pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Deep Convolutional Neural Network for the Detection of Polyps in Colonoscopy Images
Authors: Tariq Rahim, Syed Ali Hassan, Soo Young Shin
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Computerized detection of colonic polyps remains an unsolved issue because of the wide variation in the appearance, texture, color, size, and presence of the multiple polyp-like imitators during colonoscopy. In this paper, we propose a deep convolutional neural network based model for the computerized detection of polyps within colonoscopy images. The proposed model comprises 16 convolutional layers with 2 fully connected layers, and a Softmax layer, where we implement a unique approach using different convolutional kernels within the same hidden layer for deeper feature extraction. We applied two different activation functions, MISH and rectified linear unit activation functions for deeper propagation of information and self regularized smooth non-monotonicity. Furthermore, we used a generalized intersection of union, thus overcoming issues such as scale invariance, rotation, and shape. Data augmentation techniques such as photometric and geometric distortions are adapted to overcome the obstacles faced in polyp detection. Detailed benchmarked results are provided, showing better performance in terms of precision, sensitivity, F1- score, F2- score, and dice-coefficient, thus proving the efficacy of the proposed model.
Site Reliability Engineering: Application of Item Response Theory to Application Deployment Practices and Controls
Authors: Kiran Mahesh ND
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00

Reliability of an application or solution in production environment is one of the fundamental features where every SRE team is critically focused upon. At the same time achieving extreme reliability comes with the cost which include but not limited to slow pace of new feature deployments, operations cost and opportunity cost. One such earlier effort in giving an objective metric to strike the fine balance between acceptable reliability and product velocity is error budget and its associated policy. There are also contemporary deployment guidelines and controls per organization to ascertain the reliability of an application deployment version into customer facing or production environments. This work proposes new objective metrics called Application Deployment Score estimated using dichotomous Item Response Theory model. This score is used to assess the improvement trend of each application version deployed into customer facing environment, identify the improvement scope for each application deployment in each area of deployment guidelines and controls, adjust the error budget i.e. soft error budget of a interdependent application in application mesh by giving soft collective responsibility and finally defines a new metric called deployment index which helps to assess the effectiveness of these contemporary deployment guidelines and controls in upholding the agreed SLOs of the application in customer facing environments. This study opens a new field of research in developing new underlying latent indexes (i.e. new objective metrics) in SRE and DevOps space.
Performance of Hyperbolic Geometry Models on Top-N Recommendation Tasks
Authors: Leyla Mirvakhabova, Evgeny Frolov, Valentin Khrulkov, Ivan Oseledets, Alexander Tuzhilin
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering

We introduce a simple autoencoder based on hyperbolic geometry for solving standard collaborative filtering problem. In contrast to many modern deep learning techniques, we build our solution using only a single hidden layer. Remarkably, even with such a minimalistic approach, we not only outperform the Euclidean counterpart but also achieve a competitive performance with respect to the current state-of-the-art. We additionally explore the effects of space curvature on the quality of hyperbolic models and propose an efficient data-driven method for estimating its optimal value.
Single image dehazing for a variety of haze scenarios using back projected pyramid network
Authors: Ayush Singh, Ajay Bhave, Dilip K. Prasad
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Dehazing, Nonhomogeneous Image Dehazing, Single Image Dehazing

Learning to dehaze single hazy images, especially using a small training dataset is quite challenging. We propose a novel generative adversarial network architecture for this problem, namely back projected pyramid network (BPPNet), that gives good performance for a variety of challenging haze conditions, including dense haze and inhomogeneous haze. Our architecture incorporates learning of multiple levels of complexities while retaining spatial context through iterative blocks of UNets and structural information of multiple scales through a novel pyramidal convolution block. These blocks together for the generator and are amenable to learning through back projection. We have shown that our network can be trained without over-fitting using as few as 20 image pairs of hazy and non-hazy images. We report the state of the art performances on NTIRE 2018 homogeneous haze datasets for indoor and outdoor images, NTIRE 2019 denseHaze dataset, and NTIRE 2020 non-homogeneous haze dataset.
On Efficient Low Distortion Ultrametric Embedding
Authors: Vincent Cohen-Addad, Karthik C. S., Guillaume Lagarde
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

