pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Open-Set Hypothesis Transfer with Semantic Consistency
Authors: Zeyu Feng, Chang Xu, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised open-set domain adaptation (UODA) is a realistic problem where unlabeled target data contain unknown classes. Prior methods rely on the coexistence of both source and target domain data to perform domain alignment, which greatly limits their applications when source domain data are restricted due to privacy concerns. This paper addresses the challenging hypothesis transfer setting for UODA, where data from source domain are no longer available during adaptation on target domain. We introduce a method that focuses on the semantic consistency under transformation of target data, which is rarely appreciated by previous domain adaptation methods. Specifically, our model first discovers confident predictions and performs classification with pseudo-labels. Then we enforce the model to output consistent and definite predictions on semantically similar inputs. As a result, unlabeled data can be classified into discriminative classes coincided with either source classes or unknown classes. Experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on UODA benchmarks.
OutbreakFlow: Model-based Bayesian inference of disease outbreak dynamics with invertible neural networks and its application to the COVID-19 pandemics in Germany
Authors: Stefan T. Radev, Frederik Graw, Simiao Chen, Nico T. Mutters, Vanessa M. Eichel, Till Bärnighausen, Ullrich Köthe
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Epidemiology

Mathematical models in epidemiology are an indispensable tool to determine the dynamics and important characteristics of infectious diseases. Apart from their scientific merit, these models are often used to inform political decisions and intervention measures during an ongoing outbreak. However, reliably inferring the dynamics of ongoing outbreaks by connecting complex models to real data is still hard and requires either laborious manual parameter fitting or expensive optimization methods which have to be repeated from scratch for every application of a given model. In this work, we address this problem with a novel combination of epidemiological modeling with specialized neural networks. Our approach entails two computational phases: In an initial training phase, a mathematical model describing the epidemic is used as a coach for a neural network, which acquires global knowledge about the full range of possible disease dynamics. In the subsequent inference phase, the trained neural network processes the observed data of an actual outbreak and infers the parameters of the model in order to realistically reproduce the observed dynamics and reliably predict future progression. With its flexible framework, our simulation-based approach is applicable to a variety of epidemiological models. Moreover, since our method is fully Bayesian, it is designed to incorporate all available prior knowledge about plausible parameter values and returns complete joint posterior distributions over these parameters. Application of our method to the early Covid-19 outbreak phase in Germany demonstrates that we are able to obtain reliable probabilistic estimates for important disease characteristics, such as generation time, fraction of undetected infections, likelihood of transmission before symptom onset, and reporting delays using a very moderate amount of real-world observations.
Training general representations for remote sensing using in-domain knowledge
Authors: Maxim Neumann, André Susano Pinto, Xiaohua Zhai, Neil Houlsby
Date: 2020-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Transfer Learning

Automatically finding good and general remote sensing representations allows to perform transfer learning on a wide range of applications - improving the accuracy and reducing the required number of training samples. This paper investigates development of generic remote sensing representations, and explores which characteristics are important for a dataset to be a good source for representation learning. For this analysis, five diverse remote sensing datasets are selected and used for both, disjoint upstream representation learning and downstream model training and evaluation. A common evaluation protocol is used to establish baselines for these datasets that achieve state-of-the-art performance. As the results indicate, especially with a low number of available training samples a significant performance enhancement can be observed when including additionally in-domain data in comparison to training models from scratch or fine-tuning only on ImageNet (up to 11% and 40%, respectively, at 100 training samples). All datasets and pretrained representation models are published online.
Blind Federated Learning at the Wireless Edge with Low-Resolution ADC and DAC
Authors: Busra Tegin, Tolga M. Duman
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

We study collaborative machine learning systems where a massive dataset is distributed across independent workers which compute their local gradient estimates based on their own datasets. Workers send their estimates through a multipath fading multiple access channel with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing to mitigate the frequency selectivity of the channel. We assume that there is no channel state information (CSI) at the workers, and the parameter server (PS) employs multiple antennas to align the received signals. To reduce the power consumption and the hardware costs, we employ complex-valued low-resolution digital-to-analog converters (DACs) and analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), at the transmitter and the receiver sides, respectively, and study the effects of practical low-cost DACs and ADCs on the learning performance. Our theoretical analysis shows that the impairments caused by low-resolution DACs and ADCs, including those of one-bit DACs and ADCs, do not prevent the convergence of the federated learning algorithm, and the multipath channel effects vanish when a sufficient number of antennas are used at the PS. We also validate our theoretical results via simulations, and demonstrate that using low-resolution, even one-bit, DACs and ADCs causes only a slight decrease in the learning accuracy.
SESQA: semi-supervised learning for speech quality assessment
Authors: Joan Serrà, Jordi Pons, Santiago Pascual
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00

