pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Co-occurrence Based Texture Synthesis
Authors: Anna Darzi, Itai Lang, Ashutosh Taklikar, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Shai Avidan
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, MORPH, Texture Classification, Texture Synthesis

As image generation techniques mature, there is a growing interest in explainable representations that are easy to understand and intuitive to manipulate. In this work, we turn to co-occurrence statistics, which have long been used for texture analysis, to learn a controllable texture synthesis model. We propose a fully convolutional generative adversarial network, conditioned locally on co-occurrence statistics, to generate arbitrarily large images while having local, interpretable control over the texture appearance. To encourage fidelity to the input condition, we introduce a novel differentiable co-occurrence loss that is integrated seamlessly into our framework in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate that our solution offers a stable, intuitive and interpretable latent representation for texture synthesis, which can be used to generate a smooth texture morph between different textures. We further show an interactive texture tool that allows a user to adjust local characteristics of the synthesized texture image using the co-occurrence values directly.
Multi-modal Automated Speech Scoring using Attention Fusion
Authors: Manraj Singh Grover, Yaman Kumar, Sumit Sarin, Payman Vafaee, Mika Hama, Rajiv Ratn Shah
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00

In this study, we propose a novel multi-modal end-to-end neural approach for automated assessment of non-native English speakers' spontaneous speech using attention fusion. The pipeline employs Bi-directional Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks and Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks to encode acoustic and lexical cues from spectrograms and transcriptions, respectively. Attention fusion is performed on these learned predictive features to learn complex interactions between different modalities before final scoring. We compare our model with strong baselines and find combined attention to both lexical and acoustic cues significantly improves the overall performance of the system. Further, we present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of our model.
IMoJIE: Iterative Memory-Based Joint Open Information Extraction
Authors: Keshav Kolluru, Samarth Aggarwal, Vipul Rathore, Mausam, Soumen Chakrabarti
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Open Information Extraction, Sentence

While traditional systems for Open Information Extraction were statistical and rule-based, recently neural models have been introduced for the task. Our work builds upon CopyAttention, a sequence generation OpenIE model (Cui et. al., 2018). Our analysis reveals that CopyAttention produces a constant number of extractions per sentence, and its extracted tuples often express redundant information. We present IMoJIE, an extension to CopyAttention, which produces the next extraction conditioned on all previously extracted tuples. This approach overcomes both shortcomings of CopyAttention, resulting in a variable number of diverse extractions per sentence. We train IMoJIE on training data bootstrapped from extractions of several non-neural systems, which have been automatically filtered to reduce redundancy and noise. IMoJIE outperforms CopyAttention by about 18 F1 pts, and a BERT-based strong baseline by 2 F1 pts, establishing a new state of the art for the task.
Encodings of Source Syntax: Similarities in NMT Representations Across Target Languages
Authors: Tyler A. Chang, Anna N. Rafferty
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

We train neural machine translation (NMT) models from English to six target languages, using NMT encoder representations to predict ancestor constituent labels of source language words. We find that NMT encoders learn similar source syntax regardless of NMT target language, relying on explicit morphosyntactic cues to extract syntactic features from source sentences. Furthermore, the NMT encoders outperform RNNs trained directly on several of the constituent label prediction tasks, suggesting that NMT encoder representations can be used effectively for natural language tasks involving syntax. However, both the NMT encoders and the directly-trained RNNs learn substantially different syntactic information from a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG) parser. Despite lower overall accuracy scores, the PCFG often performs well on sentences for which the RNN-based models perform poorly, suggesting that RNN architectures are constrained in the types of syntax they can learn.
Neural Networks for Fashion Image Classification and Visual Search
Authors: Fengzi Li, Shashi Kant, Shunichi Araki, Sumer Bangera, Swapna Samir Shukla
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

We discuss two potentially challenging problems faced by the ecommerce industry. One relates to the problem faced by sellers while uploading pictures of products on the platform for sale and the consequent manual tagging involved. It gives rise to misclassifications leading to its absence from search results. The other problem concerns with the potential bottleneck in placing orders when a customer may not know the right keywords but has a visual impression of an image. An image based search algorithm can unleash the true potential of ecommerce by enabling customers to click a picture of an object and search for similar products without the need for typing. In this paper, we explore machine learning algorithms which can help us solve both these problems.
FA-GANs: Facial Attractiveness Enhancement with Generative Adversarial Networks on Frontal Faces
Authors: Jingwu He, Chuan Wang, Yang Zhang, Jie Guo, Yanwen Guo
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00

