pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Self-Supervised Vessel Enhancement Using Flow-Based Consistencies
Authors: Rohit Jena, Sumedha Singla, Kayhan Batmanghelich
Date: 2021-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

Vessel segmentation is an essential task in many clinical applications. Although supervised methods have achieved state-of-art performance, acquiring expert annotation is laborious and mostly limited for two-dimensional datasets with a small sample size. On the contrary, unsupervised methods rely on handcrafted features to detect tube-like structures such as vessels. However, those methods require complex pipelines involving several hyper-parameters and design choices rendering the procedure sensitive, dataset-specific, and not generalizable. We propose a self-supervised method with a limited number of hyper-parameters that is generalizable across modalities. Our method uses tube-like structure properties, such as connectivity, profile consistency, and bifurcation, to introduce inductive bias into a learning algorithm. To model those properties, we generate a vector field that we refer to as a flow. Our experiments on various public datasets in 2D and 3D show that our method performs better than unsupervised methods while learning useful transferable features from unlabeled data. Unlike generic self-supervised methods, the learned features learn vessel-relevant features that are transferable for supervised approaches, which is essential when the number of annotated data is limited.
Optimisation of Spectral Wavelets for Persistence-based Graph Classification
Authors: Ka Man Yim, Jacob Leygonie
Date: 2021-01-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Graph Classification

A graph's spectral wavelet signature determines a filtration, and consequently an associated set of extended persistence diagrams. We propose a framework that optimises the choice of wavelet for a dataset of graphs, such that their associated persistence diagrams capture features of the graphs that are best suited to a given data science problem. Since the spectral wavelet signature of a graph is derived from its Laplacian, our framework encodes geometric properties of graphs in their associated persistence diagrams and can be applied to graphs without a priori node attributes. We apply our framework to graph classification problems and obtain performances competitive with other persistence-based architectures. To provide the underlying theoretical foundations, we extend the differentiability result for ordinary persistent homology to extended persistent homology.
Deep Learning Assisted Calibrated Beam Training for Millimeter-Wave Communication Systems
Authors: Ke Ma, Dongxuan He, Hancun Sun, Zhaocheng Wang, Sheng Chen
Date: 2021-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Huge overhead of beam training imposes a significant challenge in millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless communications. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a wide beam based training approach to calibrate the narrow beam direction according to the channel power leakage. To handle the complex nonlinear properties of the channel power leakage, deep learning is utilized to predict the optimal narrow beam directly. Specifically, three deep learning assisted calibrated beam training schemes are proposed. The first scheme adopts convolution neural network to implement the prediction based on the instantaneous received signals of wide beam training. We also perform the additional narrow beam training based on the predicted probabilities for further beam direction calibrations. However, the first scheme only depends on one wide beam training, which lacks the robustness to noise. To tackle this problem, the second scheme adopts long-short term memory (LSTM) network for tracking the movement of users and calibrating the beam direction according to the received signals of prior beam training, in order to enhance the robustness to noise. To further reduce the overhead of wide beam training, our third scheme, an adaptive beam training strategy, selects partial wide beams to be trained based on the prior received signals. Two criteria, namely, optimal neighboring criterion and maximum probability criterion, are designed for the selection. Furthermore, to handle mobile scenarios, auxiliary LSTM is introduced to calibrate the directions of the selected wide beams more precisely. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed schemes achieve significantly higher beamforming gain with smaller beam training overhead compared with the conventional and existing deep-learning based counterparts.
UCNN: A Convolutional Strategy on Unstructured Mesh
Authors: Mengfei Xu, Shufang Song, Xuxiang Sun, Weiwei Zhang
Date: 2021-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

In machine learning for fluid mechanics, fully-connected neural network (FNN) only uses the local features for modelling, while the convolutional neural network (CNN) cannot be applied to data on structured/unstructured mesh. In order to overcome the limitations of FNN and CNN, the unstructured convolutional neural network (UCNN) is proposed, which aggregates and effectively exploits the features of neighbour nodes through the weight function. Adjoint vector modelling is taken as the task to study the performance of UCNN. The mapping function from flow-field features to adjoint vector is constructed through efficient parallel implementation on GPU. The modelling capability of UCNN is compared with that of FNN on validation set and in aerodynamic shape optimization at test case. The influence of mesh changing on the modelling capability of UCNN is further studied. The results indicate that UCNN is more accurate in modelling process.
AttentionLite: Towards Efficient Self-Attention Models for Vision
Authors: Souvik Kundu, Sairam Sundaresan
Date: 2020-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

