pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Heroin addiction hijacks the Nucleus Accumbens: craving and reactivity to naturalistic stimuli
Authors: Greg Kronberg, Ahmet O. Ceceli, Yuefeng Huang, Pierre-Olivier Gaudreault, Sarah King, Natalie McClain, Pazia Miller, Lily Gabay, Devarshi Vasa, Pias Malaker, Defne Ekin, Nelly Alia-Klein, Rita Z. Goldstein
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00

Drug-related cues hijack attention away from alternative reinforcers in drug addiction, inducing craving and motivating drug-seeking. However, the neural correlates underlying this biased processing, its expression in the real-world, and its relationship to cue-induced craving are not fully established, especially in opioid addiction. Here we tracked inter-brain synchronization in the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc), a hub of motivational salience, while heroin-addicted individuals and healthy control subjects watched the same engaging heroin-related movie. Strikingly, the left NAc was synchronized during drug scenes in the addicted individuals and non-drug scenes in controls, predicting scene- and movie-induced heroin craving in the former. Our results open a window into the neurobiology underlying shared drug-biased processing of naturalistic stimuli and cue-induced craving in opiate addiction as they unfold in the real world.
Detecting Object States vs Detecting Objects: A New Dataset and a Quantitative Experimental Study
Authors: Filippos Gouidis, Theodore Patkos, Antonis Argyros, Dimitris Plexousakis
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Affordance Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

The detection of object states in images (State Detection - SD) is a problem of both theoretical and practical importance and it is tightly interwoven with other important computer vision problems, such as action recognition and affordance detection. It is also highly relevant to any entity that needs to reason and act in dynamic domains, such as robotic systems and intelligent agents. Despite its importance, up to now, the research on this problem has been limited. In this paper, we attempt a systematic study of the SD problem. First, we introduce the Object State Detection Dataset (OSDD), a new publicly available dataset consisting of more than 19,000 annotations for 18 object categories and 9 state classes. Second, using a standard deep learning framework used for Object Detection (OD), we conduct a number of appropriately designed experiments, towards an in-depth study of the behavior of the SD problem. This study enables the setup of a baseline on the performance of SD, as well as its relative performance in comparison to OD, in a variety of scenarios. Overall, the experimental outcomes confirm that SD is harder than OD and that tailored SD methods need to be developed for addressing effectively this significant problem.
Guaranteed Trajectory Tracking under Learned Dynamics with Contraction Metrics and Disturbance Estimation
Authors: Pan Zhao, Ziyao Guo, Yikun Cheng, Aditya Gahlawat, Hyungsoo Kang, Naira Hovakimyan
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00

This paper presents an approach to trajectory-centric learning control based on contraction metrics and disturbance estimation for nonlinear systems subject to matched uncertainties. The approach uses deep neural networks to learn uncertain dynamics while still providing guarantees of transient tracking performance throughout the learning phase. Within the proposed approach, a disturbance estimation law is adopted to estimate the pointwise value of the uncertainty, with pre-computable estimation error bounds (EEBs). The learned dynamics, the estimated disturbances, and the EEBs are then incorporated in a robust Riemann energy condition to compute the control law that guarantees exponential convergence of actual trajectories to desired ones throughout the learning phase, even when the learned model is poor. On the other hand, with improved accuracy, the learned model can help improve the robustness of the tracking controller, e.g., against input delays, and can be incorporated to plan better trajectories with improved performance, e.g., lower energy consumption and shorter travel time.The proposed framework is validated on a planar quadrotor example.
Quantitative analysis of visual representation of sign elements in COVID-19 context
Authors: María Jesús Cano-Martínez, Miguel Carrasco, Joaquín Sandoval, César González-Martín
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00

Representation is the way in which human beings re-present the reality of what is happening, both externally and internally. Thus, visual representation as a means of communication uses elements to build a narrative, just as spoken and written language do. We propose using computer analysis to perform a quantitative analysis of the elements used in the visual creations that have been produced in reference to the epidemic, using the images compiled in The Covid Art Museum's Instagram account to analyze the different elements used to represent subjective experiences with regard to a global event. This process has been carried out with techniques based on machine learning to detect objects in the images so that the algorithm can be capable of learning and detecting the objects contained in each study image. This research reveals that the elements that are repeated in images to create narratives and the relations of association that are established in the sample, concluding that, despite the subjectivity that all creation entails, there are certain parameters of shared and reduced decisions when it comes to selecting objects to be included in visual representations
Lesan -- Machine Translation for Low Resource Languages
Authors: Asmelash Teka Hadgu, Abel Aregawi, Adam Beaudoin
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Machine Translation, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Translation

