasks.
An unsupervised deep learning framework via integrated optimization of representation learning and GMM-based modeling
Authors: Jinghua Wang, Jianmin Jiang
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Learning, Representation Learning

While supervised deep learning has achieved great success in a range of applications, relatively little work has studied the discovery of knowledge from unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised deep learning framework to provide a potential solution for the problem that existing deep learning techniques require large labeled data sets for completing the training process. Our proposed introduces a new principle of joint learning on both deep representations and GMM (Gaussian Mixture Model)-based deep modeling, and thus an integrated objective function is proposed to facilitate the principle. In comparison with the existing work in similar areas, our objective function has two learning targets, which are created to be jointly optimized to achieve the best possible unsupervised learning and knowledge discovery from unlabeled data sets. While maximizing the first target enables the GMM to achieve the best possible modeling of the data representations and each Gaussian component corresponds to a compact cluster, maximizing the second term will enhance the separability of the Gaussian components and hence the inter-cluster distances. As a result, the compactness of clusters is significantly enhanced by reducing the intra-cluster distances, and the separability is improved by increasing the inter-cluster distances. Extensive experimental results show that the propose method can improve the clustering performance compared with benchmark methods.
Conditional Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks for Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation
Authors: Jinghua Wang, Jianmin Jiang
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Machine learning models trained in one domain perform poorly in the other domains due to the existence of domain shift. Domain adaptation techniques solve this problem by training transferable models from the label-rich source domain to the label-scarce target domain. Unfortunately, a majority of the existing domain adaptation techniques rely on the availability of target-domain data, and thus limit their applications to a small community across few computer vision problems. In this paper, we tackle the challenging zero-shot domain adaptation (ZSDA) problem, where target-domain data is non-available in the training stage. For this purpose, we propose conditional coupled generative adversarial networks (CoCoGAN) by extending the coupled generative adversarial networks (CoGAN) into a conditioning model. Compared with the existing state of the arts, our proposed CoCoGAN is able to capture the joint distribution of dual-domain samples in two different tasks, i.e. the relevant task (RT) and an irrelevant task (IRT). We train CoCoGAN with both source-domain samples in RT and dual-domain samples in IRT to complete the domain adaptation. While the former provide high-level concepts of the non-available target-domain data, the latter carry the sharing correlation between the two domains in RT and IRT. To train CoCoGAN in the absence of target-domain data for RT, we propose a new supervisory signal, i.e. the alignment between representations across tasks. Extensive experiments carried out demonstrate that our proposed CoCoGAN outperforms existing state of the arts in image classifications.
Extending Label Smoothing Regularization with Self-Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Ji-Yue Wang, Pei Zhang, Wen-feng Pang, Jie Li
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Self-Knowledge Distillation

Inspired by the strong correlation between the Label Smoothing Regularization(LSR) and Knowledge distillation(KD), we propose an algorithm LsrKD for training boost by extending the LSR method to the KD regime and applying a softer temperature. Then we improve the LsrKD by a Teacher Correction(TC) method, which manually sets a constant larger proportion for the right class in the uniform distribution teacher. To further improve the performance of LsrKD, we develop a self-distillation method named Memory-replay Knowledge Distillation (MrKD) that provides a knowledgeable teacher to replace the uniform distribution one in LsrKD. The MrKD method penalizes the KD loss between the current model's output distributions and its copies' on the training trajectory. By preventing the model learning so far from its historical output distribution space, MrKD can stabilize the learning and find a more robust minimum. Our experiments show that LsrKD can improve LSR performance consistently at no cost, especially on several deep neural networks where LSR is ineffectual. Also, MrKD can significantly improve single model training. The experiment results confirm that the TC can help LsrKD and MrKD to boost training, especially on the networks they are failed. Overall, LsrKD, MrKD, and their TC variants are comparable to or outperform the LSR method, suggesting the broad applicability of these KD methods.
HAA500: Human-Centric Atomic Action Dataset with Curated Videos
Authors: Jihoon Chung, Cheng-hsin Wuu, Hsuan-ru Yang, Yu-Wing Tai, Chi-Keung Tang
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition

We contribute HAA500, a manually annotated human-centric atomic action dataset for action recognition on 500 classes with over 591K labeled frames. To minimize ambiguities in action classification, HAA500 consists of highly diversified classes of fine-grained atomic actions, where only consistent actions fall under the same label, e.g., "Baseball Pitching" vs "Free Throw in Basketball". Thus HAA500 is different from existing atomic action datasets, where coarse-grained atomic actions were labeled with coarse action-verbs such as "Throw". HAA500 has been carefully curated to capture the precise movement of human figures with little class-irrelevant motions or spatio-temporal label noises. The advantages of HAA500 are fourfold: 1) human-centric actions with a high average of 69.7% detectable joints for the relevant human poses; 2) high scalability since adding a new class can be done under 20-60 minutes; 3) curated videos capturing essential elements of an atomic action without irrelevant frames; 4) fine-grained atomic action classes. Our extensive experiments including cross-data validation using datasets collected in the wild demonstrate the clear benefits of human-centric and atomic characteristics of HAA500, which enable training even a baseline deep learning model to improve prediction by attending to atomic human poses. We detail the HAA500 dataset statistics and collection methodology and compare quantitatively with existing action recognition datasets.
Adversarial Learning for Zero-shot Domain Adaptation
Authors: Jinghua Wang, Jianmin Jiang
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Zero-shot domain adaptation (ZSDA) is a category of domain adaptation problems where neither data sample nor label is available for parameter learning in the target domain. With the hypothesis that the shift between a given pair of domains is shared across tasks, we propose a new method for ZSDA by transferring domain shift from an irrelevant task (IrT) to the task of interest (ToI). Specifically, we first identify an IrT, where dual-domain samples are available, and capture the domain shift with a coupled generative adversarial networks (CoGAN) in this task. Then, we train a CoGAN for the ToI and restrict it to carry the same domain shift as the CoGAN for IrT does. In addition, we introduce a pair of co-training classifiers to regularize the training procedure of CoGAN in the ToI. The proposed method not only derives machine learning models for the non-available target-domain data, but also synthesizes the data themselves. We evaluate the proposed method on benchmark datasets and achieve the state-of-the-art performances.
ARM: A Confidence-Based Adversarial Reweighting Module for Coarse Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jingchao Liu, Ye Du, Zehua Fu, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Coarsely-labeled semantic segmentation annotations are easy to obtain, but therefore bear the risk of losing edge details and introducing background pixels. Impeded by the inherent noise, existing coarse annotations are only taken as a bonus for model pre-training. In this paper, we try to exploit their potentials with a confidence-based reweighting strategy. To expand, loss-based reweighting strategies usually take the high loss value to identify two completely different types of pixels, namely, valuable pixels in noise-free annotations and mislabeled pixels in noisy annotations. This makes it impossible to perform two tasks of mining valuable pixels and suppressing mislabeled pixels at the same time. However, with the help of the prediction confidence, we successfully solve this dilemma and simultaneously perform two subtasks with a single reweighting strategy. Furthermore, we generalize this strategy into an Adversarial Reweighting Module (ARM) and prove its convergence strictly. Experiments on standard datasets shows our ARM can bring consistent improvements for both coarse annotations and fine annotations. Specifically, built on top of DeepLabv3+, ARM improves the mIoU on the coarsely-labeled Cityscapes by a considerable margin and increases the mIoU on the ADE20K dataset to 47.50.
Transfer Learning of Graph Neural Networks with Ego-graph Information Maximization
Authors: Qi Zhu, Carl Yang, Yidan Xu, Haonan Wang, Chao Zhang, Jiawei Han
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Transfer Learning

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved superior performance in various applications, but training dedicated GNNs can be costly for large-scale graphs. Some recent work started to study the pre-training of GNNs. However, none of them provide theoretical insights into the design of their frameworks, or clear requirements and guarantees towards their transferability. In this work, we establish a theoretically grounded and practically useful framework for the transfer learning of GNNs. Firstly, we propose a novel view towards the essential graph information and advocate the capturing of it as the goal of transferable GNN training, which motivates the design of EGI (Ego-Graph Information maximization) to analytically achieve this goal. Secondly, when node features are structure-relevant, we conduct an analysis of EGI transferability regarding the difference between the local graph Laplacians of the source and target graphs. We conduct controlled synthetic experiments to directly justify our theoretical conclusions. Comprehensive experiments on two real-world network datasets show consistent results in the analyzed setting of direct-transfering, while those on large-scale knowledge graphs show promising results in the more practical setting of transfering with fine-tuning.
CounteRGAN: Generating Realistic Counterfactuals with Residual Generative Adversarial Nets
Authors: Daniel Nemirovsky, Nicolas Thiebaut, Ye Xu, Abhishek Gupta
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

The prevalence of machine learning models in various industries has led to growing demands for model interpretability and for the ability to provide meaningful recourse to users. For example, patients hoping to improve their diagnoses or loan applicants seeking to increase their chances of approval. Counterfactuals can help in this regard by identifying input perturbations that would result in more desirable prediction outcomes. Meaningful counterfactuals should be able to achieve the desired outcome, but also be realistic, actionable, and efficient to compute. Current approaches achieve desired outcomes with moderate actionability but are severely limited in terms of realism and latency. To tackle these limitations, we apply Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) toward counterfactual search. We also introduce a novel Residual GAN (RGAN) that helps to improve counterfactual realism and actionability compared to regular GANs. The proposed CounteRGAN method utilizes an RGAN and a target classifier to produce counterfactuals capable of providing meaningful recourse. Evaluations on two popular datasets highlight how the CounteRGAN is able to overcome the limitations of existing methods, including latency improvements of >50x to >90,000x, making meaningful recourse available in real-time and applicable to a wide range of domains.
Beyond Localized Graph Neural Networks: An Attributed Motif Regularization Framework
Authors: Aravind Sankar, Junting Wang, Adit Krishnan, Hari Sundaram
Date: 2020-09-11 00:00:00

We present InfoMotif, a new semi-supervised, motif-regularized, learning framework over graphs. We overcome two key limitations of message passing in popular graph neural networks (GNNs): localization (a k-layer GNN cannot utilize features outside the k-hop neighborhood of the labeled training nodes) and over-smoothed (structurally indistinguishable) representations. We propose the concept of attributed structural roles of nodes based on their occurrence in different network motifs, independent of network proximity. Two nodes share attributed structural roles if they participate in topologically similar motif instances over co-varying sets of attributes. Further, InfoMotif achieves architecture independence by regularizing the node representations of arbitrary GNNs via mutual information maximization. Our training curriculum dynamically prioritizes multiple motifs in the learning process without relying on distributional assumptions in the underlying graph or the learning task. We integrate three state-of-the-art GNNs in our framework, to show significant gains (3-10% accuracy) across six diverse, real-world datasets. We see stronger gains for nodes with sparse training labels and diverse attributes in local neighborhood structures.