We propose a novel framework for producing a class of parameter and compute efficient models called AttentionLitesuitable for resource-constrained applications. Prior work has primarily focused on optimizing models either via knowledge distillation or pruning. In addition to fusing these two mechanisms, our joint optimization framework also leverages recent advances in self-attention as a substitute for convolutions. We can simultaneously distill knowledge from a compute-heavy teacher while also pruning the student model in a single pass of training thereby reducing training and fine-tuning times considerably. We evaluate the merits of our proposed approach on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets. Not only do our AttentionLite models significantly outperform their unoptimized counterparts in accuracy, we find that in some cases, that they perform almost as well as their compute-heavy teachers while consuming only a fraction of the parameters and FLOPs. Concretely, AttentionLite models can achieve upto30x parameter efficiency and 2x computation efficiency with no significant accuracy drop compared to their teacher.
Similarity-based prediction for channel mapping and user positioning
Authors: Luc Le Magoarou
Date: 2020-12-02 00:00:00

In a wireless network, gathering information at the base station about mobile users based only on uplink channel measurements is an interesting challenge. Indeed, accessing the users locations and predicting their downlink channels would be particularly useful in order to optimize the network efficiency. In this paper, a supervised machine learning approach addressing these tasks in an unified way is proposed. It relies on a labeled database that can be acquired in a simple way by the base station while operating. The proposed regression method can be seen as a computationally efficient two layers neural network initialized with a non-parametric estimator. It is illustrated on realistic channel data, both for the positioning and channel mapping tasks, achieving better results than previously proposed approaches, at a lower cost.
On the human-recognizability phenomenon of adversarially trained deep image classifiers
Authors: Jonathan Helland, Nathan VanHoudnos
Date: 2020-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

In this work, we investigate the phenomenon that robust image classifiers have human-recognizable features -- often referred to as interpretability -- as revealed through the input gradients of their score functions and their subsequent adversarial perturbations. In particular, we demonstrate that state-of-the-art methods for adversarial training incorporate two terms -- one that orients the decision boundary via minimizing the expected loss, and another that induces smoothness of the classifier's decision surface by penalizing the local Lipschitz constant. Through this demonstration, we provide a unified discussion of gradient and Jacobian-based regularizers that have been used to encourage adversarial robustness in prior works. Following this discussion, we give qualitative evidence that the coupling of smoothness and orientation of the decision boundary is sufficient to induce the aforementioned human-recognizability phenomenon.
Big Self-Supervised Models Advance Medical Image Classification
Authors: Shekoofeh Azizi, Basil Mustafa, Fiona Ryan, Zachary Beaver, Jan Freyberg, Jonathan Deaton, Aaron Loh, Alan Karthikesalingam, Simon Kornblith, Ting Chen, Vivek Natarajan, Mohammad Norouzi
Date: 2021-01-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Classification, Self-Supervised Learning, X-ray Classification

Self-supervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning has seen success in image recognition, especially when labeled examples are scarce, but has received limited attention in medical image analysis. This paper studies the effectiveness of self-supervised learning as a pretraining strategy for medical image classification. We conduct experiments on two distinct tasks: dermatology skin condition classification from digital camera images and multi-label chest X-ray classification, and demonstrate that self-supervised learning on ImageNet, followed by additional self-supervised learning on unlabeled domain-specific medical images significantly improves the accuracy of medical image classifiers. We introduce a novel Multi-Instance Contrastive Learning (MICLe) method that uses multiple images of the underlying pathology per patient case, when available, to construct more informative positive pairs for self-supervised learning. Combining our contributions, we achieve an improvement of 6.7% in top-1 accuracy and an improvement of 1.1% in mean AUC on dermatology and chest X-ray classification respectively, outperforming strong supervised baselines pretrained on ImageNet. In addition, we show that big self-supervised models are robust to distribution shift and can learn efficiently with a small number of labeled medical images.
Robust CUR Decomposition: Theory and Imaging Applications
Authors: HanQin Cai, Keaton Hamm, Longxiu Huang, Deanna Needell
Date: 2021-01-05 00:00:00