Millions of people around the world can not access content on the Web because most of the content is not readily available in their language. Machine translation (MT) systems have the potential to change this for many languages. Current MT systems provide very accurate results for high resource language pairs, e.g., German and English. However, for many low resource languages, MT is still under active research. The key challenge is lack of datasets to build these systems. We present Lesan, an MT system for low resource languages. Our pipeline solves the key bottleneck to low resource MT by leveraging online and offline sources, a custom OCR system for Ethiopic and an automatic alignment module. The final step in the pipeline is a sequence to sequence model that takes parallel corpus as input and gives us a translation model. Lesan's translation model is based on the Transformer architecture. After constructing a base model, back translation, is used to leverage monolingual corpora. Currently Lesan supports translation to and from Tigrinya, Amharic and English. We perform extensive human evaluation and show that Lesan outperforms state-of-the-art systems such as Google Translate and Microsoft Translator across all six pairs. Lesan is freely available and has served more than 10 million translations so far. At the moment, there are only 217 Tigrinya and 15,009 Amharic Wikipedia articles. We believe that Lesan will contribute towards democratizing access to the Web through MT for millions of people.
Multi-View Depth Estimation by Fusing Single-View Depth Probability with Multi-View Geometry
Authors: Gwangbin Bae, Ignas Budvytis, Roberto Cipolla
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Depth Estimation

Multi-view depth estimation methods typically require the computation of a multi-view cost-volume, which leads to huge memory consumption and slow inference. Furthermore, multi-view matching can fail for texture-less surfaces, reflective surfaces and moving objects. For such failure modes, single-view depth estimation methods are often more reliable. To this end, we propose MaGNet, a novel framework for fusing single-view depth probability with multi-view geometry, to improve the accuracy, robustness and efficiency of multi-view depth estimation. For each frame, MaGNet estimates a single-view depth probability distribution, parameterized as a pixel-wise Gaussian. The distribution estimated for the reference frame is then used to sample per-pixel depth candidates. Such probabilistic sampling enables the network to achieve higher accuracy while evaluating fewer depth candidates. We also propose depth consistency weighting for the multi-view matching score, to ensure that the multi-view depth is consistent with the single-view predictions. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on ScanNet, 7-Scenes and KITTI. Qualitative evaluation demonstrates that our method is more robust against challenging artifacts such as texture-less/reflective surfaces and moving objects. Our code and model weights are available at https://github.com/baegwangbin/MaGNet.
Boosting Neural Image Compression for Machines Using Latent Space Masking
Authors: Kristian Fischer, Fabian Brand, André Kaup
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Image Compression

Today, many image coding scenarios do not have a human as final intended user, but rather a machine fulfilling computer vision tasks on the decoded image. Thereby, the primary goal is not to keep visual quality but maintain the task accuracy of the machine for a given bitrate. Due to the tremendous progress of deep neural networks setting benchmarking results, mostly neural networks are employed to solve the analysis tasks at the decoder side. Moreover, neural networks have also found their way into the field of image compression recently. These two developments allow for an end-to-end training of the neural compression network for an analysis network as information sink. Therefore, we first roll out such a training with a task-specific loss to enhance the coding performance of neural compression networks. Compared to the standard VVC, 41.4% of bitrate are saved by this method for Mask R-CNN as analysis network on the uncompressed Cityscapes dataset. As a main contribution, we propose LSMnet, a network that runs in parallel to the encoder network and masks out elements of the latent space that are presumably not required for the analysis network. By this approach, additional 27.3% of bitrate are saved compared to the basic neural compression network optimized with the task loss. In addition, we are the first to utilize a feature-based distortion in the training loss within the context of machine-to-machine communication, which allows for a training without annotated data. We provide extensive analyses on the Cityscapes dataset including cross-evaluation with different analysis networks and present exemplary visual results. Inference code and pre-trained models are published at https://github.com/FAU-LMS/NCN_for_M2M.
Ensuring DNN Solution Feasibility for Optimization Problems with Convex Constraints and Its Application to DC Optimal Power Flow Problems
Authors: Tianyu Zhao, Xiang Pan, Minghua Chen, Steven H. Low
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00

