pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
You Only Look Yourself: Unsupervised and Untrained Single Image Dehazing Neural Network
Authors: Boyun Li, Yuanbiao Gou, Shuhang Gu, Jerry Zitao Liu, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Xi Peng
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing

In this paper, we study two challenging and less-touched problems in single image dehazing, namely, how to make deep learning achieve image dehazing without training on the ground-truth clean image (unsupervised) and a image collection (untrained). An unsupervised neural network will avoid the intensive labor collection of hazy-clean image pairs, and an untrained model is a ``real'' single image dehazing approach which could remove haze based on only the observed hazy image itself and no extra images is used. Motivated by the layer disentanglement idea, we propose a novel method, called you only look yourself (\textbf{YOLY}) which could be one of the first unsupervised and untrained neural networks for image dehazing. In brief, YOLY employs three jointly subnetworks to separate the observed hazy image into several latent layers, \textit{i.e.}, scene radiance layer, transmission map layer, and atmospheric light layer. After that, these three layers are further composed to the hazy image in a self-supervised manner. Thanks to the unsupervised and untrained characteristics of YOLY, our method bypasses the conventional training paradigm of deep models on hazy-clean pairs or a large scale dataset, thus avoids the labor-intensive data collection and the domain shift issue. Besides, our method also provides an effective learning-based haze transfer solution thanks to its layer disentanglement mechanism. Extensive experiments show the promising performance of our method in image dehazing compared with 14 methods on four databases.
Sliced Kernelized Stein Discrepancy
Authors: Wenbo Gong, Yingzhen Li, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1

Kernelized Stein discrepancy (KSD), though being extensively used in goodness-of-fit tests and model learning, suffers from the curse-of-dimensionality. We address this issue by proposing the sliced Stein discrepancy and its scalable and kernelized variants, which employ kernel-based test functions defined on the optimal one-dimensional projections. When applied to goodness-of-fit tests, extensive experiments show the proposed discrepancy significantly outperforms KSD and various baselines in high dimensions. For model learning, we show its advantages over existing Stein discrepancy baselines by training independent component analysis models with different discrepancies. We further propose a novel particle inference method called sliced Stein variational gradient descent (S-SVGD) which alleviates the mode-collapse issue of SVGD in training variational autoencoders.
On the Privacy-Utility Tradeoff in Peer-Review Data Analysis
Authors: Wenxin Ding, Nihar B. Shah, Weina Wang
Date: 2020-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

A major impediment to research on improving peer review is the unavailability of peer-review data, since any release of such data must grapple with the sensitivity of the peer review data in terms of protecting identities of reviewers from authors. We posit the need to develop techniques to release peer-review data in a privacy-preserving manner. Identifying this problem, in this paper we propose a framework for privacy-preserving release of certain conference peer-review data -- distributions of ratings, miscalibration, and subjectivity -- with an emphasis on the accuracy (or utility) of the released data. The crux of the framework lies in recognizing that a part of the data pertaining to the reviews is already available in public, and we use this information to post-process the data released by any privacy mechanism in a manner that improves the accuracy (utility) of the data while retaining the privacy guarantees. Our framework works with any privacy-preserving mechanism that operates via releasing perturbed data. We present several positive and negative theoretical results, including a polynomial-time algorithm for improving on the privacy-utility tradeoff.
Dose Prediction with Deep Learning for Prostate Cancer Radiation Therapy: Model Adaptation to Different Treatment Planning Practices
Authors: Roya Norouzi Kandalan, Dan Nguyen, Nima Hassan Rezaeian, Ana M. Barragan-Montero, Sebastiaan Breedveld, Kamesh Namuduri, Steve Jiang, Mu-Han Lin
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Transfer Learning

