pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Neural Non-Rigid Tracking
Authors: Aljaž Božič, Pablo Palafox, Michael Zollhöfer, Angela Dai, Justus Thies, Matthias Nießner
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

We introduce a novel, end-to-end learnable, differentiable non-rigid tracker that enables state-of-the-art non-rigid reconstruction by a learned robust optimization. Given two input RGB-D frames of a non-rigidly moving object, we employ a convolutional neural network to predict dense correspondences and their confidences. These correspondences are used as constraints in an as-rigid-as-possible (ARAP) optimization problem. By enabling gradient back-propagation through the weighted non-linear least squares solver, we are able to learn correspondences and confidences in an end-to-end manner such that they are optimal for the task of non-rigid tracking. Under this formulation, correspondence confidences can be learned via self-supervision, informing a learned robust optimization, where outliers and wrong correspondences are automatically down-weighted to enable effective tracking. Compared to state-of-the-art approaches, our algorithm shows improved reconstruction performance, while simultaneously achieving 85 times faster correspondence prediction than comparable deep-learning based methods. We make our code available.
Robot Object Retrieval with Contextual Natural Language Queries
Authors: Thao Nguyen, Nakul Gopalan, Roma Patel, Matt Corsaro, Ellie Pavlick, Stefanie Tellex
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Queries, Object, Retrieval

Natural language object retrieval is a highly useful yet challenging task for robots in human-centric environments. Previous work has primarily focused on commands specifying the desired object's type such as "scissors" and/or visual attributes such as "red," thus limiting the robot to only known object classes. We develop a model to retrieve objects based on descriptions of their usage. The model takes in a language command containing a verb, for example "Hand me something to cut," and RGB images of candidate objects and selects the object that best satisfies the task specified by the verb. Our model directly predicts an object's appearance from the object's use specified by a verb phrase. We do not need to explicitly specify an object's class label. Our approach allows us to predict high level concepts like an object's utility based on the language query. Based on contextual information present in the language commands, our model can generalize to unseen object classes and unknown nouns in the commands. Our model correctly selects objects out of sets of five candidates to fulfill natural language commands, and achieves an average accuracy of 62.3% on a held-out test set of unseen ImageNet object classes and 53.0% on unseen object classes and unknown nouns. Our model also achieves an average accuracy of 54.7% on unseen YCB object classes, which have a different image distribution from ImageNet objects. We demonstrate our model on a KUKA LBR iiwa robot arm, enabling the robot to retrieve objects based on natural language descriptions of their usage. We also present a new dataset of 655 verb-object pairs denoting object usage over 50 verbs and 216 object classes.
NASTransfer: Analyzing Architecture Transferability in Large Scale Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Rameswar Panda, Michele Merler, Mayoore Jaiswal, Hui Wu, Kandan Ramakrishnan, Ulrich Finkler, Chun-Fu Chen, Minsik Cho, David Kung, Rogerio Feris, Bishwaranjan Bhattacharjee
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an open and challenging problem in machine learning. While NAS offers great promise, the prohibitive computational demand of most of the existing NAS methods makes it difficult to directly search the architectures on large-scale tasks. The typical way of conducting large scale NAS is to search for an architectural building block on a small dataset (either using a proxy set from the large dataset or a completely different small scale dataset) and then transfer the block to a larger dataset. Despite a number of recent results that show the promise of transfer from proxy datasets, a comprehensive evaluation of different NAS methods studying the impact of different source datasets has not yet been addressed. In this work, we propose to analyze the architecture transferability of different NAS methods by performing a series of experiments on large scale benchmarks such as ImageNet1K and ImageNet22K. We find that: (i) The size and domain of the proxy set does not seem to influence architecture performance on the target dataset. On average, transfer performance of architectures searched using completely different small datasets (e.g., CIFAR10) perform similarly to the architectures searched directly on proxy target datasets. However, design of proxy sets has considerable impact on rankings of different NAS methods. (ii) While different NAS methods show similar performance on a source dataset (e.g., CIFAR10), they significantly differ on the transfer performance to a large dataset (e.g., ImageNet1K). (iii) Even on large datasets, random sampling baseline is very competitive, but the choice of the appropriate combination of proxy set and search strategy can provide significant improvement over it. We believe that our extensive empirical analysis will prove useful for future design of NAS algorithms.
Rethinking Distributional Matching Based Domain Adaptation
Authors: Bo Li, Yezhen Wang, Tong Che, Shanghang Zhang, Sicheng Zhao, Pengfei Xu, Wei Zhou, Yoshua Bengio, Kurt Keutzer
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation (DA) is a technique that transfers predictive models trained on a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, with the core difficulty of resolving distributional shift between domains. Currently, most popular DA algorithms are based on distributional matching (DM). However in practice, realistic domain shifts (RDS) may violate their basic assumptions and as a result these methods will fail. In this paper, in order to devise robust DA algorithms, we first systematically analyze the limitations of DM based methods, and then build new benchmarks with more realistic domain shifts to evaluate the well-accepted DM methods. We further propose InstaPBM, a novel Instance-based Predictive Behavior Matching method for robust DA. Extensive experiments on both conventional and RDS benchmarks demonstrate both the limitations of DM methods and the efficacy of InstaPBM: Compared with the best baselines, InstaPBM improves the classification accuracy respectively by $4.5\%$, $3.9\%$ on Digits5, VisDA2017, and $2.2\%$, $2.9\%$, $3.6\%$ on DomainNet-LDS, DomainNet-ILDS, ID-TwO. We hope our intuitive yet effective method will serve as a useful new direction and increase the robustness of DA in real scenarios. Code will be available at anonymous link: https://github.com/pikachusocute/InstaPBM-RobustDA.
Deep Generative Model-based Quality Control for Cardiac MRI Segmentation
Authors: Shuo Wang, Giacomo Tarroni, Chen Qin, Yuanhan Mo, Chengliang Dai, Chen Chen, Ben Glocker, Yike Guo, Daniel Rueckert, Wenjia Bai
Date: 2020-06-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, MRI segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, convolutional neural networks have demonstrated promising performance in a variety of medical image segmentation tasks. However, when a trained segmentation model is deployed into the real clinical world, the model may not perform optimally. A major challenge is the potential poor-quality segmentations generated due to degraded image quality or domain shift issues. There is a timely need to develop an automated quality control method that can detect poor segmentations and feedback to clinicians. Here we propose a novel deep generative model-based framework for quality control of cardiac MRI segmentation. It first learns a manifold of good-quality image-segmentation pairs using a generative model. The quality of a given test segmentation is then assessed by evaluating the difference from its projection onto the good-quality manifold. In particular, the projection is refined through iterative search in the latent space. The proposed method achieves high prediction accuracy on two publicly available cardiac MRI datasets. Moreover, it shows better generalisation ability than traditional regression-based methods. Our approach provides a real-time and model-agnostic quality control for cardiac MRI segmentation, which has the potential to be integrated into clinical image analysis workflows.
Winning the competition: enhancing counter-contagion in SIS-like epidemic processes
Authors: Argyris Kalogeratos, Stefano Sarao Mannelli
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00

