pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Revisiting Rubik's Cube: Self-supervised Learning with Volume-wise Transformation for 3D Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Xing Tao, Yuexiang Li, Wenhui Zhou, Kai Ma, Yefeng Zheng
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Pancreas Segmentation, Rubik's Cube, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning highly relies on the quantity of annotated data. However, the annotations for 3D volumetric medical data require experienced physicians to spend hours or even days for investigation. Self-supervised learning is a potential solution to get rid of the strong requirement of training data by deeply exploiting raw data information. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised learning framework for volumetric medical images. Specifically, we propose a context restoration task, i.e., Rubik's cube++, to pre-train 3D neural networks. Different from the existing context-restoration-based approaches, we adopt a volume-wise transformation for context permutation, which encourages network to better exploit the inherent 3D anatomical information of organs. Compared to the strategy of training from scratch, fine-tuning from the Rubik's cube++ pre-trained weight can achieve better performance in various tasks such as pancreas segmentation and brain tissue segmentation. The experimental results show that our self-supervised learning method can significantly improve the accuracy of 3D deep learning networks on volumetric medical datasets without the use of extra data.
Tackling scalability issues in mining path patterns from knowledge graphs: a preliminary study
Authors: Pierre Monnin, Emmanuel Bresso, Miguel Couceiro, Malika Smaïl-Tabbone, Amedeo Napoli, Adrien Coulet
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Knowledge Graphs, World Knowledge

Features mined from knowledge graphs are widely used within multiple knowledge discovery tasks such as classification or fact-checking. Here, we consider a given set of vertices, called seed vertices, and focus on mining their associated neighboring vertices, paths, and, more generally, path patterns that involve classes of ontologies linked with knowledge graphs. Due to the combinatorial nature and the increasing size of real-world knowledge graphs, the task of mining these patterns immediately entails scalability issues. In this paper, we address these issues by proposing a pattern mining approach that relies on a set of constraints (e.g., support or degree thresholds) and the monotonicity property. As our motivation comes from the mining of real-world knowledge graphs, we illustrate our approach with PGxLOD, a biomedical knowledge graph.
Neural Architecture Search For LF-MMI Trained Time Delay Neural Networks
Authors: Shoukang Hu, Xurong Xie, Shansong Liu, Mingyu Cui, Mengzhe Geng, Xunying Liu, Helen Meng
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Neural Architecture Search, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Deep neural networks (DNNs) based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are often designed using expert knowledge and empirical evaluation. In this paper, a range of neural architecture search (NAS) techniques are used to automatically learn two types of hyper-parameters of state-of-the-art factored time delay neural networks (TDNNs): i) the left and right splicing context offsets; and ii) the dimensionality of the bottleneck linear projection at each hidden layer. These include the DARTS method integrating architecture selection with lattice-free MMI (LF-MMI) TDNN training; Gumbel-Softmax and pipelined DARTS reducing the confusion over candidate architectures and improving the generalization of architecture selection; and Penalized DARTS incorporating resource constraints to adjust the trade-off between performance and system complexity. Parameter sharing among candidate architectures allows efficient search over up to $7^{28}$ different TDNN systems. Experiments conducted on the 300-hour Switchboard corpus suggest the auto-configured systems consistently outperform the baseline LF-MMI TDNN systems using manual network design or random architecture search after LHUC speaker adaptation and RNNLM rescoring. Absolute word error rate (WER) reductions up to 1.0\% and relative model size reduction of 28\% were obtained. Consistent performance improvements were also obtained on a UASpeech disordered speech recognition task using the proposed NAS approaches.
Visual Relation Grounding in Videos
Authors: Junbin Xiao, Xindi Shang, Xun Yang, Sheng Tang, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Question Answering, Relation, Video Question Answering, Visual Grounding

In this paper, we explore a novel task named visual Relation Grounding in Videos (vRGV). The task aims at spatio-temporally localizing the given relations in the form of subject-predicate-object in the videos, so as to provide supportive visual facts for other high-level video-language tasks (e.g., video-language grounding and video question answering). The challenges in this task include but not limited to: (1) both the subject and object are required to be spatio-temporally localized to ground a query relation; (2) the temporal dynamic nature of visual relations in videos is difficult to capture; and (3) the grounding should be achieved without any direct supervision in space and time. To ground the relations, we tackle the challenges by collaboratively optimizing two sequences of regions over a constructed hierarchical spatio-temporal region graph through relation attending and reconstruction, in which we further propose a message passing mechanism by spatial attention shifting between visual entities. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can not only outperform baseline approaches significantly, but also produces visually meaningful facts to support visual grounding. (Code is available at https://github.com/doc-doc/vRGV).
Latent Instrumental Variables as Priors in Causal Inference based on Independence of Cause and Mechanism
Authors: Nataliya Sokolovska, Pierre-Henri Wuillemin
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Causal Inference

