pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Two-Level Residual Distillation based Triple Network for Incremental Object Detection
Authors: Dongbao Yang, Yu Zhou, Dayan Wu, Can Ma, Fei Yang, Weiping Wang
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Modern object detection methods based on convolutional neural network suffer from severe catastrophic forgetting in learning new classes without original data. Due to time consumption, storage burden and privacy of old data, it is inadvisable to train the model from scratch with both old and new data when new object classes emerge after the model trained. In this paper, we propose a novel incremental object detector based on Faster R-CNN to continuously learn from new object classes without using old data. It is a triple network where an old model and a residual model as assistants for helping the incremental model learning on new classes without forgetting the previous learned knowledge. To better maintain the discrimination of features between old and new classes, the residual model is jointly trained on new classes in the incremental learning procedure. In addition, a corresponding distillation scheme is designed to guide the training process, which consists of a two-level residual distillation loss and a joint classification distillation loss. Extensive experiments on VOC2007 and COCO are conducted, and the results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively learn to incrementally detect objects of new classes, and the problem of catastrophic forgetting is mitigated in this context.
Image-driven discriminative and generative machine learning algorithms for establishing microstructure-processing relationships
Authors: Wufei Ma, Elizabeth Kautz, Arun Baskaran, Aritra Chowdhury, Vineet Joshi, Bülent Yener, Daniel Lewis
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We investigate methods of microstructure representation for the purpose of predicting processing condition from microstructure image data. A binary alloy (uranium-molybdenum) that is currently under development as a nuclear fuel was studied for the purpose of developing an improved machine learning approach to image recognition, characterization, and building predictive capabilities linking microstructure to processing conditions. Here, we test different microstructure representations and evaluate model performance based on the F1 score. A F1 score of 95.1% was achieved for distinguishing between micrographs corresponding to ten different thermo-mechanical material processing conditions. We find that our newly developed microstructure representation describes image data well, and the traditional approach of utilizing area fractions of different phases is insufficient for distinguishing between multiple classes using a relatively small, imbalanced original data set of 272 images. To explore the applicability of generative methods for supplementing such limited data sets, generative adversarial networks were trained to generate artificial microstructure images. Two different generative networks were trained and tested to assess performance. Challenges and best practices associated with applying machine learning to limited microstructure image data sets is also discussed. Our work has implications for quantitative microstructure analysis, and development of microstructure-processing relationships in limited data sets typical of metallurgical process design studies.
Hyper-local sustainable assortment planning
Authors: Nupur Aggarwal, Abhishek Bansal, Kushagra Manglik, Kedar Kulkarni, Vikas Raykar
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00

Assortment planning, an important seasonal activity for any retailer, involves choosing the right subset of products to stock in each store.While existing approaches only maximize the expected revenue, we propose including the environmental impact too, through the Higg Material Sustainability Index. The trade-off between revenue and environmental impact is balanced through a multi-objective optimization approach, that yields a Pareto-front of optimal assortments for merchandisers to choose from. Using the proposed approach on a few product categories of a leading fashion retailer shows that choosing assortments with lower environmental impact with a minimal impact on revenue is possible.
Binary Search and First Order Gradient Based Method for Stochastic Optimization
Authors: Vijay Pandey
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