A classic problem in unsupervised learning and data analysis is to find simpler and easy-to-visualize representations of the data that preserve its essential properties. A widely-used method to preserve the underlying hierarchical structure of the data while reducing its complexity is to find an embedding of the data into a tree or an ultrametric. The most popular algorithms for this task are the classic linkage algorithms (single, average, or complete). However, these methods on a data set of $n$ points in $\Omega(\log n)$ dimensions exhibit a quite prohibitive running time of $\Theta(n^2)$. In this paper, we provide a new algorithm which takes as input a set of points $P$ in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and for every $c\ge 1$, runs in time $n^{1+\frac{\rho}{c^2}}$ (for some universal constant $\rho>1$) to output an ultrametric $\Delta$ such that for any two points $u,v$ in $P$, we have $\Delta(u,v)$ is within a multiplicative factor of $5c$ to the distance between $u$ and $v$ in the "best" ultrametric representation of $P$. Here, the best ultrametric is the ultrametric $\tilde\Delta$ that minimizes the maximum distance distortion with respect to the $\ell_2$ distance, namely that minimizes $\underset{u,v \in P}{\max}\ \frac{\tilde\Delta(u,v)}{\|u-v\|_2}$. We complement the above result by showing that under popular complexity theoretic assumptions, for every constant $\varepsilon>0$, no algorithm with running time $n^{2-\varepsilon}$ can distinguish between inputs in $\ell_\infty$-metric that admit isometric embedding and those that incur a distortion of $\frac{3}{2}$. Finally, we present empirical evaluation on classic machine learning datasets and show that the output of our algorithm is comparable to the output of the linkage algorithms while achieving a much faster running time.
Curriculum Learning for Recurrent Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Maria Gonzalez-i-Calabuig, Carles Ventura, Xavier Giró-i-Nieto
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Video object segmentation can be understood as a sequence-to-sequence task that can benefit from the curriculum learning strategies for better and faster training of deep neural networks. This work explores different schedule sampling and frame skipping variations to significantly improve the performance of a recurrent architecture. Our results on the car class of the KITTI-MOTS challenge indicate that, surprisingly, an inverse schedule sampling is a better option than a classic forward one. Also, that a progressive skipping of frames during training is beneficial, but only when training with the ground truth masks instead of the predicted ones. Source code and trained models are available at http://imatge-upc.github.io/rvos-mots/.
Autonomous Braking and Throttle System: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Naturalistic Driving
Authors: Varshit S. Dubey, Ruhshad Kasad, Karan Agrawal
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Autonomous Braking and Throttle control is key in developing safe driving systems for the future. There exists a need for autonomous vehicles to negotiate a multi-agent environment while ensuring safety and comfort. A Deep Reinforcement Learning based autonomous throttle and braking system is presented. For each time step, the proposed system makes a decision to apply the brake or throttle. The throttle and brake are modelled as continuous action space values. We demonstrate 2 scenarios where there is a need for a sophisticated braking and throttle system, i.e when there is a static obstacle in front of our agent like a car, stop sign. The second scenario consists of 2 vehicles approaching an intersection. The policies for brake and throttle control are learned through computer simulation using Deep deterministic policy gradients. The experiment shows that the system not only avoids a collision, but also it ensures that there is smooth change in the values of throttle/brake as it gets out of the emergency situation and abides by the speed regulations, i.e the system resembles human driving.
Label-Wise Document Pre-Training for Multi-Label Text Classification
Authors: Han Liu, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Document Classification, General Classification, Multi Label Text Classification, Multi-Label Text Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

A major challenge of multi-label text classification (MLTC) is to stimulatingly exploit possible label differences and label correlations. In this paper, we tackle this challenge by developing Label-Wise Pre-Training (LW-PT) method to get a document representation with label-aware information. The basic idea is that, a multi-label document can be represented as a combination of multiple label-wise representations, and that, correlated labels always cooccur in the same or similar documents. LW-PT implements this idea by constructing label-wise document classification tasks and trains label-wise document encoders. Finally, the pre-trained label-wise encoder is fine-tuned with the downstream MLTC task. Extensive experimental results validate that the proposed method has significant advantages over the previous state-of-the-art models and is able to discover reasonable label relationship. The code is released to facilitate other researchers.
Explainability in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Alexandre Heuillet, Fabien Couthouis, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A large set of the explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) literature is emerging on feature relevance techniques to explain a deep neural network (DNN) output or explaining models that ingest image source data. However, assessing how XAI techniques can help understand models beyond classification tasks, e.g. for reinforcement learning (RL), has not been extensively studied. We review recent works in the direction to attain Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL), a relatively new subfield of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, intended to be used in general public applications, with diverse audiences, requiring ethical, responsible and trustable algorithms. In critical situations where it is essential to justify and explain the agent's behaviour, better explainability and interpretability of RL models could help gain scientific insight on the inner workings of what is still considered a black box. We evaluate mainly studies directly linking explainability to RL, and split these into two categories according to the way the explanations are generated: transparent algorithms and post-hoc explainaility. We also review the most prominent XAI works from the lenses of how they could potentially enlighten the further deployment of the latest advances in RL, in the demanding present and future of everyday problems.
How to build your own ASP-based system?!
Authors: Roland Kaminski, Javier Romero, Torsten Schaub, Philipp Wanko
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00

