pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Hyperspectral Image Denoising With Realistic Data
Authors: Tao Zhang, Ying Fu, Cheng Li
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Denoising, Hyperspectral Image Denoising, Image Denoising

    The hyperspectral image (HSI) denoising has been widely utilized to improve HSI qualities. Recently, learning-based HSI denoising methods have shown their effectiveness, but most of them are based on synthetic dataset and lack the generalization capability on real testing HSI. Moreover, there is still no public paired real HSI denoising dataset to learn HSI denoising network and quantitatively evaluate HSI methods. In this paper, we mainly focus on how to produce realistic dataset for learning and evaluating HSI denoising network. On the one hand, we collect a paired real HSI denoising dataset, which consists of shortexposure noisy HSIs and the corresponding long-exposure clean HSIs. On the other hand, we propose an accurate HSI noise model which matches the distribution of real data well and can be employed to synthesize realistic dataset. On the basis of the noise model, we present an approach to calibrate the noise parameters of the given hyperspectral camera. The extensive experimental results show that a network learned with only synthetic data generated by our noise model performs as well as it is learned with paired real data.
Unshuffling Data for Improved Generalization in Visual Question Answering
Authors: Damien Teney, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Anton Van Den Hengel
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

    Generalization beyond the training distribution is a core challenge in machine learning. The common practice of mixing and shuffling examples when training neural networks may not be optimal in this regard. We show that partitioning the data into well-chosen, non-i.i.d. subsets treated as multiple training environments can guide the learning of models with better out-of-distribution generalization. We describe a training procedure to capture the patterns that are stable across environments while discarding spurious ones. The method makes a step beyond correlation-based learning: the choice of the partitioning allows injecting information about the task that cannot be otherwise recovered from the joint distribution of the training data. We demonstrate multiple use cases with the task of visual question answering, which is notorious for dataset biases. We obtain significant improvements on VQA-CP, using environments built from prior knowledge, existing meta data, or unsupervised clustering. We also get improvements on GQA using annotations of "equivalent questions", and on multi-dataset training (VQA v2 / Visual Genome) by treating them as distinct environments.
Domain-Invariant Disentangled Network for Generalizable Object Detection
Authors: Chuang Lin, Zehuan Yuan, Sicheng Zhao, Peize Sun, Changhu Wang, Jianfei Cai
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Disentanglement, Domain Generalization, image-classification, Image Classification, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

    We address the problem of domain generalizable object detection, which aims to learn a domain-invariant detector from multiple "seen" domains so that it can generalize well to other "unseen" domains. The generalization ability is crucial in practical scenarios especially when it is difficult to collect data. Compared to image classification, domain generalization in object detection has seldom been explored with more challenges brought by domain gaps on both image and instance levels. In this paper, we propose a novel generalizable object detection model, termed Domain-Invariant Disentangled Network (DIDN). In contrast to directly aligning multiple sources, we integrate a disentangled network into Faster R-CNN. By disentangling representations on both image and instance levels, DIDN is able to learn domain-invariant representations that are suitable for generalized object detection. Furthermore, we design a cross-level representation reconstruction to complement this two-level disentanglement so that informative object representations could be preserved. Extensive experiments are conducted on five benchmark datasets and the results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances on domain generalization for object detection.
SmartShadow: Artistic Shadow Drawing Tool for Line Drawings
Authors: Lvmin Zhang, Jinyue Jiang, Yi Ji, Chunping Liu
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10

    SmartShadow is a deep learning application for digital painting artists to draw shadows on line drawings, with three proposed tools. (1) Shadow brush: artists can draw scribbles to coarsely indicate the areas inside or outside their wanted shadows, and the application will generate the shadows in real-time. (2) Shadow boundary brush: this brush can precisely control the boundary of any specific shadow. (3) Global shadow generator: this tool can estimate the global shadow direction from input brush scribbles, and then consistently propagate local shadows to the entire image. These three tools can not only speed up the shadow drawing process (by 3.1 times as experiments validate), but also allow for the flexibility to achieve various shadow effects and facilitate richer artistic creations. To this end, we train Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with a collected large-scale dataset of both real and synthesized data, and especially, we collect 1670 shadow samples drawn by real artists. Both qualitative analysis and user study show that our approach can generate high-quality shadows that are practically usable in the daily works of digital painting artists. We present 30 additional results and 15 visual comparisons in the supplementary materiel.
Self-Supervised Transfer Learning for Hand Mesh Recovery From Binocular Images
Authors: Zheng Chen, Sihan Wang, Yi Sun, Xiaohong Ma
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Transfer Learning