In this paper we consider the epidemic competition between two generic diffusion processes, where each competing side is represented by a different state of a stochastic process. For this setting, we present the Generalized Largest Reduction in Infectious Edges (gLRIE) dynamic resource allocation strategy to advantage the preferred state against the other. Motivated by social epidemics, we apply this method to a generic continuous-time SIS-like diffusion model where we allow for: i) arbitrary node transition rate functions that describe the dynamics of propagation depending on the network state, and ii) competition between the healthy (positive) and infected (negative) states, which are both diffusive at the same time, yet mutually exclusive on each node. Finally we use simulations to compare empirically the proposed gLRIE against competitive approaches from literature.
Using Deep Learning and Explainable Artificial Intelligence in Patients' Choices of Hospital Levels
Authors: Lichin Chen, Yu Tsao, Ji-Tian Sheu
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Specificity

In countries that enabled patients to choose their own providers, a common problem is that the patients did not make rational decisions, and hence, fail to use healthcare resources efficiently. This might cause problems such as overwhelming tertiary facilities with mild condition patients, thus limiting their capacity of treating acute and critical patients. To address such maldistributed patient volume, it is essential to oversee patients choices before further evaluation of a policy or resource allocation. This study used nationwide insurance data, accumulated possible features discussed in existing literature, and used a deep neural network to predict the patients choices of hospital levels. This study also used explainable artificial intelligence methods to interpret the contribution of features for the general public and individuals. In addition, we explored the effectiveness of changing data representations. The results showed that the model was able to predict with high area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUC) (0.90), accuracy (0.90), sensitivity (0.94), and specificity (0.97) with highly imbalanced label. Generally, social approval of the provider by the general public (positive or negative) and the number of practicing physicians serving per ten thousand people of the located area are listed as the top effecting features. The changing data representation had a positive effect on the prediction improvement. Deep learning methods can process highly imbalanced data and achieve high accuracy. The effecting features affect the general public and individuals differently. Addressing the sparsity and discrete nature of insurance data leads to better prediction. Applications using deep learning technology are promising in health policy making. More work is required to interpret models and practice implementation.
DINGO: an ontology for projects and grants linked data
Authors: Diego Chialva, Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Integration