Causal inference methods based on conditional independence construct Markov equivalent graphs, and cannot be applied to bivariate cases. The approaches based on independence of cause and mechanism state, on the contrary, that causal discovery can be inferred for two observations. In our contribution, we challenge to reconcile these two research directions. We study the role of latent variables such as latent instrumental variables and hidden common causes in the causal graphical structures. We show that the methods based on the independence of cause and mechanism, indirectly contain traces of the existence of the hidden instrumental variables. We derive a novel algorithm to infer causal relationships between two variables, and we validate the proposed method on simulated data and on a benchmark of cause-effect pairs. We illustrate by our experiments that the proposed approach is simple and extremely competitive in terms of empirical accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
A Hölderian backtracking method for min-max and min-min problems
Authors: Jérôme Bolte, Lilian Glaudin, Edouard Pauwels, Mathieu Serrurier
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00

We present a new algorithm to solve min-max or min-min problems out of the convex world. We use rigidity assumptions, ubiquitous in learning, making our method applicable to many optimization problems. Our approach takes advantage of hidden regularity properties and allows us to devise a simple algorithm of ridge type. An original feature of our method is to come with automatic step size adaptation which departs from the usual overly cautious backtracking methods. In a general framework, we provide convergence theoretical guarantees and rates. We apply our findings on simple GAN problems obtaining promising numerical results.
SumGraph: Video Summarization via Recursive Graph Modeling
Authors: Jungin Park, Jiyoung Lee, Ig-Jae Kim, Kwanghoon Sohn
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Video Summarization

The goal of video summarization is to select keyframes that are visually diverse and can represent a whole story of an input video. State-of-the-art approaches for video summarization have mostly regarded the task as a frame-wise keyframe selection problem by aggregating all frames with equal weight. However, to find informative parts of the video, it is necessary to consider how all the frames of the video are related to each other. To this end, we cast video summarization as a graph modeling problem. We propose recursive graph modeling networks for video summarization, termed SumGraph, to represent a relation graph, where frames are regarded as nodes and nodes are connected by semantic relationships among frames. Our networks accomplish this through a recursive approach to refine an initially estimated graph to correctly classify each node as a keyframe by reasoning the graph representation via graph convolutional networks. To leverage SumGraph in a more practical environment, we also present a way to adapt our graph modeling in an unsupervised fashion. With SumGraph, we achieved state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks for video summarization in both supervised and unsupervised manners.
Privacy-Preserving Distributed Learning in the Analog Domain
Authors: Mahdi Soleymani, Hessam Mahdavifar, A. Salman Avestimehr
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

We consider the critical problem of distributed learning over data while keeping it private from the computational servers. The state-of-the-art approaches to this problem rely on quantizing the data into a finite field, so that the cryptographic approaches for secure multiparty computing can then be employed. These approaches, however, can result in substantial accuracy losses due to fixed-point representation of the data and computation overflows. To address these critical issues, we propose a novel algorithm to solve the problem when data is in the analog domain, e.g., the field of real/complex numbers. We characterize the privacy of the data from both information-theoretic and cryptographic perspectives, while establishing a connection between the two notions in the analog domain. More specifically, the well-known connection between the distinguishing security (DS) and the mutual information security (MIS) metrics is extended from the discrete domain to the continues domain. This is then utilized to bound the amount of information about the data leaked to the servers in our protocol, in terms of the DS metric, using well-known results on the capacity of single-input multiple-output (SIMO) channel with correlated noise. It is shown how the proposed framework can be adopted to do computation tasks when data is represented using floating-point numbers. We then show that this leads to a fundamental trade-off between the privacy level of data and accuracy of the result. As an application, we also show how to train a machine learning model while keeping the data as well as the trained model private. Then numerical results are shown for experiments on the MNIST dataset. Furthermore, experimental advantages are shown comparing to fixed-point implementations over finite fields.
Learn to Propagate Reliably on Noisy Affinity Graphs
Authors: Lei Yang, Qingqiu Huang, Huaiyi Huang, Linning Xu, Dahua Lin
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Open-Ended Question Answering

