pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Principle of Least Action with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zehao Jin, Joshua Yao-Yu Lin, Siao-Fong Li
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Nature provides a way to understand physics with reinforcement learning since nature favors the economical way for an object to propagate. In the case of classical mechanics, nature favors the object to move along the path according to the integral of the Lagrangian, called the action $\mathcal{S}$. We consider setting the reward/penalty as a function of $\mathcal{S}$, so the agent could learn the physical trajectory of particles in various kinds of environments with reinforcement learning. In this work, we verified the idea by using a Q-Learning based algorithm on learning how light propagates in materials with different refraction indices, and show that the agent could recover the minimal-time path equivalent to the solution obtained by Snell's law or Fermat's Principle. We also discuss the similarity of our reinforcement learning approach to the path integral formalism.
Cross-Camera Convolutional Color Constancy
Authors: Mahmoud Afifi, Jonathan T. Barron, Chloe LeGendre, Yun-Ta Tsai, Francois Bleibel
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Color Constancy, CPU, GPU

We present "Cross-Camera Convolutional Color Constancy" (C5), a learning-based method, trained on images from multiple cameras, that accurately estimates a scene's illuminant color from raw images captured by a new camera previously unseen during training. C5 is a hypernetwork-like extension of the convolutional color constancy (CCC) approach: C5 learns to generate the weights of a CCC model that is then evaluated on the input image, with the CCC weights dynamically adapted to different input content. Unlike prior cross-camera color constancy models, which are usually designed to be agnostic to the spectral properties of test-set images from unobserved cameras, C5 approaches this problem through the lens of transductive inference: additional unlabeled images are provided as input to the model at test time, which allows the model to calibrate itself to the spectral properties of the test-set camera during inference. C5 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for cross-camera color constancy on several datasets, is fast to evaluate (~7 and ~90 ms per image on a GPU or CPU, respectively), and requires little memory (~2 MB), and thus is a practical solution to the problem of calibration-free automatic white balance for mobile photography.
SMG: A Shuffling Gradient-Based Method with Momentum
Authors: Trang H. Tran, Lam M. Nguyen, Quoc Tran-Dinh
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00

We combine two advanced ideas widely used in optimization for machine learning: shuffling strategy and momentum technique to develop a novel shuffling gradient-based method with momentum, coined Shuffling Momentum Gradient (SMG), for non-convex finite-sum optimization problems. While our method is inspired by momentum techniques, its update is fundamentally different from existing momentum-based methods. We establish state-of-the-art convergence rates of SMG for any shuffling strategy using either constant or diminishing learning rate under standard assumptions (i.e.$L$-smoothness and bounded variance). When the shuffling strategy is fixed, we develop another new algorithm that is similar to existing momentum methods, and prove the same convergence rates for this algorithm under the $L$-smoothness and bounded gradient assumptions. We demonstrate our algorithms via numerical simulations on standard datasets and compare them with existing shuffling methods. Our tests have shown encouraging performance of the new algorithms.
Blind deblurring for microscopic pathology images using deep learning networks
Authors: Cheng Jiang, Jun Liao, Pei Dong, Zhaoxuan Ma, De Cai, Guoan Zheng, Yueping Liu, Hong Bu, Jianhua Yao
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Decoder, Deep Learning

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered pathology is a revolutionary step in the world of digital pathology and shows great promise to increase both diagnosis accuracy and efficiency. However, defocus and motion blur can obscure tissue or cell characteristics hence compromising AI algorithms'accuracy and robustness in analyzing the images. In this paper, we demonstrate a deep-learning-based approach that can alleviate the defocus and motion blur of a microscopic image and output a sharper and cleaner image with retrieved fine details without prior knowledge of the blur type, blur extent and pathological stain. In this approach, a deep learning classifier is first trained to identify the image blur type. Then, two encoder-decoder networks are trained and used alone or in combination to deblur the input image. It is an end-to-end approach and introduces no corrugated artifacts as traditional blind deconvolution methods do. We test our approach on different types of pathology specimens and demonstrate great performance on image blur correction and the subsequent improvement on the diagnosis outcome of AI algorithms.
Counterfactual Fairness with Disentangled Causal Effect Variational Autoencoder
Authors: Hyemi Kim, Seungjae Shin, JoonHo Jang, Kyungwoo Song, Weonyoung Joo, Wanmo Kang, Il-Chul Moon
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Causal Inference, counterfactual, Disentanglement, Fairness