Automatic speech quality assessment is an important, transversal task whose progress is hampered by the scarcity of human annotations, poor generalization to unseen recording conditions, and a lack of flexibility of existing approaches. In this work, we tackle these problems with a semi-supervised learning approach, combining available annotations with programmatically generated data, and using 3 different optimization criteria together with 5 complementary auxiliary tasks. Our results show that such a semi-supervised approach can cut the error of existing methods by more than 36%, while providing additional benefits in terms of reusable features or auxiliary outputs. Improvement is further corroborated with an out-of-sample test showing promising generalization capabilities.
Analyzing Koopman approaches to physics-informed machine learning for long-term sea-surface temperature forecasting
Authors: Julian Rice, Wenwei Xu, Andrew August
Date: 2020-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Physics-informed machine learning, Weather Forecasting

Accurately predicting sea-surface temperature weeks to months into the future is an important step toward long term weather forecasting. Standard atmosphere-ocean coupled numerical models provide accurate sea-surface forecasts on the scale of a few days to a few weeks, but many important weather systems require greater foresight. In this paper we propose machine-learning approaches sea-surface temperature forecasting that are accurate on the scale of dozens of weeks. Our approach is based in Koopman operator theory, a useful tool for dynamical systems modelling. With this approach, we predict sea surface temperature in the Gulf of Mexico up to 180 days into the future based on a present image of thermal conditions and three years of historical training data. We evaluate the combination of a basic Koopman method with a convolutional autoencoder, and a newly proposed "consistent Koopman" method, in various permutations. We show that the Koopman approach consistently outperforms baselines, and we discuss the utility of our additional assumptions and methods in this sea-surface temperature domain.
A computationally efficient reconstruction algorithm for circular cone-beam computed tomography using shallow neural networks
Authors: Marinus J. Lagerwerf, Daniel M. Pelt, Willem Jan Palenstijn, K. Joost Batenburg
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Computed Tomography (CT), CT Reconstruction

Circular cone-beam (CCB) Computed Tomography (CT) has become an integral part of industrial quality control, materials science and medical imaging. The need to acquire and process each scan in a short time naturally leads to trade-offs between speed and reconstruction quality, creating a need for fast reconstruction algorithms capable of creating accurate reconstructions from limited data. In this paper we introduce the Neural Network Feldkamp-Davis-Kress (NN-FDK) algorithm. This algorithm adds a machine learning component to the FDK algorithm to improve its reconstruction accuracy while maintaining its computational efficiency. Moreover, the NN-FDK algorithm is designed such that it has low training data requirements and is fast to train. This ensures that the proposed algorithm can be used to improve image quality in high throughput CT scanning settings, where FDK is currently used to keep pace with the acquisition speed using readily available computational resources. We compare the NN-FDK algorithm to two standard CT reconstruction algorithms and to two popular deep neural networks trained to remove reconstruction artifacts from the 2D slices of an FDK reconstruction. We show that the NN-FDK reconstruction algorithm is substantially faster in computing a reconstruction than all the tested alternative methods except for the standard FDK algorithm and we show it can compute accurate CCB CT reconstructions in cases of high noise, a low number of projection angles or large cone angles. Moreover, we show that the training time of an NN-FDK network is orders of magnitude lower than the considered deep neural networks, with only a slight reduction in reconstruction accuracy.
Mini-DDSM: Mammography-based Automatic Age Estimation
Authors: Charitha Dissanayake Lekamlage, Fabia Afzal, Erik Westerberg, Abbas Cheddad
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation, Attribute

