pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Who Should Get Vaccinated? Individualized Allocation of Vaccines Over SIR Network
Authors: Toru Kitagawa, Guanyi Wang
Date: 2020-12-07 00:00:00

How to allocate vaccines over heterogeneous individuals is one of the important policy decisions in pandemic times. This paper develops a procedure to estimate an individualized vaccine allocation policy under limited supply, exploiting social network data containing individual demographic characteristics and health status. We model spillover effects of the vaccines based on a Heterogeneous-Interacted-SIR network model and estimate an individualized vaccine allocation policy by maximizing an estimated social welfare (public health) criterion incorporating the spillovers. While this optimization problem is generally an NP-hard integer optimization problem, we show that the SIR structure leads to a submodular objective function, and provide a computationally attractive greedy algorithm for approximating a solution that has theoretical performance guarantee. Moreover, we characterise a finite sample welfare regret bound and examine how its uniform convergence rate depends on the complexity and riskiness of social network. In the simulation, we illustrate the importance of considering spillovers by comparing our method with targeting without network information.
SnapMix: Semantically Proportional Mixing for Augmenting Fine-grained Data
Authors: Shaoli Huang, Xinchao Wang, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Classification, Semantic Composition, Semantic correspondence

Data mixing augmentation has proved effective in training deep models. Recent methods mix labels mainly based on the mixture proportion of image pixels. As the main discriminative information of a fine-grained image usually resides in subtle regions, methods along this line are prone to heavy label noise in fine-grained recognition. We propose in this paper a novel scheme, termed as Semantically Proportional Mixing (SnapMix), which exploits class activation map (CAM) to lessen the label noise in augmenting fine-grained data. SnapMix generates the target label for a mixed image by estimating its intrinsic semantic composition, and allows for asymmetric mixing operations and ensures semantic correspondence between synthetic images and target labels. Experiments show that our method consistently outperforms existing mixed-based approaches on various datasets and under different network depths. Furthermore, by incorporating the mid-level features, the proposed SnapMix achieves top-level performance, demonstrating its potential to serve as a solid baseline for fine-grained recognition. Our code is available at https://github.com/Shaoli-Huang/SnapMix.git.
Participatory Budgeting with Project Groups
Authors: Pallavi Jain, Krzysztof Sornat, Nimrod Talmon, Meirav Zehavi
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00

We study a generalization of the standard approval-based model of participatory budgeting (PB), in which voters are providing approval ballots over a set of predefined projects and -- in addition to a global budget limit, there are several groupings of the projects, each group with its own budget limit. We study the computational complexity of identifying project bundles that maximize voter satisfaction while respecting all budget limits. We show that the problem is generally intractable and describe efficient exact algorithms for several special cases, including instances with only few groups and instances where the group structure is close to be hierarchical, as well as efficient approximation algorithms. Our results could allow, e.g., municipalities to hold richer PB processes that are thematically and geographically inclusive.
Robust Facial Landmark Detection by Multi-order Multi-constraint Deep Networks
Authors: Jun Wan, Zhihui Lai, Jing Li, Jie zhou, Can Gao
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Landmark Detection, regression

Recently, heatmap regression has been widely explored in facial landmark detection and obtained remarkable performance. However, most of the existing heatmap regression-based facial landmark detection methods neglect to explore the high-order feature correlations, which is very important to learn more representative features and enhance shape constraints. Moreover, no explicit global shape constraints have been added to the final predicted landmarks, which leads to a reduction in accuracy. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a Multi-order Multi-constraint Deep Network (MMDN) for more powerful feature correlations and shape constraints learning. Specifically, an Implicit Multi-order Correlating Geometry-aware (IMCG) model is proposed to introduce the multi-order spatial correlations and multi-order channel correlations for more discriminative representations. Furthermore, an Explicit Probability-based Boundary-adaptive Regression (EPBR) method is developed to enhance the global shape constraints and further search the semantically consistent landmarks in the predicted boundary for robust facial landmark detection. It's interesting to show that the proposed MMDN can generate more accurate boundary-adaptive landmark heatmaps and effectively enhance shape constraints to the predicted landmarks for faces with large pose variations and heavy occlusions. Experimental results on challenging benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our MMDN over state-of-the-art facial landmark detection methods. The code has been publicly available at https://github.com/junwan2014/MMDN-master.
Strong but Simple Baseline with Dual-Granularity Triplet Loss for Visible-Thermal Person Re-Identification
Authors: Haijun Liu, Yanxia Chai, Xiaoheng Tan, Dong Li, Xichuan Zhou
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal  Person Re-Identification, Person Re-Identification, Triplet