We present DINGO (Data INtegration for Grants Ontology), an ontology that provides a machine readable extensible framework to model data for semantically-enabled applications relative to projects, funding, actors, and, notably, funding policies in the research landscape. DINGO is designed to yield high modeling power and elasticity to cope with the huge variety in funding, research and policy practices, which makes it applicable also to other areas besides research where funding is an important aspect. We discuss its main features, the principles followed for its development, its community uptake, its maintenance and evolution.
DeepMnemonic: Password Mnemonic Generation via Deep Attentive Encoder-Decoder Model
Authors: Yao Cheng, Chang Xu, Zhen Hai, Yingjiu Li
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Sentence

Strong passwords are fundamental to the security of password-based user authentication systems. In recent years, much effort has been made to evaluate password strength or to generate strong passwords. Unfortunately, the usability or memorability of the strong passwords has been largely neglected. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap between strong password generation and the usability of strong passwords. We propose to automatically generate textual password mnemonics, i.e., natural language sentences, which are intended to help users better memorize passwords. We introduce \textit{DeepMnemonic}, a deep attentive encoder-decoder framework which takes a password as input and then automatically generates a mnemonic sentence for the password. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate DeepMnemonic on the real-world data sets. The experimental results demonstrate that DeepMnemonic outperforms a well-known baseline for generating semantically meaningful mnemonic sentences. Moreover, the user study further validates that the generated mnemonic sentences by DeepMnemonic are useful in helping users memorize strong passwords.
Face-to-Music Translation Using a Distance-Preserving Generative Adversarial Network with an Auxiliary Discriminator
Authors: Chelhwon Kim, Andrew Port, Mitesh Patel
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Generative Adversarial Network, Translation

Learning a mapping between two unrelated domains-such as image and audio, without any supervision is a challenging task. In this work, we propose a distance-preserving generative adversarial model to translate images of human faces into an audio domain. The audio domain is defined by a collection of musical note sounds recorded by 10 different instrument families (NSynth \cite{nsynth2017}) and a distance metric where the instrument family class information is incorporated together with a mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) feature. To enforce distance-preservation, a loss term that penalizes difference between pairwise distances of the faces and the translated audio samples is used. Further, we discover that the distance preservation constraint in the generative adversarial model leads to reduced diversity in the translated audio samples, and propose the use of an auxiliary discriminator to enhance the diversity of the translations while using the distance preservation constraint. We also provide a visual demonstration of the results and numerical analysis of the fidelity of the translations. A video demo of our proposed model's learned translation is available in https://www.dropbox.com/s/the176w9obq8465/face_to_musical_note.mov?dl=0.
Namira Soccer 2D Simulation Team Description Paper 2020
Authors: Ehsan Asali, Farzin Negahbani, Shahriyar Bamaei, Zahra Abbasi
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00

In this article, we will discuss methods and ideas which are implemented on Namira 2D Soccer Simulation team in the recent year. Numerous scientific and programming activities were done in the process of code development, but we will mention the most outstanding ones in details. A Kalman filtering method for localization and two helpful software packages will be discussed here. Namira uses agent2d-3.1.1 as base code and librcsc-4.1.0 as library with some deliberate changes.
No Substitute for Functionalism -- A Reply to 'Falsification & Consciousness'
Authors: Natesh Ganesh
Date: 2020-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

In their paper 'Falsification and Consciousness' [1], Kleiner and Hoel introduced a formal mathematical model of the process of generating observable data from experiments and using that data to generate inferences and predictions onto an experience space. The resulting substitution argument built on this framework was used to show that any theory of consciousness with independent inference and prediction data are pre-falsified, if the inference reports are considered valid. If this argument does indeed pre-falsify many of the leading theories of consciousness, it would indicate a fundamental problem affecting the field of consciousness as a whole that would require radical changes to how consciousness science is performed. In this reply, the author will identify avenues of expansion for the model proposed in [1], allowing us to distinguish between different types of variation. Motivated by examples from neural networks, state machines and Turing machines, we will prove that substitutions do not exist for a very broad class of Level-1 functionalist theories, rendering them immune to the aforementioned substitution argument.
Efficient Sampling-Based Maximum Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Application to Autonomous Driving
Authors: Zheng Wu, Liting Sun, Wei Zhan, Chenyu Yang, Masayoshi Tomizuka
Date: 2020-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In the past decades, we have witnessed significant progress in the domain of autonomous driving. Advanced techniques based on optimization and reinforcement learning (RL) become increasingly powerful at solving the forward problem: given designed reward/cost functions, how should we optimize them and obtain driving policies that interact with the environment safely and efficiently. Such progress has raised another equally important question: \emph{what should we optimize}? Instead of manually specifying the reward functions, it is desired that we can extract what human drivers try to optimize from real traffic data and assign that to autonomous vehicles to enable more naturalistic and transparent interaction between humans and intelligent agents. To address this issue, we present an efficient sampling-based maximum-entropy inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) algorithm in this paper. Different from existing IRL algorithms, by introducing an efficient continuous-domain trajectory sampler, the proposed algorithm can directly learn the reward functions in the continuous domain while considering the uncertainties in demonstrated trajectories from human drivers. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on real driving data, including both non-interactive and interactive scenarios. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves more accurate prediction performance with faster convergence speed and better generalization compared to other baseline IRL algorithms.
DeepAbstract: Neural Network Abstraction for Accelerating Verification
Authors: Pranav Ashok, Vahid Hashemi, Jan Křetínský, Stefanie Mohr
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