Age estimation has attracted attention for its various medical applications. There are many studies on human age estimation from biomedical images. However, there is no research done on mammograms for age estimation, as far as we know. The purpose of this study is to devise an AI-based model for estimating age from mammogram images. Due to lack of public mammography data sets that have the age attribute, we resort to using a web crawler to download thumbnail mammographic images and their age fields from the public data set; the Digital Database for Screening Mammography. The original images in this data set unfortunately can only be retrieved by a software which is broken. Subsequently, we extracted deep learning features from the collected data set, by which we built a model using Random Forests regressor to estimate the age automatically. The performance assessment was measured using the mean absolute error values. The average error value out of 10 tests on random selection of samples was around 8 years. In this paper, we show the merits of this approach to fill up missing age values. We ran logistic and linear regression models on another independent data set to further validate the advantage of our proposed work. This paper also introduces the free-access Mini-DDSM data set.
Neural encoding with visual attention
Authors: Meenakshi Khosla, Gia H. Ngo, Keith Jamison, Amy Kuceyeski, Mert R. Sabuncu
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

Visual perception is critically influenced by the focus of attention. Due to limited resources, it is well known that neural representations are biased in favor of attended locations. Using concurrent eye-tracking and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) recordings from a large cohort of human subjects watching movies, we first demonstrate that leveraging gaze information, in the form of attentional masking, can significantly improve brain response prediction accuracy in a neural encoding model. Next, we propose a novel approach to neural encoding by including a trainable soft-attention module. Using our new approach, we demonstrate that it is possible to learn visual attention policies by end-to-end learning merely on fMRI response data, and without relying on any eye-tracking. Interestingly, we find that attention locations estimated by the model on independent data agree well with the corresponding eye fixation patterns, despite no explicit supervision to do so. Together, these findings suggest that attention modules can be instrumental in neural encoding models of visual stimuli.
Machine learning with persistent homology and chemical word embeddings improves prediction accuracy and interpretability in metal-organic frameworks
Authors: Aditi S. Krishnapriyan, Joseph Montoya, Maciej Haranczyk, Jens Hummelshøj, Dmitriy Morozov
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Interpretable Machine Learning, Word Embeddings

Machine learning has emerged as a powerful approach in materials discovery. Its major challenge is selecting features that create interpretable representations of materials, useful across multiple prediction tasks. We introduce an end-to-end machine learning model that automatically generates descriptors that capture a complex representation of a material's structure and chemistry. This approach builds on computational topology techniques (namely, persistent homology) and word embeddings from natural language processing. It automatically encapsulates geometric and chemical information directly from the material system. We demonstrate our approach on multiple nanoporous metal-organic framework datasets by predicting methane and carbon dioxide adsorption across different conditions. Our results show considerable improvement in both accuracy and transferability across targets compared to models constructed from the commonly-used, manually-curated features, consistently achieving an average 25-30% decrease in root-mean-squared-deviation and an average increase of 40-50% in R2 scores. A key advantage of our approach is interpretability: Our model identifies the pores that correlate best to adsorption at different pressures, which contributes to understanding atomic-level structure--property relationships for materials design.
DOT: Dynamic Object Tracking for Visual SLAM
Authors: Irene Ballester, Alejandro Fontan, Javier Civera, Klaus H. Strobl, Rudolph Triebel
Date: 2020-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, Object Tracking, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper we present DOT (Dynamic Object Tracking), a front-end that added to existing SLAM systems can significantly improve their robustness and accuracy in highly dynamic environments. DOT combines instance segmentation and multi-view geometry to generate masks for dynamic objects in order to allow SLAM systems based on rigid scene models to avoid such image areas in their optimizations. To determine which objects are actually moving, DOT segments first instances of potentially dynamic objects and then, with the estimated camera motion, tracks such objects by minimizing the photometric reprojection error. This short-term tracking improves the accuracy of the segmentation with respect to other approaches. In the end, only actually dynamic masks are generated. We have evaluated DOT with ORB-SLAM 2 in three public datasets. Our results show that our approach improves significantly the accuracy and robustness of ORB-SLAM 2, especially in highly dynamic scenes.
Depth Estimation from Monocular Images and Sparse Radar Data
Authors: Juan-Ting Lin, Dengxin Dai, Luc van Gool
Date: 2020-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation

In this paper, we explore the possibility of achieving a more accurate depth estimation by fusing monocular images and Radar points using a deep neural network. We give a comprehensive study of the fusion between RGB images and Radar measurements from different aspects and proposed a working solution based on the observations. We find that the noise existing in Radar measurements is one of the main key reasons that prevents one from applying the existing fusion methods developed for LiDAR data and images to the new fusion problem between Radar data and images. The experiments are conducted on the nuScenes dataset, which is one of the first datasets which features Camera, Radar, and LiDAR recordings in diverse scenes and weather conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing fusion methods. We also provide detailed ablation studies to show the effectiveness of each component in our method.
GCNNMatch: Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Multi-Object Tracking via Sinkhorn Normalization
Authors: Ioannis Papakis, Abhijit Sarkar, Anuj Karpatne
Date: 2020-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking, Online Multi-Object Tracking

