pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Distilling Object Detectors with Task Adaptive Regularization
Authors: Ruoyu Sun, Fuhui Tang, Xiaopeng Zhang, Hongkai Xiong, Qi Tian
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Object, Region Proposal

Current state-of-the-art object detectors are at the expense of high computational costs and are hard to deploy to low-end devices. Knowledge distillation, which aims at training a smaller student network by transferring knowledge from a larger teacher model, is one of the promising solutions for model miniaturization. In this paper, we investigate each module of a typical detector in depth, and propose a general distillation framework that adaptively transfers knowledge from teacher to student according to the task specific priors. The intuition is that simply distilling all information from teacher to student is not advisable, instead we should only borrow priors from the teacher model where the student cannot perform well. Towards this goal, we propose a region proposal sharing mechanism to interflow region responses between the teacher and student models. Based on this, we adaptively transfer knowledge at three levels, \emph{i.e.}, feature backbone, classification head, and bounding box regression head, according to which model performs more reasonably. Furthermore, considering that it would introduce optimization dilemma when minimizing distillation loss and detection loss simultaneously, we propose a distillation decay strategy to help improve model generalization via gradually reducing the distillation penalty. Experiments on widely used detection benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In particular, using Faster R-CNN with FPN as an instantiation, we achieve an accuracy of $39.0\%$ with Resnet-50 on COCO dataset, which surpasses the baseline $36.3\%$ by $2.7\%$ points, and even better than the teacher model with $38.5\%$ mAP.
Calibrated Adversarial Refinement for Stochastic Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Elias Kassapis, Georgi Dikov, Deepak K. Gupta, Cedric Nugteren
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, valid

In semantic segmentation tasks, input images can often have more than one plausible interpretation, thus allowing for multiple valid labels. To capture such ambiguities, recent work has explored the use of probabilistic networks that can learn a distribution over predictions. However, these do not necessarily represent the empirical distribution accurately. In this work, we present a strategy for learning a calibrated predictive distribution over semantic maps, where the probability associated with each prediction reflects its ground truth correctness likelihood. To this end, we propose a novel two-stage, cascaded approach for calibrated adversarial refinement: (i) a standard segmentation network is trained with categorical cross entropy to predict a pixelwise probability distribution over semantic classes and (ii) an adversarially trained stochastic network is used to model the inter-pixel correlations to refine the output of the first network into coherent samples. Importantly, to calibrate the refinement network and prevent mode collapse, the expectation of the samples in the second stage is matched to the probabilities predicted in the first. We demonstrate the versatility and robustness of the approach by achieving state-of-the-art results on the multigrader LIDC dataset and on a modified Cityscapes dataset with injected ambiguities. In addition, we show that the core design can be adapted to other tasks requiring learning a calibrated predictive distribution by experimenting on a toy regression dataset. We provide an open source implementation of our method at https://github.com/EliasKassapis/CARSSS.
ObjectNav Revisited: On Evaluation of Embodied Agents Navigating to Objects
Authors: Dhruv Batra, Aaron Gokaslan, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Oleksandr Maksymets, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Manolis Savva, Alexander Toshev, Erik Wijmans
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

We revisit the problem of Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav). In its simplest form, ObjectNav is defined as the task of navigating to an object, specified by its label, in an unexplored environment. In particular, the agent is initialized at a random location and pose in an environment and asked to find an instance of an object category, e.g., find a chair, by navigating to it. As the community begins to show increased interest in semantic goal specification for navigation tasks, a number of different often-inconsistent interpretations of this task are emerging. This document summarizes the consensus recommendations of this working group on ObjectNav. In particular, we make recommendations on subtle but important details of evaluation criteria (for measuring success when navigating towards a target object), the agent's embodiment parameters, and the characteristics of the environments within which the task is carried out. Finally, we provide a detailed description of the instantiation of these recommendations in challenges organized at the Embodied AI workshop at CVPR 2020 http://embodied-ai.org .
Boundary Regularized Building Footprint Extraction From Satellite Images Using Deep Neural Network
Authors: Kang Zhao, Muhammad Kamran, Gunho Sohn
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Localization