The problem of fair classification can be mollified if we develop a method to remove the embedded sensitive information from the classification features. This line of separating the sensitive information is developed through the causal inference, and the causal inference enables the counterfactual generations to contrast the what-if case of the opposite sensitive attribute. Along with this separation with the causality, a frequent assumption in the deep latent causal model defines a single latent variable to absorb the entire exogenous uncertainty of the causal graph. However, we claim that such structure cannot distinguish the 1) information caused by the intervention (i.e., sensitive variable) and 2) information correlated with the intervention from the data. Therefore, this paper proposes Disentangled Causal Effect Variational Autoencoder (DCEVAE) to resolve this limitation by disentangling the exogenous uncertainty into two latent variables: either 1) independent to interventions or 2) correlated to interventions without causality. Particularly, our disentangling approach preserves the latent variable correlated to interventions in generating counterfactual examples. We show that our method estimates the total effect and the counterfactual effect without a complete causal graph. By adding a fairness regularization, DCEVAE generates a counterfactual fair dataset while losing less original information. Also, DCEVAE generates natural counterfactual images by only flipping sensitive information. Additionally, we theoretically show the differences in the covariance structures of DCEVAE and prior works from the perspective of the latent disentanglement.
InstaHide's Sample Complexity When Mixing Two Private Images
Authors: Baihe Huang, Zhao Song, Runzhou Tao, Junze Yin, Ruizhe Zhang, Danyang Zhuo
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Training neural networks usually require large numbers of sensitive training data, and how to protect the privacy of training data has thus become a critical topic in deep learning research. InstaHide is a state-of-the-art scheme to protect training data privacy with only minor effects on test accuracy, and its security has become a salient question. In this paper, we systematically study recent attacks on InstaHide and present a unified framework to understand and analyze these attacks. We find that existing attacks either do not have a provable guarantee or can only recover a single private image. On the current InstaHide challenge setup, where each InstaHide image is a mixture of two private images, we present a new algorithm to recover all the private images with a provable guarantee and optimal sample complexity. In addition, we also provide a computational hardness result on retrieving all InstaHide images. Our results demonstrate that InstaHide is not information-theoretically secure but computationally secure in the worst case, even when mixing two private images.
Mixture-based Feature Space Learning for Few-shot Image Classification
Authors: Arman Afrasiyabi, Jean-François Lalonde, Christian Gagné
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Clustering, Few-Shot Image Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Representation Learning

We introduce Mixture-based Feature Space Learning (MixtFSL) for obtaining a rich and robust feature representation in the context of few-shot image classification. Previous works have proposed to model each base class either with a single point or with a mixture model by relying on offline clustering algorithms. In contrast, we propose to model base classes with mixture models by simultaneously training the feature extractor and learning the mixture model parameters in an online manner. This results in a richer and more discriminative feature space which can be employed to classify novel examples from very few samples. Two main stages are proposed to train the MixtFSL model. First, the multimodal mixtures for each base class and the feature extractor parameters are learned using a combination of two loss functions. Second, the resulting network and mixture models are progressively refined through a leader-follower learning procedure, which uses the current estimate as a "target" network. This target network is used to make a consistent assignment of instances to mixture components, which increases performance and stabilizes training. The effectiveness of our end-to-end feature space learning approach is demonstrated with extensive experiments on four standard datasets and four backbones. Notably, we demonstrate that when we combine our robust representation with recent alignment-based approaches, we achieve new state-of-the-art results in the inductive setting, with an absolute accuracy for 5-shot classification of 82.45 on miniImageNet, 88.20 with tieredImageNet, and 60.70 in FC100 using the ResNet-12 backbone.
Gaussian Processes for Traffic Speed Prediction at Different Aggregation Levels
Authors: Gurcan Comert
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, Management, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Dynamic behavior of traffic adversely affect the performance of the prediction models in intelligent transportation applications. This study applies Gaussian processes (GPs) to traffic speed prediction. Such predictions can be used by various transportation applications, such as real-time route guidance, ramp metering, congestion pricing and special events traffic management. One-step predictions with various aggregation levels (1 to 60-minute) are tested for performance of the generated models. Univariate and multivariate GPs are compared with several other linear, nonlinear time series, and Grey system models using loop and Inrix probe vehicle datasets from California, Portland, and Virginia freeways respectively. Based on the test data samples, results are promising that GP models are able to consistently outperform compared models with similar computational times.
Multi-Scale Progressive Fusion Learning for Depth Map Super-Resolution
Authors: Chuhua Xian, Kun Qian, Zitian Zhang, Charlie C. L. Wang
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Map Super-Resolution, Image Super-Resolution, Single Image Deraining, Super-Resolution