Recent works have shown that exploiting unlabeled data through label propagation can substantially reduce the labeling cost, which has been a critical issue in developing visual recognition models. Yet, how to propagate labels reliably, especially on a dataset with unknown outliers, remains an open question. Conventional methods such as linear diffusion lack the capability of handling complex graph structures and may perform poorly when the seeds are sparse. Latest methods based on graph neural networks would face difficulties on performance drop as they scale out to noisy graphs. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a new framework that allows labels to be propagated reliably on large-scale real-world data. This framework incorporates (1) a local graph neural network to predict accurately on varying local structures while maintaining high scalability, and (2) a confidence-based path scheduler that identifies outliers and moves forward the propagation frontier in a prudent way. Experiments on both ImageNet and Ms-Celeb-1M show that our confidence guided framework can significantly improve the overall accuracies of the propagated labels, especially when the graph is very noisy.
Learning to Combine: Knowledge Aggregation for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation
Authors: Hang Wang, Minghao Xu, Bingbing Ni, Wenjun Zhang
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Transferring knowledges learned from multiple source domains to target domain is a more practical and challenging task than conventional single-source domain adaptation. Furthermore, the increase of modalities brings more difficulty in aligning feature distributions among multiple domains. To mitigate these problems, we propose a Learning to Combine for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation (LtC-MSDA) framework via exploring interactions among domains. In the nutshell, a knowledge graph is constructed on the prototypes of various domains to realize the information propagation among semantically adjacent representations. On such basis, a graph model is learned to predict query samples under the guidance of correlated prototypes. In addition, we design a Relation Alignment Loss (RAL) to facilitate the consistency of categories' relational interdependency and the compactness of features, which boosts features' intra-class invariance and inter-class separability. Comprehensive results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods with a remarkable margin. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/ChrisAllenMing/LtC-MSDA}
Self-Supervised Bernoulli Autoencoders for Semi-Supervised Hashing
Authors: Ricardo Ñanculef, Francisco Mena, Antonio Macaluso, Stefano Lodi, Claudio Sartori
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Supervised Image Retrieval, Supervised Text Retrieval

Semantic hashing is an emerging technique for large-scale similarity search based on representing high-dimensional data using similarity-preserving binary codes used for efficient indexing and search. It has recently been shown that variational autoencoders, with Bernoulli latent representations parametrized by neural nets, can be successfully trained to learn such codes in supervised and unsupervised scenarios, improving on more traditional methods thanks to their ability to handle the binary constraints architecturally. However, the scenario where labels are scarce has not been studied yet. This paper investigates the robustness of hashing methods based on variational autoencoders to the lack of supervision, focusing on two semi-supervised approaches currently in use. The first augments the variational autoencoder's training objective to jointly model the distribution over the data and the class labels. The second approach exploits the annotations to define an additional pairwise loss that enforces consistency between the similarity in the code (Hamming) space and the similarity in the label space. Our experiments show that both methods can significantly increase the hash codes' quality. The pairwise approach can exhibit an advantage when the number of labelled points is large. However, we found that this method degrades quickly and loses its advantage when labelled samples decrease. To circumvent this problem, we propose a novel supervision method in which the model uses its label distribution predictions to implement the pairwise objective. Compared to the best baseline, this procedure yields similar performance in fully supervised settings but improves the results significantly when labelled data is scarce. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/amacaluso/SSB-VAE.
Discovering Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
Authors: Junhyuk Oh, Matteo Hessel, Wojciech M. Czarnecki, Zhongwen Xu, Hado van Hasselt, Satinder Singh, David Silver
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Atari Games, Meta-Learning, Open-Ended Question Answering, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms update an agent's parameters according to one of several possible rules, discovered manually through years of research. Automating the discovery of update rules from data could lead to more efficient algorithms, or algorithms that are better adapted to specific environments. Although there have been prior attempts at addressing this significant scientific challenge, it remains an open question whether it is feasible to discover alternatives to fundamental concepts of RL such as value functions and temporal-difference learning. This paper introduces a new meta-learning approach that discovers an entire update rule which includes both 'what to predict' (e.g. value functions) and 'how to learn from it' (e.g. bootstrapping) by interacting with a set of environments. The output of this method is an RL algorithm that we call Learned Policy Gradient (LPG). Empirical results show that our method discovers its own alternative to the concept of value functions. Furthermore it discovers a bootstrapping mechanism to maintain and use its predictions. Surprisingly, when trained solely on toy environments, LPG generalises effectively to complex Atari games and achieves non-trivial performance. This shows the potential to discover general RL algorithms from data.
Uncertainty Quantification and Deep Ensembles
Authors: Rahul Rahaman, Alexandre H. Thiery
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Uncertainty Quantification