This work aims to study the generalizability of a pre-developed deep learning (DL) dose prediction model for volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) for prostate cancer and to adapt the model to three different internal treatment planning styles and one external institution planning style. We built the source model with planning data from 108 patients previously treated with VMAT for prostate cancer. For the transfer learning, we selected patient cases planned with three different styles from the same institution and one style from a different institution to adapt the source model to four target models. We compared the dose distributions predicted by the source model and the target models with the clinical dose predictions and quantified the improvement in the prediction quality for the target models over the source model using the Dice similarity coefficients (DSC) of 10% to 100% isodose volumes and the dose-volume-histogram (DVH) parameters of the planning target volume and the organs-at-risk. The source model accurately predicts dose distributions for plans generated in the same source style but performs sub-optimally for the three internal and one external target styles, with the mean DSC ranging between 0.81-0.94 and 0.82-0.91 for the internal and the external styles, respectively. With transfer learning, the target model predictions improved the mean DSC to 0.88-0.95 and 0.92-0.96 for the internal and the external styles, respectively. Target model predictions significantly improved the accuracy of the DVH parameter predictions to within 1.6%. We demonstrated model generalizability for DL-based dose prediction and the feasibility of using transfer learning to solve this problem. With 14-29 cases per style, we successfully adapted the source model into several different practice styles. This indicates a realistic way to widespread clinical implementation of DL-based dose prediction.
EndoSLAM Dataset and An Unsupervised Monocular Visual Odometry and Depth Estimation Approach for Endoscopic Videos: Endo-SfMLearner
Authors: Kutsev Bengisu Ozyoruk, Guliz Irem Gokceler, Gulfize Coskun, Kagan Incetan, Yasin Almalioglu, Faisal Mahmood, Eva Curto, Luis Perdigoto, Marina Oliveira, Hasan Sahin, Helder Araujo, Henrique Alexandrino, Nicholas J. Durr, Hunter B. Gilbert, Mehmet Turan
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Depth Estimation, Monocular Visual Odometry, Pose Estimation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, Transfer Learning, Visual Odometry

Deep learning techniques hold promise to develop dense topography reconstruction and pose estimation methods for endoscopic videos. However, currently available datasets do not support effective quantitative benchmarking. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive endoscopic SLAM dataset consisting of 3D point cloud data for six porcine organs, capsule and standard endoscopy recordings as well as synthetically generated data. A Panda robotic arm, two commercially available capsule endoscopes, two conventional endoscopes with different camera properties, and two high precision 3D scanners were employed to collect data from 8 ex-vivo porcine gastrointestinal (GI)-tract organs. In total, 35 sub-datasets are provided with 6D pose ground truth for the ex-vivo part: 18 sub-dataset for colon, 12 sub-datasets for stomach and 5 sub-datasets for small intestine, while four of these contain polyp-mimicking elevations carried out by an expert gastroenterologist. Synthetic capsule endoscopy frames from GI-tract with both depth and pose annotations are included to facilitate the study of simulation-to-real transfer learning algorithms. Additionally, we propound Endo-SfMLearner, an unsupervised monocular depth and pose estimation method that combines residual networks with spatial attention module in order to dictate the network to focus on distinguishable and highly textured tissue regions. The proposed approach makes use of a brightness-aware photometric loss to improve the robustness under fast frame-to-frame illumination changes. To exemplify the use-case of the EndoSLAM dataset, the performance of Endo-SfMLearner is extensively compared with the state-of-the-art. The codes and the link for the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/CapsuleEndoscope/EndoSLAM. A video demonstrating the experimental setup and procedure is accessible through https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_LCe0aWWdQ.
Sparse Gaussian Processes with Spherical Harmonic Features
Authors: Vincent Dutordoir, Nicolas Durrande, James Hensman
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Gaussian Processes

We introduce a new class of inter-domain variational Gaussian processes (GP) where data is mapped onto the unit hypersphere in order to use spherical harmonic representations. Our inference scheme is comparable to variational Fourier features, but it does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality, and leads to diagonal covariance matrices between inducing variables. This enables a speed-up in inference, because it bypasses the need to invert large covariance matrices. Our experiments show that our model is able to fit a regression model for a dataset with 6 million entries two orders of magnitude faster compared to standard sparse GPs, while retaining state of the art accuracy. We also demonstrate competitive performance on classification with non-conjugate likelihoods.
On the Demystification of Knowledge Distillation: A Residual Network Perspective
Authors: Nandan Kumar Jha, Rajat Saini, Sparsh Mittal
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression

