pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TaL: a synchronised multi-speaker corpus of ultrasound tongue imaging, audio, and lip videos
Authors: Manuel Sam Ribeiro, Jennifer Sanger, Jing-Xuan Zhang, Aciel Eshky, Alan Wrench, Korin Richmond, Steve Renals
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Synthesis

We present the Tongue and Lips corpus (TaL), a multi-speaker corpus of audio, ultrasound tongue imaging, and lip videos. TaL consists of two parts: TaL1 is a set of six recording sessions of one professional voice talent, a male native speaker of English; TaL80 is a set of recording sessions of 81 native speakers of English without voice talent experience. Overall, the corpus contains 24 hours of parallel ultrasound, video, and audio data, of which approximately 13.5 hours are speech. This paper describes the corpus and presents benchmark results for the tasks of speech recognition, speech synthesis (articulatory-to-acoustic mapping), and automatic synchronisation of ultrasound to audio. The TaL corpus is publicly available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Novel Classification of Ischemic Heart Disease Using Artificial Neural Network
Authors: Giulia Silveri, Marco Merlo, Luca Restivo, Gianfranco Sinagra, Agostino Accardo
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Heart Rate Variability

Ischemic heart disease (IHD), particularly in its chronic stable form, is a subtle pathology due to its silent behavior before developing in unstable angina, myocardial infarction or sudden cardiac death. Machine learning techniques applied to parameters extracted form heart rate variability (HRV) signal seem to be a valuable support in the early diagnosis of some cardiac diseases. However, so far, IHD patients were identified using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) applied to a limited number of HRV parameters and only to very few subjects. In this study, we used several linear and non-linear HRV parameters applied to ANNs, in order to confirm these results on a large cohort of 965 sample of subjects and to identify which features could discriminate IHD patients with high accuracy. By using principal component analysis and stepwise regression, we reduced the original 17 parameters to five, used as inputs, for a series of ANNs. The highest accuracy of 82% was achieved using meanRR, LFn, SD1, gender and age parameters and two hidden neurons.
Unifying Instance and Panoptic Segmentation with Dynamic Rank-1 Convolutions
Authors: Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen, Zhi Tian
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recently, fully-convolutional one-stage networks have shown superior performance comparing to two-stage frameworks for instance segmentation as typically they can generate higher-quality mask predictions with less computation. In addition, their simple design opens up new opportunities for joint multi-task learning. In this paper, we demonstrate that adding a single classification layer for semantic segmentation, fully-convolutional instance segmentation networks can achieve state-of-the-art panoptic segmentation quality. This is made possible by our novel dynamic rank-1 convolution (DR1Conv), a novel dynamic module that can efficiently merge high-level context information with low-level detailed features which is beneficial for both semantic and instance segmentation. Importantly, the proposed new method, termed DR1Mask, can perform panoptic segmentation by adding a single layer. To our knowledge, DR1Mask is the first panoptic segmentation framework that exploits a shared feature map for both instance and semantic segmentation by considering both efficacy and efficiency. Not only our framework is much more efficient -- twice as fast as previous best two-branch approaches, but also the unified framework opens up opportunities for using the same context module to improve the performance for both tasks. As a byproduct, when performing instance segmentation alone, DR1Mask is 10% faster and 1 point in mAP more accurate than previous state-of-the-art instance segmentation network BlendMask. Code is available at: https://git.io/AdelaiDet
An Experimental Study of Semantic Continuity for Deep Learning Models
Authors: Shangxi Wu, Dongyuan Lu, Xian Zhao, Lizhang Chen, Jitao Sang
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Deep Learning