    Traditional methods for RGB hand mesh recovery usually need to train a separate model for each dataset with the corresponding ground truth and are hardly adapted to new scenarios without the ground truth for supervision. To address the problem, we propose a self-supervised framework for hand mesh estimation, where we pre-learn hand priors from existing hand datasets and transfer the priors to new scenarios without any landmark annotations. The proposed approach takes binocular images as input and mainly relies on left-right consistency constraints including appearance consensus and shape consistency to train the model to estimate the hand mesh in new scenarios. We conduct experiments on the widely used stereo hand dataset, and the experimental results verify that our model can get comparable performance compared with state-of-the-art methods even without the corresponding landmark annotations. To further evaluate our model, we collect a large real binocular dataset. The experimental results on the collected real dataset also verify the effectiveness of our model qualitatively.
StyleFormer: Real-Time Arbitrary Style Transfer via Parametric Style Composition
Authors: Xiaolei Wu, Zhihao Hu, Lu Sheng, Dong Xu
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Diversity, Style Transfer

    In this work, we propose a new feed-forward arbitrary style transfer method, referred to as StyleFormer, which can simultaneously fulfill fine-grained style diversity and semantic content coherency. Specifically, our transformer-inspired feature-level stylization method consists of three modules: (a) the style bank generation module for sparse but compact parametric style pattern extraction, (b) the transformer-driven style composition module for content-guided global style composition, and (c) the parametric content modulation module for flexible but faithful stylization. The output stylized images are impressively coherent with the content structure, sensitive to the detailed style variations, but still holistically adhere to the style distributions from the style images. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons as well as comprehensive user studies demonstrate that our StyleFormer outperforms the existing SOTA methods in generating visually plausible stylization results with real-time efficiency.
Image Synthesis From Layout With Locality-Aware Mask Adaption
Authors: Zejian Li, Jingyu Wu, Immanuel Koh, Yongchuan Tang, Lingyun Sun
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Image Generation, Object, Semantic Segmentation

    This paper is concerned with synthesizing images conditioned on a layout (a set of bounding boxes with object categories). Existing works construct a layout-mask-image pipeline. Object masks are generated separately and mapped to bounding boxes to form a whole semantic segmentation mask (layout-to-mask), with which a new image is generated (mask-to-image). However, overlapped boxes in layouts result in overlapped object masks, which reduces the mask clarity and causes confusion in image generation. We hypothesize the importance of generating clean and semantically clear semantic masks. The hypothesis is supported by the finding that the performance of state-of-the-art LostGAN decreases when input masks are tainted. Motivated by this hypothesis, we propose Locality-Aware Mask Adaption (LAMA) module to adapt overlapped or nearby object masks in the generation. Experimental results show our proposed model with LAMA outperforms existing approaches regarding visual fidelity and alignment with input layouts. On COCO-stuff in 256x256, our method improves the state-of-the-art FID score from 41.65 to 31.12 and the SceneFID from 22.00 to 18.64.
Online Pseudo Label Generation by Hierarchical Cluster Dynamics for Adaptive Person Re-Identification
Authors: Yi Zheng, Shixiang Tang, Guolong Teng, Yixiao Ge, Kaijian Liu, Jing Qin, Donglian Qi, Dapeng Chen
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Model Optimization, Person Re-Identification, Pseudo Label

    Adaptive person re-identification (adaptive ReID) targets at transferring learned knowledge from the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Pseudo-label-based methods that alternatively generate pseudo labels and optimize the training model have demonstrated great effectiveness in this field. However, the generated pseudo labels are inaccurate and cannot reflect the true semantic meaning of the unlabeled samples. We consider such inaccuracy stems from both the lagged update of the pseudo labels as well as the simple criterion of the employed clustering method. To tackle the problem, we propose an online pseudo label generation by hierarchical cluster dynamics for adaptive ReID. In particular, hierarchical label banks are constructed for all the samples in the dataset, and we update the pseudo labels of the sample in each coming mini-batch, performing the model optimization and the label generation simultaneously. A new hierarchical cluster dynamics is built for the label update, where cluster merge and cluster split are driven by a possibility computed by the label propagation. Our method can achieve better pseudo labels and higher reid accuracy. Extensive experiments on Market-to-Duke, Duke-to-Market, MSMT-to-Market, MSMT-to-Duke, Market-to-MSMT, and Duke-to-MSMT verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.
R-MSFM: Recurrent Multi-Scale Feature Modulation for Monocular Depth Estimating
Authors: Zhongkai Zhou, Xinnan Fan, Pengfei Shi, Yuanxue Xin
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Decoder, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation

    In this paper, we propose Recurrent Multi-Scale Feature Modulation (R-MSFM), a new deep network architecture for self-supervised monocular depth estimation. R-MSFM extracts per-pixel features, builds a multi-scale feature modulation module, and iteratively updates an inverse depth through a parameter-shared decoder at the fixed resolution. This architecture enables our R-MSFM to maintain semantically richer while spatially more precise representations and avoid the error propagation caused by the traditional U-Net-like coarse-to-fine architecture widely used in this domain, resulting in strong generalization and efficient parameter count. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed R-MSFM both at model size and inference speed, and show the state-of-the-art results on the KITTI benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/jsczzzk/R-MSFM
Faster Multi-Object Segmentation Using Parallel Quadratic Pseudo-Boolean Optimization
Authors: Niels Jeppesen, Patrick M. Jensen, Anders N. Christensen, Anders B. Dahl, Vedrana A. Dahl
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

    We introduce a parallel version of the Quadratic Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (QPBO) algorithm for solving binary optimization tasks, such as image segmentation. The original QPBO implementation by Kolmogorov and Rother relies on the Boykov-Kolmogorov (BK) maxflow/mincut algorithm and performs well for many image analysis tasks. However, the serial nature of their QPBO algorithm results in poor utilization of modern hardware. By redesigning the QPBO algorithm to work with parallel maxflow/mincut algorithms, we significantly reduce solve time of large optimization tasks. We compare our parallel QPBO implementation to other state-of-the-art solvers and benchmark them on two large segmentation tasks and a substantial set of small segmentation tasks. The results show that our parallel QPBO algorithm is over 20 times faster than the serial QPBO algorithm on the large tasks and over three times faster for the majority of the small tasks. Although we focus on image segmentation, our algorithm is generic and can be used for any QPBO problem. Our implementation and experimental results are available at DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5201620
Attentional Pyramid Pooling of Salient Visual Residuals for Place Recognition
Authors: Guohao Peng, Jun Zhang, Heshan Li, Danwei Wang
Date: 2021-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Visual Place Recognition

    The core of visual place recognition (VPR) lies in how to identify task-relevant visual cues and embed them into discriminative representations. Focusing on these two points, we propose a novel encoding strategy named Attentional Pyramid Pooling of Salient Visual Residuals (APPSVR). It incorporates three types of attention modules to model the saliency of local features in individual, spatial and cluster dimensions respectively. (1) To inhibit task-irrelevant local features, a semantic-reinforced local weighting scheme is employed for local feature refinement; (2) To leverage the spatial context, an attentional pyramid structure is constructed to adaptively encode regional features according to their relative spatial saliency; (3) To distinguish the different importance of visual clusters to the task, a parametric normalization is proposed to adjust their contribution to image descriptor generation. Experiments demonstrate APPSVR outperforms the existing techniques and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on VPR benchmark datasets. The visualization shows the saliency map learned in a weakly supervised manner is largely consistent with human cognition.
Sparse Gaussian processes using pseudo-inputs
Authors: Edward Snelson, Zoubin Ghahramani
Date: 2005-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2005 6
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, regression

We present a new Gaussian process (GP) regression model whose covariance is parameterized by the the locations of M pseudo-input points, which we learn by a gradient based optimization. We take M << N, where N is the number of real data points, and hence obtain a sparse regression method which has O(M^2N) training cost and O(M^2) prediction cost per test case. We also find hyperparameters of the covariance function in the same joint optimization. The method can be viewed as a Bayesian regression model with particular input dependent noise. The method turns out to be closely related to several other sparse GP approaches, and we discuss the relation in detail. We finally demonstrate its performance on some large data sets, and make a direct comparison to other sparse GP methods. We show that our method can match full GP performance with small M, i.e. very sparse solutions, and it significantly outperforms other approaches in this regime.
Privacy enabled Financial Text Classification using Differential Privacy and Federated Learning
Authors: Priyam Basu, Tiasa Singha Roy, Rakshit Naidu, Zumrut Muftuoglu
Date: 2021-10-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (ECONLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Federated Learning, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