Knowledge distillation (KD) is generally considered as a technique for performing model compression and learned-label smoothing. However, in this paper, we study and investigate the KD approach from a new perspective: we study its efficacy in training a deeper network without any residual connections. We find that in most of the cases, non-residual student networks perform equally or better than their residual versions trained on raw data without KD (baseline network). Surprisingly, in some cases, they surpass the accuracy of baseline networks even with the inferior teachers. After a certain depth of non-residual student network, the accuracy drop, coming from the removal of residual connections, is substantial, and training with KD boosts the accuracy of the student up to a great extent; however, it does not fully recover the accuracy drop. Furthermore, we observe that the conventional teacher-student view of KD is incomplete and does not adequately explain our findings. We propose a novel interpretation of KD with the Trainee-Mentor hypothesis, which provides a holistic view of KD. We also present two viewpoints, loss landscape, and feature reuse, to explain the interplay between residual connections and KD. We substantiate our claims through extensive experiments on residual networks.
Graph Neural Networks for Leveraging Industrial Equipment Structure: An application to Remaining Useful Life Estimation
Authors: Jyoti Narwariya, Pankaj Malhotra, Vishnu Tv, Lovekesh Vig, Gautam Shroff
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Automated equipment health monitoring from streaming multisensor time-series data can be used to enable condition-based maintenance, avoid sudden catastrophic failures, and ensure high operational availability. We note that most complex machinery has a well-documented and readily accessible underlying structure capturing the inter-dependencies between sub-systems or modules. Deep learning models such as those based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) or convolutional neural networks (CNNs) fail to explicitly leverage this potentially rich source of domain-knowledge into the learning procedure. In this work, we propose to capture the structure of a complex equipment in the form of a graph, and use graph neural networks (GNNs) to model multi-sensor time-series data. Using remaining useful life estimation as an application task, we evaluate the advantage of incorporating the graph structure via GNNs on the publicly available turbofan engine benchmark dataset. We observe that the proposed GNN-based RUL estimation model compares favorably to several strong baselines from literature such as those based on RNNs and CNNs. Additionally, we observe that the learned network is able to focus on the module (node) with impending failure through a simple attention mechanism, potentially paving the way for actionable diagnosis.
Lipschitzness Is All You Need To Tame Off-policy Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning
Authors: Lionel Blondé, Pablo Strasser, Alexandros Kalousis
Date: 2020-06-28 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Continuous Control, Imitation Learning, valid

Despite the recent success of reinforcement learning in various domains, these approaches remain, for the most part, deterringly sensitive to hyper-parameters and are often riddled with essential engineering feats allowing their success. We consider the case of off-policy generative adversarial imitation learning, and perform an in-depth review, qualitative and quantitative, of the method. We show that forcing the learned reward function to be local Lipschitz-continuous is a sine qua non condition for the method to perform well. We then study the effects of this necessary condition and provide several theoretical results involving the local Lipschitzness of the state-value function. We complement these guarantees with empirical evidence attesting to the strong positive effect that the consistent satisfaction of the Lipschitzness constraint on the reward has on imitation performance. Finally, we tackle a generic pessimistic reward preconditioning add-on spawning a large class of reward shaping methods, which makes the base method it is plugged into provably more robust, as shown in several additional theoretical guarantees. We then discuss these through a fine-grained lens and share our insights. Crucially, the guarantees derived and reported in this work are valid for any reward satisfying the Lipschitzness condition, nothing is specific to imitation. As such, these may be of independent interest.
Handling Missing Data in Decision Trees: A Probabilistic Approach
Authors: Pasha Khosravi, Antonio Vergari, YooJung Choi, Yitao Liang, Guy Van Den Broeck
Date: 2020-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Prediction

Decision trees are a popular family of models due to their attractive properties such as interpretability and ability to handle heterogeneous data. Concurrently, missing data is a prevalent occurrence that hinders performance of machine learning models. As such, handling missing data in decision trees is a well studied problem. In this paper, we tackle this problem by taking a probabilistic approach. At deployment time, we use tractable density estimators to compute the "expected prediction" of our models. At learning time, we fine-tune parameters of already learned trees by minimizing their "expected prediction loss" w.r.t.\ our density estimators. We provide brief experiments showcasing effectiveness of our methods compared to few baselines.
Approximating Network Centrality Measures Using Node Embedding and Machine Learning
Authors: Matheus R. F. Mendonça, André M. S. Barreto, Artur Ziviani
Date: 2020-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Graph Embedding

Extracting information from real-world large networks is a key challenge nowadays. For instance, computing a node centrality may become unfeasible depending on the intended centrality due to its computational cost. One solution is to develop fast methods capable of approximating network centralities. Here, we propose an approach for efficiently approximating node centralities for large networks using Neural Networks and Graph Embedding techniques. Our proposed model, entitled Network Centrality Approximation using Graph Embedding (NCA-GE), uses the adjacency matrix of a graph and a set of features for each node (here, we use only the degree) as input and computes the approximate desired centrality rank for every node. NCA-GE has a time complexity of $O(|E|)$, $E$ being the set of edges of a graph, making it suitable for large networks. NCA-GE also trains pretty fast, requiring only a set of a thousand small synthetic scale-free graphs (ranging from 100 to 1000 nodes each), and it works well for different node centralities, network sizes, and topologies. Finally, we compare our approach to the state-of-the-art method that approximates centrality ranks using the degree and eigenvector centralities as input, where we show that the NCA-GE outperforms the former in a variety of scenarios.
Robust Kernel Density Estimation with Median-of-Means principle
Authors: Pierre Humbert, Batiste Le Bars, Ludovic Minvielle, Nicolas Vayatis
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