Answer Set Programming (ASP) has become a popular and quite sophisticated approach to declarative problem solving. This is arguably due to its attractive modeling-grounding-solving workflow that provides an easy approach to problem solving, even for laypersons outside computer science. Unlike this, the high degree of sophistication of the underlying technology makes it increasingly hard for ASP experts to put ideas into practice. For addressing this issue, this tutorial aims at enabling users to build their own ASP-based systems. More precisely, we show how the ASP system CLINGO can be used for extending ASP and for implementing customized special-purpose systems. To this end, we propose two alternatives. We begin with a traditional AI technique and show how meta programming can be used for extending ASP. This is a rather light approach that relies on CLINGO's reification feature to use ASP itself for expressing new functionalities. Unlike this, the major part of this tutorial uses traditional programming (in PYTHON) for manipulating CLINGO via its application programming interface. This approach allows for changing and controlling the entire model-ground-solve workflow of ASP. Central to this is CLINGO's new Application class that allows us to draw on CLINGO's infrastructure by customizing processes similar to the one in CLINGO. For instance, we may engage manipulations to programs' abstract syntax trees, control various forms of multi-shot solving, and set up theory propagators for foreign inferences. Another cross-sectional structure, spanning meta as well as application programming, is CLINGO's intermediate format, ASPIF, that specifies the interface among the underlying grounder and solver. We illustrate the aforementioned concepts and techniques throughout this tutorial by means of examples and several non-trivial case-studies.
Natural Reweighted Wake-Sleep
Authors: Csongor Várady, Riccardo Volpi, Luigi Malagò, Nihat Ay
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop DL-IG 2020 12
Tasks: Decoder

Helmholtz Machines (HMs) are a class of generative models composed of two Sigmoid Belief Networks (SBNs), acting respectively as an encoder and a decoder. These models are commonly trained using a two-step optimization algorithm called Wake-Sleep (WS) and more recently by improved versions, such as Reweighted Wake-Sleep (RWS) and Bidirectional Helmholtz Machines (BiHM). The locality of the connections in an SBN induces sparsity in the Fisher Information Matrices associated to the probabilistic models, in the form of a finely-grained block-diagonal structure. In this paper we exploit this property to efficiently train SBNs and HMs using the natural gradient. We present a novel algorithm, called Natural Reweighted Wake-Sleep (NRWS), that corresponds to the geometric adaptation of its standard version. In a similar manner, we also introduce Natural Bidirectional Helmholtz Machine (NBiHM). Differently from previous work, we will show how for HMs the natural gradient can be efficiently computed without the need of introducing any approximation in the structure of the Fisher information matrix. The experiments performed on standard datasets from the literature show a consistent improvement of NRWS and NBiHM not only with respect to their non-geometric baselines but also with respect to state-of-the-art training algorithms for HMs. The improvement is quantified both in terms of speed of convergence as well as value of the log-likelihood reached after training.
Crossing The Gap: A Deep Dive into Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Transfer for Dynamics
Authors: Eugene Valassakis, Zihan Ding, Edward Johns
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00

Zero-shot sim-to-real transfer of tasks with complex dynamics is a highly challenging and unsolved problem. A number of solutions have been proposed in recent years, but we have found that many works do not present a thorough evaluation in the real world, or underplay the significant engineering effort and task-specific fine tuning that is required to achieve the published results. In this paper, we dive deeper into the sim-to-real transfer challenge, investigate why this is such a difficult problem, and present objective evaluations of a number of transfer methods across a range of real-world tasks. Surprisingly, we found that a method which simply injects random forces into the simulation performs just as well as more complex methods, such as those which randomise the simulator's dynamics parameters, or adapt a policy online using recurrent network architectures.
Jointly Fine-Tuning "BERT-like" Self Supervised Models to Improve Multimodal Speech Emotion Recognition
Authors: Shamane Siriwardhana, Andrew Reis, Rivindu Weerasekera, Suranga Nanayakkara
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00