Deep learning models suffer from the problem of semantic discontinuity: small perturbations in the input space tend to cause semantic-level interference to the model output. We argue that the semantic discontinuity results from these inappropriate training targets and contributes to notorious issues such as adversarial robustness, interpretability, etc. We first conduct data analysis to provide evidence of semantic discontinuity in existing deep learning models, and then design a simple semantic continuity constraint which theoretically enables models to obtain smooth gradients and learn semantic-oriented features. Qualitative and quantitative experiments prove that semantically continuous models successfully reduce the use of non-semantic information, which further contributes to the improvement in adversarial robustness, interpretability, model transfer, and machine bias.
ReAssert: Deep Learning for Assert Generation
Authors: Robert White, Jens Krinke
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The automated generation of test code can reduce the time and effort required to build software while increasing its correctness and robustness. In this paper, we present RE-ASSERT, an approach for the automated generation of JUnit test asserts which produces more accurate asserts than previous work with fewer constraints. This is achieved by targeting projects individually, using precise code-to-test traceability for learning and by generating assert statements from the method-under-test directly without the need to write an assert-less test first. We also utilise Reformer, a state-of-the-art deep learning model, along with two models from previous work to evaluate ReAssert and an existing approach, known as ATLAS, using lexical accuracy,uniqueness, and dynamic analysis. Our evaluation of ReAssert shows up to 44% of generated asserts for a single project match exactly with the ground truth, increasing to 51% for generated asserts that compile. We also improve on the ATLAS results through our use of Reformer with 28% of generated asserts matching exactly with the ground truth. Reformer also produces the greatest proportion of unique asserts (71%), giving further evidence that Reformer produces the most useful asserts.
DeepMorph: A System for Hiding Bitstrings in Morphable Vector Drawings
Authors: Søren Rasmussen, Karsten Østergaard Noe, Oliver Gyldenberg Hjermitslev, Henrik Pedersen
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Pose Estimation, Decoder, object-detection, Object Detection, Pose Estimation, Vector Graphics

We introduce DeepMorph, an information embedding technique for vector drawings. Provided a vector drawing, such as a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file, our method embeds bitstrings in the image by perturbing the drawing primitives (lines, circles, etc.). This results in a morphed image that can be decoded to recover the original bitstring. The use-case is similar to that of the well-known QR code, but our solution provides creatives with artistic freedom to transfer digital information via drawings of their own design. The method comprises two neural networks, which are trained jointly: an encoder network that transforms a bitstring into a perturbation of the drawing primitives, and a decoder network that recovers the bitstring from an image of the morphed drawing. To enable end-to-end training via back propagation, we introduce a soft rasterizer, which is differentiable with respect to perturbations of the drawing primitives. In order to add robustness towards real-world image capture conditions, image corruptions are injected between the soft rasterizer and the decoder. Further, the addition of an object detection and camera pose estimation system enables decoding of drawings in complex scenes as well as use of the drawings as markers for use in augmented reality applications. We demonstrate that our method reliably recovers bitstrings from real-world photos of printed drawings, thereby providing a novel solution for creatives to transfer digital information via artistic imagery.
Towards Spatio-Temporal Video Scene Text Detection via Temporal Clustering
Authors: Yuanqiang Cai, Chang Liu, Weiqiang Wang, Qixiang Ye
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Scene Text Detection, Text Detection

With only bounding-box annotations in the spatial domain, existing video scene text detection (VSTD) benchmarks lack temporal relation of text instances among video frames, which hinders the development of video text-related applications. In this paper, we systematically introduce a new large-scale benchmark, named as STVText4, a well-designed spatial-temporal detection metric (STDM), and a novel clustering-based baseline method, referred to as Temporal Clustering (TC). STVText4 opens a challenging yet promising direction of VSTD, termed as ST-VSTD, which targets at simultaneously detecting video scene texts in both spatial and temporal domains. STVText4 contains more than 1.4 million text instances from 161,347 video frames of 106 videos, where each instance is annotated with not only spatial bounding box and temporal range but also four intrinsic attributes, including legibility, density, scale, and lifecycle, to facilitate the community. With continuous propagation of identical texts in the video sequence, TC can accurately output the spatial quadrilateral and temporal range of the texts, which sets a strong baseline for ST-VSTD. Experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our method and the great academic and practical value of the STVText4. The dataset and code will be available soon.
Deep Learning for Automated Screening of Tuberculosis from Indian Chest X-rays: Analysis and Update
Authors: Anushikha Singh, Brejesh lall, B. K. Panigrahi, Anjali Agrawal, Anurag Agrawal, Balamugesh Thangakunam, DJ Christopher
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00

Background and Objective: Tuberculosis (TB) is a significant public health issue and a leading cause of death worldwide. Millions of deaths can be averted by early diagnosis and successful treatment of TB patients. Automated diagnosis of TB holds vast potential to assist medical experts in expediting and improving its diagnosis, especially in developing countries like India, where there is a shortage of trained medical experts and radiologists. To date, several deep learning based methods for automated detection of TB from chest radiographs have been proposed. However, the performance of a few of these methods on the Indian chest radiograph data set has been suboptimal, possibly due to different texture of the lungs on chest radiographs of Indian subjects compared to other countries. Thus deep learning for accurate and automated diagnosis of TB on Indian datasets remains an important subject of research. Methods: The proposed work explores the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the diagnosis of TB in Indian chest x-ray images. Three different pre-trained neural network models, AlexNet, GoogLenet, and ResNet are used to classify chest x-ray images into healthy or TB infected. The proposed approach does not require any pre-processing technique. Also, other works use pre-trained NNs as a tool for crafting features and then apply standard classification techniques. However, we attempt an end to end NN model based diagnosis of TB from chest x-rays. The proposed visualization tool can also be used by radiologists in the screening of large datasets. Results: The proposed method achieved 93.40% accuracy with 98.60% sensitivity to diagnose TB for the Indian population. Conclusions: The performance of the proposed method is also tested against techniques described in the literature. The proposed method outperforms the state of art on Indian and Shenzhen datasets.
Improving Bayesian Network Structure Learning in the Presence of Measurement Error
Authors: Yang Liu, Anthony C. Constantinou, Zhigao Guo
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00