In this paper, we introduce a robust nonparametric density estimator combining the popular Kernel Density Estimation method and the Median-of-Means principle (MoM-KDE). This estimator is shown to achieve robustness to any kind of anomalous data, even in the case of adversarial contamination. In particular, while previous works only prove consistency results under known contamination model, this work provides finite-sample high-probability error-bounds without a priori knowledge on the outliers. Finally, when compared with other robust kernel estimators, we show that MoM-KDE achieves competitive results while having significant lower computational complexity.
Uniform Priors for Data-Efficient Transfer
Authors: Samarth Sinha, Karsten Roth, Anirudh Goyal, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Hugo Larochelle, Animesh Garg
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Meta-Learning, Metric Learning

Deep Neural Networks have shown great promise on a variety of downstream applications; but their ability to adapt and generalize to new data and tasks remains a challenge. However, the ability to perform few or zero-shot adaptation to novel tasks is important for the scalability and deployment of machine learning models. It is therefore crucial to understand what makes for good, transfer-able features in deep networks that best allow for such adaptation. In this paper, we shed light on this by showing that features that are most transferable have high uniformity in the embedding space and propose a uniformity regularization scheme that encourages better transfer and feature reuse. We evaluate the regularization on its ability to facilitate adaptation to unseen tasks and data, for which we conduct a thorough experimental study covering four relevant, and distinct domains: few-shot Meta-Learning, Deep Metric Learning, Zero-Shot Domain Adaptation, as well as Out-of-Distribution classification. Across all experiments, we show that uniformity regularization consistently offers benefits over baseline methods and is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance in Deep Metric Learning and Meta-Learning.
A Simple Domain Shifting Networkfor Generating Low Quality Images
Authors: Guruprasad Hegde, Avinash Nittur Ramesh, Kanchana Vaishnavi Gandikota, Roman Obermaisser, Michael Moeller
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Domain Adaptation, General Classification

Deep Learning systems have proven to be extremely successful for image recognition tasks for which significant amounts of training data is available, e.g., on the famous ImageNet dataset. We demonstrate that for robotics applications with cheap camera equipment, the low image quality, however,influences the classification accuracy, and freely available databases cannot be exploited in a straight forward way to train classifiers to be used on a robot. As a solution we propose to train a network on degrading the quality images in order to mimic specific low quality imaging systems. Numerical experiments demonstrate that classification networks trained by using images produced by our quality degrading network along with the high quality images outperform classification networks trained only on high quality data when used on a real robot system, while being significantly easier to use than competing zero-shot domain adaptation techniques.
Online Dynamic Network Embedding
Authors: Haiwei Huang, Jinlong Li, Huimin He, Huanhuan Chen
Date: 2020-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Embedding

Network embedding is a very important method for network data. However, most of the algorithms can only deal with static networks. In this paper, we propose an algorithm Recurrent Neural Network Embedding (RNNE) to deal with dynamic network, which can be typically divided into two categories: a) topologically evolving graphs whose nodes and edges will increase (decrease) over time; b) temporal graphs whose edges contain time information. In order to handle the changing size of dynamic networks, RNNE adds virtual node, which is not connected to any other nodes, to the networks and replaces it when new node arrives, so that the network size can be unified at different time. On the one hand, RNNE pays attention to the direct links between nodes and the similarity between the neighborhood structures of two nodes, trying to preserve the local and global network structure. On the other hand, RNNE reduces the influence of noise by transferring the previous embedding information. Therefore, RNNE can take into account both static and dynamic characteristics of the network.We evaluate RNNE on five networks and compare with several state-of-the-art algorithms. The results demonstrate that RNNE has advantages over other algorithms in reconstruction, classification and link predictions.
Counterfactual explanation of machine learning survival models
Authors: Maxim S. Kovalev, Lev V. Utkin
Date: 2020-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation

A method for counterfactual explanation of machine learning survival models is proposed. One of the difficulties of solving the counterfactual explanation problem is that the classes of examples are implicitly defined through outcomes of a machine learning survival model in the form of survival functions. A condition that establishes the difference between survival functions of the original example and the counterfactual is introduced. This condition is based on using a distance between mean times to event. It is shown that the counterfactual explanation problem can be reduced to a standard convex optimization problem with linear constraints when the explained black-box model is the Cox model. For other black-box models, it is proposed to apply the well-known Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. A lot of numerical experiments with real and synthetic data demonstrate the proposed method.