Multimodal emotion recognition from speech is an important area in affective computing. Fusing multiple data modalities and learning representations with limited amounts of labeled data is a challenging task. In this paper, we explore the use of modality-specific "BERT-like" pretrained Self Supervised Learning (SSL) architectures to represent both speech and text modalities for the task of multimodal speech emotion recognition. By conducting experiments on three publicly available datasets (IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSEI, and CMU-MOSI), we show that jointly fine-tuning "BERT-like" SSL architectures achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. We also evaluate two methods of fusing speech and text modalities and show that a simple fusion mechanism can outperform more complex ones when using SSL models that have similar architectural properties to BERT.
Preferential Bayesian optimisation with Skew Gaussian Processes
Authors: Alessio Benavoli, Dario Azzimonti, Dario Piga
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimisation, Gaussian Processes, Recommendation Systems, valid

Preferential Bayesian optimisation (PBO) deals with optimisation problems where the objective function can only be accessed via preference judgments, such as "this is better than that" between two candidate solutions (like in A/B tests or recommender systems). The state-of-the-art approach to PBO uses a Gaussian process to model the preference function and a Bernoulli likelihood to model the observed pairwise comparisons. Laplace's method is then employed to compute posterior inferences and, in particular, to build an appropriate acquisition function. In this paper, we prove that the true posterior distribution of the preference function is a Skew Gaussian Process (SkewGP), with highly skewed pairwise marginals and, thus, show that Laplace's method usually provides a very poor approximation. We then derive an efficient method to compute the exact SkewGP posterior and use it as surrogate model for PBO employing standard acquisition functions (Upper Credible Bound, etc.). We illustrate the benefits of our exact PBO-SkewGP in a variety of experiments, by showing that it consistently outperforms PBO based on Laplace's approximation both in terms of convergence speed and computational time. We also show that our framework can be extended to deal with mixed preferential-categorical BO, where binary judgments (valid or non-valid) together with preference judgments are available.
BroadFace: Looking at Tens of Thousands of People at Once for Face Recognition
Authors: Yonghyun Kim, Wonpyo Park, Jongju Shin
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Face Identification, Face Recognition, Face Verification, Image Retrieval, Retrieval

The datasets of face recognition contain an enormous number of identities and instances. However, conventional methods have difficulty in reflecting the entire distribution of the datasets because a mini-batch of small size contains only a small portion of all identities. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a novel method called BroadFace, which is a learning process to consider a massive set of identities, comprehensively. In BroadFace, a linear classifier learns optimal decision boundaries among identities from a large number of embedding vectors accumulated over past iterations. By referring more instances at once, the optimality of the classifier is naturally increased on the entire datasets. Thus, the encoder is also globally optimized by referring the weight matrix of the classifier. Moreover, we propose a novel compensation method to increase the number of referenced instances in the training stage. BroadFace can be easily applied on many existing methods to accelerate a learning process and obtain a significant improvement in accuracy without extra computational burden at inference stage. We perform extensive ablation studies and experiments on various datasets to show the effectiveness of BroadFace, and also empirically prove the validity of our compensation method. BroadFace achieves the state-of-the-art results with significant improvements on nine datasets in 1:1 face verification and 1:N face identification tasks, and is also effective in image retrieval.
ECG beats classification via online sparse dictionary and time pyramid matching
Authors: Nanyu Li, Yujuan Si, Duo Deng, Chunyu Yuan
Date: 2020-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Dictionary Learning, ECG Classification, General Classification, Quantization

Recently, the Bag-Of-Word (BOW) algorithm provides efficient features and promotes the accuracy of the ECG classification system. However, BOW algorithm has two shortcomings: (1). it has large quantization errors and poor reconstruction performance; (2). it loses heart beat's time information, and may provide confusing features for different kinds of heart beats. Furthermore, ECG classification system can be used for long time monitoring and analysis of cardiovascular patients, while a huge amount of data will be produced, so we urgently need an efficient compression algorithm. In view of the above problems, we use the wavelet feature to construct the sparse dictionary, which lower the quantization error to a minimum. In order to reduce the complexity of our algorithm and adapt to large-scale heart beats operation, we combine the Online Dictionary Learning with Feature-sign algorithm to update the dictionary and coefficients. Coefficients matrix is used to represent ECG beats, which greatly reduces the memory consumption, and solve the problem of quantitative error simultaneously. Finally, we construct the pyramid to match coefficients of each ECG beat. Thus, we obtain the features that contain the beat time information by time stochastic pooling. It is efficient to solve the problem of losing time information. The experimental results show that: on the one hand, the proposed algorithm has advantages of high reconstruction performance for BOW, this storage method is high fidelity and low memory consumption; on the other hand, our algorithm yields highest accuracy in ECG beats classification; so this method is more suitable for large-scale heart beats data storage and classification.