While abstraction is a classic tool of verification to scale it up, it is not used very often for verifying neural networks. However, it can help with the still open task of scaling existing algorithms to state-of-the-art network architectures. We introduce an abstraction framework applicable to fully-connected feed-forward neural networks based on clustering of neurons that behave similarly on some inputs. For the particular case of ReLU, we additionally provide error bounds incurred by the abstraction. We show how the abstraction reduces the size of the network, while preserving its accuracy, and how verification results on the abstract network can be transferred back to the original network.
Competitive Balance in Team Sports Games
Authors: Sofia M Nikolakaki, Ogheneovo Dibie, Ahmad Beirami, Nicholas Peterson, Navid Aghdaie, Kazi Zaman
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00

Competition is a primary driver of player satisfaction and engagement in multiplayer online games. Traditional matchmaking systems aim at creating matches involving teams of similar aggregated individual skill levels, such as Elo score or TrueSkill. However, team dynamics cannot be solely captured using such linear predictors. Recently, it has been shown that nonlinear predictors that target to learn probability of winning as a function of player and team features significantly outperforms these linear skill-based methods. In this paper, we show that using final score difference provides yet a better prediction metric for competitive balance. We also show that a linear model trained on a carefully selected set of team and individual features achieves almost the performance of the more powerful neural network model while offering two orders of magnitude inference speed improvement. This shows significant promise for implementation in online matchmaking systems.
Deep Learning-based Computational Pathology Predicts Origins for Cancers of Unknown Primary
Authors: Ming Y. Lu, Melissa Zhao, Maha Shady, Jana Lipkova, Tiffany Y. Chen, Drew F. K. Williamson, Faisal Mahmood
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, whole slide images

Cancer of unknown primary (CUP) is an enigmatic group of diagnoses where the primary anatomical site of tumor origin cannot be determined. This poses a significant challenge since modern therapeutics such as chemotherapy regimen and immune checkpoint inhibitors are specific to the primary tumor. Recent work has focused on using genomics and transcriptomics for identification of tumor origins. However, genomic testing is not conducted for every patient and lacks clinical penetration in low resource settings. Herein, to overcome these challenges, we present a deep learning-based computational pathology algorithm-TOAD-that can provide a differential diagnosis for CUP using routinely acquired histology slides. We used 17,486 gigapixel whole slide images with known primaries spread over 18 common origins to train a multi-task deep model to simultaneously identify the tumor as primary or metastatic and predict its site of origin. We tested our model on an internal test set of 4,932 cases with known primaries and achieved a top-1 accuracy of 0.84, a top-3 accuracy of 0.94 while on our external test set of 662 cases from 202 different hospitals, it achieved a top-1 and top-3 accuracy of 0.79 and 0.93 respectively. We further curated a dataset of 717 CUP cases from 151 different medical centers and identified a subset of 290 cases for which a differential diagnosis was assigned. Our model predictions resulted in concordance for 50% of cases (\k{appa}=0.4 when adjusted for agreement by chance) and a top-3 agreement of 75%. Our proposed method can be used as an assistive tool to assign differential diagnosis to complicated metastatic and CUP cases and could be used in conjunction with or in lieu of immunohistochemical analysis and extensive diagnostic work-ups to reduce the occurrence of CUP.
Mining Misdiagnosis Patterns from Biomedical Literature
Authors: Cindy Li, Elizabeth Chen, Guergana Savova, Hamish Fraser, Carsten Eickhoff
Date: 2020-06-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Diagnostic errors can pose a serious threat to patient safety, leading to serious harm and even death. Efforts are being made to develop interventions that allow physicians to reassess for errors and improve diagnostic accuracy. Our study presents an exploration of misdiagnosis patterns mined from PubMed abstracts. Article titles containing certain phrases indicating misdiagnosis were selected and frequencies of these misdiagnoses calculated. We present the resulting patterns in the form of a directed graph with frequency-weighted misdiagnosis edges connecting diagnosis vertices. We find that the most commonly misdiagnosed diseases were often misdiagnosed as many different diseases, with each misdiagnosis having a relatively low frequency, rather than as a single disease with greater probability. Additionally, while a misdiagnosis relationship may generally exist, the relationship was often found to be one-sided.