pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Open World Object Detection
Authors: K J Joseph, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Vineeth N Balasubramanian
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Clustering, Object, object-detection, Open World Object Detection

Humans have a natural instinct to identify unknown object instances in their environments. The intrinsic curiosity about these unknown instances aids in learning about them, when the corresponding knowledge is eventually available. This motivates us to propose a novel computer vision problem called: `Open World Object Detection', where a model is tasked to: 1) identify objects that have not been introduced to it as `unknown', without explicit supervision to do so, and 2) incrementally learn these identified unknown categories without forgetting previously learned classes, when the corresponding labels are progressively received. We formulate the problem, introduce a strong evaluation protocol and provide a novel solution, which we call ORE: Open World Object Detector, based on contrastive clustering and energy based unknown identification. Our experimental evaluation and ablation studies analyze the efficacy of ORE in achieving Open World objectives. As an interesting by-product, we find that identifying and characterizing unknown instances helps to reduce confusion in an incremental object detection setting, where we achieve state-of-the-art performance, with no extra methodological effort. We hope that our work will attract further research into this newly identified, yet crucial research direction.
Hybrid and Automated Machine Learning Approaches for Oil Fields Development: the Case Study of Volve Field, North Sea
Authors: Nikolay O. Nikitin, Ilia Revin, Alexander Hvatov, Pavel Vychuzhanin, Anna V. Kalyuzhnaya
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Production Forecasting

The paper describes the usage of intelligent approaches for field development tasks that may assist a decision-making process. We focused on the problem of wells location optimization and two tasks within it: improving the quality of oil production estimation and estimation of reservoir characteristics for appropriate wells allocation and parametrization, using machine learning methods. For oil production estimation, we implemented and investigated the quality of forecasting models: physics-based, pure data-driven, and hybrid one. The CRMIP model was chosen as a physics-based approach. We compare it with the machine learning and hybrid methods in a frame of oil production forecasting task. In the investigation of reservoir characteristics for wells location choice, we automated the seismic analysis using evolutionary identification of convolutional neural network for the reservoir detection. The Volve oil field dataset was used as a case study to conduct the experiments. The implemented approaches can be used to analyze different oil fields or adapted to similar physics-related problems.
Neural 3D Video Synthesis from Multi-view Video
Authors: Tianye Li, Mira Slavcheva, Michael Zollhoefer, Simon Green, Christoph Lassner, Changil Kim, Tanner Schmidt, Steven Lovegrove, Michael Goesele, Richard Newcombe, Zhaoyang Lv
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Motion Interpolation

We propose a novel approach for 3D video synthesis that is able to represent multi-view video recordings of a dynamic real-world scene in a compact, yet expressive representation that enables high-quality view synthesis and motion interpolation. Our approach takes the high quality and compactness of static neural radiance fields in a new direction: to a model-free, dynamic setting. At the core of our approach is a novel time-conditioned neural radiance field that represents scene dynamics using a set of compact latent codes. We are able to significantly boost the training speed and perceptual quality of the generated imagery by a novel hierarchical training scheme in combination with ray importance sampling. Our learned representation is highly compact and able to represent a 10 second 30 FPS multiview video recording by 18 cameras with a model size of only 28MB. We demonstrate that our method can render high-fidelity wide-angle novel views at over 1K resolution, even for complex and dynamic scenes. We perform an extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation that shows that our approach outperforms the state of the art. Project website: https://neural-3d-video.github.io/.
Elliot: a Comprehensive and Rigorous Framework for Reproducible Recommender Systems Evaluation
Authors: Vito Walter Anelli, Alejandro Bellogín, Antonio Ferrara, Daniele Malitesta, Felice Antonio Merra, Claudio Pomo, Francesco Maria Donini, Tommaso Di Noia
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Hyperparameter Optimization, Recommendation Systems