Structure learning algorithms that learn the graph of a Bayesian network from observational data often do so by assuming the data correctly reflect the true distribution of the variables. However, this assumption does not hold in the presence of measurement error, which can lead to spurious edges. This is one of the reasons why the synthetic performance of these algorithms often overestimates real-world performance. This paper describes an algorithm that can be added as an additional learning phase at the end of any structure learning algorithm, and serves as a correction learning phase that removes potential false positive edges. The results show that the proposed correction algorithm successfully improves the graphical score of four well-established structure learning algorithms spanning different classes of learning in the presence of measurement error.
A Temporal Convolution Network Approach to State-of-Charge Estimation in Li-ion Batteries
Authors: Aniruddh Herle, Janamejaya Channegowda, Dinakar Prabhu
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00

Electric Vehicle (EV) fleets have dramatically expanded over the past several years. There has been significant increase in interest to electrify all modes of transportation. EVs are primarily powered by Energy Storage Systems such as Lithium-ion Battery packs. Total battery pack capacity translates to the available range in an EV. State of Charge (SOC) is the ratio of available battery capacity to total capacity and is expressed in percentages. It is crucial to accurately estimate SOC to determine the available range in an EV while it is in use. In this paper, a Temporal Convolution Network (TCN) approach is taken to estimate SOC. This is the first implementation of TCNs for the SOC estimation task. Estimation is carried out on various drive cycles such as HWFET, LA92, UDDS and US06 drive cycles at 1 C and 25 {\deg}Celsius. It was found that TCN architecture achieved an accuracy of 99.1%.
Data-Driven Robust Optimization using Unsupervised Deep Learning
Authors: Marc Goerigk, Jannis Kurtz
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Learning

Robust optimization has been established as a leading methodology to approach decision problems under uncertainty. To derive a robust optimization model, a central ingredient is to identify a suitable model for uncertainty, which is called the uncertainty set. An ongoing challenge in the recent literature is to derive uncertainty sets from given historical data that result in solutions that are robust regarding future scenarios. In this paper we use an unsupervised deep learning method to learn and extract hidden structures from data, leading to non-convex uncertainty sets and better robust solutions. We prove that most of the classical uncertainty classes are special cases of our derived sets and that optimizing over them is strongly NP-hard. Nevertheless, we show that the trained neural networks can be integrated into a robust optimization model by formulating the adversarial problem as a convex quadratic mixed-integer program. This allows us to derive robust solutions through an iterative scenario generation process. In our computational experiments, we compare this approach to a similar approach using kernel-based support vector clustering. We find that uncertainty sets derived by the unsupervised deep learning method find a better description of data and lead to robust solutions that outperform the comparison method both with respect to objective value and feasibility.
Scene text removal via cascaded text stroke detection and erasing
Authors: Xuewei Bian, Chaoqun Wang, Weize Quan, Juntao Ye, Xiaopeng Zhang, Dong-Ming Yan
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00

