pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Discriminative Semantic Transitive Consistency for Cross-Modal Learning
Authors: Kranti Kumar Parida, Gaurav Sharma
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Retrieval

Cross-modal retrieval is generally performed by projecting and aligning the data from two different modalities onto a shared representation space. This shared space often also acts as a bridge for translating the modalities. We address the problem of learning such representation space by proposing and exploiting the property of Discriminative Semantic Transitive Consistency -- ensuring that the data points are correctly classified even after being transferred to the other modality. Along with semantic transitive consistency, we also enforce the traditional distance minimizing constraint which makes the projections of the corresponding data points from both the modalities to come closer in the representation space. We analyze and compare the contribution of both the loss terms and their interaction, for the task. In addition, we incorporate semantic cycle-consistency for each of the modality. We empirically demonstrate better performance owing to the different components with clear ablation studies. We also provide qualitative results to support the proposals.
Robust Data-Driven Predictive Control using Reachability Analysis
Authors: Amr Alanwar, Yvonne Stürz, Karl Henrik Johansson
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Predictive Control

We present a robust data-driven control scheme for an unknown linear system model with bounded process and measurement noise. Instead of depending on a system model in traditional predictive control, a controller utilizing data-driven reachable regions is proposed. The data-driven reachable regions are based on a matrix zonotope recursion and are computed based on only noisy input-output data of a trajectory of the system. We assume that measurement and process noise are contained in bounded sets. While we assume knowledge of these bounds, no knowledge about the statistical properties of the noise is assumed. In the noise-free case, we prove that the presented purely data-driven control scheme results in an equivalent closed-loop behavior to a nominal model predictive control scheme. In the case of measurement and process noise, our proposed scheme guarantees robust constraint satisfaction, which is essential in safety-critical applications. Numerical experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed data-driven controller in comparison to model-based control schemes.
Copolymer Informatics with Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Christopher Kuenneth, William Schertzer, Rampi Ramprasad
Date: 2021-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Multi-Task Learning, Property Prediction

Polymer informatics tools have been recently gaining ground to efficiently and effectively develop, design, and discover new polymers that meet specific application needs. So far, however, these data-driven efforts have largely focused on homopolymers. Here, we address the property prediction challenge for copolymers, extending the polymer informatics framework beyond homopolymers. Advanced polymer fingerprinting and deep-learning schemes that incorporate multi-task learning and meta-learning are proposed. A large data set containing over 18,000 data points of glass transition, melting, and degradation temperature of homopolymers and copolymers of up to two monomers is used to demonstrate the copolymer prediction efficacy. The developed models are accurate, fast, flexible, and scalable to more copolymer properties when suitable data become available.
DBATES: DataBase of Audio features, Text, and visual Expressions in competitive debate Speeches
Authors: Taylan K. Sen, Gazi Naven, Luke Gerstner, Daryl Bagley, Raiyan Abdul Baten, Wasifur Rahman, Kamrul Hasan, Kurtis G. Haut, Abdullah Mamun, Samiha Samrose, Anne Solbu, R. Eric Barnes, Mark G. Frank, Ehsan Hoque
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00

In this work, we present a database of multimodal communication features extracted from debate speeches in the 2019 North American Universities Debate Championships (NAUDC). Feature sets were extracted from the visual (facial expression, gaze, and head pose), audio (PRAAT), and textual (word sentiment and linguistic category) modalities of raw video recordings of competitive collegiate debaters (N=717 6-minute recordings from 140 unique debaters). Each speech has an associated competition debate score (range: 67-96) from expert judges as well as competitor demographic and per-round reflection surveys. We observe the fully multimodal model performs best in comparison to models trained on various compositions of modalities. We also find that the weights of some features (such as the expression of joy and the use of the word we) change in direction between the aforementioned models. We use these results to highlight the value of a multimodal dataset for studying competitive, collegiate debate.
Image2Reverb: Cross-Modal Reverb Impulse Response Synthesis
Authors: Nikhil Singh, Jeff Mentch, Jerry Ng, Matthew Beveridge, Iddo Drori
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10