Privacy is important considering the financial Domain as such data is highly confidential and sensitive. Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can be applied for text classification and entity detection purposes in financial domains such as customer feedback sentiment analysis, invoice entity detection, categorisation of financial documents by type etc. Due to the sensitive nature of such data, privacy measures need to be taken for handling and training large models with such data. In this work, we propose a contextualized transformer (BERT and RoBERTa) based text classification model integrated with privacy features such as Differential Privacy (DP) and Federated Learning (FL). We present how to privately train NLP models and desirable privacy-utility tradeoffs and evaluate them on the Financial Phrase Bank dataset.
Rerunning OCR: A Machine Learning Approach to Quality Assessment and Enhancement Prediction
Authors: Pit Schneider, Yves Maurer
Date: 2021-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Iterating with new and improved OCR solutions enforces decision making when it comes to targeting the right candidates for reprocessing. This especially applies when the underlying data collection is of considerable size and rather diverse in terms of fonts, languages, periods of publication and consequently OCR quality. This article captures the efforts of the National Library of Luxembourg to support those targeting decisions. They are crucial in order to guarantee low computational overhead and reduced quality degradation risks, combined with a more quantifiable OCR improvement. In particular, this work explains the methodology of the library with respect to text block level quality assessment. Through extension of this technique, a regression model, that is able to take into account the enhancement potential of a new OCR engine, is also presented. They both mark promising approaches, especially for cultural institutions dealing with historical data of lower quality.
MoEfication: Transformer Feed-forward Layers are Mixtures of Experts
Authors: Zhengyan Zhang, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie zhou
Date: 2021-10-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (ACL) 2022 5
Tasks: Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension, Text Classification

Recent work has shown that feed-forward networks (FFNs) in pre-trained Transformers are a key component, storing various linguistic and factual knowledge. However, the computational patterns of FFNs are still unclear. In this work, we study the computational patterns of FFNs and observe that most inputs only activate a tiny ratio of neurons of FFNs. This phenomenon is similar to the sparsity of the human brain, which drives research on functional partitions of the human brain. To verify whether functional partitions also emerge in FFNs, we propose to convert a model into its MoE version with the same parameters, namely MoEfication. Specifically, MoEfication consists of two phases: (1) splitting the parameters of FFNs into multiple functional partitions as experts, and (2) building expert routers to decide which experts will be used for each input. Experimental results show that MoEfication can conditionally use 10% to 30% of FFN parameters while maintaining over 95% original performance for different models on various downstream tasks. Besides, MoEfication brings two advantages: (1) it significantly reduces the FLOPS of inference, i.e., 2x speedup with 25% of FFN parameters, and (2) it provides a fine-grained perspective to study the inner mechanism of FFNs. The source code of this paper can be obtained from https://github.com/thunlp/MoEfication.
ContractNLI: A Dataset for Document-level Natural Language Inference for Contracts
Authors: Yuta Koreeda, Christopher D. Manning
Date: 2021-10-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings (EMNLP) 2021 11
Tasks: Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Natural Language Inference

Reviewing contracts is a time-consuming procedure that incurs large expenses to companies and social inequality to those who cannot afford it. In this work, we propose "document-level natural language inference (NLI) for contracts", a novel, real-world application of NLI that addresses such problems. In this task, a system is given a set of hypotheses (such as "Some obligations of Agreement may survive termination.") and a contract, and it is asked to classify whether each hypothesis is "entailed by", "contradicting to" or "not mentioned by" (neutral to) the contract as well as identifying "evidence" for the decision as spans in the contract. We annotated and release the largest corpus to date consisting of 607 annotated contracts. We then show that existing models fail badly on our task and introduce a strong baseline, which (1) models evidence identification as multi-label classification over spans instead of trying to predict start and end tokens, and (2) employs more sophisticated context segmentation for dealing with long documents. We also show that linguistic characteristics of contracts, such as negations by exceptions, are contributing to the difficulty of this task and that there is much room for improvement.
A Survey On Neural Word Embeddings
Authors: Erhan Sezerer, Selma Tekir
Date: 2021-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Retrieval, Survey, Word Embeddings

Understanding human language has been a sub-challenge on the way of intelligent machines. The study of meaning in natural language processing (NLP) relies on the distributional hypothesis where language elements get meaning from the words that co-occur within contexts. The revolutionary idea of distributed representation for a concept is close to the working of a human mind in that the meaning of a word is spread across several neurons, and a loss of activation will only slightly affect the memory retrieval process. Neural word embeddings transformed the whole field of NLP by introducing substantial improvements in all NLP tasks. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive literature review on neural word embeddings. We give theoretical foundations and describe existing work by an interplay between word embeddings and language modelling. We provide broad coverage on neural word embeddings, including early word embeddings, embeddings targeting specific semantic relations, sense embeddings, morpheme embeddings, and finally, contextual representations. Finally, we describe benchmark datasets in word embeddings' performance evaluation and downstream tasks along with the performance results of/due to word embeddings.