In this letter, we propose a conceptually simple and effective dual-granularity triplet loss for visible-thermal person re-identification (VT-ReID). In general, ReID models are always trained with the sample-based triplet loss and identification loss from the fine granularity level. It is possible when a center-based loss is introduced to encourage the intra-class compactness and inter-class discrimination from the coarse granularity level. Our proposed dual-granularity triplet loss well organizes the sample-based triplet loss and center-based triplet loss in a hierarchical fine to coarse granularity manner, just with some simple configurations of typical operations, such as pooling and batch normalization. Experiments on RegDB and SYSU-MM01 datasets show that with only the global features our dual-granularity triplet loss can improve the VT-ReID performance by a significant margin. It can be a strong VT-ReID baseline to boost future research with high quality.
Parametric measures of variability induced by risk measures
Authors: Fabio Bellini, Tolulope Fadina, Ruodu Wang, Yunran Wei
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We present a general framework for a comparative theory of variability measures, with a particular focus on the recently introduced one-parameter families of inter-Expected Shortfall differences and inter-expectile differences, that are explored in detail and compared with the widely known and applied inter-quantile differences. From the mathematical point of view, our main result is a characterization of symmetric and comonotonic variability measures as mixtures of inter-Expected Shortfall differences, under a few additional technical conditions. Further, we study the stochastic orders induced by the pointwise comparison of inter-Expected Shortfall and inter-expectile differences, and discuss their relationship with the dilation order. From the statistical point of view, we establish asymptotic consistency and normality of the natural estimators and provide a rule of the thumb for cross-comparisons. Finally, we study the empirical behaviour of the considered classes of variability measures on the S&P 500 Index under various economic regimes, and explore the comparability of different time series according to the introduced stochastic orders.
Gauge equivariant neural networks for quantum lattice gauge theories
Authors: Di Luo, Giuseppe Carleo, Bryan K. Clark, James Stokes
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00

Gauge symmetries play a key role in physics appearing in areas such as quantum field theories of the fundamental particles and emergent degrees of freedom in quantum materials. Motivated by the desire to efficiently simulate many-body quantum systems with exact local gauge invariance, gauge equivariant neural-network quantum states are introduced, which exactly satisfy the local Hilbert space constraints necessary for the description of quantum lattice gauge theory with Zd gauge group on different geometries. Focusing on the special case of Z2 gauge group on a periodically identified square lattice, the equivariant architecture is analytically shown to contain the loop-gas solution as a special case. Gauge equivariant neural-network quantum states are used in combination with variational quantum Monte Carlo to obtain compact descriptions of the ground state wavefunction for the Z2 theory away from the exactly solvable limit, and to demonstrate the confining/deconfining phase transition of the Wilson loop order parameter.
Video Deblurring by Fitting to Test Data
Authors: Xuanchi Ren, Zian Qian, Qifeng Chen
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Deblurring, Video Deblurring

Motion blur in videos captured by autonomous vehicles and robots can degrade their perception capability. In this work, we present a novel approach to video deblurring by fitting a deep network to the test video. Our key observation is that some frames in a video with motion blur are much sharper than others, and thus we can transfer the texture information in those sharp frames to blurry frames. Our approach heuristically selects sharp frames from a video and then trains a convolutional neural network on these sharp frames. The trained network often absorbs enough details in the scene to perform deblurring on all the video frames. As an internal learning method, our approach has no domain gap between training and test data, which is a problematic issue for existing video deblurring approaches. The conducted experiments on real-world video data show that our model can reconstruct clearer and sharper videos than state-of-the-art video deblurring approaches. Code and data are available at https://github.com/xrenaa/Deblur-by-Fitting.
MorphGAN: One-Shot Face Synthesis GAN for Detecting Recognition Bias
Authors: Nataniel Ruiz, Barry-John Theobald, Anurag Ranjan, Ahmed Hussein Abdelaziz, Nicholas Apostoloff
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Face Generation, Face Recognition, Generative Adversarial Network

To detect bias in face recognition networks, it can be useful to probe a network under test using samples in which only specific attributes vary in some controlled way. However, capturing a sufficiently large dataset with specific control over the attributes of interest is difficult. In this work, we describe a simulator that applies specific head pose and facial expression adjustments to images of previously unseen people. The simulator first fits a 3D morphable model to a provided image, applies the desired head pose and facial expression controls, then renders the model into an image. Next, a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) conditioned on the original image and the rendered morphable model is used to produce the image of the original person with the new facial expression and head pose. We call this conditional GAN -- MorphGAN. Images generated using MorphGAN conserve the identity of the person in the original image, and the provided control over head pose and facial expression allows test sets to be created to identify robustness issues of a facial recognition deep network with respect to pose and expression. Images generated by MorphGAN can also serve as data augmentation when training data are scarce. We show that by augmenting small datasets of faces with new poses and expressions improves the recognition performance by up to 9% depending on the augmentation and data scarcity.
Positional Encoding as Spatial Inductive Bias in GANs
Authors: Rui Xu, Xintao Wang, Kai Chen, Bolei Zhou, Chen Change Loy
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Image Manipulation, Inductive Bias, Translation