Measuring the acoustic characteristics of a space is often done by capturing its impulse response (IR), a representation of how a full-range stimulus sound excites it. This work generates an IR from a single image, which can then be applied to other signals using convolution, simulating the reverberant characteristics of the space shown in the image. Recording these IRs is both time-intensive and expensive, and often infeasible for inaccessible locations. We use an end-to-end neural network architecture to generate plausible audio impulse responses from single images of acoustic environments. We evaluate our method both by comparisons to ground truth data and by human expert evaluation. We demonstrate our approach by generating plausible impulse responses from diverse settings and formats including well known places, musical halls, rooms in paintings, images from animations and computer games, synthetic environments generated from text, panoramic images, and video conference backgrounds.
Adversarial Attacks are Reversible with Natural Supervision
Authors: Chengzhi Mao, Mia Chiquier, Hao Wang, Junfeng Yang, Carl Vondrick
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10

We find that images contain intrinsic structure that enables the reversal of many adversarial attacks. Attack vectors cause not only image classifiers to fail, but also collaterally disrupt incidental structure in the image. We demonstrate that modifying the attacked image to restore the natural structure will reverse many types of attacks, providing a defense. Experiments demonstrate significantly improved robustness for several state-of-the-art models across the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, and ImageNet datasets. Our results show that our defense is still effective even if the attacker is aware of the defense mechanism. Since our defense is deployed during inference instead of training, it is compatible with pre-trained networks as well as most other defenses. Our results suggest deep networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples partly because their representations do not enforce the natural structure of images.
Abstract Spatial-Temporal Reasoning via Probabilistic Abduction and Execution
Authors: Chi Zhang, Baoxiong Jia, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Attribute, Logical Reasoning

Spatial-temporal reasoning is a challenging task in Artificial Intelligence (AI) due to its demanding but unique nature: a theoretic requirement on representing and reasoning based on spatial-temporal knowledge in mind, and an applied requirement on a high-level cognitive system capable of navigating and acting in space and time. Recent works have focused on an abstract reasoning task of this kind -- Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM). Despite the encouraging progress on RPM that achieves human-level performance in terms of accuracy, modern approaches have neither a treatment of human-like reasoning on generalization, nor a potential to generate answers. To fill in this gap, we propose a neuro-symbolic Probabilistic Abduction and Execution (PrAE) learner; central to the PrAE learner is the process of probabilistic abduction and execution on a probabilistic scene representation, akin to the mental manipulation of objects. Specifically, we disentangle perception and reasoning from a monolithic model. The neural visual perception frontend predicts objects' attributes, later aggregated by a scene inference engine to produce a probabilistic scene representation. In the symbolic logical reasoning backend, the PrAE learner uses the representation to abduce the hidden rules. An answer is predicted by executing the rules on the probabilistic representation. The entire system is trained end-to-end in an analysis-by-synthesis manner without any visual attribute annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the PrAE learner improves cross-configuration generalization and is capable of rendering an answer, in contrast to prior works that merely make a categorical choice from candidates.
Congestion-aware Multi-agent Trajectory Prediction for Collision Avoidance
Authors: Xu Xie, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu, Ying Nian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Predicting agents' future trajectories plays a crucial role in modern AI systems, yet it is challenging due to intricate interactions exhibited in multi-agent systems, especially when it comes to collision avoidance. To address this challenge, we propose to learn congestion patterns as contextual cues explicitly and devise a novel "Sense--Learn--Reason--Predict" framework by exploiting advantages of three different doctrines of thought, which yields the following desirable benefits: (i) Representing congestion as contextual cues via latent factors subsumes the concept of social force commonly used in physics-based approaches and implicitly encodes the distance as a cost, similar to the way a planning-based method models the environment. (ii) By decomposing the learning phases into two stages, a "student" can learn contextual cues from a "teacher" while generating collision-free trajectories. To make the framework computationally tractable, we formulate it as an optimization problem and derive an upper bound by leveraging the variational parametrization. In experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed model is able to generate collision-free trajectory predictions in a synthetic dataset designed for collision avoidance evaluation and remains competitive on the commonly used NGSIM US-101 highway dataset.
ACRE: Abstract Causal REasoning Beyond Covariation
Authors: Chi Zhang, Baoxiong Jia, Mark Edmonds, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Blocking, Causal Discovery, Diagnostic, scientific discovery, Visual Reasoning