Limited by the cost and technology, the resolution of depth map collected by depth camera is often lower than that of its associated RGB camera. Although there have been many researches on RGB image super-resolution (SR), a major problem with depth map super-resolution is that there will be obvious jagged edges and excessive loss of details. To tackle these difficulties, in this work, we propose a multi-scale progressive fusion network for depth map SR, which possess an asymptotic structure to integrate hierarchical features in different domains. Given a low-resolution (LR) depth map and its associated high-resolution (HR) color image, We utilize two different branches to achieve multi-scale feature learning. Next, we propose a step-wise fusion strategy to restore the HR depth map. Finally, a multi-dimensional loss is introduced to constrain clear boundaries and details. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method produces improved results against state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Cyclic Label Propagation for Graph Semi-supervised Learning
Authors: Zhao Li, Yixin Liu, Zhen Zhang, Shirui Pan, Jianliang Gao, Jiajun Bu
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as effective approaches for graph analysis, especially in the scenario of semi-supervised learning. Despite its success, GNN often suffers from over-smoothing and over-fitting problems, which affects its performance on node classification tasks. We analyze that an alternative method, the label propagation algorithm (LPA), avoids the aforementioned problems thus it is a promising choice for graph semi-supervised learning. Nevertheless, the intrinsic limitations of LPA on feature exploitation and relation modeling make propagating labels become less effective. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel framework for graph semi-supervised learning termed as Cyclic Label Propagation (CycProp for abbreviation), which integrates GNNs into the process of label propagation in a cyclic and mutually reinforcing manner to exploit the advantages of both GNNs and LPA. In particular, our proposed CycProp updates the node embeddings learned by GNN module with the augmented information by label propagation, while fine-tunes the weighted graph of label propagation with the help of node embedding in turn. After the model converges, reliably predicted labels and informative node embeddings are obtained with the LPA and GNN modules respectively. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets are conducted, and the experimental results empirically demonstrate that the proposed CycProp model can achieve relatively significant gains over the state-of-the-art methods.
GMOT-40: A Benchmark for Generic Multiple Object Tracking
Authors: Hexin Bai, Wensheng Cheng, Peng Chu, Juehuan Liu, Kai Zhang, Haibin Ling
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Multiple Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) has witnessed remarkable advances in recent years. However, existing studies dominantly request prior knowledge of the tracking target, and hence may not generalize well to unseen categories. In contrast, Generic Multiple Object Tracking (GMOT), which requires little prior information about the target, is largely under-explored. In this paper, we make contributions to boost the study of GMOT in three aspects. First, we construct the first public GMOT dataset, dubbed GMOT-40, which contains 40 carefully annotated sequences evenly distributed among 10 object categories. In addition, two tracking protocols are adopted to evaluate different characteristics of tracking algorithms. Second, by noting the lack of devoted tracking algorithms, we have designed a series of baseline GMOT algorithms. Third, we perform a thorough evaluation on GMOT-40, involving popular MOT algorithms (with necessary modifications) and the proposed baselines. We will release the GMOT-40 benchmark, the evaluation results, as well as the baseline algorithm to the public upon the publication of the paper.
A Robotic Dating Coaching System Leveraging Online Communities Posts
Authors: Sihyeon Jo, Donghwi Jung, Keonwoo Kim, Eun Gyo Joung, Giulia Nespoli, Seungryong Yoo, Minseob So, Seung-Woo Seo, Seong-Woo Kim
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00

Can a robot be a personal dating coach? Even with the increasing amount of conversational data on the internet, the implementation of conversational robots remains a challenge. In particular, a detailed and professional counseling log is expensive and not publicly accessible. In this paper, we develop a robot dating coaching system leveraging corpus from online communities. We examine people's perceptions of the dating coaching robot with a dialogue module. 97 participants joined to have a conversation with the robot, and 30 of them evaluated the robot. The results indicate that participants thought the robot could become a dating coach while considering the robot is entertaining rather than helpful.
Policy Optimization for Markovian Jump Linear Quadratic Control: Gradient-Based Methods and Global Convergence
Authors: Joao Paulo Jansch-Porto, Bin Hu, Geir Dullerud
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Policy Gradient Methods