In recent years, an ever-increasing number of remote satellites are orbiting the Earth which streams vast amount of visual data to support a wide range of civil, public and military applications. One of the key information obtained from satellite imagery is to produce and update spatial maps of built environment due to its wide coverage with high resolution data. However, reconstructing spatial maps from satellite imagery is not a trivial vision task as it requires reconstructing a scene or object with high-level representation such as primitives. For the last decade, significant advancement in object detection and representation using visual data has been achieved, but the primitive-based object representation still remains as a challenging vision task. Thus, a high-quality spatial map is mainly produced through complex labour-intensive processes. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network, which enables to jointly detect building instance and regularize noisy building boundary shapes from a single satellite imagery. The proposed deep learning method consists of a two-stage object detection network to produce region of interest (RoI) features and a building boundary extraction network using graph models to learn geometric information of the polygon shapes. Extensive experiments show that our model can accomplish multi-tasks of object localization, recognition, semantic labelling and geometric shape extraction simultaneously. In terms of building extraction accuracy, computation efficiency and boundary regularization performance, our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models.
Efficient Spatially Adaptive Convolution and Correlation
Authors: Thomas W. Mitchel, Benedict Brown, David Koller, Tim Weyrich, Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Michael Kazhdan
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

Fast methods for convolution and correlation underlie a variety of applications in computer vision and graphics, including efficient filtering, analysis, and simulation. However, standard convolution and correlation are inherently limited to fixed filters: spatial adaptation is impossible without sacrificing efficient computation. In early work, Freeman and Adelson have shown how steerable filters can address this limitation, providing a way for rotating the filter as it is passed over the signal. In this work, we provide a general, representation-theoretic, framework that allows for spatially varying linear transformations to be applied to the filter. This framework allows for efficient implementation of extended convolution and correlation for transformation groups such as rotation (in 2D and 3D) and scale, and provides a new interpretation for previous methods including steerable filters and the generalized Hough transform. We present applications to pattern matching, image feature description, vector field visualization, and adaptive image filtering.
Facing the Hard Problems in FGVC
Authors: Connor Anderson, Matt Gwilliam, Adam Teuscher, Andrew Merrill, Ryan Farrell
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Visual Categorization

In fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC), there is a near-singular focus in pursuit of attaining state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy. This work carefully analyzes the performance of recent SOTA methods, quantitatively, but more importantly, qualitatively. We show that these models universally struggle with certain "hard" images, while also making complementary mistakes. We underscore the importance of such analysis, and demonstrate that combining complementary models can improve accuracy on the popular CUB-200 dataset by over 5%. In addition to detailed analysis and characterization of the errors made by these SOTA methods, we provide a clear set of recommended directions for future FGVC researchers.
Adversarial Robustness of Deep Sensor Fusion Models
Authors: Shaojie Wang, Tong Wu, Ayan Chakrabarti, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, Adversarial Robustness, Autonomous Driving, General Classification, object-detection, Object Detection, Sensor Fusion

We experimentally study the robustness of deep camera-LiDAR fusion architectures for 2D object detection in autonomous driving. First, we find that the fusion model is usually both more accurate, and more robust against single-source attacks than single-sensor deep neural networks. Furthermore, we show that without adversarial training, early fusion is more robust than late fusion, whereas the two perform similarly after adversarial training. However, we note that single-channel adversarial training of deep fusion is often detrimental even to robustness. Moreover, we observe cross-channel externalities, where single-channel adversarial training reduces robustness to attacks on the other channel. Additionally, we observe that the choice of adversarial model in adversarial training is critical: using attacks restricted to cars' bounding boxes is more effective in adversarial training and exhibits less significant cross-channel externalities. Finally, we find that joint-channel adversarial training helps mitigate many of the issues above, but does not significantly boost adversarial robustness.
Instant 3D Object Tracking with Applications in Augmented Reality
Authors: Adel Ahmadyan, Tingbo Hou, Jianing Wei, Liangkai Zhang, Artsiom Ablavatski, Matthias Grundmann
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Tracking, CPU, GPU, Object Tracking

Tracking object poses in 3D is a crucial building block for Augmented Reality applications. We propose an instant motion tracking system that tracks an object's pose in space (represented by its 3D bounding box) in real-time on mobile devices. Our system does not require any prior sensory calibration or initialization to function. We employ a deep neural network to detect objects and estimate their initial 3D pose. Then the estimated pose is tracked using a robust planar tracker. Our tracker is capable of performing relative-scale 9-DoF tracking in real-time on mobile devices. By combining use of CPU and GPU efficiently, we achieve 26-FPS+ performance on mobile devices.
Semantic Features Aided Multi-Scale Reconstruction of Inter-Modality Magnetic Resonance Images
Authors: Preethi Srinivasan, Prabhjot Kaur, Aditya Nigam, Arnav Bhavsar
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Long acquisition time (AQT) due to series acquisition of multi-modality MR images (especially T2 weighted images (T2WI) with longer AQT), though beneficial for disease diagnosis, is practically undesirable. We propose a novel deep network based solution to reconstruct T2W images from T1W images (T1WI) using an encoder-decoder architecture. The proposed learning is aided with semantic features by using multi-channel input with intensity values and gradient of image in two orthogonal directions. A reconstruction module (RM) augmenting the network along with a domain adaptation module (DAM) which is an encoder-decoder model built-in with sharp bottleneck module (SBM) is trained via modular training. The proposed network significantly reduces the total AQT with negligible qualitative artifacts and quantitative loss (reconstructs one volume in approximately 1 second). The testing is done on publicly available dataset with real MR images, and the proposed network shows (approximately 1dB) increase in PSNR over SOTA.
Generalized Grasping for Mechanical Grippers for Unknown Objects with Partial Point Cloud Representations
Authors: Michael Hegedus, Kamal Gupta, Mehran Mehrandezh
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00