SinGAN shows impressive capability in learning internal patch distribution despite its limited effective receptive field. We are interested in knowing how such a translation-invariant convolutional generator could capture the global structure with just a spatially i.i.d. input. In this work, taking SinGAN and StyleGAN2 as examples, we show that such capability, to a large extent, is brought by the implicit positional encoding when using zero padding in the generators. Such positional encoding is indispensable for generating images with high fidelity. The same phenomenon is observed in other generative architectures such as DCGAN and PGGAN. We further show that zero padding leads to an unbalanced spatial bias with a vague relation between locations. To offer a better spatial inductive bias, we investigate alternative positional encodings and analyze their effects. Based on a more flexible positional encoding explicitly, we propose a new multi-scale training strategy and demonstrate its effectiveness in the state-of-the-art unconditional generator StyleGAN2. Besides, the explicit spatial inductive bias substantially improve SinGAN for more versatile image manipulation.
E3D: Event-Based 3D Shape Reconstruction
Authors: Alexis Baudron, Zihao W. Wang, Oliver Cossairt, Aggelos K. Katsaggelos
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, 3D Shape Reconstruction

3D shape reconstruction is a primary component of augmented/virtual reality. Despite being highly advanced, existing solutions based on RGB, RGB-D and Lidar sensors are power and data intensive, which introduces challenges for deployment in edge devices. We approach 3D reconstruction with an event camera, a sensor with significantly lower power, latency and data expense while enabling high dynamic range. While previous event-based 3D reconstruction methods are primarily based on stereo vision, we cast the problem as multi-view shape from silhouette using a monocular event camera. The output from a moving event camera is a sparse point set of space-time gradients, largely sketching scene/object edges and contours. We first introduce an event-to-silhouette (E2S) neural network module to transform a stack of event frames to the corresponding silhouettes, with additional neural branches for camera pose regression. Second, we introduce E3D, which employs a 3D differentiable renderer (PyTorch3D) to enforce cross-view 3D mesh consistency and fine-tune the E2S and pose network. Lastly, we introduce a 3D-to-events simulation pipeline and apply it to publicly available object datasets and generate synthetic event/silhouette training pairs for supervised learning.
Data embedding and prediction by sparse tropical matrix factorization
Authors: Amra Omanović, Hilal Kazan, Polona Oblak, Tomaž Curk
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Matrix factorization methods are linear models, with limited capability to model complex relations. In our work, we use tropical semiring to introduce non-linearity into matrix factorization models. We propose a method called Sparse Tropical Matrix Factorization (STMF) for the estimation of missing (unknown) values. We evaluate the efficiency of the STMF method on both synthetic data and biological data in the form of gene expression measurements downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database. Tests on unique synthetic data showed that STMF approximation achieves a higher correlation than non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), which is unable to recover patterns effectively. On real data, STMF outperforms NMF on six out of nine gene expression datasets. While NMF assumes normal distribution and tends toward the mean value, STMF can better fit to extreme values and distributions. STMF is the first work that uses tropical semiring on sparse data. We show that in certain cases semirings are useful because they consider the structure, which is different and simpler to understand than it is with standard linear algebra.
On the Binding Problem in Artificial Neural Networks
Authors: Klaus Greff, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Jürgen Schmidhuber
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00

Contemporary neural networks still fall short of human-level generalization, which extends far beyond our direct experiences. In this paper, we argue that the underlying cause for this shortcoming is their inability to dynamically and flexibly bind information that is distributed throughout the network. This binding problem affects their capacity to acquire a compositional understanding of the world in terms of symbol-like entities (like objects), which is crucial for generalizing in predictable and systematic ways. To address this issue, we propose a unifying framework that revolves around forming meaningful entities from unstructured sensory inputs (segregation), maintaining this separation of information at a representational level (representation), and using these entities to construct new inferences, predictions, and behaviors (composition). Our analysis draws inspiration from a wealth of research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and surveys relevant mechanisms from the machine learning literature, to help identify a combination of inductive biases that allow symbolic information processing to emerge naturally in neural networks. We believe that a compositional approach to AI, in terms of grounded symbol-like representations, is of fundamental importance for realizing human-level generalization, and we hope that this paper may contribute towards that goal as a reference and inspiration.
Uncertainty Intervals for Graph-based Spatio-Temporal Traffic Prediction
Authors: Tijs Maas, Peter Bloem
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Prediction, Traffic Prediction