Facial attractiveness enhancement has been an interesting application in Computer Vision and Graphics over these years. It aims to generate a more attractive face via manipulations on image and geometry structure while preserving face identity. In this paper, we propose the first Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for enhancing facial attractiveness in both geometry and appearance aspects, which we call "FA-GANs". FA-GANs contain two branches and enhance facial attractiveness in two perspectives: facial geometry and facial appearance. Each branch consists of individual GANs with the appearance branch adjusting the facial image and the geometry branch adjusting the facial landmarks in appearance and geometry aspects, respectively. Unlike the traditional facial manipulations learning from paired faces, which are infeasible to collect before and after enhancement of the same individual, we achieve this by learning the features of attractiveness faces through unsupervised adversarial learning. The proposed FA-GANs are able to extract attractiveness features and impose them on the enhancement results. To better enhance faces, both the geometry and appearance networks are considered to refine the facial attractiveness by adjusting the geometry layout of faces and the appearance of faces independently. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to enhance the facial attractiveness with GANs in both geometry and appearance aspects. The experimental results suggest that our FA-GANs can generate compelling perceptual results in both geometry structure and facial appearance and outperform current state-of-the-art methods.
Three-Filters-to-Normal: An Accurate and Ultrafast Surface Normal Estimator
Authors: Rui Fan, Hengli Wang, Bohuan Xue, Huaiyang Huang, YuAn Wang, Ming Liu, Ioannis Pitas
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00

This paper proposes three-filters-to-normal (3F2N), an accurate and ultrafast surface normal estimator (SNE), which is designed for structured range sensor data, e.g., depth/disparity images. 3F2N SNE computes surface normals by simply performing three filtering operations (two image gradient filters in horizontal and vertical directions, respectively, and a mean/median filter) on an inverse depth image or a disparity image. Despite the simplicity of 3F2N SNE, no similar method already exists in the literature. To evaluate the performance of our proposed SNE, we created three large-scale synthetic datasets (easy, medium and hard) using 24 3D mesh models, each of which is used to generate 1800--2500 pairs of depth images (resolution: 480X640 pixels) and the corresponding ground-truth surface normal maps from different views. 3F2N SNE demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance, outperforming all other existing geometry-based SNEs, where the average angular errors with respect to the easy, medium and hard datasets are 1.66 degrees, 5.69 degrees and 15.31 degrees, respectively. Furthermore, our C++ and CUDA implementations achieve a processing speed of over 260 Hz and 21 kHz, respectively. Our datasets and source code are publicly available at sites.google.com/view/3f2n.
Attacking Recommender Systems with Augmented User Profiles
Authors: Chen Lin, Si Chen, Hui Li, Yanghua Xiao, Lianyun Li, Qian Yang
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Generative Adversarial Network, Recommendation Systems

Recommendation Systems (RS) have become an essential part of many online services. Due to its pivotal role in guiding customers towards purchasing, there is a natural motivation for unscrupulous parties to spoof RS for profits. In this paper, we study the shilling attack: a subsistent and profitable attack where an adversarial party injects a number of user profiles to promote or demote a target item. Conventional shilling attack models are based on simple heuristics that can be easily detected, or directly adopt adversarial attack methods without a special design for RS. Moreover, the study on the attack impact on deep learning based RS is missing in the literature, making the effects of shilling attack against real RS doubtful. We present a novel Augmented Shilling Attack framework (AUSH) and implement it with the idea of Generative Adversarial Network. AUSH is capable of tailoring attacks against RS according to budget and complex attack goals, such as targeting a specific user group. We experimentally show that the attack impact of AUSH is noticeable on a wide range of RS including both classic and modern deep learning based RS, while it is virtually undetectable by the state-of-the-art attack detection model.
Optimizing for the Future in Non-Stationary MDPs
Authors: Yash Chandak, Georgios Theocharous, Shiv Shankar, Martha White, Sridhar Mahadevan, Philip S. Thomas
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

Most reinforcement learning methods are based upon the key assumption that the transition dynamics and reward functions are fixed, that is, the underlying Markov decision process is stationary. However, in many real-world applications, this assumption is violated, and using existing algorithms may result in a performance lag. To proactively search for a good future policy, we present a policy gradient algorithm that maximizes a forecast of future performance. This forecast is obtained by fitting a curve to the counter-factual estimates of policy performance over time, without explicitly modeling the underlying non-stationarity. The resulting algorithm amounts to a non-uniform reweighting of past data, and we observe that minimizing performance over some of the data from past episodes can be beneficial when searching for a policy that maximizes future performance. We show that our algorithm, called Prognosticator, is more robust to non-stationarity than two online adaptation techniques, on three simulated problems motivated by real-world applications.
Adversarial Training for Commonsense Inference
Authors: Lis Pereira, Xiaodong Liu, Fei Cheng, Masayuki Asahara, Ichiro Kobayashi
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Reading Comprehension, Word Embeddings

