pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Spatio-temporal Attention Model for Tactile Texture Recognition
Authors: Guanqun Cao, Yi Zhou, Danushka Bollegala, Shan Luo
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Recently, tactile sensing has attracted great interest in robotics, especially for facilitating exploration of unstructured environments and effective manipulation. A detailed understanding of the surface textures via tactile sensing is essential for many of these tasks. Previous works on texture recognition using camera based tactile sensors have been limited to treating all regions in one tactile image or all samples in one tactile sequence equally, which includes much irrelevant or redundant information. In this paper, we propose a novel Spatio-Temporal Attention Model (STAM) for tactile texture recognition, which is the very first of its kind to our best knowledge. The proposed STAM pays attention to both spatial focus of each single tactile texture and the temporal correlation of a tactile sequence. In the experiments to discriminate 100 different fabric textures, the spatially and temporally selective attention has resulted in a significant improvement of the recognition accuracy, by up to 18.8%, compared to the non-attention based models. Specifically, after introducing noisy data that is collected before the contact happens, our proposed STAM can learn the salient features efficiently and the accuracy can increase by 15.23% on average compared with the CNN based baseline approach. The improved tactile texture perception can be applied to facilitate robot tasks like grasping and manipulation.
Distributed Multi-agent Video Fast-forwarding
Authors: Shuyue Lan, Zhilu Wang, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, Ermin Wei, Qi Zhu
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00

In many intelligent systems, a network of agents collaboratively perceives the environment for better and more efficient situation awareness. As these agents often have limited resources, it could be greatly beneficial to identify the content overlapping among camera views from different agents and leverage it for reducing the processing, transmission and storage of redundant/unimportant video frames. This paper presents a consensus-based distributed multi-agent video fast-forwarding framework, named DMVF, that fast-forwards multi-view video streams collaboratively and adaptively. In our framework, each camera view is addressed by a reinforcement learning based fast-forwarding agent, which periodically chooses from multiple strategies to selectively process video frames and transmits the selected frames at adjustable paces. During every adaptation period, each agent communicates with a number of neighboring agents, evaluates the importance of the selected frames from itself and those from its neighbors, refines such evaluation together with other agents via a system-wide consensus algorithm, and uses such evaluation to decide their strategy for the next period. Compared with approaches in the literature on a real-world surveillance video dataset VideoWeb, our method significantly improves the coverage of important frames and also reduces the number of frames processed in the system.
Measures of Complexity for Large Scale Image Datasets
Authors: Ameet Annasaheb Rahane, Anbumani Subramanian
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Learning

Large scale image datasets are a growing trend in the field of machine learning. However, it is hard to quantitatively understand or specify how various datasets compare to each other - i.e., if one dataset is more complex or harder to ``learn'' with respect to a deep-learning based network. In this work, we build a series of relatively computationally simple methods to measure the complexity of a dataset. Furthermore, we present an approach to demonstrate visualizations of high dimensional data, in order to assist with visual comparison of datasets. We present our analysis using four datasets from the autonomous driving research community - Cityscapes, IDD, BDD and Vistas. Using entropy based metrics, we present a rank-order complexity of these datasets, which we compare with an established rank-order with respect to deep learning.
Locating Cephalometric X-Ray Landmarks with Foveated Pyramid Attention
Authors: Logan Gilmour, Nilanjan Ray
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: MIDL 2019 7
Tasks: regression