Many traffic prediction applications rely on uncertainty estimates instead of the mean prediction. Statistical traffic prediction literature has a complete subfield devoted to uncertainty modelling, but recent deep learning traffic prediction models either lack this feature or make specific assumptions that restrict its practicality. We propose Quantile Graph Wavenet, a Spatio-Temporal neural network that is trained to estimate a density given the measurements of previous timesteps, conditioned on a quantile. Our method of density estimation is fully parameterised by our neural network and does not use a likelihood approximation internally. The quantile loss function is asymmetric and this makes it possible to model skewed densities. This approach produces uncertainty estimates without the need to sample during inference, such as in Monte Carlo Dropout, which makes our method also efficient.
Tactile Object Pose Estimation from the First Touch with Geometric Contact Rendering
Authors: Maria Bauza, Eric Valls, Bryan Lim, Theo Sechopoulos, Alberto Rodriguez
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Object, Pose Estimation

In this paper, we present an approach to tactile pose estimation from the first touch for known objects. First, we create an object-agnostic map from real tactile observations to contact shapes. Next, for a new object with known geometry, we learn a tailored perception model completely in simulation. To do so, we simulate the contact shapes that a dense set of object poses would produce on the sensor. Then, given a new contact shape obtained from the sensor output, we match it against the pre-computed set using the object-specific embedding learned purely in simulation using contrastive learning. This results in a perception model that can localize objects from a single tactile observation. It also allows reasoning over pose distributions and including additional pose constraints coming from other perception systems or multiple contacts. We provide quantitative results for four objects. Our approach provides high accuracy pose estimations from distinctive tactile observations while regressing pose distributions to account for those contact shapes that could result from different object poses. We further extend and test our approach in multi-contact scenarios where several tactile sensors are simultaneously in contact with the object. Website: http://mcube.mit.edu/research/tactile_loc_first_touch.html
Out-of-Equilibrium Dynamics and Excess Volatility in Firm Networks
Authors: Théo Dessertaine, José Moran, Michael Benzaquen, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

We study the conditions under which input-output networks can dynamically attain a competitive equilibrium, where markets clear and profits are zero. We endow a classical firm network model with minimal dynamical rules that reduce supply/demand imbalances and excess profits. We show that the time needed to reach equilibrium diverges to infinity as the system approaches an instability point beyond which the Hawkins-Simons condition is violated and competitive equilibrium is no longer admissible. We argue that such slow dynamics is a source of excess volatility, through accumulation and amplification of exogenous shocks. Factoring in essential physical constraints absent in our minimal model, such as causality or inventory management, we then propose a dynamically consistent model that displays a rich variety of phenomena. Competitive equilibrium can only be reached after some time and within some restricted region of parameter space, outside of which one observes spontaneous periodic and chaotic dynamics, reminiscent of real business cycles. This suggests an alternative explanation of excess volatility in terms of purely endogenous fluctuations. Diminishing return to scale and increased perishability of goods are found to ease convergence towards equilibrium.
A Riemannian Block Coordinate Descent Method for Computing the Projection Robust Wasserstein Distance
Authors: Minhui Huang, Shiqian Ma, Lifeng Lai
Date: 2020-12-09 00:00:00

The Wasserstein distance has become increasingly important in machine learning and deep learning. Despite its popularity, the Wasserstein distance is hard to approximate because of the curse of dimensionality. A recently proposed approach to alleviate the curse of dimensionality is to project the sampled data from the high dimensional probability distribution onto a lower-dimensional subspace, and then compute the Wasserstein distance between the projected data. However, this approach requires to solve a max-min problem over the Stiefel manifold, which is very challenging in practice. The only existing work that solves this problem directly is the RGAS (Riemannian Gradient Ascent with Sinkhorn Iteration) algorithm, which requires to solve an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem in each iteration, and thus can be costly for large-scale problems. In this paper, we propose a Riemannian block coordinate descent (RBCD) method to solve this problem, which is based on a novel reformulation of the regularized max-min problem over the Stiefel manifold. We show that the complexity of arithmetic operations for RBCD to obtain an $\epsilon$-stationary point is $O(\epsilon^{-3})$. This significantly improves the corresponding complexity of RGAS, which is $O(\epsilon^{-12})$. Moreover, our RBCD has very low per-iteration complexity, and hence is suitable for large-scale problems. Numerical results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our method is more efficient than existing methods, especially when the number of sampled data is very large.