pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Canonical Embedding for Non-rigid Shape Matching
Authors: Abhishek Sharma, Maks Ovsjanikov
Date: 2021-10-06 00:00:00

This paper provides a novel framework that learns canonical embeddings for non-rigid shape matching. In contrast to prior work in this direction, our framework is trained end-to-end and thus avoids instabilities and constraints associated with the commonly-used Laplace-Beltrami basis or sequential optimization schemes. On multiple datasets, we demonstrate that learning self symmetry maps with a deep functional map projects 3D shapes into a low dimensional canonical embedding that facilitates non-rigid shape correspondence via a simple nearest neighbor search. Our framework outperforms multiple recent learning based methods on FAUST and SHREC benchmarks while being computationally cheaper, data-efficient, and robust.
Distributed Optimization of Graph Convolutional Network using Subgraph Variance
Authors: Taige Zhao, XiangYu Song, JianXin Li, Wei Luo, Imran Razzak
Date: 2021-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Optimization

In recent years, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have achieved great success in learning from graph-structured data. With the growing tendency of graph nodes and edges, GCN training by single processor cannot meet the demand for time and memory, which led to a boom into distributed GCN training frameworks research. However, existing distributed GCN training frameworks require enormous communication costs between processors since multitudes of dependent nodes and edges information need to be collected and transmitted for GCN training from other processors. To address this issue, we propose a Graph Augmentation based Distributed GCN framework(GAD). In particular, GAD has two main components, GAD-Partition and GAD-Optimizer. We first propose a graph augmentation-based partition (GAD-Partition) that can divide original graph into augmented subgraphs to reduce communication by selecting and storing as few significant nodes of other processors as possible while guaranteeing the accuracy of the training. In addition, we further design a subgraph variance-based importance calculation formula and propose a novel weighted global consensus method, collectively referred to as GAD-Optimizer. This optimizer adaptively reduces the importance of subgraphs with large variances for the purpose of reducing the effect of extra variance introduced by GAD-Partition on distributed GCN training. Extensive experiments on four large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly reduces the communication overhead (50%), improves the convergence speed (2X) of distributed GCN training, and slight gain in accuracy (0.45%) based on minimal redundancy compared to the state-of-the-art methods.
GANtron: Emotional Speech Synthesis with Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Enrique Hortal, Rodrigo Brechard Alarcia
Date: 2021-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotional Speech Synthesis, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Speech synthesis is used in a wide variety of industries. Nonetheless, it always sounds flat or robotic. The state of the art methods that allow for prosody control are very cumbersome to use and do not allow easy tuning. To tackle some of these drawbacks, in this work we target the implementation of a text-to-speech model where the inferred speech can be tuned with the desired emotions. To do so, we use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) together with a sequence-to-sequence model using an attention mechanism. We evaluate four different configurations considering different inputs and training strategies, study them and prove how our best model can generate speech files that lie in the same distribution as the initial training dataset. Additionally, a new strategy to boost the training convergence by applying a guided attention loss is proposed.
Cloud Failure Prediction with Hierarchical Temporal Memory: An Empirical Assessment
Authors: Oliviero Riganelli, Paolo Saltarel, Alessandro Tundo, Marco Mobilio, Leonardo Mariani
Date: 2021-10-06 00:00:00

Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM) is an unsupervised learning algorithm inspired by the features of the neocortex that can be used to continuously process stream data and detect anomalies, without requiring a large amount of data for training nor requiring labeled data. HTM is also able to continuously learn from samples, providing a model that is always up-to-date with respect to observations. These characteristics make HTM particularly suitable for supporting online failure prediction in cloud systems, which are systems with a dynamically changing behavior that must be monitored to anticipate problems. This paper presents the first systematic study that assesses HTM in the context of failure prediction. The results that we obtained considering 72 configurations of HTM applied to 12 different types of faults introduced in the Clearwater cloud system show that HTM can help to predict failures with sufficient effectiveness (F-measure = 0.76), representing an interesting practical alternative to (semi-)supervised algorithms.
Unifying Likelihood-free Inference with Black-box Optimization and Beyond
Authors: Dinghuai Zhang, Jie Fu, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville
Date: 2021-10-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Drug Discovery

