pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MU-GAN: Facial Attribute Editing based on Multi-attention Mechanism
Authors: Ke Zhang, Yukun Su, Xiwang Guo, Liang Qi, Zhenbing Zhao
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Decoder, Generative Adversarial Network

Facial attribute editing has mainly two objectives: 1) translating image from a source domain to a target one, and 2) only changing the facial regions related to a target attribute and preserving the attribute-excluding details. In this work, we propose a Multi-attention U-Net-based Generative Adversarial Network (MU-GAN). First, we replace a classic convolutional encoder-decoder with a symmetric U-Net-like structure in a generator, and then apply an additive attention mechanism to build attention-based U-Net connections for adaptively transferring encoder representations to complement a decoder with attribute-excluding detail and enhance attribute editing ability. Second, a self-attention mechanism is incorporated into convolutional layers for modeling long-range and multi-level dependencies across image regions. experimental results indicate that our method is capable of balancing attribute editing ability and details preservation ability, and can decouple the correlation among attributes. It outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of attribute manipulation accuracy and image quality.
Multiple F0 Estimation in Vocal Ensembles using Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Helena Cuesta, Brian McFee, Emilia Gómez
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00

This paper addresses the extraction of multiple F0 values from polyphonic and a cappella vocal performances using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We address the major challenges of ensemble singing, i.e., all melodic sources are vocals and singers sing in harmony. We build upon an existing architecture to produce a pitch salience function of the input signal, where the harmonic constant-Q transform (HCQT) and its associated phase differentials are used as an input representation. The pitch salience function is subsequently thresholded to obtain a multiple F0 estimation output. For training, we build a dataset that comprises several multi-track datasets of vocal quartets with F0 annotations. This work proposes and evaluates a set of CNNs for this task in diverse scenarios and data configurations, including recordings with additional reverb. Our models outperform a state-of-the-art method intended for the same music genre when evaluated with an increased F0 resolution, as well as a general-purpose method for multi-F0 estimation. We conclude with a discussion on future research directions.
Diversified Mutual Learning for Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Wonpyo Park, Wonjae Kim, Kihyun You, Minsu Cho
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Metric Learning, Transfer Learning, Triplet

Mutual learning is an ensemble training strategy to improve generalization by transferring individual knowledge to each other while simultaneously training multiple models. In this work, we propose an effective mutual learning method for deep metric learning, called Diversified Mutual Metric Learning, which enhances embedding models with diversified mutual learning. We transfer relational knowledge for deep metric learning by leveraging three kinds of diversities in mutual learning: (1) model diversity from different initializations of models, (2) temporal diversity from different frequencies of parameter update, and (3) view diversity from different augmentations of inputs. Our method is particularly adequate for inductive transfer learning at the lack of large-scale data, where the embedding model is initialized with a pretrained model and then fine-tuned on a target dataset. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves individual models as well as their ensemble. Finally, the proposed method with a conventional triplet loss achieves the state-of-the-art performance of Recall@1 on standard datasets: 69.9 on CUB-200-2011 and 89.1 on CARS-196.
Revealing Lung Affections from CTs. A Comparative Analysis of Various Deep Learning Approaches for Dealing with Volumetric Data
Authors: Radu Miron, Cosmin Moisii, Mihaela Breaban
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

The paper presents and comparatively analyses several deep learning approaches to automatically detect tuberculosis related lesions in lung CTs, in the context of the ImageClef 2020 Tuberculosis task. Three classes of methods, different with respect to the way the volumetric data is given as input to neural network-based classifiers are discussed and evaluated. All these come with a rich experimental analysis comprising a variety of neural network architectures, various segmentation algorithms and data augmentation schemes. The reported work belongs to the SenticLab.UAIC team, which obtained the best results in the competition.
One-shot Text Field Labeling using Attention and Belief Propagation for Structure Information Extraction
Authors: Mengli Cheng, Minghui Qiu, Xing Shi, Jun Huang, Wei. Lin
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: One-Shot Learning, Text Detection

Structured information extraction from document images usually consists of three steps: text detection, text recognition, and text field labeling. While text detection and text recognition have been heavily studied and improved a lot in literature, text field labeling is less explored and still faces many challenges. Existing learning based methods for text labeling task usually require a large amount of labeled examples to train a specific model for each type of document. However, collecting large amounts of document images and labeling them is difficult and sometimes impossible due to privacy issues. Deploying separate models for each type of document also consumes a lot of resources. Facing these challenges, we explore one-shot learning for the text field labeling task. Existing one-shot learning methods for the task are mostly rule-based and have difficulty in labeling fields in crowded regions with few landmarks and fields consisting of multiple separate text regions. To alleviate these problems, we proposed a novel deep end-to-end trainable approach for one-shot text field labeling, which makes use of attention mechanism to transfer the layout information between document images. We further applied conditional random field on the transferred layout information for the refinement of field labeling. We collected and annotated a real-world one-shot field labeling dataset with a large variety of document types and conducted extensive experiments to examine the effectiveness of the proposed model. To stimulate research in this direction, the collected dataset and the one-shot model will be released1.
Kernel-based parameter estimation of dynamical systems with unknown observation functions
Authors: Ofir Lindenbaum, Amir Sagiv, Gal Mishne, Ronen Talmon
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