Recommender Systems have shown to be an effective way to alleviate the over-choice problem and provide accurate and tailored recommendations. However, the impressive number of proposed recommendation algorithms, splitting strategies, evaluation protocols, metrics, and tasks, has made rigorous experimental evaluation particularly challenging. Puzzled and frustrated by the continuous recreation of appropriate evaluation benchmarks, experimental pipelines, hyperparameter optimization, and evaluation procedures, we have developed an exhaustive framework to address such needs. Elliot is a comprehensive recommendation framework that aims to run and reproduce an entire experimental pipeline by processing a simple configuration file. The framework loads, filters, and splits the data considering a vast set of strategies (13 splitting methods and 8 filtering approaches, from temporal training-test splitting to nested K-folds Cross-Validation). Elliot optimizes hyperparameters (51 strategies) for several recommendation algorithms (50), selects the best models, compares them with the baselines providing intra-model statistics, computes metrics (36) spanning from accuracy to beyond-accuracy, bias, and fairness, and conducts statistical analysis (Wilcoxon and Paired t-test). The aim is to provide the researchers with a tool to ease (and make them reproducible) all the experimental evaluation phases, from data reading to results collection. Elliot is available on GitHub (https://github.com/sisinflab/elliot).
IH-GAN: A Conditional Generative Model for Implicit Surface-Based Inverse Design of Cellular Structures
Authors: Jun Wang, Wei Wayne Chen, Daicong Da, Mark Fuge, Rahul Rai
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Variable-density cellular structures can overcome connectivity and manufacturability issues of topologically optimized structures, particularly those represented as discrete density maps. However, the optimization of such cellular structures is challenging due to the multiscale design problem. Past work addressing this problem generally either only optimizes the volume fraction of single-type unit cells but ignores the effects of unit cell geometry on properties, or considers the geometry-property relation but builds this relation via heuristics. In contrast, we propose a simple yet more principled way to accurately model the property to geometry mapping using a conditional deep generative model, named Inverse Homogenization Generative Adversarial Network (IH-GAN). It learns the conditional distribution of unit cell geometries given properties and can realize the one-to-many mapping from properties to geometries. We further reduce the complexity of IH-GAN by using the implicit function parameterization to represent unit cell geometries. Results show that our method can 1) generate various unit cells that satisfy given material properties with high accuracy ($R^2$-scores between target properties and properties of generated unit cells $>98\%$) and 2) improve the optimized structural performance over the conventional variable-density single-type structure. In the minimum compliance example, our IH-GAN generated structure achieves a $79.7\%$ reduction in concentrated stress and an extra $3.03\%$ reduction in displacement. In the target deformation examples, our IH-GAN generated structure reduces the target matching error by $86.4\%$ and $79.6\%$ for two test cases, respectively. We also demonstrated that the connectivity issue for multi-type unit cells can be solved by transition layer blending.
Detecting Extraneous Content in Podcasts
Authors: Sravana Reddy, Yongze Yu, Aasish Pappu, Aswin Sivaraman, Rezvaneh Rezapour, Rosie Jones
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: Music Information Retrieval

Podcast episodes often contain material extraneous to the main content, such as advertisements, interleaved within the audio and the written descriptions. We present classifiers that leverage both textual and listening patterns in order to detect such content in podcast descriptions and audio transcripts. We demonstrate that our models are effective by evaluating them on the downstream task of podcast summarization and show that we can substantively improve ROUGE scores and reduce the extraneous content generated in the summaries.
Cross-View Regularization for Domain Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Jiaxing Huang, Dayan Guan, Aoran Xiao, Shijian Lu
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Instance Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Panoptic segmentation unifies semantic segmentation and instance segmentation which has been attracting increasing attention in recent years. However, most existing research was conducted under a supervised learning setup whereas unsupervised domain adaptive panoptic segmentation which is critical in different tasks and applications is largely neglected. We design a domain adaptive panoptic segmentation network that exploits inter-style consistency and inter-task regularization for optimal domain adaptive panoptic segmentation. The inter-style consistency leverages geometric invariance across the same image of the different styles which fabricates certain self-supervisions to guide the network to learn domain-invariant features. The inter-task regularization exploits the complementary nature of instance segmentation and semantic segmentation and uses it as a constraint for better feature alignment across domains. Extensive experiments over multiple domain adaptive panoptic segmentation tasks (e.g., synthetic-to-real and real-to-real) show that our proposed network achieves superior segmentation performance as compared with the state-of-the-art.
Simulating time to event prediction with spatiotemporal echocardiography deep learning
Authors: Rohan Shad, Nicolas Quach, Robyn Fong, Patpilai Kasinpila, Cayley Bowles, Kate M. Callon, Michelle C. Li, Jeffrey Teuteberg, John P. Cunningham, Curtis P. Langlotz, William Hiesinger
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Diagnostic, Prediction, Time-to-Event Prediction

Integrating methods for time-to-event prediction with diagnostic imaging modalities is of considerable interest, as accurate estimates of survival requires accounting for censoring of individuals within the observation period. New methods for time-to-event prediction have been developed by extending the cox-proportional hazards model with neural networks. In this paper, to explore the feasibility of these methods when applied to deep learning with echocardiography videos, we utilize the Stanford EchoNet-Dynamic dataset with over 10,000 echocardiograms, and generate simulated survival datasets based on the expert annotated ejection fraction readings. By training on just the simulated survival outcomes, we show that spatiotemporal convolutional neural networks yield accurate survival estimates.
D'ya like DAGs? A Survey on Structure Learning and Causal Discovery
Authors: Matthew J. Vowels, Necati Cihan Camgoz, Richard Bowden
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Survey