Black-box optimization formulations for biological sequence design have drawn recent attention due to their promising potential impact on the pharmaceutical industry. In this work, we propose to unify two seemingly distinct worlds: likelihood-free inference and black-box optimization, under one probabilistic framework. In tandem, we provide a recipe for constructing various sequence design methods based on this framework. We show how previous optimization approaches can be "reinvented" in our framework, and further propose new probabilistic black-box optimization algorithms. Extensive experiments on sequence design application illustrate the benefits of the proposed methodology.
PWG-IDS: An Intrusion Detection Model for Solving Class Imbalance in IIoT Networks Using Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Lei Zhang, Shuaimin Jiang, Xiajiong Shen, Brij B. Gupta, Zhihong Tian
Date: 2021-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection

With the continuous development of industrial IoT (IIoT) technology, network security is becoming more and more important. And intrusion detection is an important part of its security. However, since the amount of attack traffic is very small compared to normal traffic, this imbalance makes intrusion detection in it very difficult. To address this imbalance, an intrusion detection system called pretraining Wasserstein generative adversarial network intrusion detection system (PWG-IDS) is proposed in this paper. This system is divided into two main modules: 1) In this module, we introduce the pretraining mechanism in the Wasserstein generative adversarial network with gradient penalty (WGAN-GP) for the first time, firstly using the normal network traffic to train the WGAN-GP, and then inputting the imbalance data into the pre-trained WGAN-GP to retrain and generate the final required data. 2) Intrusion detection module: We use LightGBM as the classification algorithm to detect attack traffic in IIoT networks. The experimental results show that our proposed PWG-IDS outperforms other models, with F1-scores of 99% and 89% on the 2 datasets, respectively. And the pretraining mechanism we proposed can also be widely used in other GANs, providing a new way of thinking for the training of GANs.
A Hierarchical Variational Neural Uncertainty Model for Stochastic Video Prediction
Authors: Moitreya Chatterjee, Narendra Ahuja, Anoop Cherian
Date: 2021-10-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Diversity, Video Generation, Video Prediction

Predicting the future frames of a video is a challenging task, in part due to the underlying stochastic real-world phenomena. Prior approaches to solve this task typically estimate a latent prior characterizing this stochasticity, however do not account for the predictive uncertainty of the (deep learning) model. Such approaches often derive the training signal from the mean-squared error (MSE) between the generated frame and the ground truth, which can lead to sub-optimal training, especially when the predictive uncertainty is high. Towards this end, we introduce Neural Uncertainty Quantifier (NUQ) - a stochastic quantification of the model's predictive uncertainty, and use it to weigh the MSE loss. We propose a hierarchical, variational framework to derive NUQ in a principled manner using a deep, Bayesian graphical model. Our experiments on four benchmark stochastic video prediction datasets show that our proposed framework trains more effectively compared to the state-of-the-art models (especially when the training sets are small), while demonstrating better video generation quality and diversity against several evaluation metrics.
Unpacking the Black Box: Regulating Algorithmic Decisions
Authors: Laura Blattner, Scott Nelson, Jann Spiess
Date: 2021-10-05 00:00:00

What should regulators of complex algorithms regulate? We propose a model of oversight over 'black-box' algorithms used in high-stakes applications such as lending, medical testing, or hiring. In our model, a regulator is limited in how much she can learn about a black-box model deployed by an agent with misaligned preferences. The regulator faces two choices: first, whether to allow for the use of complex algorithms; and second, which key properties of algorithms to regulate. We show that limiting agents to algorithms that are simple enough to be fully transparent is inefficient as long as the misalignment is limited and complex algorithms have sufficiently better performance than simple ones. Allowing for complex algorithms can improve welfare, but the gains depend on how the regulator regulates them. Regulation that focuses on the overall average behavior of algorithms, for example based on standard explainer tools, will generally be inefficient. Targeted regulation that focuses on the source of incentive misalignment, e.g., excess false positives or racial disparities, can provide second-best solutions. We provide empirical support for our theoretical findings using an application in consumer lending, where we document that complex models regulated based on context-specific explanation tools outperform simple, fully transparent models. This gain from complex models represents a Pareto improvement across our empirical applications that is preferred both by the lender and from the perspective of the financial regulator.
Modeling Effect of Lockdowns and Other Effects on India Covid-19 Infections Using SEIR Model and Machine Learning
Authors: Sathiyanarayanan Sampath, Joy Bose
Date: 2021-10-04 00:00:00