A low-dimensional dynamical system is observed in an experiment as a high-dimensional signal; for example, a video of a chaotic pendulums system. Assuming that we know the dynamical model up to some unknown parameters, can we estimate the underlying system's parameters by measuring its time-evolution only once? The key information for performing this estimation lies in the temporal inter-dependencies between the signal and the model. We propose a kernel-based score to compare these dependencies. Our score generalizes a maximum likelihood estimator for a linear model to a general nonlinear setting in an unknown feature space. We estimate the system's underlying parameters by maximizing the proposed score. We demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of the method using two chaotic dynamical systems - the double pendulum and the Lorenz '63 model.
SoK: Certified Robustness for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Linyi Li, Tao Xie, Bo Li
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Great advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have led to state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of tasks. However, recent studies have shown that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which have brought great concerns when deploying these models to safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Different defense approaches have been proposed against adversarial attacks, including: a) empirical defenses, which can usually be adaptively attacked again without providing robustness certification; and b) certifiably robust approaches, which consist of robustness verification providing the lower bound of robust accuracy against any attacks under certain conditions and corresponding robust training approaches. In this paper, we systematize certifiably robust approaches and related practical and theoretical implications and findings. We also provide the first comprehensive benchmark on existing robustness verification and training approaches on different datasets. In particular, we 1) provide a taxonomy for the robustness verification and training approaches, as well as summarize the methodologies for representative algorithms, 2) reveal the characteristics, strengths, limitations, and fundamental connections among these approaches, 3) discuss current research progresses, theoretical barriers, main challenges, and future directions for certifiably robust approaches for DNNs, and 4) provide an open-sourced unified platform to evaluate 20+ representative certifiably robust approaches.
Single Image Super-Resolution for Domain-Specific Ultra-Low Bandwidth Image Transmission
Authors: Jesper Haahr Christensen, Lars Valdemar Mogensen, Ole Ravn
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Low-bandwidth communication, such as underwater acoustic communication, is limited by best-case data rates of 30--50 kbit/s. This renders such channels unusable or inefficient at best for single image, video, or other bandwidth-demanding sensor-data transmission. To combat data-transmission bottlenecks, we consider practical use-cases within the maritime domain and investigate the prospect of Single Image Super-Resolution methodologies. This is investigated on a large, diverse dataset obtained during years of trawl fishing where cameras have been placed in the fishing nets. We propose down-sampling images to a low-resolution low-size version of about 1 kB that satisfies underwater acoustic bandwidth requirements for even several frames per second. A neural network is then trained to perform up-sampling, trying to reconstruct the original image. We aim to investigate the quality of reconstructed images and prospects for such methods in practical use-cases in general. Our focus in this work is solely on learning to reconstruct the high-resolution images on "real-world" data. We show that our method achieves better perceptual quality and superior reconstruction than generic bicubic up-sampling and motivates further work in this area for underwater applications.
FleXOR: Trainable Fractional Quantization
Authors: Dongsoo Lee, Se Jung Kwon, Byeongwook Kim, Yongkweon Jeon, Baeseong Park, Jeongin Yun
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Quantization

Quantization based on the binary codes is gaining attention because each quantized bit can be directly utilized for computations without dequantization using look-up tables. Previous attempts, however, only allow for integer numbers of quantization bits, which ends up restricting the search space for compression ratio and accuracy. In this paper, we propose an encryption algorithm/architecture to compress quantized weights so as to achieve fractional numbers of bits per weight. Decryption during inference is implemented by digital XOR-gate networks added into the neural network model while XOR gates are described by utilizing $\tanh(x)$ for backward propagation to enable gradient calculations. We perform experiments using MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet to show that inserting XOR gates learns quantization/encrypted bit decisions through training and obtains high accuracy even for fractional sub 1-bit weights. As a result, our proposed method yields smaller size and higher model accuracy compared to binary neural networks.
On the Orthogonality of Knowledge Distillation with Other Techniques: From an Ensemble Perspective
Authors: SeongUk Park, KiYoon Yoo, Nojun Kwak
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Efficient Neural Network, Knowledge Distillation, Quantization