This paper proposes a novel method for online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) using Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCNN) based feature extraction and end-to-end feature matching for object association. The Graph based approach incorporates both appearance and geometry of objects at past frames as well as the current frame into the task of feature learning. This new paradigm enables the network to leverage the "context" information of the geometry of objects and allows us to model the interactions among the features of multiple objects. Another central innovation of our proposed framework is the use of the Sinkhorn algorithm for end-to-end learning of the associations among objects during model training. The network is trained to predict object associations by taking into account constraints specific to the MOT task. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in achieving top performance on the MOT '15, '16, '17 and '20 Challenges among state-of-the-art online approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/IPapakis/GCNNMatch.
MaterialGAN: Reflectance Capture using a Generative SVBRDF Model
Authors: Yu Guo, Cameron Smith, Miloš Hašan, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Shuang Zhao
Date: 2020-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Inverse Rendering, model

We address the problem of reconstructing spatially-varying BRDFs from a small set of image measurements. This is a fundamentally under-constrained problem, and previous work has relied on using various regularization priors or on capturing many images to produce plausible results. In this work, we present MaterialGAN, a deep generative convolutional network based on StyleGAN2, trained to synthesize realistic SVBRDF parameter maps. We show that MaterialGAN can be used as a powerful material prior in an inverse rendering framework: we optimize in its latent representation to generate material maps that match the appearance of the captured images when rendered. We demonstrate this framework on the task of reconstructing SVBRDFs from images captured under flash illumination using a hand-held mobile phone. Our method succeeds in producing plausible material maps that accurately reproduce the target images, and outperforms previous state-of-the-art material capture methods in evaluations on both synthetic and real data. Furthermore, our GAN-based latent space allows for high-level semantic material editing operations such as generating material variations and material morphing.
Deformable Kernel Convolutional Network for Video Extreme Super-Resolution
Authors: Xuan Xu, Xin Xiong, Jinge Wang, Xin Li
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution, Video Super-Resolution

Video super-resolution, which attempts to reconstruct high-resolution video frames from their corresponding low-resolution versions, has received increasingly more attention in recent years. Most existing approaches opt to use deformable convolution to temporally align neighboring frames and apply traditional spatial attention mechanism (convolution based) to enhance reconstructed features. However, such spatial-only strategies cannot fully utilize temporal dependency among video frames. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based VSR algorithm, named Deformable Kernel Spatial Attention Network (DKSAN). Thanks to newly designed Deformable Kernel Convolution Alignment (DKC_Align) and Deformable Kernel Spatial Attention (DKSA) modules, DKSAN can better exploit both spatial and temporal redundancies to facilitate the information propagation across different layers. We have tested DKSAN on AIM2020 Video Extreme Super-Resolution Challenge to super-resolve videos with a scale factor as large as 16. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed DKSAN can achieve both better subjective and objective performance compared with the existing state-of-the-art EDVR on Vid3oC and IntVID datasets.
Quantum Annealing Approaches to the Phase-Unwrapping Problem in Synthetic-Aperture Radar Imaging
Authors: Khaled A. Helal Kelany, Nikitas Dimopoulos, Clemens P. J. Adolphs, Bardia Barabadi, Amirali Baniasadi
Date: 2020-10-01 00:00:00

The focus of this work is to explore the use of quantum annealing solvers for the problem of phase unwrapping of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Although solutions to this problem exist based on network programming, these techniques do not scale well to larger-sized images. Our approach involves formulating the problem as a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem, which can be solved using a quantum annealer. Given that present embodiments of quantum annealers remain limited in the number of qubits they possess, we decompose the problem into a set of subproblems that can be solved individually. These individual solutions are close to optimal up to an integer constant, with one constant per sub-image. In a second phase, these integer constants are determined as a solution to yet another QUBO problem. We test our approach with a variety of software-based QUBO solvers and on a variety of images, both synthetic and real. Additionally, we experiment using D-Wave Systems's quantum annealer, the D-Wave 2000Q. The software-based solvers obtain high-quality solutions comparable to state-of-the-art phase-unwrapping solvers. We are currently working on optimally mapping the problem onto the restricted topology of the quantum annealer to improve the quality of the solution.