The SEIR model is a widely used epidemiological model used to predict the rise in infections. This model has been widely used in different countries to predict the number of Covid-19 cases. But the original SEIR model does not take into account the effect of factors such as lockdowns, vaccines, and re-infections. In India the first wave of Covid started in March 2020 and the second wave in April 2021. In this paper, we modify the SEIR model equations to model the effect of lockdowns and other influencers, and fit the model on data of the daily Covid-19 infections in India using lmfit, a python library for least squares minimization for curve fitting. We modify R0 parameter in the standard SEIR model as a rectangle in order to account for the effect of lockdowns. Our modified SEIR model accurately fits the available data of infections.
Surrogate-Based Black-Box Optimization Method for Costly Molecular Properties
Authors: Jules Leguy, Thomas Cauchy, Beatrice Duval, Benoit Da Mota
Date: 2021-10-01 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, GPR

AI-assisted molecular optimization is a very active research field as it is expected to provide the next-generation drugs and molecular materials. An important difficulty is that the properties to be optimized rely on costly evaluations. Machine learning methods are investigated with success to predict these properties, but show generalization issues on less known areas of the chemical space. We propose here a surrogate-based black box optimization method, to tackle jointly the optimization and machine learning problems. It consists in optimizing the expected improvement of the surrogate of a molecular property using an evolutionary algorithm. The surrogate is defined as a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model, learned on a relevant area of the search space with respect to the property to be optimized. We show that our approach can successfully optimize a costly property of interest much faster than a purely metaheuristic approach.
Burst Image Restoration and Enhancement
Authors: Akshay Dudhane, Syed Waqas Zamir, Salman Khan, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Date: 2021-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Burst Image Super-Resolution, Denoising, Image Enhancement, Image Restoration, Low-Light Image Enhancement, Super-Resolution

Modern handheld devices can acquire burst image sequence in a quick succession. However, the individual acquired frames suffer from multiple degradations and are misaligned due to camera shake and object motions. The goal of Burst Image Restoration is to effectively combine complimentary cues across multiple burst frames to generate high-quality outputs. Towards this goal, we develop a novel approach by solely focusing on the effective information exchange between burst frames, such that the degradations get filtered out while the actual scene details are preserved and enhanced. Our central idea is to create a set of pseudo-burst features that combine complementary information from all the input burst frames to seamlessly exchange information. However, the pseudo-burst cannot be successfully created unless the individual burst frames are properly aligned to discount inter-frame movements. Therefore, our approach initially extracts pre-processed features from each burst frame and matches them using an edge-boosting burst alignment module. The pseudo-burst features are then created and enriched using multi-scale contextual information. Our final step is to adaptively aggregate information from the pseudo-burst features to progressively increase resolution in multiple stages while merging the pseudo-burst features. In comparison to existing works that usually follow a late fusion scheme with single-stage upsampling, our approach performs favorably, delivering state-of-the-art performance on burst superresolution, burst low-light image enhancement, and burst denoising tasks. The source code and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/akshaydudhane16/BIPNet}.
ATISS: Autoregressive Transformers for Indoor Scene Synthesis
Authors: Despoina Paschalidou, Amlan Kar, Maria Shugrina, Karsten Kreis, Andreas Geiger, Sanja Fidler
Date: 2021-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: 2D Semantic Segmentation task 1 (8 classes), 3D Semantic Scene Completion, Indoor Scene Synthesis

The ability to synthesize realistic and diverse indoor furniture layouts automatically or based on partial input, unlocks many applications, from better interactive 3D tools to data synthesis for training and simulation. In this paper, we present ATISS, a novel autoregressive transformer architecture for creating diverse and plausible synthetic indoor environments, given only the room type and its floor plan. In contrast to prior work, which poses scene synthesis as sequence generation, our model generates rooms as unordered sets of objects. We argue that this formulation is more natural, as it makes ATISS generally useful beyond fully automatic room layout synthesis. For example, the same trained model can be used in interactive applications for general scene completion, partial room re-arrangement with any objects specified by the user, as well as object suggestions for any partial room. To enable this, our model leverages the permutation equivariance of the transformer when conditioning on the partial scene, and is trained to be permutation-invariant across object orderings. Our model is trained end-to-end as an autoregressive generative model using only labeled 3D bounding boxes as supervision. Evaluations on four room types in the 3D-FRONT dataset demonstrate that our model consistently generates plausible room layouts that are more realistic than existing methods. In addition, it has fewer parameters, is simpler to implement and train and runs up to 8 times faster than existing methods.
Dense Gaussian Processes for Few-Shot Segmentation
Authors: Joakim Johnander, Johan Edstedt, Michael Felsberg, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Martin Danelljan
Date: 2021-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Gaussian Processes, Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation is a challenging dense prediction task, which entails segmenting a novel query image given only a small annotated support set. The key problem is thus to design a method that aggregates detailed information from the support set, while being robust to large variations in appearance and context. To this end, we propose a few-shot segmentation method based on dense Gaussian process (GP) regression. Given the support set, our dense GP learns the mapping from local deep image features to mask values, capable of capturing complex appearance distributions. Furthermore, it provides a principled means of capturing uncertainty, which serves as another powerful cue for the final segmentation, obtained by a CNN decoder. Instead of a one-dimensional mask output, we further exploit the end-to-end learning capabilities of our approach to learn a high-dimensional output space for the GP. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art on the PASCAL-5$^i$ and COCO-20$^i$ benchmarks, achieving an absolute gain of $+8.4$ mIoU in the COCO-20$^i$ 5-shot setting. Furthermore, the segmentation quality of our approach scales gracefully when increasing the support set size, while achieving robust cross-dataset transfer. Code and trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/joakimjohnander/dgpnet}.
Using Keypoint Matching and Interactive Self Attention Network to verify Retail POSMs
Authors: Harshita Seth, Sonaal Kant, Muktabh Mayank Srivastava
Date: 2021-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