Causal reasoning is a crucial part of science and human intelligence. In order to discover causal relationships from data, we need structure discovery methods. We provide a review of background theory and a survey of methods for structure discovery. We primarily focus on modern, continuous optimization methods, and provide reference to further resources such as benchmark datasets and software packages. Finally, we discuss the assumptive leap required to take us from structure to causality.
Scalable Learning With a Structural Recurrent Neural Network for Short-Term Traffic Prediction
Authors: Youngjoo Kim, Peng Wang, Lyudmila Mihaylova
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Traffic Prediction

This paper presents a scalable deep learning approach for short-term traffic prediction based on historical traffic data in a vehicular road network. Capturing the spatio-temporal relationship of the big data often requires a significant amount of computational burden or an ad-hoc design aiming for a specific type of road network. To tackle the problem, we combine a road network graph with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to construct a structural RNN (SRNN). The SRNN employs a spatio-temporal graph to infer the interaction between adjacent road segments as well as the temporal dynamics of the time series data. The model is scalable thanks to two key aspects. First, the proposed SRNN architecture is built by using the semantic similarity of the spatio-temporal dynamic interactions of all segments. Second, we design the architecture to deal with fixed-length tensors regardless of the graph topology. With the real traffic speed data measured in the city of Santander, we demonstrate the proposed SRNN outperforms the image-based approaches using the capsule network (CapsNet) by 14.1% and the convolutional neural network (CNN) by 5.87%, respectively, in terms of root mean squared error (RMSE). Moreover, we show that the proposed model is scalable. The SRNN model trained with data of a road network is able to predict traffic speed of different road networks, with the fixed number of parameters to train.
Learning to Manipulate Amorphous Materials
Authors: Yunbo Zhang, Wenhao Yu, C. Karen Liu, Charles C. Kemp, Greg Turk
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00

We present a method of training character manipulation of amorphous materials such as those often used in cooking. Common examples of amorphous materials include granular materials (salt, uncooked rice), fluids (honey), and visco-plastic materials (sticky rice, softened butter). A typical task is to spread a given material out across a flat surface using a tool such as a scraper or knife. We use reinforcement learning to train our controllers to manipulate materials in various ways. The training is performed in a physics simulator that uses position-based dynamics of particles to simulate the materials to be manipulated. The neural network control policy is given observations of the material (e.g. a low-resolution density map), and the policy outputs actions such as rotating and translating the knife. We demonstrate policies that have been successfully trained to carry out the following tasks: spreading, gathering, and flipping. We produce a final animation by using inverse kinematics to guide a character's arm and hand to match the motion of the manipulation tool such as a knife or a frying pan.
Constraint Control of a Boom Crane System
Authors: Michele Ambrosino, Arnaud Dawans, Emanuele Garone
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Boom cranes are among the most used cranes to lift heavy loads. Although fairly simple mechanically, from the control viewpoint this kind of crane is a nonlinear underactuated system which presents several challenges, especially when con-trolled in the presence of constraints. To solve this problem, we propose an approach based on the Explicit Reference Governor (ERG), which does not require any online optimization, thus making it computationally inexpensive. The proposed control scheme is able to steer the crane to a desired position ensuring the respect of limited joint ranges, maximum oscillation angle, and the avoidance of static obstacles.
Personal Productivity and Well-being -- Chapter 2 of the 2021 New Future of Work Report
Authors: Jenna Butler, Mary Czerwinski, Shamsi Iqbal, Sonia Jaffe, Kate Nowak, Emily Peloquin, Longqi Yang
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00

We now turn to understanding the impact that COVID-19 had on the personal productivity and well-being of information workers as their work practices were impacted by remote work. This chapter overviews people's productivity, satisfaction, and work patterns, and shows that the challenges and benefits of remote work are closely linked. Looking forward, the infrastructure surrounding work will need to evolve to help people adapt to the challenges of remote and hybrid work.
NeurIPS 2020 NLC2CMD Competition: Translating Natural Language to Bash Commands
Authors: Mayank Agarwal, Tathagata Chakraborti, Quchen Fu, David Gros, Xi Victoria Lin, Jaron Maene, Kartik Talamadupula, Zhongwei Teng, Jules White
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00

The NLC2CMD Competition hosted at NeurIPS 2020 aimed to bring the power of natural language processing to the command line. Participants were tasked with building models that can transform descriptions of command line tasks in English to their Bash syntax. This is a report on the competition with details of the task, metrics, data, attempted solutions, and lessons learned.
Reservoir Computing with Superconducting Electronics
Authors: Graham E. Rowlands, Minh-Hai Nguyen, Guilhem J. Ribeill, Andrew P. Wagner, Luke C. G. Govia, Wendson A. S. Barbosa, Daniel J. Gauthier, Thomas A. Ohki
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00