Deep Learning methods are known to suffer from calibration issues: they typically produce over-confident estimates. These problems are exacerbated in the low data regime. Although the calibration of probabilistic models is well studied, calibrating extremely over-parametrized models in the low-data regime presents unique challenges. We show that deep-ensembles do not necessarily lead to improved calibration properties. In fact, we show that standard ensembling methods, when used in conjunction with modern techniques such as mixup regularization, can lead to less calibrated models. This text examines the interplay between three of the most simple and commonly used approaches to leverage deep learning when data is scarce: data-augmentation, ensembling, and post-processing calibration methods. Although standard ensembling techniques certainly help boost accuracy, we demonstrate that the calibration of deep ensembles relies on subtle trade-offs. We also find that calibration methods such as temperature scaling need to be slightly tweaked when used with deep-ensembles and, crucially, need to be executed after the averaging process. Our simulations indicate that this simple strategy can halve the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) on a range of benchmark classification problems compared to standard deep-ensembles in the low data regime.
Spatial Resolution Enhancement of Remote Sensing Mine Images using Deep Learning Techniques
Authors: E. Zioga, A. Panagiotopoulou, M. Stefouli, E. Charou, L. Grammatikopoulos, E. Bratsolis, N. Madamopoulos
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00

Deep learning techniques are applied so as to increase the spatial resolution of Sentinel2 satellite imagery, depicting the Amynteo lignite mine in Ptolemaida, Greece. Resolution enhancement by factors 2 and 4 as well as by factors 2 and 6 using Very-Deep SuperResolution (VDSR) and DSen2 networks, respectively, provides fairly well results on Amynteo lignite mine images.
Explanation-Guided Training for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Classification
Authors: Jiamei Sun, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Wojciech Samek, Yunqing Zhao, Ngai-Man Cheung, Alexander Binder
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Cross-Domain Few-Shot, Few-Shot Learning, General Classification, Graph Neural Network

Cross-domain few-shot classification task (CD-FSC) combines few-shot classification with the requirement to generalize across domains represented by datasets. This setup faces challenges originating from the limited labeled data in each class and, additionally, from the domain shift between training and test sets. In this paper, we introduce a novel training approach for existing FSC models. It leverages on the explanation scores, obtained from existing explanation methods when applied to the predictions of FSC models, computed for intermediate feature maps of the models. Firstly, we tailor the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) method to explain the predictions of FSC models. Secondly, we develop a model-agnostic explanation-guided training strategy that dynamically finds and emphasizes the features which are important for the predictions. Our contribution does not target a novel explanation method but lies in a novel application of explanations for the training phase. We show that explanation-guided training effectively improves the model generalization. We observe improved accuracy for three different FSC models: RelationNet, cross attention network, and a graph neural network-based formulation, on five few-shot learning datasets: miniImagenet, CUB, Cars, Places, and Plantae. The source code is available at https://github.com/SunJiamei/few-shot-lrp-guided
An ensemble classifier for vibration-based quality monitoring
Authors: Vahid Yaghoubi, Liangliang Cheng, Wim Van Paepegem, Mathias Kersemans
Date: 2020-07-17 00:00:00

Vibration-based quality monitoring of manufactured components often employs pattern recognition methods. Albeit developing several classification methods, they usually provide high accuracy for specific types of datasets, but not for general cases. In this paper, this issue has been addressed by developing a novel ensemble classifier based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. To deal with conflicting evidences, three remedies are proposed prior to combination: (i) selection of proper classifiers by evaluating the relevancy between the predicted and target outputs, (ii) devising an optimization method to minimize the distance between the predicted and target outputs, (iii) utilizing five different weighting factors, including a new one, to enhance the fusion performance. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated by its application to 15 UCI and KEEL machine learning datasets. It is then applied to two vibration-based datasets to detect defected samples: one synthetic dataset generated from the finite element model of a dogbone cylinder, and one real experimental dataset generated by collecting broadband vibrational response of polycrystalline Nickel alloy first-stage turbine blades. The investigation is made through statistical analysis in presence of different levels of noise-to-signal ratio. Comparing the results with those of four state-of-the-art fusion techniques reveals the good performance of the proposed ensemble method.