CNNs, initially inspired by human vision, differ in a key way: they sample uniformly, rather than with highest density in a focal point. For very large images, this makes training untenable, as the memory and computation required for activation maps scales quadratically with the side length of an image. We propose an image pyramid based approach that extracts narrow glimpses of the of the input image and iteratively refines them to accomplish regression tasks. To assist with high-accuracy regression, we introduce a novel intermediate representation we call 'spatialized features'. Our approach scales logarithmically with the side length, so it works with very large images. We apply our method to Cephalometric X-ray Landmark Detection and get state-of-the-art results.
Balanced k-Means Clustering on an Adiabatic Quantum Computer
Authors: Davis Arthur, Prasanna Date
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Adiabatic quantum computers are a promising platform for approximately solving challenging optimization problems. We present a quantum approach to solving the balanced $k$-means clustering training problem on the D-Wave 2000Q adiabatic quantum computer. Existing classical approaches scale poorly for large datasets and only guarantee a locally optimal solution. We show that our quantum approach better targets the global solution of the training problem, while achieving better theoretic scalability on large datasets. We test our quantum approach on a number of small problems, and observe clustering performance similar to the best classical algorithms.
Fault-Tolerant Control of Degrading Systems with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ibrahim Ahmed, Marcos Quiñones-Grueiro, Gautam Biswas
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a novel adaptive reinforcement learning control approach for fault tolerant control of degrading systems that is not preceded by a fault detection and diagnosis step. Therefore, \textit{a priori} knowledge of faults that may occur in the system is not required. The adaptive scheme combines online and offline learning of the on-policy control method to improve exploration and sample efficiency, while guaranteeing stable learning. The offline learning phase is performed using a data-driven model of the system, which is frequently updated to track the system's operating conditions. We conduct experiments on an aircraft fuel transfer system to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Comparison of Model Predictive and Reinforcement Learning Methods for Fault Tolerant Control
Authors: Ibrahim Ahmed, Hamed Khorasgani, Gautam Biswas
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A desirable property in fault-tolerant controllers is adaptability to system changes as they evolve during systems operations. An adaptive controller does not require optimal control policies to be enumerated for possible faults. Instead it can approximate one in real-time. We present two adaptive fault-tolerant control schemes for a discrete time system based on hierarchical reinforcement learning. We compare their performance against a model predictive controller in presence of sensor noise and persistent faults. The controllers are tested on a fuel tank model of a C-130 plane. Our experiments demonstrate that reinforcement learning-based controllers perform more robustly than model predictive controllers under faults, partially observable system models, and varying sensor noise levels.
GANDALF: Generative Adversarial Networks with Discriminator-Adaptive Loss Fine-tuning for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis from MRI
Authors: Hoo-chang Shin, Alvin Ihsani, Ziyue Xu, Swetha Mandava, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Christopher Forster, Jiook Cha, Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is now regarded as the gold standard for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). However, PET imaging can be prohibitive in terms of cost and planning, and is also among the imaging techniques with the highest dosage of radiation. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), in contrast, is more widely available and provides more flexibility when setting the desired image resolution. Unfortunately, the diagnosis of AD using MRI is difficult due to the very subtle physiological differences between healthy and AD subjects visible on MRI. As a result, many attempts have been made to synthesize PET images from MR images using generative adversarial networks (GANs) in the interest of enabling the diagnosis of AD from MR. Existing work on PET synthesis from MRI has largely focused on Conditional GANs, where MR images are used to generate PET images and subsequently used for AD diagnosis. There is no end-to-end training goal. This paper proposes an alternative approach to the aforementioned, where AD diagnosis is incorporated in the GAN training objective to achieve the best AD classification performance. Different GAN lossesare fine-tuned based on the discriminator performance, and the overall training is stabilized. The proposed network architecture and training regime show state-of-the-art performance for three- and four- class AD classification tasks.
GANBERT: Generative Adversarial Networks with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers for MRI to PET synthesis
Authors: Hoo-chang Shin, Alvin Ihsani, Swetha Mandava, Sharath Turuvekere Sreenivas, Christopher Forster, Jiook Cha, Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Synthesizing medical images, such as PET, is a challenging task due to the fact that the intensity range is much wider and denser than those in photographs and digital renderings and are often heavily biased toward zero. Above all, intensity values in PET have absolute significance, and are used to compute parameters that are reproducible across the population. Yet, usually much manual adjustment has to be made in pre-/post- processing when synthesizing PET images, because its intensity ranges can vary a lot, e.g., between -100 to 1000 in floating point values. To overcome these challenges, we adopt the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm that has had great success in natural language processing (NLP), where wide-range floating point intensity values are represented as integers ranging between 0 to 10000 that resemble a dictionary of natural language vocabularies. BERT is then trained to predict a proportion of masked values images, where its "next sentence prediction (NSP)" acts as GAN discriminator. Our proposed approach, is able to generate PET images from MRI images in wide intensity range, with no manual adjustments in pre-/post- processing. It is a method that can scale and ready to deploy.
DeepDrummer : Generating Drum Loops using Deep Learning and a Human in the Loop
Authors: Guillaume Alain, Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, Frederic Osterrath, Remi Piche-Taillefer
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Efficient Exploration