This paper considers the use of Robust PCA in a CUR decomposition framework and applications thereof. Our main algorithms produce a robust version of column-row factorizations of matrices $\mathbf{D}=\mathbf{L}+\mathbf{S}$ where $\mathbf{L}$ is low-rank and $\mathbf{S}$ contains sparse outliers. These methods yield interpretable factorizations at low computational cost, and provide new CUR decompositions that are robust to sparse outliers, in contrast to previous methods. We consider two key imaging applications of Robust PCA: video foreground-background separation and face modeling. This paper examines the qualitative behavior of our Robust CUR decompositions on the benchmark videos and face datasets, and find that our method works as well as standard Robust PCA while being significantly faster. Additionally, we consider hybrid randomized and deterministic sampling methods which produce a compact CUR decomposition of a given matrix, and apply this to video sequences to produce canonical frames thereof.
On Misspecification in Prediction Problems and Robustness via Improper Learning
Authors: Annie Marsden, John Duchi, Gregory Valiant
Date: 2021-01-13 00:00:00

We study probabilistic prediction games when the underlying model is misspecified, investigating the consequences of predicting using an incorrect parametric model. We show that for a broad class of loss functions and parametric families of distributions, the regret of playing a "proper" predictor -- one from the putative model class -- relative to the best predictor in the same model class has lower bound scaling at least as $\sqrt{\gamma n}$, where $\gamma$ is a measure of the model misspecification to the true distribution in terms of total variation distance. In contrast, using an aggregation-based (improper) learner, one can obtain regret $d \log n$ for any underlying generating distribution, where $d$ is the dimension of the parameter; we exhibit instances in which this is unimprovable even over the family of all learners that may play distributions in the convex hull of the parametric family. These results suggest that simple strategies for aggregating multiple learners together should be more robust, and several experiments conform to this hypothesis.
Solving Min-Max Optimization with Hidden Structure via Gradient Descent Ascent
Authors: Lampros Flokas, Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis, Georgios Piliouras
Date: 2021-01-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12

Many recent AI architectures are inspired by zero-sum games, however, the behavior of their dynamics is still not well understood. Inspired by this, we study standard gradient descent ascent (GDA) dynamics in a specific class of non-convex non-concave zero-sum games, that we call hidden zero-sum games. In this class, players control the inputs of smooth but possibly non-linear functions whose outputs are being applied as inputs to a convex-concave game. Unlike general zero-sum games, these games have a well-defined notion of solution; outcomes that implement the von-Neumann equilibrium of the "hidden" convex-concave game. We prove that if the hidden game is strictly convex-concave then vanilla GDA converges not merely to local Nash, but typically to the von-Neumann solution. If the game lacks strict convexity properties, GDA may fail to converge to any equilibrium, however, by applying standard regularization techniques we can prove convergence to a von-Neumann solution of a slightly perturbed zero-sum game. Our convergence guarantees are non-local, which as far as we know is a first-of-its-kind type of result in non-convex non-concave games. Finally, we discuss connections of our framework with generative adversarial networks.
Random Fourier Feature Based Deep Learning for Wireless Communications
Authors: Rangeet Mitra, Georges Kaddoum
Date: 2021-01-13 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning

Deep-learning (DL) has emerged as a powerful machine-learning technique for several classic problems encountered in generic wireless communications. Specifically, random Fourier Features (RFF) based deep-learning has emerged as an attractive solution for several machine-learning problems; yet there is a lacuna of rigorous results to justify the viability of RFF based DL-algorithms in general. To address this gap, we attempt to analytically quantify the viability of RFF based DL. Precisely, in this paper, analytical proofs are presented demonstrating that RFF based DL architectures have lower approximation-error and probability of misclassification as compared to classical DL architectures. In addition, a new distribution-dependent RFF is proposed to facilitate DL architectures with low training-complexity. Through computer simulations, the practical application of the presented analytical results and the proposed distribution-dependent RFF, are depicted for various machine-learning problems encountered in next-generation communication systems such as: a) line of sight (LOS)/non-line of sight (NLOS) classification, and b) message-passing based detection of low-density parity check codes (LDPC) codes over nonlinear visible light communication (VLC) channels. Especially in the low training-data regime, the presented simulations show that significant performance gains are achieved when utilizing RFF maps of observations. Lastly, in all the presented simulations, it is observed that the proposed distribution-dependent RFFs significantly outperform RFFs, which make them useful for potential machine-learning/DL based applications in the context of next-generation communication systems.
Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Han Zhang, Jing Yu Koh, Jason Baldridge, Honglak Lee, Yinfei Yang
Date: 2021-01-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