Causal induction, i.e., identifying unobservable mechanisms that lead to the observable relations among variables, has played a pivotal role in modern scientific discovery, especially in scenarios with only sparse and limited data. Humans, even young toddlers, can induce causal relationships surprisingly well in various settings despite its notorious difficulty. However, in contrast to the commonplace trait of human cognition is the lack of a diagnostic benchmark to measure causal induction for modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems. Therefore, in this work, we introduce the Abstract Causal REasoning (ACRE) dataset for systematic evaluation of current vision systems in causal induction. Motivated by the stream of research on causal discovery in Blicket experiments, we query a visual reasoning system with the following four types of questions in either an independent scenario or an interventional scenario: direct, indirect, screening-off, and backward-blocking, intentionally going beyond the simple strategy of inducing causal relationships by covariation. By analyzing visual reasoning architectures on this testbed, we notice that pure neural models tend towards an associative strategy under their chance-level performance, whereas neuro-symbolic combinations struggle in backward-blocking reasoning. These deficiencies call for future research in models with a more comprehensive capability of causal induction.
Embedding Power Flow into Machine Learning for Parameter and State Estimation
Authors: Laurent Pagnier, Michael Chertkov
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, State Estimation

Modern state and parameter estimations in power systems consist of two stages: the outer problem of minimizing the mismatch between network observation and prediction over the network parameters, and the inner problem of predicting the system state for given values of the parameters. The standard solution of the combined problem is iterative: (a) set the parameters, e.g. to priors on the power line characteristics, (b) map input observation to prediction of the output, (c) compute the mismatch between predicted and observed output, (d) make a gradient descent step in the space of parameters to minimize the mismatch, and loop back to (a). We show how modern Machine Learning (ML), and specifically training guided by automatic differentiation, allows to resolve the iterative loop more efficiently. Moreover, we extend the scheme to the case of incomplete observations, where Phasor Measurement Units (reporting real and reactive powers, voltage and phase) are available only at the generators (PV buses), while loads (PQ buses) report (via SCADA controls) only active and reactive powers. Considering it from the implementation perspective, our methodology of resolving the parameter and state estimation problem can be viewed as embedding of the Power Flow (PF) solver into the training loop of the Machine Learning framework (PyTorch, in this study). We argue that this embedding can help to resolve high-level optimization problems in power system operations and planning.
Learning Reactive and Predictive Differentiable Controllers for Switching Linear Dynamical Models
Authors: Saumya Saxena, Alex LaGrassa, Oliver Kroemer
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00

Humans leverage the dynamics of the environment and their own bodies to accomplish challenging tasks such as grasping an object while walking past it or pushing off a wall to turn a corner. Such tasks often involve switching dynamics as the robot makes and breaks contact. Learning these dynamics is a challenging problem and prone to model inaccuracies, especially near contact regions. In this work, we present a framework for learning composite dynamical behaviors from expert demonstrations. We learn a switching linear dynamical model with contacts encoded in switching conditions as a close approximation of our system dynamics. We then use discrete-time LQR as the differentiable policy class for data-efficient learning of control to develop a control strategy that operates over multiple dynamical modes and takes into account discontinuities due to contact. In addition to predicting interactions with the environment, our policy effectively reacts to inaccurate predictions such as unanticipated contacts. Through simulation and real world experiments, we demonstrate generalization of learned behaviors to different scenarios and robustness to model inaccuracies during execution.
OmniHang: Learning to Hang Arbitrary Objects using Contact Point Correspondences and Neural Collision Estimation
Authors: Yifan You, Lin Shao, Toki Migimatsu, Jeannette Bohg
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Object

In this paper, we explore whether a robot can learn to hang arbitrary objects onto a diverse set of supporting items such as racks or hooks. Endowing robots with such an ability has applications in many domains such as domestic services, logistics, or manufacturing. Yet, it is a challenging manipulation task due to the large diversity of geometry and topology of everyday objects. In this paper, we propose a system that takes partial point clouds of an object and a supporting item as input and learns to decide where and how to hang the object stably. Our system learns to estimate the contact point correspondences between the object and supporting item to get an estimated stable pose. We then run a deep reinforcement learning algorithm to refine the predicted stable pose. Then, the robot needs to find a collision-free path to move the object from its initial pose to stable hanging pose. To this end, we train a neural network based collision estimator that takes as input partial point clouds of the object and supporting item. We generate a new and challenging, large-scale, synthetic dataset annotated with stable poses of objects hung on various supporting items and their contact point correspondences. In this dataset, we show that our system is able to achieve a 68.3% success rate of predicting stable object poses and has a 52.1% F1 score in terms of finding feasible paths. Supplemental material and videos are available on our project webpage.
Reinforcement Learning for Robust Parameterized Locomotion Control of Bipedal Robots
Authors: Zhongyu Li, Xuxin Cheng, Xue Bin Peng, Pieter Abbeel, Sergey Levine, Glen Berseth, Koushil Sreenath
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Developing robust walking controllers for bipedal robots is a challenging endeavor. Traditional model-based locomotion controllers require simplifying assumptions and careful modelling; any small errors can result in unstable control. To address these challenges for bipedal locomotion, we present a model-free reinforcement learning framework for training robust locomotion policies in simulation, which can then be transferred to a real bipedal Cassie robot. To facilitate sim-to-real transfer, domain randomization is used to encourage the policies to learn behaviors that are robust across variations in system dynamics. The learned policies enable Cassie to perform a set of diverse and dynamic behaviors, while also being more robust than traditional controllers and prior learning-based methods that use residual control. We demonstrate this on versatile walking behaviors such as tracking a target walking velocity, walking height, and turning yaw.
Evaluation of Preprocessing Techniques for U-Net Based Automated Liver Segmentation
Authors: Muhammad Islam, Kaleem Nawaz Khan, Muhammad Salman Khan
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Liver Segmentation

