pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
What Can Style Transfer and Paintings Do For Model Robustness?
Authors: Hubert Lin, Mitchell Van Zuijlen, Sylvia C. Pont, Maarten W. A. Wijntjes, Kavita Bala
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Style Transfer

A common strategy for improving model robustness is through data augmentations. Data augmentations encourage models to learn desired invariances, such as invariance to horizontal flipping or small changes in color. Recent work has shown that arbitrary style transfer can be used as a form of data augmentation to encourage invariance to textures by creating painting-like images from photographs. However, a stylized photograph is not quite the same as an artist-created painting. Artists depict perceptually meaningful cues in paintings so that humans can recognize salient components in scenes, an emphasis which is not enforced in style transfer. Therefore, we study how style transfer and paintings differ in their impact on model robustness. First, we investigate the role of paintings as style images for stylization-based data augmentation. We find that style transfer functions well even without paintings as style images. Second, we show that learning from paintings as a form of perceptual data augmentation can improve model robustness. Finally, we investigate the invariances learned from stylization and from paintings, and show that models learn different invariances from these differing forms of data. Our results provide insights into how stylization improves model robustness, and provide evidence that artist-created paintings can be a valuable source of data for model robustness.
An Artificial Consciousness Model and its relations with Philosophy of Mind
Authors: Eduardo C. Garrido-Merchán, Martin Molina, Francisco M. Mendoza
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Philosophy, POS

This work seeks to study the beneficial properties that an autonomous agent can obtain by implementing a cognitive architecture similar to the one of conscious beings. Along this document, a conscious model of autonomous agent based in a global workspace architecture is presented. We describe how this agent is viewed from different perspectives of philosophy of mind, being inspired by their ideas. The goal of this model is to create autonomous agents able to navigate within an environment composed of multiple independent magnitudes, adapting to its surroundings in order to find the best possible position in base of its inner preferences. The purpose of the model is to test the effectiveness of many cognitive mechanisms that are incorporated, such as an attention mechanism for magnitude selection, pos-session of inner feelings and preferences, usage of a memory system to storage beliefs and past experiences, and incorporating a global workspace which controls and integrates information processed by all the subsystem of the model. We show in a large experiment set how an autonomous agent can benefit from having a cognitive architecture such as the one described.
Kinetics-Informed Neural Networks
Authors: Gabriel S. Gusmão, Adhika P. Retnanto, Shashwati C. da Cunha, Andrew J. Medford
Date: 2020-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Multiobjective Optimization

Chemical kinetics and reaction engineering consists of the phenomenological framework for the disentanglement of reaction mechanisms, optimization of reaction performance and the rational design of chemical processes. Here, we utilize feed-forward artificial neural networks as basis functions to solve ordinary differential equations (ODEs) constrained by differential algebraic equations (DAEs) that describe microkinetic models (MKMs). We present an algebraic framework for the mathematical description and classification of reaction networks, types of elementary reaction, and chemical species. Under this framework, we demonstrate that the simultaneous training of neural nets and kinetic model parameters in a regularized multi-objective optimization setting leads to the solution of the inverse problem through the estimation of kinetic parameters from synthetic experimental data. We analyze a set of scenarios to establish the extent to which kinetic parameters can be retrieved from transient kinetic data, and assess the robustness of the methodology with respect to statistical noise. This approach to inverse kinetic ODEs can assist in the elucidation of reaction mechanisms based on transient data.
Conditional Link Prediction of Category-Implicit Keypoint Detection
Authors: Ellen Yi-Ge, Rui Fan, Zechun Liu, Zhiqiang Shen
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Keypoint Detection, Link Prediction, Prediction

Keypoints of objects reflect their concise abstractions, while the corresponding connection links (CL) build the skeleton by detecting the intrinsic relations between keypoints. Existing approaches are typically computationally-intensive, inapplicable for instances belonging to multiple classes, and/or infeasible to simultaneously encode connection information. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an end-to-end category-implicit Keypoint and Link Prediction Network (KLPNet), which is the first approach for simultaneous semantic keypoint detection (for multi-class instances) and CL rejuvenation. In our KLPNet, a novel Conditional Link Prediction Graph is proposed for link prediction among keypoints that are contingent on a predefined category. Furthermore, a Cross-stage Keypoint Localization Module (CKLM) is introduced to explore feature aggregation for coarse-to-fine keypoint localization. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three publicly available benchmarks demonstrate that our KLPNet consistently outperforms all other state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, the experimental results of CL prediction also show the effectiveness of our KLPNet with respect to occlusion problems.
Improved Semantic Role Labeling using Parameterized Neighborhood Memory Adaptation
Authors: Ishan Jindal, Ranit Aharonov, Siddhartha Brahma, Huaiyu Zhu, Yunyao Li
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Parsing, Semantic Role Labeling, Word Embeddings