Recently, policy optimization for control purposes has received renewed attention due to the increasing interest in reinforcement learning. In this paper, we investigate the global convergence of gradient-based policy optimization methods for quadratic optimal control of discrete-time Markovian jump linear systems (MJLS). First, we study the optimization landscape of direct policy optimization for MJLS, with static state feedback controllers and quadratic performance costs. Despite the non-convexity of the resultant problem, we are still able to identify several useful properties such as coercivity, gradient dominance, and almost smoothness. Based on these properties, we show global convergence of three types of policy optimization methods: the gradient descent method; the Gauss-Newton method; and the natural policy gradient method. We prove that all three methods converge to the optimal state feedback controller for MJLS at a linear rate if initialized at a controller which is mean-square stabilizing. Some numerical examples are presented to support the theory. This work brings new insights for understanding the performance of policy gradient methods on the Markovian jump linear quadratic control problem.
Dual Supervision Framework for Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision and Human Annotation
Authors: Woohwan Jung, Kyuseok Shim
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Knowledge Base Construction, Relation, Relation Extraction, Sentence

Relation extraction (RE) has been extensively studied due to its importance in real-world applications such as knowledge base construction and question answering. Most of the existing works train the models on either distantly supervised data or human-annotated data. To take advantage of the high accuracy of human annotation and the cheap cost of distant supervision, we propose the dual supervision framework which effectively utilizes both types of data. However, simply combining the two types of data to train a RE model may decrease the prediction accuracy since distant supervision has labeling bias. We employ two separate prediction networks HA-Net and DS-Net to predict the labels by human annotation and distant supervision, respectively, to prevent the degradation of accuracy by the incorrect labeling of distant supervision. Furthermore, we propose an additional loss term called disagreement penalty to enable HA-Net to learn from distantly supervised labels. In addition, we exploit additional networks to adaptively assess the labeling bias by considering contextual information. Our performance study on sentence-level and document-level REs confirms the effectiveness of the dual supervision framework.
Solving The Lunar Lander Problem under Uncertainty using Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Soham Gadgil, Yunfeng Xin, Chengzhe Xu
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with enabling an agent to navigate an environment with uncertainty in order to maximize some notion of cumulative long-term reward. In this paper, we implement and analyze two different RL techniques, Sarsa and Deep QLearning, on OpenAI Gym's LunarLander-v2 environment. We then introduce additional uncertainty to the original problem to test the robustness of the mentioned techniques. With our best models, we are able to achieve average rewards of 170+ with the Sarsa agent and 200+ with the Deep Q-Learning agent on the original problem. We also show that these techniques are able to overcome the additional uncertainities and achieve positive average rewards of 100+ with both agents. We then perform a comparative analysis of the two techniques to conclude which agent peforms better.
Unsupervised Discovery of Disentangled Manifolds in GANs
Authors: Yu-Ding Lu, Hsin-Ying Lee, Hung-Yu Tseng, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

As recent generative models can generate photo-realistic images, people seek to understand the mechanism behind the generation process. Interpretable generation process is beneficial to various image editing applications. In this work, we propose a framework to discover interpretable directions in the latent space given arbitrary pre-trained generative adversarial networks. We propose to learn the transformation from prior one-hot vectors representing different attributes to the latent space used by pre-trained models. Furthermore, we apply a centroid loss function to improve consistency and smoothness while traversing through different directions. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework on a wide range of datasets. The discovered direction vectors are shown to be visually corresponding to various distinct attributes and thus enable attribute editing.
Benchmarking Inference Performance of Deep Learning Models on Analog Devices
Authors: Omobayode Fagbohungbe, Lijun Qian
Date: 2020-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Deep Learning, Edge-computing, image-classification, Image Classification, Philosophy

Analog hardware implemented deep learning models are promising for computation and energy constrained systems such as edge computing devices. However, the analog nature of the device and the associated many noise sources will cause changes to the value of the weights in the trained deep learning models deployed on such devices. In this study, systematic evaluation of the inference performance of trained popular deep learning models for image classification deployed on analog devices has been carried out, where additive white Gaussian noise has been added to the weights of the trained models during inference. It is observed that deeper models and models with more redundancy in design such as VGG are more robust to the noise in general. However, the performance is also affected by the design philosophy of the model, the detailed structure of the model, the exact machine learning task, as well as the datasets.