We propose an AdversariaL training algorithm for commonsense InferenCE (ALICE). We apply small perturbations to word embeddings and minimize the resultant adversarial risk to regularize the model. We exploit a novel combination of two different approaches to estimate these perturbations: 1) using the true label and 2) using the model prediction. Without relying on any human-crafted features, knowledge bases, or additional datasets other than the target datasets, our model boosts the fine-tuning performance of RoBERTa, achieving competitive results on multiple reading comprehension datasets that require commonsense inference.
A Hybrid Approach to Enhance Pure Collaborative Filtering based on Content Feature Relationship
Authors: Mohammad Maghsoudi Mehrabani, Hamid Mohayeji, Ali Moeini
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems get expanding significance because of their applications in both the scholarly community and industry. With the development of additional data sources and methods of extracting new information other than the rating history of clients on items, hybrid recommendation algorithms, in which some methods have usually been combined to improve performance, have become pervasive. In this work, we first introduce a novel method to extract the implicit relationship between content features using a sort of well-known methods from the natural language processing domain, namely Word2Vec. In contrast to the typical use of Word2Vec, we utilize some features of items as words of sentences to produce neural feature embeddings, through which we can calculate the similarity between features. Next, we propose a novel content-based recommendation system that employs the relationship to determine vector representations for items by which the similarity between items can be computed (RELFsim). Our evaluation results demonstrate that it can predict the preference a user would have for a set of items as good as pure collaborative filtering. This content-based algorithm is also embedded in a pure item-based collaborative filtering algorithm to deal with the cold-start problem and enhance its accuracy. Our experiments on a benchmark movie dataset corroborate that the proposed approach improves the accuracy of the system.
Attacking Black-box Recommendations via Copying Cross-domain User Profiles
Authors: Wenqi Fan, Tyler Derr, Xiangyu Zhao, Yao Ma, Hui Liu, Jian-Ping Wang, Jiliang Tang, Qing Li
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Poisoning, Deep Learning, Recommendation Systems

Recently, recommender systems that aim to suggest personalized lists of items for users to interact with online have drawn a lot of attention. In fact, many of these state-of-the-art techniques have been deep learning based. Recent studies have shown that these deep learning models (in particular for recommendation systems) are vulnerable to attacks, such as data poisoning, which generates users to promote a selected set of items. However, more recently, defense strategies have been developed to detect these generated users with fake profiles. Thus, advanced injection attacks of creating more `realistic' user profiles to promote a set of items is still a key challenge in the domain of deep learning based recommender systems. In this work, we present our framework CopyAttack, which is a reinforcement learning based black-box attack method that harnesses real users from a source domain by copying their profiles into the target domain with the goal of promoting a subset of items. CopyAttack is constructed to both efficiently and effectively learn policy gradient networks that first select, and then further refine/craft, user profiles from the source domain to ultimately copy into the target domain. CopyAttack's goal is to maximize the hit ratio of the targeted items in the Top-$k$ recommendation list of the users in the target domain. We have conducted experiments on two real-world datasets and have empirically verified the effectiveness of our proposed framework and furthermore performed a thorough model analysis.
Semi-Automating Knowledge Base Construction for Cancer Genetics
Authors: Somin Wadhwa, Kanhua Yin, Kevin S. Hughes, Byron C. Wallace
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: AKBC 2020 6
Tasks: Articles, Joint Entity and Relation Extraction, Knowledge Base Construction, Relation Extraction