Ensuring solution feasibility is a key challenge in developing Deep Neural Network (DNN) schemes for solving constrained optimization problems, due to inherent DNN prediction errors. In this paper, we propose a ``preventive learning'' framework to guarantee DNN solution feasibility for problems with convex constraints and general objective functions without post-processing, upon satisfying a mild condition on constraint calibration. Without loss of generality, we focus on problems with only inequality constraints. We systematically calibrate inequality constraints used in DNN training, thereby anticipating prediction errors and ensuring the resulting solutions remain feasible. We characterize the calibration magnitudes and the DNN size sufficient for ensuring universal feasibility. We propose a new Adversarial-Sample Aware training algorithm to improve DNN's optimality performance without sacrificing feasibility guarantee. Overall, the framework provides two DNNs. The first one from characterizing the sufficient DNN size can guarantee universal feasibility while the other from the proposed training algorithm further improves optimality and maintains DNN's universal feasibility simultaneously. We apply the framework to develop DeepOPF+ for solving essential DC optimal power flow problems in grid operation. Simulation results over IEEE test cases show that it outperforms existing strong DNN baselines in ensuring 100% feasibility and attaining consistent optimality loss ($<$0.19%) and speedup (up to $\times$228) in both light-load and heavy-load regimes, as compared to a state-of-the-art solver. We also apply our framework to a non-convex problem and show its performance advantage over existing schemes.
Image-Adaptive YOLO for Object Detection in Adverse Weather Conditions
Authors: Wenyu Liu, Gaofeng Ren, Runsheng Yu, Shi Guo, Jianke Zhu, Lei Zhang
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, object-detection, Object Detection

Though deep learning-based object detection methods have achieved promising results on the conventional datasets, it is still challenging to locate objects from the low-quality images captured in adverse weather conditions. The existing methods either have difficulties in balancing the tasks of image enhancement and object detection, or often ignore the latent information beneficial for detection. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel Image-Adaptive YOLO (IA-YOLO) framework, where each image can be adaptively enhanced for better detection performance. Specifically, a differentiable image processing (DIP) module is presented to take into account the adverse weather conditions for YOLO detector, whose parameters are predicted by a small convolutional neural net-work (CNN-PP). We learn CNN-PP and YOLOv3 jointly in an end-to-end fashion, which ensures that CNN-PP can learn an appropriate DIP to enhance the image for detection in a weakly supervised manner. Our proposed IA-YOLO approach can adaptively process images in both normal and adverse weather conditions. The experimental results are very encouraging, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed IA-YOLO method in both foggy and low-light scenarios.
Database Search Results Disambiguation for Task-Oriented Dialog Systems
Authors: Kun Qian, Ahmad Beirami, Satwik Kottur, Shahin Shayandeh, Paul Crook, Alborz Geramifard, Zhou Yu, Chinnadhurai Sankar
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

As task-oriented dialog systems are becoming increasingly popular in our lives, more realistic tasks have been proposed and explored. However, new practical challenges arise. For instance, current dialog systems cannot effectively handle multiple search results when querying a database, due to the lack of such scenarios in existing public datasets. In this paper, we propose Database Search Result (DSR) Disambiguation, a novel task that focuses on disambiguating database search results, which enhances user experience by allowing them to choose from multiple options instead of just one. To study this task, we augment the popular task-oriented dialog datasets (MultiWOZ and SGD) with turns that resolve ambiguities by (a) synthetically generating turns through a pre-defined grammar, and (b) collecting human paraphrases for a subset. We find that training on our augmented dialog data improves the model's ability to deal with ambiguous scenarios, without sacrificing performance on unmodified turns. Furthermore, pre-fine tuning and multi-task learning help our model to improve performance on DSR-disambiguation even in the absence of in-domain data, suggesting that it can be learned as a universal dialog skill. Our data and code will be made publicly available.
Prompt Waywardness: The Curious Case of Discretized Interpretation of Continuous Prompts
Authors: Daniel Khashabi, Shane Lyu, Sewon Min, Lianhui Qin, Kyle Richardson, Sean Welleck, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Sameer Singh, Yejin Choi
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2022 7

Fine-tuning continuous prompts for target tasks has recently emerged as a compact alternative to full model fine-tuning. Motivated by these promising results, we investigate the feasibility of extracting a discrete (textual) interpretation of continuous prompts that is faithful to the problem they solve. In practice, we observe a "wayward" behavior between the task solved by continuous prompts and their nearest neighbor discrete projections: We can find continuous prompts that solve a task while being projected to an arbitrary text (e.g., definition of a different or even a contradictory task), while being within a very small (2%) margin of the best continuous prompt of the same size for the task. We provide intuitions behind this odd and surprising behavior, as well as extensive empirical analyses quantifying the effect of various parameters. For instance, for larger model sizes we observe higher waywardness, i.e, we can find prompts that more closely map to any arbitrary text with a smaller drop in accuracy. These findings have important implications relating to the difficulty of faithfully interpreting continuous prompts and their generalization across models and tasks, providing guidance for future progress in prompting language models.
ForgeryNet -- Face Forgery Analysis Challenge 2021: Methods and Results
Authors: Yinan He, Lu Sheng, Jing Shao, Ziwei Liu, Zhaofan Zou, Zhizhi Guo, Shan Jiang, Curitis Sun, Guosheng Zhang, Keyao Wang, Haixiao Yue, Zhibin Hong, Wanguo Wang, Zhenyu Li, Qi Wang, Zhenli Wang, Ronghao Xu, Mingwen Zhang, Zhiheng Wang, Zhenhang Huang, Tianming Zhang, Ningning Zhao
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