The output of text-to-image synthesis systems should be coherent, clear, photo-realistic scenes with high semantic fidelity to their conditioned text descriptions. Our Cross-Modal Contrastive Generative Adversarial Network (XMC-GAN) addresses this challenge by maximizing the mutual information between image and text. It does this via multiple contrastive losses which capture inter-modality and intra-modality correspondences. XMC-GAN uses an attentional self-modulation generator, which enforces strong text-image correspondence, and a contrastive discriminator, which acts as a critic as well as a feature encoder for contrastive learning. The quality of XMC-GAN's output is a major step up from previous models, as we show on three challenging datasets. On MS-COCO, not only does XMC-GAN improve state-of-the-art FID from 24.70 to 9.33, but--more importantly--people prefer XMC-GAN by 77.3 for image quality and 74.1 for image-text alignment, compared to three other recent models. XMC-GAN also generalizes to the challenging Localized Narratives dataset (which has longer, more detailed descriptions), improving state-of-the-art FID from 48.70 to 14.12. Lastly, we train and evaluate XMC-GAN on the challenging Open Images data, establishing a strong benchmark FID score of 26.91.
Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network for Mobile and Web Applications
Authors: Xuebin Qin, Deng-Ping Fan, Chenyang Huang, Cyril Diagne, Zichen Zhang, Adrià Cabeza Sant'Anna, Albert Suàrez, Martin Jagersand, Ling Shao
Date: 2021-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Camouflaged Object Segmentation, Decoder, GPU, Image Segmentation, Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Although deep models have greatly improved the accuracy and robustness of image segmentation, obtaining segmentation results with highly accurate boundaries and fine structures is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful Boundary-Aware Segmentation Network (BASNet), which comprises a predict-refine architecture and a hybrid loss, for highly accurate image segmentation. The predict-refine architecture consists of a densely supervised encoder-decoder network and a residual refinement module, which are respectively used to predict and refine a segmentation probability map. The hybrid loss is a combination of the binary cross entropy, structural similarity and intersection-over-union losses, which guide the network to learn three-level (ie, pixel-, patch- and map- level) hierarchy representations. We evaluate our BASNet on two reverse tasks including salient object segmentation, camouflaged object segmentation, showing that it achieves very competitive performance with sharp segmentation boundaries. Importantly, BASNet runs at over 70 fps on a single GPU which benefits many potential real applications. Based on BASNet, we further developed two (close to) commercial applications: AR COPY & PASTE, in which BASNet is integrated with augmented reality for "COPYING" and "PASTING" real-world objects, and OBJECT CUT, which is a web-based tool for automatic object background removal. Both applications have already drawn huge amount of attention and have important real-world impacts. The code and two applications will be publicly available at: https://github.com/NathanUA/BASNet.
SEED: Self-supervised Distillation For Visual Representation
Authors: Zhiyuan Fang, JianFeng Wang, Lijuan Wang, Lei Zhang, Yezhou Yang, Zicheng Liu
Date: 2021-01-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Self-Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Pre-training

This paper is concerned with self-supervised learning for small models. The problem is motivated by our empirical studies that while the widely used contrastive self-supervised learning method has shown great progress on large model training, it does not work well for small models. To address this problem, we propose a new learning paradigm, named SElf-SupErvised Distillation (SEED), where we leverage a larger network (as Teacher) to transfer its representational knowledge into a smaller architecture (as Student) in a self-supervised fashion. Instead of directly learning from unlabeled data, we train a student encoder to mimic the similarity score distribution inferred by a teacher over a set of instances. We show that SEED dramatically boosts the performance of small networks on downstream tasks. Compared with self-supervised baselines, SEED improves the top-1 accuracy from 42.2% to 67.6% on EfficientNet-B0 and from 36.3% to 68.2% on MobileNet-v3-Large on the ImageNet-1k dataset.
CityFlow-NL: Tracking and Retrieval of Vehicles at City Scale by Natural Language Descriptions
Authors: Qi Feng, Vitaly Ablavsky, Stan Sclaroff
Date: 2021-01-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking, Retrieval, Temporal Localization

Natural Language (NL) descriptions can be one of the most convenient or the only way to interact with systems built to understand and detect city scale traffic patterns and vehicle-related events. In this paper, we extend the widely adopted CityFlow Benchmark with NL descriptions for vehicle targets and introduce the CityFlow-NL Benchmark. The CityFlow-NL contains more than 5,000 unique and precise NL descriptions of vehicle targets, making it the first multi-target multi-camera tracking with NL descriptions dataset to our knowledge. Moreover, the dataset facilitates research at the intersection of multi-object tracking, retrieval by NL descriptions, and temporal localization of events. In this paper, we focus on two foundational tasks: the Vehicle Retrieval by NL task and the Vehicle Tracking by NL task, which take advantage of the proposed CityFlow-NL benchmark and provide a strong basis for future research on the multi-target multi-camera tracking by NL description task.