The rapidity and low power consumption of superconducting electronics makes them an ideal substrate for physical reservoir computing, which commandeers the computational power inherent to the evolution of a dynamical system for the purposes of performing machine learning tasks. We focus on a subset of superconducting circuits that exhibit soliton-like dynamics in simple transmission line geometries. With numerical simulations we demonstrate the effectiveness of these circuits in performing higher-order parity calculations and channel equalization at rates approaching 100 Gb/s. The availability of a proven superconducting logic scheme considerably simplifies the path to a fully integrated reservoir computing platform and makes superconducting reservoirs an enticing substrate for high rate signal processing applications.
On the role of depth predictions for 3D human pose estimation
Authors: Alec Diaz-Arias, Mitchell Messmore, Dmitriy Shin, Stephen Baek
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Following the successful application of deep convolutional neural networks to 2d human pose estimation, the next logical problem to solve is 3d human pose estimation from monocular images. While previous solutions have shown some success, they do not fully utilize the depth information from the 2d inputs. With the goal of addressing this depth ambiguity, we build a system that takes 2d joint locations as input along with their estimated depth value and predicts their 3d positions in camera coordinates. Given the inherent noise and inaccuracy from estimating depth maps from monocular images, we perform an extensive statistical analysis showing that given this noise there is still a statistically significant correlation between the predicted depth values and the third coordinate of camera coordinates. We further explain how the state-of-the-art results we achieve on the H3.6M validation set are due to the additional input of depth. Notably, our results are produced on neural network that accepts a low dimensional input and be integrated into a real-time system. Furthermore, our system can be combined with an off-the-shelf 2d pose detector and a depth map predictor to perform 3d pose estimation in the wild.
Recurrent Graph Neural Network Algorithm for Unsupervised Network Community Detection
Authors: Stanislav Sobolevsky
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Graph Neural Network

Network community detection often relies on optimizing partition quality functions, like modularity. This optimization appears to be a complex problem traditionally relying on discrete heuristics. And although the problem could be reformulated as continuous optimization, direct application of the standard optimization methods has limited efficiency in overcoming the numerous local extrema. However, the rise of deep learning and its applications to graphs offers new opportunities. And while graph neural networks have been used for supervised and unsupervised learning on networks, their application to modularity optimization has not been explored yet. This paper proposes a new variant of the recurrent graph neural network algorithm for unsupervised network community detection through modularity optimization. The new algorithm's performance is compared against a popular and fast Louvain method and a more efficient but slower Combo algorithm recently proposed by the author. The approach also serves as a proof-of-concept for the broader application of recurrent graph neural networks to unsupervised network optimization.
EllipsoidNet: Ellipsoid Representation for Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation
Authors: Yecheng Lyu, Xinming Huang, Ziming Zhang
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Point Cloud Classification

Point cloud patterns are hard to learn because of the implicit local geometry features among the orderless points. In recent years, point cloud representation in 2D space has attracted increasing research interest since it exposes the local geometry features in a 2D space. By projecting those points to a 2D feature map, the relationship between points is inherited in the context between pixels, which are further extracted by a 2D convolutional neural network. However, existing 2D representing methods are either accuracy limited or time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a novel 2D representation method that projects a point cloud onto an ellipsoid surface space, where local patterns are well exposed in ellipsoid-level and point-level. Additionally, a novel convolutional neural network named EllipsoidNet is proposed to utilize those features for point cloud classification and segmentation applications. The proposed methods are evaluated in ModelNet40 and ShapeNet benchmarks, where the advantages are clearly shown over existing 2D representation methods.
Approximation Algorithms for Socially Fair Clustering
Authors: Yury Makarychev, Ali Vakilian
Date: 2021-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

We present an $(e^{O(p)} \frac{\log \ell}{\log\log\ell})$-approximation algorithm for socially fair clustering with the $\ell_p$-objective. In this problem, we are given a set of points in a metric space. Each point belongs to one (or several) of $\ell$ groups. The goal is to find a $k$-medians, $k$-means, or, more generally, $\ell_p$-clustering that is simultaneously good for all of the groups. More precisely, we need to find a set of $k$ centers $C$ so as to minimize the maximum over all groups $j$ of $\sum_{u \text{ in group }j} d(u,C)^p$. The socially fair clustering problem was independently proposed by Ghadiri, Samadi, and Vempala [2021] and Abbasi, Bhaskara, and Venkatasubramanian [2021]. Our algorithm improves and generalizes their $O(\ell)$-approximation algorithms for the problem. The natural LP relaxation for the problem has an integrality gap of $\Omega(\ell)$. In order to obtain our result, we introduce a strengthened LP relaxation and show that it has an integrality gap of $\Theta(\frac{\log \ell}{\log\log\ell})$ for a fixed $p$. Additionally, we present a bicriteria approximation algorithm, which generalizes the bicriteria approximation of Abbasi et al. [2021].