We present a generalized grasping algorithm that uses point clouds (i.e. a group of points and their respective surface normals) to discover grasp pose solutions for multiple grasp types, executed by a mechanical gripper, in near real-time. The algorithm introduces two ideas: 1) a histogram of finger contact normals is used to represent a grasp 'shape' to guide a gripper orientation search in a histogram of object(s) surface normals, and 2) voxel grid representations of gripper and object(s) are cross-correlated to match finger contact points, i.e. grasp 'size', to discover a grasp pose. Constraints, such as collisions with neighbouring objects, are optionally incorporated in the cross-correlation computation. We show via simulations and experiments that 1) grasp poses for three grasp types can be found in near real-time, 2) grasp pose solutions are consistent with respect to voxel resolution changes for both partial and complete point cloud scans, and 3) a planned grasp is executed with a mechanical gripper.
Semi-Supervised Learning for Fetal Brain MRI Quality Assessment with ROI consistency
Authors: Junshen Xu, Sayeri Lala, Borjan Gagoski, Esra Abaci Turk, P. Ellen Grant, Polina Golland, Elfar Adalsteinsson
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment

Fetal brain MRI is useful for diagnosing brain abnormalities but is challenged by fetal motion. The current protocol for T2-weighted fetal brain MRI is not robust to motion so image volumes are degraded by inter- and intra- slice motion artifacts. Besides, manual annotation for fetal MR image quality assessment are usually time-consuming. Therefore, in this work, a semi-supervised deep learning method that detects slices with artifacts during the brain volume scan is proposed. Our method is based on the mean teacher model, where we not only enforce consistency between student and teacher models on the whole image, but also adopt an ROI consistency loss to guide the network to focus on the brain region. The proposed method is evaluated on a fetal brain MR dataset with 11,223 labeled images and more than 200,000 unlabeled images. Results show that compared with supervised learning, the proposed method can improve model accuracy by about 6\% and outperform other state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning methods. The proposed method is also implemented and evaluated on an MR scanner, which demonstrates the feasibility of online image quality assessment and image reacquisition during fetal MR scans.
3D Probabilistic Segmentation and Volumetry from 2D projection images
Authors: Athanasios Vlontzos, Samuel Budd, Benjamin Hou, Daniel Rueckert, Bernhard Kainz
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

X-Ray imaging is quick, cheap and useful for front-line care assessment and intra-operative real-time imaging (e.g., C-Arm Fluoroscopy). However, it suffers from projective information loss and lacks vital volumetric information on which many essential diagnostic biomarkers are based on. In this paper we explore probabilistic methods to reconstruct 3D volumetric images from 2D imaging modalities and measure the models' performance and confidence. We show our models' performance on large connected structures and we test for limitations regarding fine structures and image domain sensitivity. We utilize fast end-to-end training of a 2D-3D convolutional networks, evaluate our method on 117 CT scans segmenting 3D structures from digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) with a Dice score of $0.91 \pm 0.0013$. Source code will be made available by the time of the conference.
Deep Attentive Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks for MRI Reconstruction with Recurrent Context-Awareness
Authors: Yifeng Guo, Chengjia Wang, Heye Zhang, Guang Yang
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Deep Learning, MRI Reconstruction

The performance of traditional compressive sensing-based MRI (CS-MRI) reconstruction is affected by its slow iterative procedure and noise-induced artefacts. Although many deep learning-based CS-MRI methods have been proposed to mitigate the problems of traditional methods, they have not been able to achieve more robust results at higher acceleration factors. Most of the deep learning-based CS-MRI methods still can not fully mine the information from the k-space, which leads to unsatisfactory results in the MRI reconstruction. In this study, we propose a new deep learning-based CS-MRI reconstruction method to fully utilise the relationship among sequential MRI slices by coupling Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGAN) with Recurrent Neural Networks. Further development of an attentive unit enables our model to reconstruct more accurate anatomical structures for the MRI data. By experimenting on different MRI datasets, we have demonstrated that our method can not only achieve better results compared to the state-of-the-arts but can also effectively reduce residual noise generated during the reconstruction process.
Joint Left Atrial Segmentation and Scar Quantification Based on a DNN with Spatial Encoding and Shape Attention
Authors: Lei Li, Xin Weng, Julia A. Schnabel, Xiahai Zhuang
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