To put a state-of-the-art neural network to practical use, it is necessary to design a model that has a good trade-off between the resource consumption and performance on the test set. Many researchers and engineers are developing methods that enable training or designing a model more efficiently. Developing an efficient model includes several strategies such as network architecture search, pruning, quantization, knowledge distillation, utilizing cheap convolution, regularization, and also includes any craft that leads to a better performance-resource trade-off. When combining these technologies together, it would be ideal if one source of performance improvement does not conflict with others. We call this property as the orthogonality in model efficiency. In this paper, we focus on knowledge distillation and demonstrate that knowledge distillation methods are orthogonal to other efficiency-enhancing methods both analytically and empirically. Analytically, we claim that knowledge distillation functions analogous to a ensemble method, bootstrap aggregating. This analytical explanation is provided from the perspective of implicit data augmentation property of knowledge distillation. Empirically, we verify knowledge distillation as a powerful apparatus for practical deployment of efficient neural network, and also introduce ways to integrate it with other methods effectively.
Real-time Plant Health Assessment Via Implementing Cloud-based Scalable Transfer Learning On AWS DeepLens
Authors: Asim Khan, Umair Nawaz, Anwaar Ulhaq, Randall W. Robinson
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Transfer Learning

In the Agriculture sector, control of plant leaf diseases is crucial as it influences the quality and production of plant species with an impact on the economy of any country. Therefore, automated identification and classification of plant leaf disease at an early stage is essential to reduce economic loss and to conserve the specific species. Previously, to detect and classify plant leaf disease, various Machine Learning models have been proposed; however, they lack usability due to hardware incompatibility, limited scalability and inefficiency in practical usage. Our proposed DeepLens Classification and Detection Model (DCDM) approach deal with such limitations by introducing automated detection and classification of the leaf diseases in fruits (apple, grapes, peach and strawberry) and vegetables (potato and tomato) via scalable transfer learning on AWS SageMaker and importing it on AWS DeepLens for real-time practical usability. Cloud integration provides scalability and ubiquitous access to our approach. Our experiments on extensive image data set of healthy and unhealthy leaves of fruits and vegetables showed an accuracy of 98.78% with a real-time diagnosis of plant leaves diseases. We used forty thousand images for the training of deep learning model and then evaluated it on ten thousand images. The process of testing an image for disease diagnosis and classification using AWS DeepLens on average took 0.349s, providing disease information to the user in less than a second.
Understanding the Dynamics of Drivers' Locations for Passengers Pickup Performance: A Case Study
Authors: Punit Rathore, Ali Zonoozi, Omid Geramifard, Tan Kian Lee
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

With the emergence of e-hailing taxi services, a growing number of scholars have attempted to analyze the taxi trips data to gain insights from drivers' and passengers' flow patterns and understand different dynamics of urban public transportation. Existing studies are limited to passengers' location analysis e.g., pick-up and drop-off points, in the context of maximizing the profits or better managing the resources for service providers. Moreover, taxi drivers' locations at the time of pick-up requests and their pickup performance in the spatial-temporal domain have not been explored. In this paper, we analyze drivers' and passengers' locations at the time of booking request in the context of drivers' pick-up performances. To facilitate our analysis, we implement a modified and extended version of a co-clustering technique, called sco-iVAT, to obtain useful clusters and co-clusters from big relational data, derived from booking records of Grab ride-hailing service in Singapore. We also explored the possibility of predicting timely pickup for a given booking request, without using entire trajectories data. Finally, we devised two scoring mechanisms to compute pickup performance score for all driver candidates for a booking request. These scores could be integrated into a booking assignment model to prioritize top-performing drivers for passenger pickups.
Rule-Guided Graph Neural Networks for Recommender Systems
Authors: Xinze Lyu, Guangyao Li, Jiacheng Huang, Wei Hu
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Knowledge Graphs, Recommendation Systems

To alleviate the cold start problem caused by collaborative filtering in recommender systems, knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly employed by many methods as auxiliary resources. However, existing work incorporated with KGs cannot capture the explicit long-range semantics between users and items meanwhile consider various connectivity between items. In this paper, we propose RGRec, which combines rule learning and graph neural networks (GNNs) for recommendation. RGRec first maps items to corresponding entities in KGs and adds users as new entities. Then, it automatically learns rules to model the explicit long-range semantics, and captures the connectivity between entities by aggregation to better encode various information. We show the effectiveness of RGRec on three real-world datasets. Particularly, the combination of rule learning and GNNs achieves substantial improvement compared to methods only using either of them.
Comparative Study of Language Models on Cross-Domain Data with Model Agnostic Explainability
Authors: Mayank Chhipa, Hrushikesh Mahesh Vazurkar, Abhijeet Kumar, Mridul Mishra
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