The rapid progress of photorealistic synthesis techniques has reached a critical point where the boundary between real and manipulated images starts to blur. Recently, a mega-scale deep face forgery dataset, ForgeryNet which comprised of 2.9 million images and 221,247 videos has been released. It is by far the largest publicly available in terms of data-scale, manipulations (7 image-level approaches, 8 video-level approaches), perturbations (36 independent and more mixed perturbations), and annotations (6.3 million classification labels, 2.9 million manipulated area annotations, and 221,247 temporal forgery segment labels). This paper reports methods and results in the ForgeryNet - Face Forgery Analysis Challenge 2021, which employs the ForgeryNet benchmark. The model evaluation is conducted offline on the private test set. A total of 186 participants registered for the competition, and 11 teams made valid submissions. We will analyze the top-ranked solutions and present some discussion on future work directions.
Autoencoder-based background reconstruction and foreground segmentation with background noise estimation
Authors: Bruno Sauvalle, Arnaud de La Fortelle
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Foreground Segmentation, Segmentation, Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation, Video Background Subtraction, Video Object Segmentation

Even after decades of research, dynamic scene background reconstruction and foreground object segmentation are still considered as open problems due various challenges such as illumination changes, camera movements, or background noise caused by air turbulence or moving trees. We propose in this paper to model the background of a frame sequence as a low dimensional manifold using an autoencoder and compare the reconstructed background provided by this autoencoder with the original image to compute the foreground/background segmentation masks. The main novelty of the proposed model is that the autoencoder is also trained to predict the background noise, which allows to compute for each frame a pixel-dependent threshold to perform the foreground segmentation. Although the proposed model does not use any temporal or motion information, it exceeds the state of the art for unsupervised background subtraction on the CDnet 2014 and LASIESTA datasets, with a significant improvement on videos where the camera is moving. It is also able to perform background reconstruction on some non-video image datasets.
Self-Ensembling GAN for Cross-Domain Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yonghao Xu, Fengxiang He, Bo Du, DaCheng Tao, Liangpei Zhang
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have greatly contributed to the performance gains in semantic segmentation. Nevertheless, training DNNs generally requires large amounts of pixel-level labeled data, which is expensive and time-consuming to collect in practice. To mitigate the annotation burden, this paper proposes a self-ensembling generative adversarial network (SE-GAN) exploiting cross-domain data for semantic segmentation. In SE-GAN, a teacher network and a student network constitute a self-ensembling model for generating semantic segmentation maps, which together with a discriminator, forms a GAN. Despite its simplicity, we find SE-GAN can significantly boost the performance of adversarial training and enhance the stability of the model, the latter of which is a common barrier shared by most adversarial training-based methods. We theoretically analyze SE-GAN and provide an $\mathcal O(1/\sqrt{N})$ generalization bound ($N$ is the training sample size), which suggests controlling the discriminator's hypothesis complexity to enhance the generalizability. Accordingly, we choose a simple network as the discriminator. Extensive and systematic experiments in two standard settings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches. The source code of our model is available online (https://github.com/YonghaoXu/SE-GAN).
Temporal Action Proposal Generation with Background Constraint
Authors: Haosen Yang, Wenhao Wu, Lining Wang, Sheng Jin, Boyang xia, Hongxun Yao, Hujie Huang
Date: 2021-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Temporal Action Localization, Temporal Action Proposal Generation

Temporal action proposal generation (TAPG) is a challenging task that aims to locate action instances in untrimmed videos with temporal boundaries. To evaluate the confidence of proposals, the existing works typically predict action score of proposals that are supervised by the temporal Intersection-over-Union (tIoU) between proposal and the ground-truth. In this paper, we innovatively propose a general auxiliary Background Constraint idea to further suppress low-quality proposals, by utilizing the background prediction score to restrict the confidence of proposals. In this way, the Background Constraint concept can be easily plug-and-played into existing TAPG methods (e.g., BMN, GTAD). From this perspective, we propose the Background Constraint Network (BCNet) to further take advantage of the rich information of action and background. Specifically, we introduce an Action-Background Interaction module for reliable confidence evaluation, which models the inconsistency between action and background by attention mechanisms at the frame and clip levels. Extensive experiments are conducted on two popular benchmarks, i.e., ActivityNet-1.3 and THUMOS14. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Equipped with the existing action classifier, our method also achieves remarkable performance on the temporal action localization task.