DeepDrummer is a drum loop generation tool that uses active learning to learn the preferences (or current artistic intentions) of a human user from a small number of interactions. The principal goal of this tool is to enable an efficient exploration of new musical ideas. We train a deep neural network classifier on audio data and show how it can be used as the core component of a system that generates drum loops based on few prior beliefs as to how these loops should be structured. We aim to build a system that can converge to meaningful results even with a limited number of interactions with the user. This property enables our method to be used from a cold start situation (no pre-existing dataset), or starting from a collection of audio samples provided by the user. In a proof of concept study with 25 participants, we empirically demonstrate that DeepDrummer is able to converge towards the preference of our subjects after a small number of interactions.
GRIMGEP: Learning Progress for Robust Goal Sampling in Visual Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Grgur Kovač, Adrien Laversanne-Finot, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Diversity, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Designing agents, capable of learning autonomously a wide range of skills is critical in order to increase the scope of reinforcement learning. It will both increase the diversity of learned skills and reduce the burden of manually designing reward functions for each skill. Self-supervised agents, setting their own goals, and trying to maximize the diversity of those goals have shown great promise towards this end. However, a currently known limitation of agents trying to maximize the diversity of sampled goals is that they tend to get attracted to noise or more generally to parts of the environments that cannot be controlled (distractors). When agents have access to predefined goal features or expert knowledge, absolute Learning Progress (ALP) provides a way to distinguish between regions that can be controlled and those that cannot. However, those methods often fall short when the agents are only provided with raw sensory inputs such as images. In this work we extend those concepts to unsupervised image-based goal exploration. We propose a framework that allows agents to autonomously identify and ignore noisy distracting regions while searching for novelty in the learnable regions to both improve overall performance and avoid catastrophic forgetting. Our framework can be combined with any state-of-the-art novelty seeking goal exploration approaches. We construct a rich 3D image based environment with distractors. Experiments on this environment show that agents using our framework successfully identify interesting regions of the environment, resulting in drastically improved performances. The source code is available at https://sites.google.com/view/grimgep.
Probability Link Models with Symmetric Information Divergence
Authors: Majid Asadi, Karthik Devarajan, Nader Ebrahimi, Ehsan Soofi, Lauren Spirko-Burns
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis

This paper introduces link functions for transforming one probability distribution to another such that the Kullback-Leibler and R\'enyi divergences between the two distributions are symmetric. Two general classes of link models are proposed. The first model links two survival functions and is applicable to models such as the proportional odds and change point, which are used in survival analysis and reliability modeling. A prototype application involving the proportional odds model demonstrates advantages of symmetric divergence measures over asymmetric measures for assessing the efficacy of features and for model averaging purposes. The advantages include providing unique ranks for models and unique information weights for model averaging with one-half as much computation requirement of asymmetric divergences. The second model links two cumulative probability distribution functions. This model produces a generalized location model which are continuous counterparts of the binary probability models such as probit and logit models. Examples include the generalized probit and logit models which have appeared in the survival analysis literature, and a generalized Laplace model and a generalized Student-$t$ model, which are survival time models corresponding to the respective binary probability models. Lastly, extensions to symmetric divergence between survival functions and conditions for copula dependence information are presented.
Bipartite Graph Reasoning GANs for Person Image Generation
Authors: Hao Tang, Song Bai, Philip H. S. Torr, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Pose Transfer

We present a novel Bipartite Graph Reasoning GAN (BiGraphGAN) for the challenging person image generation task. The proposed graph generator mainly consists of two novel blocks that aim to model the pose-to-pose and pose-to-image relations, respectively. Specifically, the proposed Bipartite Graph Reasoning (BGR) block aims to reason the crossing long-range relations between the source pose and the target pose in a bipartite graph, which mitigates some challenges caused by pose deformation. Moreover, we propose a new Interaction-and-Aggregation (IA) block to effectively update and enhance the feature representation capability of both person's shape and appearance in an interactive way. Experiments on two challenging and public datasets, i.e., Market-1501 and DeepFashion, show the effectiveness of the proposed BiGraphGAN in terms of objective quantitative scores and subjective visual realness. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/BiGraphGAN.
A Survey and Insights on Deployments of the Connected and Autonomous Vehicles in US
Authors: Sanchu Han
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