To extract liver from medical images is a challenging task due to similar intensity values of liver with adjacent organs, various contrast levels, various noise associated with medical images and irregular shape of liver. To address these issues, it is important to preprocess the medical images, i.e., computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data prior to liver analysis and quantification. This paper investigates the impact of permutation of various preprocessing techniques for CT images, on the automated liver segmentation using deep learning, i.e., U-Net architecture. The study focuses on Hounsfield Unit (HU) windowing, contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE), z-score normalization, median filtering and Block-Matching and 3D (BM3D) filtering. The segmented results show that combination of three techniques; HU-windowing, median filtering and z-score normalization achieve optimal performance with Dice coefficient of 96.93%, 90.77% and 90.84% for training, validation and testing respectively.
Building Reliable Explanations of Unreliable Neural Networks: Locally Smoothing Perspective of Model Interpretation
Authors: Dohun Lim, HyeonSeok Lee, Sungchan Kim
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1

We present a novel method for reliably explaining the predictions of neural networks. We consider an explanation reliable if it identifies input features relevant to the model output by considering the input and the neighboring data points. Our method is built on top of the assumption of smooth landscape in a loss function of the model prediction: locally consistent loss and gradient profile. A theoretical analysis established in this study suggests that those locally smooth model explanations are learned using a batch of noisy copies of the input with the L1 regularization for a saliency map. Extensive experiments support the analysis results, revealing that the proposed saliency maps retrieve the original classes of adversarial examples crafted against both naturally and adversarially trained models, significantly outperforming previous methods. We further demonstrated that such good performance results from the learning capability of this method to identify input features that are truly relevant to the model output of the input and the neighboring data points, fulfilling the requirements of a reliable explanation.
Geometry-Aware Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Stereo Matching
Authors: Hiroki Sakuma, Yoshinori Konishi
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image-to-Image Translation, Stereo Matching, Translation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Recently proposed DNN-based stereo matching methods that learn priors directly from data are known to suffer a drastic drop in accuracy in new environments. Although supervised approaches with ground truth disparity maps often work well, collecting them in each deployment environment is cumbersome and costly. For this reason, many unsupervised domain adaptation methods based on image-to-image translation have been proposed, but these methods do not preserve the geometric structure of a stereo image pair because the image-to-image translation is applied to each view separately. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose an attention mechanism that aggregates features in the left and right views, called Stereoscopic Cross Attention (SCA). Incorporating SCA to an image-to-image translation network makes it possible to preserve the geometric structure of a stereo image pair in the process of the image-to-image translation. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed unsupervised domain adaptation based on the image-to-image translation with SCA.
MedSelect: Selective Labeling for Medical Image Classification Combining Meta-Learning with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Akshay Smit, Damir Vrabac, Yujie He, Andrew Y. Ng, Andrew L. Beam, Pranav Rajpurkar
Date: 2021-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification, Meta-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a selective learning method using meta-learning and deep reinforcement learning for medical image interpretation in the setting of limited labeling resources. Our method, MedSelect, consists of a trainable deep learning selector that uses image embeddings obtained from contrastive pretraining for determining which images to label, and a non-parametric selector that uses cosine similarity to classify unseen images. We demonstrate that MedSelect learns an effective selection strategy outperforming baseline selection strategies across seen and unseen medical conditions for chest X-ray interpretation. We also perform an analysis of the selections performed by MedSelect comparing the distribution of latent embeddings and clinical features, and find significant differences compared to the strongest performing baseline. We believe that our method may be broadly applicable across medical imaging settings where labels are expensive to acquire.