We propose an end-to-end deep neural network (DNN) which can simultaneously segment the left atrial (LA) cavity and quantify LA scars. The framework incorporates the continuous spatial information of the target by introducing a spatially encoded (SE) loss based on the distance transform map. Compared to conventional binary label based loss, the proposed SE loss can reduce noisy patches in the resulting segmentation, which is commonly seen for deep learning-based methods. To fully utilize the inherent spatial relationship between LA and LA scars, we further propose a shape attention (SA) mechanism through an explicit surface projection to build an end-to-end-trainable model. Specifically, the SA scheme is embedded into a two-task network to perform the joint LA segmentation and scar quantification. Moreover, the proposed method can alleviate the severe class-imbalance problem when detecting small and discrete targets like scars. We evaluated the proposed framework on 60 LGE MRI data from the MICCAI2018 LA challenge. For LA segmentation, the proposed method reduced the mean Hausdorff distance from 36.4 mm to 20.0 mm compared to the 3D basic U-Net using the binary cross-entropy loss. For scar quantification, the method was compared with the results or algorithms reported in the literature and demonstrated better performance.
MANTRA: A Machine Learning reference lightcurve dataset for astronomical transient event recognition
Authors: Mauricio Neira, Catalina Gómez, John F. Suárez-Pérez, Diego A. Gómez, Juan Pablo Reyes, Marcela Hernández Hoyos, Pablo Arbeláez, Jaime E. Forero-Romero
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Binary Classification, Classification, feature selection, General Classification

We introduce MANTRA, an annotated dataset of 4869 transient and 71207 non-transient object lightcurves built from the Catalina Real Time Transient Survey. We provide public access to this dataset as a plain text file to facilitate standardized quantitative comparison of astronomical transient event recognition algorithms. Some of the classes included in the dataset are: supernovae, cataclysmic variables, active galactic nuclei, high proper motion stars, blazars and flares. As an example of the tasks that can be performed on the dataset we experiment with multiple data pre-processing methods, feature selection techniques and popular machine learning algorithms (Support Vector Machines, Random Forests and Neural Networks). We assess quantitative performance in two classification tasks: binary (transient/non-transient) and eight-class classification. The best performing algorithm in both tasks is the Random Forest Classifier. It achieves an F1-score of 96.25% in the binary classification and 52.79% in the eight-class classification. For the eight-class classification, non-transients ( 96.83% ) is the class with the highest F1-score, while the lowest corresponds to high-proper-motion stars ( 16.79% ); for supernovae it achieves a value of 54.57% , close to the average across classes. The next release of MANTRA includes images and benchmarks with deep learning models.
Keyframe Segmentation and Positional Encoding for Video-guided Machine Translation Challenge 2020
Authors: Tosho Hirasawa, Zhishen Yang, Mamoru Komachi, Naoaki Okazaki
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation, Video-Guided Machine Translation

Video-guided machine translation as one of multimodal neural machine translation tasks targeting on generating high-quality text translation by tangibly engaging both video and text. In this work, we presented our video-guided machine translation system in approaching the Video-guided Machine Translation Challenge 2020. This system employs keyframe-based video feature extractions along with the video feature positional encoding. In the evaluation phase, our system scored 36.60 corpus-level BLEU-4 and achieved the 1st place on the Video-guided Machine Translation Challenge 2020.
Inductive Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Few-Shot Classification via Clustering
Authors: Xin Cong, Bowen Yu, Tingwen Liu, Shiyao Cui, Hengzhu Tang, Bin Wang
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Clustering, Domain Adaptation, General Classification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Few-shot classification tends to struggle when it needs to adapt to diverse domains. Due to the non-overlapping label space between domains, the performance of conventional domain adaptation is limited. Previous work tackles the problem in a transductive manner, by assuming access to the full set of test data, which is too restrictive for many real-world applications. In this paper, we set out to tackle this issue by introducing a inductive framework, DaFeC, to improve Domain adaptation performance for Few-shot classification via Clustering. We first build a representation extractor to derive features for unlabeled data from the target domain (no test data is necessary) and then group them with a cluster miner. The generated pseudo-labeled data and the labeled source-domain data are used as supervision to update the parameters of the few-shot classifier. In order to derive high-quality pseudo labels, we propose a Clustering Promotion Mechanism, to learn better features for the target domain via Similarity Entropy Minimization and Adversarial Distribution Alignment, which are combined with a Cosine Annealing Strategy. Experiments are performed on the FewRel 2.0 dataset. Our approach outperforms previous work with absolute gains (in classification accuracy) of 4.95%, 9.55%, 3.99% and 11.62%, respectively, under four few-shot settings.