With the recent influx of bidirectional contextualized transformer language models in the NLP, it becomes a necessity to have a systematic comparative study of these models on variety of datasets. Also, the performance of these language models has not been explored on non-GLUE datasets. The study presented in paper compares the state-of-the-art language models - BERT, ELECTRA and its derivatives which include RoBERTa, ALBERT and DistilBERT. We conducted experiments by finetuning these models for cross domain and disparate data and penned an in-depth analysis of model's performances. Moreover, an explainability of language models coherent with pretraining is presented which verifies the context capturing capabilities of these models through a model agnostic approach. The experimental results establish new state-of-the-art for Yelp 2013 rating classification task and Financial Phrasebank sentiment detection task with 69% accuracy and 88.2% accuracy respectively. Finally, the study conferred here can greatly assist industry researchers in choosing the language model effectively in terms of performance or compute efficiency.
Deep Metric Learning Meets Deep Clustering: An Novel Unsupervised Approach for Feature Embedding
Authors: Binh X. Nguyen, Binh D. Nguyen, Gustavo Carneiro, Erman Tjiputra, Quang D. Tran, Thanh-Toan Do
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Clustering, Deep Clustering, Metric Learning, Triplet

Unsupervised Deep Distance Metric Learning (UDML) aims to learn sample similarities in the embedding space from an unlabeled dataset. Traditional UDML methods usually use the triplet loss or pairwise loss which requires the mining of positive and negative samples w.r.t. anchor data points. This is, however, challenging in an unsupervised setting as the label information is not available. In this paper, we propose a new UDML method that overcomes that challenge. In particular, we propose to use a deep clustering loss to learn centroids, i.e., pseudo labels, that represent semantic classes. During learning, these centroids are also used to reconstruct the input samples. It hence ensures the representativeness of centroids - each centroid represents visually similar samples. Therefore, the centroids give information about positive (visually similar) and negative (visually dissimilar) samples. Based on pseudo labels, we propose a novel unsupervised metric loss which enforces the positive concentration and negative separation of samples in the embedding space. Experimental results on benchmarking datasets show that the proposed approach outperforms other UDML methods.
Deep learning for gravitational-wave data analysis: A resampling white-box approach
Authors: Manuel D. Morales, Javier M. Antelis, Claudia Moreno, Alexander I. Nesterov
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series Analysis

In this work, we apply Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to detect gravitational wave (GW) signals of compact binary coalescences, using single-interferometer data from LIGO detectors. As novel contribution, we adopted a resampling white-box approach to advance towards a statistical understanding of uncertainties intrinsic to CNNs in GW data analysis. Resampling is performed by repeated $k$-fold cross-validation experiments, and for a white-box approach, behavior of CNNs is mathematically described in detail. Through a Morlet wavelet transform, strain time series are converted to time-frequency images, which in turn are reduced before generating input datasets. Moreover, to reproduce more realistic experimental conditions, we worked only with data of non-Gaussian noise and hardware injections, removing freedom to set signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values in GW templates by hand. After hyperparameter adjustments, we found that resampling smooths stochasticity of mini-batch stochastic gradient descend by reducing mean accuracy perturbations in a factor of $3.6$. CNNs were quite precise to detect noise but not sensitive enough to recall GW signals, meaning that CNNs are better for noise reduction than generation of GW triggers. However, applying a post-analysis, we found that for GW signals of SNR $\geq 21.80$ with H1 data and SNR $\geq 26.80$ with L1 data, CNNs could remain as tentative alternatives for detecting GW signals. Besides, with receiving operating characteristic curves we found that CNNs show much better performances than those of Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines models and, with a significance level of $5\%$, we estimated that predictions of CNNs are significant different from those of a random classifier. Finally, we elucidated that performance of CNNs is highly class dependent because of the distribution of probabilistic scores outputted by the softmax layer.
Central Yup'ik and Machine Translation of Low-Resource Polysynthetic Languages
Authors: Christopher Liu, Laura Dominé, Kevin Chavez, Richard Socher
Date: 2020-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Machine translation tools do not yet exist for the Yup'ik language, a polysynthetic language spoken by around 8,000 people who live primarily in Southwest Alaska. We compiled a parallel text corpus for Yup'ik and English and developed a morphological parser for Yup'ik based on grammar rules. We trained a seq2seq neural machine translation model with attention to translate Yup'ik input into English. We then compared the influence of different tokenization methods, namely rule-based, unsupervised (byte pair encoding), and unsupervised morphological (Morfessor) parsing, on BLEU score accuracy for Yup'ik to English translation. We find that using tokenized input increases the translation accuracy compared to that of unparsed input. Although overall Morfessor did best with a vocabulary size of 30k, our first experiments show that BPE performed best with a reduced vocabulary size.