In this paper, we present a novel stochastic optimization method, which uses the binary search technique with first order gradient based optimization method, called Binary Search Gradient Optimization (BSG) or BiGrad. In this optimization setup, a non-convex surface is treated as a set of convex surfaces. In BSG, at first, a region is defined, assuming region is convex. If region is not convex, then the algorithm leaves the region very fast and defines a new one, otherwise, it tries to converge at the optimal point of the region. In BSG, core purpose of binary search is to decide, whether region is convex or not in logarithmic time, whereas, first order gradient based method is primarily applied, to define a new region. In this paper, Adam is used as a first order gradient based method, nevertheless, other methods of this class may also be considered. In deep neural network setup, it handles the problem of vanishing and exploding gradient efficiently. We evaluate BSG on the MNIST handwritten digit, IMDB, and CIFAR10 data set, using logistic regression and deep neural networks. We produce more promising results as compared to other first order gradient based optimization methods. Furthermore, proposed algorithm generalizes significantly better on unseen data as compared to other methods.
XCAT-GAN for Synthesizing 3D Consistent Labeled Cardiac MR Images on Anatomically Variable XCAT Phantoms
Authors: Sina Amirrajab, Samaneh Abbasi-Sureshjani, Yasmina Al Khalil, Cristian Lorenz, Juergen Weese, Josien Pluim, Marcel Breeuwer
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have provided promising data enrichment solutions by synthesizing high-fidelity images. However, generating large sets of labeled images with new anatomical variations remains unexplored. We propose a novel method for synthesizing cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) images on a population of virtual subjects with a large anatomical variation, introduced using the 4D eXtended Cardiac and Torso (XCAT) computerized human phantom. We investigate two conditional image synthesis approaches grounded on a semantically-consistent mask-guided image generation technique: 4-class and 8-class XCAT-GANs. The 4-class technique relies on only the annotations of the heart; while the 8-class technique employs a predicted multi-tissue label map of the heart-surrounding organs and provides better guidance for our conditional image synthesis. For both techniques, we train our conditional XCAT-GAN with real images paired with corresponding labels and subsequently at the inference time, we substitute the labels with the XCAT derived ones. Therefore, the trained network accurately transfers the tissue-specific textures to the new label maps. By creating 33 virtual subjects of synthetic CMR images at the end-diastolic and end-systolic phases, we evaluate the usefulness of such data in the downstream cardiac cavity segmentation task under different augmentation strategies. Results demonstrate that even with only 20% of real images (40 volumes) seen during training, segmentation performance is retained with the addition of synthetic CMR images. Moreover, the improvement in utilizing synthetic images for augmenting the real data is evident through the reduction of Hausdorff distance up to 28% and an increase in the Dice score up to 5%, indicating a higher similarity to the ground truth in all dimensions.
Contraction Mapping of Feature Norms for Classifier Learning on the Data with Different Quality
Authors: Weihua Liu, Xiabi Liu, Murong Wang, Ling Ma
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Face Recognition, Face Verification, General Classification, Handwritten Digit Recognition, image-classification, Image Classification, Lung Nodule Classification

The popular softmax loss and its recent extensions have achieved great success in the deep learning-based image classification. However, the data for training image classifiers usually has different quality. Ignoring such problem, the correct classification of low quality data is hard to be solved. In this paper, we discover the positive correlation between the feature norm of an image and its quality through careful experiments on various applications and various deep neural networks. Based on this finding, we propose a contraction mapping function to compress the range of feature norms of training images according to their quality and embed this contraction mapping function into softmax loss or its extensions to produce novel learning objectives. The experiments on various classification applications, including handwritten digit recognition, lung nodule classification, face verification and face recognition, demonstrate that the proposed approach is promising to effectively deal with the problem of learning on the data with different quality and leads to the significant and stable improvements in the classification accuracy.
YOLOpeds: Efficient Real-Time Single-Shot Pedestrian Detection for Smart Camera Applications
Authors: Christos Kyrkou
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Learning, Pedestrian Detection

Deep Learning-based object detectors can enhance the capabilities of smart camera systems in a wide spectrum of machine vision applications including video surveillance, autonomous driving, robots and drones, smart factory, and health monitoring. Pedestrian detection plays a key role in all these applications and deep learning can be used to construct accurate state-of-the-art detectors. However, such complex paradigms do not scale easily and are not traditionally implemented in resource-constrained smart cameras for on-device processing which offers significant advantages in situations when real-time monitoring and robustness are vital. Efficient neural networks can not only enable mobile applications and on-device experiences but can also be a key enabler of privacy and security allowing a user to gain the benefits of neural networks without needing to send their data to the server to be evaluated. This work addresses the challenge of achieving a good trade-off between accuracy and speed for efficient deployment of deep-learning-based pedestrian detection in smart camera applications. A computationally efficient architecture is introduced based on separable convolutions and proposes integrating dense connections across layers and multi-scale feature fusion to improve representational capacity while decreasing the number of parameters and operations. In particular, the contributions of this work are the following: 1) An efficient backbone combining multi-scale feature operations, 2) a more elaborate loss function for improved localization, 3) an anchor-less approach for detection, The proposed approach called YOLOpeds is evaluated using the PETS2009 surveillance dataset on 320x320 images. Overall, YOLOpeds provides real-time sustained operation of over 30 frames per second with detection rates in the range of 86% outperforming existing deep learning models.
Differentiable model-based adaptive optics with transmitted and reflected light
Authors: Ivan Vishniakou, Johannes D. Seelig
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Aberrations limit optical systems in many situations, for example when imaging in biological tissue. Machine learning offers novel ways to improve imaging under such conditions by learning inverse models of aberrations. Learning requires datasets that cover a wide range of possible aberrations, which however becomes limiting for more strongly scattering samples, and does not take advantage of prior information about the imaging process. Here, we show that combining model-based adaptive optics with the optimization techniques of machine learning frameworks can find aberration corrections with a small number of measurements. Corrections are determined in a transmission configuration through a single aberrating layer and in a reflection configuration through two different layers at the same time. Additionally, corrections are not limited by a predetermined model of aberrations (such as combinations of Zernike modes). Focusing in transmission can be achieved based only on reflected light, compatible with an epidetection imaging configuration.
Ladybird: Quasi-Monte Carlo Sampling for Deep Implicit Field Based 3D Reconstruction with Symmetry
Authors: Yifan Xu, Tianqi Fan, Yi Yuan, Gurprit Singh
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Deep implicit field regression methods are effective for 3D reconstruction from single-view images. However, the impact of different sampling patterns on the reconstruction quality is not well-understood. In this work, we first study the effect of point set discrepancy on the network training. Based on Farthest Point Sampling algorithm, we propose a sampling scheme that theoretically encourages better generalization performance, and results in fast convergence for SGD-based optimization algorithms. Secondly, based on the reflective symmetry of an object, we propose a feature fusion method that alleviates issues due to self-occlusions which makes it difficult to utilize local image features. Our proposed system Ladybird is able to create high quality 3D object reconstructions from a single input image. We evaluate Ladybird on a large scale 3D dataset (ShapeNet) demonstrating highly competitive results in terms of Chamfer distance, Earth Mover's distance and Intersection Over Union (IoU).
ALF: Autoencoder-based Low-rank Filter-sharing for Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Alexander Frickenstein, Manoj-Rohit Vemparala, Nael Fasfous, Laura Hauenschild, Naveen-Shankar Nagaraja, Christian Unger, Walter Stechele
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression

Closing the gap between the hardware requirements of state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks and the limited resources constraining embedded applications is the next big challenge in deep learning research. The computational complexity and memory footprint of such neural networks are typically daunting for deployment in resource constrained environments. Model compression techniques, such as pruning, are emphasized among other optimization methods for solving this problem. Most existing techniques require domain expertise or result in irregular sparse representations, which increase the burden of deploying deep learning applications on embedded hardware accelerators. In this paper, we propose the autoencoder-based low-rank filter-sharing technique technique (ALF). When applied to various networks, ALF is compared to state-of-the-art pruning methods, demonstrating its efficient compression capabilities on theoretical metrics as well as on an accurate, deterministic hardware-model. In our experiments, ALF showed a reduction of 70\% in network parameters, 61\% in operations and 41\% in execution time, with minimal loss in accuracy.
Practical and sample efficient zero-shot HPO
Authors: Fela Winkelmolen, Nikita Ivkin, H. Furkan Bozkurt, Zohar Karnin
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Hyperparameter Optimization, Transfer Learning

Zero-shot hyperparameter optimization (HPO) is a simple yet effective use of transfer learning for constructing a small list of hyperparameter (HP) configurations that complement each other. That is to say, for any given dataset, at least one of them is expected to perform well. Current techniques for obtaining this list are computationally expensive as they rely on running training jobs on a diverse collection of datasets and a large collection of randomly drawn HPs. This cost is especially problematic in environments where the space of HPs is regularly changing due to new algorithm versions, or changing architectures of deep networks. We provide an overview of available approaches and introduce two novel techniques to handle the problem. The first is based on a surrogate model and adaptively chooses pairs of dataset, configuration to query. The second, for settings where finding, tuning and testing a surrogate model is problematic, is a multi-fidelity technique combining HyperBand with submodular optimization. We benchmark our methods experimentally on five tasks (XGBoost, LightGBM, CatBoost, MLP and AutoML) and show significant improvement in accuracy compared to standard zero-shot HPO with the same training budget. In addition to contributing new algorithms, we provide an extensive study of the zero-shot HPO technique resulting in (1) default hyper-parameters for popular algorithms that would benefit the community using them, (2) massive lookup tables to further the research of hyper-parameter tuning.
Inception Neural Network for Complete Intersection Calabi-Yau 3-folds
Authors: Harold Erbin, Riccardo Finotello
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00