Recent learning-based approaches show promising performance improvement for scene text removal task. However, these methods usually leave some remnants of text and obtain visually unpleasant results. In this work, we propose a novel "end-to-end" framework based on accurate text stroke detection. Specifically, we decouple the text removal problem into text stroke detection and stroke removal. We design a text stroke detection network and a text removal generation network to solve these two sub-problems separately. Then, we combine these two networks as a processing unit, and cascade this unit to obtain the final model for text removal. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for locating and erasing scene text. Since current publicly available datasets are all synthetic and cannot properly measure the performance of different methods, we therefore construct a new real-world dataset, which will be released to facilitate the relevant research.
Deep Residual Local Feature Learning for Speech Emotion Recognition
Authors: Sattaya Singkul, Thakorn Chatchaisathaporn, Boontawee Suntisrivaraporn, Kuntpong Woraratpanya
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is becoming a key role in global business today to improve service efficiency, like call center services. Recent SERs were based on a deep learning approach. However, the efficiency of deep learning depends on the number of layers, i.e., the deeper layers, the higher efficiency. On the other hand, the deeper layers are causes of a vanishing gradient problem, a low learning rate, and high time-consuming. Therefore, this paper proposed a redesign of existing local feature learning block (LFLB). The new design is called a deep residual local feature learning block (DeepResLFLB). DeepResLFLB consists of three cascade blocks: LFLB, residual local feature learning block (ResLFLB), and multilayer perceptron (MLP). LFLB is built for learning local correlations along with extracting hierarchical correlations; DeepResLFLB can take advantage of repeatedly learning to explain more detail in deeper layers using residual learning for solving vanishing gradient and reducing overfitting; and MLP is adopted to find the relationship of learning and discover probability for predicted speech emotions and gender types. Based on two available published datasets: EMODB and RAVDESS, the proposed DeepResLFLB can significantly improve performance when evaluated by standard metrics: accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score.
Attention-Based Transformers for Instance Segmentation of Cells in Microstructures
Authors: Tim Prangemeier, Christoph Reich, Heinz Koeppl
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Detection, Cell Segmentation, Experimental Design, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Detecting and segmenting object instances is a common task in biomedical applications. Examples range from detecting lesions on functional magnetic resonance images, to the detection of tumours in histopathological images and extracting quantitative single-cell information from microscopy imagery, where cell segmentation is a major bottleneck. Attention-based transformers are state-of-the-art in a range of deep learning fields. They have recently been proposed for segmentation tasks where they are beginning to outperforming other methods. We present a novel attention-based cell detection transformer (Cell-DETR) for direct end-to-end instance segmentation. While the segmentation performance is on par with a state-of-the-art instance segmentation method, Cell-DETR is simpler and faster. We showcase the method's contribution in a the typical use case of segmenting yeast in microstructured environments, commonly employed in systems or synthetic biology. For the specific use case, the proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art tools for semantic segmentation and additionally predicts the individual object instances. The fast and accurate instance segmentation performance increases the experimental information yield for a posteriori data processing and makes online monitoring of experiments and closed-loop optimal experimental design feasible.
Active Inference and Behavior Trees for Reactive Action Planning and Execution in Robotics
Authors: Corrado Pezzato, Carlos Hernandez Corbato, Stefan Bonhof, Martijn Wisse
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

We propose a hybrid combination of active inference and behavior trees (BTs) for reactive action planning and execution in dynamic environments, showing how robotic tasks can be formulated as a free-energy minimization problem. The proposed approach allows handling partially observable initial states and improves the robustness of classical BTs against unexpected contingencies while at the same time reducing the number of nodes in a tree. In this work, we specify the nominal behavior offline, through BTs. However, in contrast to previous approaches, we introduce a new type of leaf node to specify the desired state to be achieved rather than an action to execute. The decision of which action to execute to reach the desired state is performed online through active inference. This results in continual online planning and hierarchical deliberation. By doing so, an agent can follow a predefined offline plan while still keeping the ability to locally adapt and take autonomous decisions at runtime, respecting safety constraints. We provide proof of convergence and robustness analysis, and we validate our method in two different mobile manipulators performing similar tasks, both in a simulated and real retail environment. The results showed improved runtime adaptability with a fraction of the hand-coded nodes compared to classical BTs.
From Protocol to Screening: A Hybrid Learning Approach for Technology-Assisted Systematic Literature Reviews
Authors: Athanasios Lagopoulos, Grigorios Tsoumakas
Date: 2020-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning-To-Rank, Retrieval, Systematic Literature Review, TAR, Task 2

In the medical domain, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) attempts to collect all empirical evidence, that fit pre-specified eligibility criteria, in order to answer a specific research question. The process of preparing an SLR consists of multiple tasks that are labor-intensive and time-consuming, involving large monetary costs. Technology-assisted review (TAR) methods automate the different processes of creating an SLR and they are particularly focused on reducing the burden of screening for reviewers. We present a novel method for TAR that implements a full pipeline from the research protocol to the screening of the relevant papers. Our pipeline overcomes the need of a Boolean query constructed by specialists and consists of three different components: the primary retrieval engine, the inter-review ranker and the intra-review ranker, combining learning-to-rank techniques with a relevance feedback method. In addition, we contribute an updated version of the Task 2 of the CLEF 2019 eHealth Lab dataset, which we make publicly available. Empirical results on this dataset show that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art results.