Point of Sale Materials(POSM) are the merchandising and decoration items that are used by companies to communicate product information and offers in retail stores. POSMs are part of companies' retail marketing strategy and are often applied as stylized window displays around retail shelves. In this work, we apply computer vision techniques to the task of verification of POSMs in supermarkets by telling if all desired components of window display are present in a shelf image. We use Convolutional Neural Network based unsupervised keypoint matching as a baseline to verify POSM components and propose a supervised Neural Network based method to enhance the accuracy of baseline by a large margin. We also show that the supervised pipeline is not restricted to the POSM material it is trained on and can generalize. We train and evaluate our model on a private dataset composed of retail shelf images.
Using Contrastive Learning and Pseudolabels to learn representations for Retail Product Image Classification
Authors: Muktabh Mayank Srivastava
Date: 2021-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, regression

Retail product Image classification problems are often few shot classification problems, given retail product classes cannot have the type of variations across images like a cat or dog or tree could have. Previous works have shown different methods to finetune Convolutional Neural Networks to achieve better classification accuracy on such datasets. In this work, we try to address the problem statement : Can we pretrain a Convolutional Neural Network backbone which yields good enough representations for retail product images, so that training a simple logistic regression on these representations gives us good classifiers ? We use contrastive learning and pseudolabel based noisy student training to learn representations that get accuracy in order of finetuning the entire Convnet backbone for retail product image classification.
Boxhead: A Dataset for Learning Hierarchical Representations
Authors: Yukun Chen, Andrea Dittadi, Frederik Träuble, Stefan Bauer, Bernhard Schölkopf
Date: 2021-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop SVRHM 2021 12
Tasks: Disentanglement

Disentanglement is hypothesized to be beneficial towards a number of downstream tasks. However, a common assumption in learning disentangled representations is that the data generative factors are statistically independent. As current methods are almost solely evaluated on toy datasets where this ideal assumption holds, we investigate their performance in hierarchical settings, a relevant feature of real-world data. In this work, we introduce Boxhead, a dataset with hierarchically structured ground-truth generative factors. We use this novel dataset to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art autoencoder-based disentanglement models and observe that hierarchical models generally outperform single-layer VAEs in terms of disentanglement of hierarchically arranged factors.
TranSalNet: Towards perceptually relevant visual saliency prediction
Authors: Jianxun Lou, Hanhe Lin, David Marshall, Dietmar Saupe, Hantao Liu
Date: 2021-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Saliency Prediction

Visual saliency prediction using transformers - Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have significantly advanced computational modelling for saliency prediction. However, accurately simulating the mechanisms of visual attention in the human cortex remains an academic challenge. It is critical to integrate properties of human vision into the design of CNN architectures, leading to perceptually more relevant saliency prediction. Due to the inherent inductive biases of CNN architectures, there is a lack of sufficient long-range contextual encoding capacity. This hinders CNN-based saliency models from capturing properties that emulate viewing behaviour of humans. Transformers have shown great potential in encoding long-range information by leveraging the self-attention mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel saliency model that integrates transformer components to CNNs to capture the long-range contextual visual information. Experimental results show that the transformers provide added value to saliency prediction, enhancing its perceptual relevance in the performance. Our proposed saliency model using transformers has achieved superior results on public benchmarks and competitions for saliency prediction models. The source code of our proposed saliency model TranSalNet is available at: https://github.com/LJOVO/TranSalNet