CV/ITS (Connected Vehicle, Intelligent Transportation System) and AV/ADS (Autonomous Vehicle, Automated Driving System) have been emerging for the sake of saving people lives, improving traffic efficiency and helping the environment for decades. There are separate efforts led respectively by USDOT with state DOTs for CV, and private sectors through market driven approach from start-ups and technology companies for AV. By CV/ITS effort there are 97 deployments of V2X communications utilizing the 5.9 GHz band, 18,877 vehicles with aftermarket V2X communications devices, and 8,098 infrastructure V2X devices installed at the roadsides. However, CV/ITS still cannot be massively deployed in US markets due to lack of regulations, dedicated wireless spectrum bands, sustainable financial & business models with mature supply chain, etc. In the other side, technology-driven AV market has been much slower than expected mainly because of immaturity of AI technology to handle different complex driving scenarios in a cost effective way. In this paper, we first present these two parallel journeys focusing on the deployments including operating models, scenarios and applications, evaluations and lessons learning. Then, come up with recommendations to a cooperative CAV approach driving a more feasible, safer, affordable and cost effective transportation, but require a great industry collaboration from Automotive, Transportation. ICT and Cloud.
Unsupervised Deep Metric Learning with Transformed Attention Consistency and Contrastive Clustering Loss
Authors: Yang Li, Shichao Kan, Zhihai He
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Clustering, Metric Learning, Triplet

Existing approaches for unsupervised metric learning focus on exploring self-supervision information within the input image itself. We observe that, when analyzing images, human eyes often compare images against each other instead of examining images individually. In addition, they often pay attention to certain keypoints, image regions, or objects which are discriminative between image classes but highly consistent within classes. Even if the image is being transformed, the attention pattern will be consistent. Motivated by this observation, we develop a new approach to unsupervised deep metric learning where the network is learned based on self-supervision information across images instead of within one single image. To characterize the consistent pattern of human attention during image comparisons, we introduce the idea of transformed attention consistency. It assumes that visually similar images, even undergoing different image transforms, should share the same consistent visual attention map. This consistency leads to a pairwise self-supervision loss, allowing us to learn a Siamese deep neural network to encode and compare images against their transformed or matched pairs. To further enhance the inter-class discriminative power of the feature generated by this network, we adapt the concept of triplet loss from supervised metric learning to our unsupervised case and introduce the contrastive clustering loss. Our extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods for unsupervised metric learning by a large margin.
An Automated, End-to-End Framework for Modeling Attacks From Vulnerability Descriptions
Authors: Hodaya Binyamini, Ron Bitton, Masaki Inokuchi, Tomohiko Yagyu, Yuval Elovici, Asaf Shabtai
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00

Attack graphs are one of the main techniques used to automate the risk assessment process. In order to derive a relevant attack graph, up-to-date information on known attack techniques should be represented as interaction rules. Designing and creating new interaction rules is not a trivial task and currently performed manually by security experts. However, since the number of new security vulnerabilities and attack techniques continuously and rapidly grows, there is a need to frequently update the rule set of attack graph tools with new attack techniques to ensure that the set of interaction rules is always up-to-date. We present a novel, end-to-end, automated framework for modeling new attack techniques from textual description of a security vulnerability. Given a description of a security vulnerability, the proposed framework first extracts the relevant attack entities required to model the attack, completes missing information on the vulnerability, and derives a new interaction rule that models the attack; this new rule is integrated within MulVAL attack graph tool. The proposed framework implements a novel pipeline that includes a dedicated cybersecurity linguistic model trained on the the NVD repository, a recurrent neural network model used for attack entity extraction, a logistic regression model used for completing the missing information, and a novel machine learning-based approach for automatically modeling the attacks as MulVAL's interaction rule. We evaluated the performance of each of the individual algorithms, as well as the complete framework and demonstrated its effectiveness.
Can We Spot the "Fake News" Before It Was Even Written?
Authors: Preslav Nakov
Date: 2020-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking

Given the recent proliferation of disinformation online, there has been also growing research interest in automatically debunking rumors, false claims, and "fake news." A number of fact-checking initiatives have been launched so far, both manual and automatic, but the whole enterprise remains in a state of crisis: by the time a claim is finally fact-checked, it could have reached millions of users, and the harm caused could hardly be undone. An arguably more promising direction is to focus on fact-checking entire news outlets, which can be done in advance. Then, we could fact-check the news before it was even written: by checking how trustworthy the outlets that published it is. We describe how we do this in the Tanbih news aggregator, which makes readers aware of what they are reading. In particular, we develop media profiles that show the general factuality of reporting, the degree of propagandistic content, hyper-partisanship, leading political ideology, general frame of reporting, and stance with respect to various claims and topics.