We introduce a neural network inspired by Google's Inception model to compute the Hodge number $h^{1,1}$ of complete intersection Calabi-Yau (CICY) 3-folds. This architecture improves largely the accuracy of the predictions over existing results, giving already 97% of accuracy with just 30% of the data for training. Moreover, accuracy climbs to 99% when using 80% of the data for training. This proves that neural networks are a valuable resource to study geometric aspects in both pure mathematics and string theory.
NOH-NMS: Improving Pedestrian Detection by Nearby Objects Hallucination
Authors: Penghao Zhou, Chong Zhou, Pai Peng, Junlong Du, Xing Sun, Xiaowei Guo, Feiyue Huang
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Object Detection, Pedestrian Detection

Greedy-NMS inherently raises a dilemma, where a lower NMS threshold will potentially lead to a lower recall rate and a higher threshold introduces more false positives. This problem is more severe in pedestrian detection because the instance density varies more intensively. However, previous works on NMS don't consider or vaguely consider the factor of the existent of nearby pedestrians. Thus, we propose Nearby Objects Hallucinator (NOH), which pinpoints the objects nearby each proposal with a Gaussian distribution, together with NOH-NMS, which dynamically eases the suppression for the space that might contain other objects with a high likelihood. Compared to Greedy-NMS, our method, as the state-of-the-art, improves by $3.9\%$ AP, $5.1\%$ Recall, and $0.8\%$ $\text{MR}^{-2}$ on CrowdHuman to $89.0\%$ AP and $92.9\%$ Recall, and $43.9\%$ $\text{MR}^{-2}$ respectively.
Decomposing Generation Networks with Structure Prediction for Recipe Generation
Authors: Hao Wang, Guosheng Lin, Steven C. H. Hoi, Chunyan Miao
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Recipe Generation, Sentence

Recipe generation from food images and ingredients is a challenging task, which requires the interpretation of the information from another modality. Different from the image captioning task, where the captions usually have one sentence, cooking instructions contain multiple sentences and have obvious structures. To help the model capture the recipe structure and avoid missing some cooking details, we propose a novel framework: Decomposing Generation Networks (DGN) with structure prediction, to get more structured and complete recipe generation outputs. Specifically, we split each cooking instruction into several phases, and assign different sub-generators to each phase. Our approach includes two novel ideas: (i) learning the recipe structures with the global structure prediction component and (ii) producing recipe phases in the sub-generator output component based on the predicted structure. Extensive experiments on the challenging large-scale Recipe1M dataset validate the effectiveness of our proposed model, which improves the performance over the state-of-the-art results.
Part-Aware Data Augmentation for 3D Object Detection in Point Cloud
Authors: Jaeseok Choi, Yeji Song, Nojun Kwak
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Data Augmentation, object-detection, Object Detection

Data augmentation has greatly contributed to improving the performance in image recognition tasks, and a lot of related studies have been conducted. However, data augmentation on 3D point cloud data has not been much explored. 3D label has more sophisticated and rich structural information than the 2D label, so it enables more diverse and effective data augmentation. In this paper, we propose part-aware data augmentation (PA-AUG) that can better utilize rich information of 3D label to enhance the performance of 3D object detectors. PA-AUG divides objects into partitions and stochastically applies five augmentation methods to each local region. It is compatible with existing point cloud data augmentation methods and can be used universally regardless of the detector's architecture. PA-AUG has improved the performance of state-of-the-art 3D object detector for all classes of the KITTI dataset and has the equivalent effect of increasing the train data by about 2.5$\times$. We also show that PA-AUG not only increases performance for a given dataset but also is robust to corrupted data. The code is available at https://github.com/sky77764/pa-aug.pytorch
Building Trust in Autonomous Vehicles: Role of Virtual Reality Driving Simulators in HMI Design
Authors: Lia Morra, Fabrizio Lamberti, F. Gabriele Pratticó, Salvatore La Rosa, Paolo Montuschi
Date: 2020-07-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

The investigation of factors contributing at making humans trust Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) will play a fundamental role in the adoption of such technology. The user's ability to form a mental model of the AV, which is crucial to establish trust, depends on effective user-vehicle communication; thus, the importance of Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) is poised to increase. In this work, we propose a methodology to validate the user experience in AVs based on continuous, objective information gathered from physiological signals, while the user is immersed in a Virtual Reality-based driving simulation. We applied this methodology to the design of a head-up display interface delivering visual cues about the vehicle' sensory and planning systems. Through this approach, we obtained qualitative and quantitative evidence that a complete picture of the vehicle's surrounding, despite the higher cognitive load, is conducive to a less stressful experience. Moreover, after having been exposed to a more informative interface, users involved in the study were also more willing to test a real AV. The proposed methodology could be extended by adjusting the simulation environment, the HMI and/or the vehicle's Artificial Intelligence modules to dig into other aspects of the user experience.