In this work, we consider the exponentially growing subarea of genetics in cancer. The need to synthesize and centralize this evidence for dissemination has motivated a team of physicians to manually construct and maintain a knowledge base that distills key results reported in the literature. This is a laborious process that entails reading through full-text articles to understand the study design, assess study quality, and extract the reported cancer risk estimates associated with particular hereditary cancer genes (i.e., penetrance). In this work, we propose models to automatically surface key elements from full-text cancer genetics articles, with the ultimate aim of expediting the manual workflow currently in place. We propose two challenging tasks that are critical for characterizing the findings reported cancer genetics studies: (i) Extracting snippets of text that describe \emph{ascertainment mechanisms}, which in turn inform whether the population studied may introduce bias owing to deviations from the target population; (ii) Extracting reported risk estimates (e.g., odds or hazard ratios) associated with specific germline mutations. The latter task may be viewed as a joint entity tagging and relation extraction problem. To train models for these tasks, we induce distant supervision over tokens and snippets in full-text articles using the manually constructed knowledge base. We propose and evaluate several model variants, including a transformer-based joint entity and relation extraction model to extract <germline mutation, risk-estimate>} pairs. We observe strong empirical performance, highlighting the practical potential for such models to aid KB construction in this space. We ablate components of our model, observing, e.g., that a joint model for <germline mutation, risk-estimate> fares substantially better than a pipelined approach.
High-dimensional Convolutional Networks for Geometric Pattern Recognition
Authors: Christopher Choy, Junha Lee, Rene Ranftl, Jaesik Park, Vladlen Koltun
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Many problems in science and engineering can be formulated in terms of geometric patterns in high-dimensional spaces. We present high-dimensional convolutional networks (ConvNets) for pattern recognition problems that arise in the context of geometric registration. We first study the effectiveness of convolutional networks in detecting linear subspaces in high-dimensional spaces with up to 32 dimensions: much higher dimensionality than prior applications of ConvNets. We then apply high-dimensional ConvNets to 3D registration under rigid motions and image correspondence estimation. Experiments indicate that our high-dimensional ConvNets outperform prior approaches that relied on deep networks based on global pooling operators.
Global inducing point variational posteriors for Bayesian neural networks and deep Gaussian processes
Authors: Sebastian W. Ober, Laurence Aitchison
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Gaussian Processes

We consider the optimal approximate posterior over the top-layer weights in a Bayesian neural network for regression, and show that it exhibits strong dependencies on the lower-layer weights. We adapt this result to develop a correlated approximate posterior over the weights at all layers in a Bayesian neural network. We extend this approach to deep Gaussian processes, unifying inference in the two model classes. Our approximate posterior uses learned "global" inducing points, which are defined only at the input layer and propagated through the network to obtain inducing inputs at subsequent layers. By contrast, standard, "local", inducing point methods from the deep Gaussian process literature optimise a separate set of inducing inputs at every layer, and thus do not model correlations across layers. Our method gives state-of-the-art performance for a variational Bayesian method, without data augmentation or tempering, on CIFAR-10 of 86.7%, which is comparable to SGMCMC without tempering but with data augmentation (88% in Wenzel et al. 2020).
Train in Germany, Test in The USA: Making 3D Object Detectors Generalize
Authors: Yan Wang, Xiangyu Chen, Yurong You, Li Erran, Bharath Hariharan, Mark Campbell, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Wei-Lun Chao
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In the domain of autonomous driving, deep learning has substantially improved the 3D object detection accuracy for LiDAR and stereo camera data alike. While deep networks are great at generalization, they are also notorious to over-fit to all kinds of spurious artifacts, such as brightness, car sizes and models, that may appear consistently throughout the data. In fact, most datasets for autonomous driving are collected within a narrow subset of cities within one country, typically under similar weather conditions. In this paper we consider the task of adapting 3D object detectors from one dataset to another. We observe that naively, this appears to be a very challenging task, resulting in drastic drops in accuracy levels. We provide extensive experiments to investigate the true adaptation challenges and arrive at a surprising conclusion: the primary adaptation hurdle to overcome are differences in car sizes across geographic areas. A simple correction based on the average car size yields a strong correction of the adaptation gap. Our proposed method is simple and easily incorporated into most 3D object detection frameworks. It provides a first baseline for 3D object detection adaptation across countries, and gives hope that the underlying problem may be more within grasp than one may have hoped to believe. Our code is available at https://github.com/cxy1997/3D_adapt_auto_driving.
An Open source Implementation of ITU-T Recommendation P.808 with Validation
Authors: Babak Naderi, Ross Cutler
Date: 2020-05-17 00:00:00

The ITU-T Recommendation P.808 provides a crowdsourcing approach for conducting a subjective assessment of speech quality using the Absolute Category Rating (ACR) method. We provide an open-source implementation of the ITU-T Rec. P.808 that runs on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We extended our implementation to include Degradation Category Ratings (DCR) and Comparison Category Ratings (CCR) test methods. We also significantly speed up the test process by integrating the participant qualification step into the main rating task compared to a two-stage qualification and rating solution. We provide program scripts for creating and executing the subjective test, and data cleansing and analyzing the answers to avoid operational errors. To validate the implementation, we compare the Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) collected through our implementation with MOS values from a standard laboratory experiment conducted based on the ITU-T Rec. P.800. We also evaluate the reproducibility of the result of the subjective speech quality assessment through crowdsourcing using our implementation. Finally, we quantify the impact of parts of the system designed to improve the reliability: environmental tests, gold and trapping questions, rating patterns, and a headset usage test.