Deep neural models achieve some of the best results for semantic role labeling. Inspired by instance-based learning that utilizes nearest neighbors to handle low-frequency context-specific training samples, we investigate the use of memory adaptation techniques in deep neural models. We propose a parameterized neighborhood memory adaptive (PNMA) method that uses a parameterized representation of the nearest neighbors of tokens in a memory of activations and makes predictions based on the most similar samples in the training data. We empirically show that PNMA consistently improves the SRL performance of the base model irrespective of types of word embeddings. Coupled with contextualized word embeddings derived from BERT, PNMA improves over existing models for both span and dependency semantic parsing datasets, especially on out-of-domain text, reaching F1 scores of 80.2, and 84.97 on CoNLL2005, and CoNLL2009 datasets, respectively.
Hybrid Imitation Learning for Real-Time Service Restoration in Resilient Distribution Systems
Authors: Yichen Zhang, Feng Qiu, Tianqi Hong, Zhaoyu Wang, Fangxing Li
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Self-healing capability is one of the most critical factors for a resilient distribution system, which requires intelligent agents to automatically perform restorative actions online, including network reconfiguration and reactive power dispatch. These agents should be equipped with a predesigned decision policy to meet real-time requirements and handle highly complex $N-k$ scenarios. The disturbance randomness hampers the application of exploration-dominant algorithms like traditional reinforcement learning (RL), and the agent training problem under $N-k$ scenarios has not been thoroughly solved. In this paper, we propose the imitation learning (IL) framework to train such policies, where the agent will interact with an expert to learn its optimal policy, and therefore significantly improve the training efficiency compared with the RL methods. To handle tie-line operations and reactive power dispatch simultaneously, we design a hybrid policy network for such a discrete-continuous hybrid action space. We employ the 33-node system under $N-k$ disturbances to verify the proposed framework.
Improved Handling of Motion Blur in Online Object Detection
Authors: Mohamed Sayed, Gabriel Brostow
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Deblurring, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

We wish to detect specific categories of objects, for online vision systems that will run in the real world. Object detection is already very challenging. It is even harder when the images are blurred, from the camera being in a car or a hand-held phone. Most existing efforts either focused on sharp images, with easy to label ground truth, or they have treated motion blur as one of many generic corruptions. Instead, we focus especially on the details of egomotion induced blur. We explore five classes of remedies, where each targets different potential causes for the performance gap between sharp and blurred images. For example, first deblurring an image changes its human interpretability, but at present, only partly improves object detection. The other four classes of remedies address multi-scale texture, out-of-distribution testing, label generation, and conditioning by blur-type. Surprisingly, we discover that custom label generation aimed at resolving spatial ambiguity, ahead of all others, markedly improves object detection. Also, in contrast to findings from classification, we see a noteworthy boost by conditioning our model on bespoke categories of motion blur. We validate and cross-breed the different remedies experimentally on blurred COCO images and real-world blur datasets, producing an easy and practical favorite model with superior detection rates.
A Scalable, Flexible Augmentation of the Student Education Process
Authors: Bhairav Mehta, Adithya Ramanathan
Date: 2018-10-17 00:00:00

We present a novel intelligent tutoring system which builds upon well-established hypotheses in educational psychology and incorporates them inside of a scalable software architecture. Specifically, we build upon the known benefits of knowledge vocalization, parallel learning, and immediate feedback in the context of student learning. We show that open-source data combined with state-of-the-art techniques in deep learning and natural language processing can apply the benefits of these three factors at scale, while still operating at the granularity of individual student needs and recommendations. Additionally, we allow teachers to retain full control of the outputs of the algorithms, and provide student statistics to help better guide classroom discussions towards topics that would benefit from more in-person review and coverage. Our experiments and pilot programs show promising results, and cement our hypothesis that the system is flexible enough to serve a wide variety of purposes in both classroom and classroom-free settings.
Intrinsic Decomposition of Document Images In-the-Wild
Authors: Sagnik Das, Hassan Ahmed Sial, Ke Ma, Ramon Baldrich, Maria Vanrell, Dimitris Samaras
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Shadow Removal, Intrinsic Image Decomposition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Shadow Removal

Automatic document content processing is affected by artifacts caused by the shape of the paper, non-uniform and diverse color of lighting conditions. Fully-supervised methods on real data are impossible due to the large amount of data needed. Hence, the current state of the art deep learning models are trained on fully or partially synthetic images. However, document shadow or shading removal results still suffer because: (a) prior methods rely on uniformity of local color statistics, which limit their application on real-scenarios with complex document shapes and textures and; (b) synthetic or hybrid datasets with non-realistic, simulated lighting conditions are used to train the models. In this paper we tackle these problems with our two main contributions. First, a physically constrained learning-based method that directly estimates document reflectance based on intrinsic image formation which generalizes to challenging illumination conditions. Second, a new dataset that clearly improves previous synthetic ones, by adding a large range of realistic shading and diverse multi-illuminant conditions, uniquely customized to deal with documents in-the-wild. The proposed architecture works in a self-supervised manner where only the synthetic texture is used as a weak training signal (obviating the need for very costly ground truth with disentangled versions of shading and reflectance). The proposed approach leads to a significant generalization of document reflectance estimation in real scenes with challenging illumination. We extensively evaluate on the real benchmark datasets available for intrinsic image decomposition and document shadow removal tasks. Our reflectance estimation scheme, when used as a pre-processing step of an OCR pipeline, shows a 26% improvement of character error rate (CER), thus, proving the practical applicability.
Audio, Speech, Language, & Signal Processing for COVID-19: A Comprehensive Overview
Authors: Gauri Deshpande, Björn W. Schuller
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has been the research focus world-wide in the year 2020. Several efforts, from collection of COVID-19 patients' data to screening them for the virus's detection are taken with rigour. A major portion of COVID-19 symptoms are related to the functioning of the respiratory system, which in-turn critically influences the human speech production system. This drives the research focus towards identifying the markers of COVID-19 in speech and other human generated audio signals. In this paper, we give an overview of the speech and other audio signal, language and general signal processing-based work done using Artificial Intelligence techniques to screen, diagnose, monitor, and spread the awareness aboutCOVID-19. We also briefly describe the research related to detect accord-ing COVID-19 symptoms carried out so far. We aspire that this collective information will be useful in developing automated systems, which can help in the context of COVID-19 using non-obtrusive and easy to use modalities such as audio, speech, and language.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Crowdsourced Urban Delivery: System States Characterization, Heuristics-guided Action Choice, and Rule-Interposing Integration
Authors: Tanvir Ahamed, Bo Zou, Nahid Parvez Farazi, Theja Tulabandhula
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

This paper investigates the problem of assigning shipping requests to ad hoc couriers in the context of crowdsourced urban delivery. The shipping requests are spatially distributed each with a limited time window between the earliest time for pickup and latest time for delivery. The ad hoc couriers, termed crowdsourcees, also have limited time availability and carrying capacity. We propose a new deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach to tackling this assignment problem. A deep Q network (DQN) algorithm is trained which entails two salient features of experience replay and target network that enhance the efficiency, convergence, and stability of DRL training. More importantly, this paper makes three methodological contributions: 1) presenting a comprehensive and novel characterization of crowdshipping system states that encompasses spatial-temporal and capacity information of crowdsourcees and requests; 2) embedding heuristics that leverage the information offered by the state representation and are based on intuitive reasoning to guide specific actions to take, to preserve tractability and enhance efficiency of training; and 3) integrating rule-interposing to prevent repeated visiting of the same routes and node sequences during routing improvement, thereby further enhancing the training efficiency by accelerating learning. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through extensive numerical analysis. The results show the benefits brought by the heuristics-guided action choice and rule-interposing in DRL training, and the superiority of the proposed approach over existing heuristics in both solution quality, time, and scalability. Besides the potential to improve the efficiency of crowdshipping operation planning, the proposed approach also provides a new avenue and generic framework for other problems in the vehicle routing context.
Architectural Adversarial Robustness: The Case for Deep Pursuit
Authors: George Cazenavette, Calvin Murdock, Simon Lucey
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, global-optimization

Despite their unmatched performance, deep neural networks remain susceptible to targeted attacks by nearly imperceptible levels of adversarial noise. While the underlying cause of this sensitivity is not well understood, theoretical analyses can be simplified by reframing each layer of a feed-forward network as an approximate solution to a sparse coding problem. Iterative solutions using basis pursuit are theoretically more stable and have improved adversarial robustness. However, cascading layer-wise pursuit implementations suffer from error accumulation in deeper networks. In contrast, our new method of deep pursuit approximates the activations of all layers as a single global optimization problem, allowing us to consider deeper, real-world architectures with skip connections such as residual networks. Experimentally, our approach demonstrates improved robustness to adversarial noise.
Short-Term Flow-Based Bandwidth Forecasting using Machine Learning
Authors: Maxime Labonne, Jorge López, Claude Poletti, Jean-Baptiste Munier
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Management

This paper proposes a novel framework to predict traffic flows' bandwidth ahead of time. Modern network management systems share a common issue: the network situation evolves between the moment the decision is made and the moment when actions (countermeasures) are applied. This framework converts packets from real-life traffic into flows containing relevant features. Machine learning models, including Decision Tree, Random Forest, XGBoost, and Deep Neural Network, are trained on these data to predict the bandwidth at the next time instance for every flow. Predictions can be fed to the management system instead of current flows bandwidth in order to take decisions on a more accurate network state. Experiments were performed on 981,774 flows and 15 different time windows (from 0.03s to 4s). They show that the Random Forest is the best performing and most reliable model, with a predictive performance consistently better than relying on the current bandwidth (+19.73% in mean absolute error and +18.00% in root mean square error). Experimental results indicate that this framework can help network management systems to take more informed decisions using a predicted network state.
Improving Neural Network with Uniform Sparse Connectivity
Authors: Weijun Luo
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00

Neural network forms the foundation of deep learning and numerous AI applications. Classical neural networks are fully connected, expensive to train and prone to overfitting. Sparse networks tend to have convoluted structure search, suboptimal performance and limited usage. We proposed the novel uniform sparse network (USN) with even and sparse connectivity within each layer. USN has one striking property that its performance is independent of the substantial topology variation and enormous model space, thus offers a search-free solution to all above mentioned issues of neural networks. USN consistently and substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art sparse network models in prediction accuracy, speed and robustness. It even achieves higher prediction accuracy than the fully connected network with only 0.55% parameters and 1/4 computing time and resources. Importantly, USN is conceptually simple as a natural generalization of fully connected network with multiple improvements in accuracy, robustness and scalability. USN can replace the latter in a range of applications, data types and deep learning architectures. We have made USN open source at https://github.com/datapplab/sparsenet.
LABNet: Local Graph Aggregation Network with Class Balanced Loss for Vehicle Re-Identification
Authors: Abu Md Niamul Taufique, Andreas Savakis
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Spatial Reasoning, Vehicle Re-Identification

Vehicle re-identification is an important computer vision task where the objective is to identify a specific vehicle among a set of vehicles seen at various viewpoints. Recent methods based on deep learning utilize a global average pooling layer after the backbone feature extractor, however, this ignores any spatial reasoning on the feature map. In this paper, we propose local graph aggregation on the backbone feature map, to learn associations of local information and hence improve feature learning as well as reduce the effects of partial occlusion and background clutter. Our local graph aggregation network considers spatial regions of the feature map as nodes and builds a local neighborhood graph that performs local feature aggregation before the global average pooling layer. We further utilize a batch normalization layer to improve the system effectiveness. Additionally, we introduce a class balanced loss to compensate for the imbalance in the sample distributions found in the most widely used vehicle re-identification datasets. Finally, we evaluate our method in three popular benchmarks and show that our approach outperforms many state-of-the-art methods.
Reconfigurable Cyber-Physical System for Critical Infrastructure Protection in Smart Cities via Smart Video-Surveillance
Authors: Juan Isern, Francisco Barranco, Daniel Deniz, Juho Lesonen, Jari Hannuksela, Richard R. Carrillo
Date: 2020-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Automated surveillance is essential for the protection of Critical Infrastructures (CIs) in future Smart Cities. The dynamic environments and bandwidth requirements demand systems that adapt themselves to react when events of interest occur. We present a reconfigurable Cyber Physical System for the protection of CIs using distributed cloud-edge smart video surveillance. Our local edge nodes perform people detection via Deep Learning. Processing is embedded in high performance SoCs (System-on-Chip) achieving real-time performance ($\approx$ 100 fps - frames per second) which enables efficiently managing video streams of more cameras source at lower frame rate. Cloud server gathers results from nodes to carry out biometric facial identification, tracking, and perimeter monitoring. A Quality and Resource Management module monitors data bandwidth and triggers reconfiguration adapting the transmitted video resolution. This also enables a flexible use of the network by multiple cameras while maintaining the accuracy of biometric identification. A real-world example shows a reduction of $\approx$ 75\% bandwidth use with respect to the no-reconfiguration scenario.