pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Transformer-based Math Language Model for Handwritten Math Expression Recognition
Authors: Huy Quang Ung, Cuong Tuan Nguyen, Hung Tuan Nguyen, Thanh-Nghia Truong, Masaki Nakagawa
Date: 2021-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Math

Handwritten mathematical expressions (HMEs) contain ambiguities in their interpretations, even for humans sometimes. Several math symbols are very similar in the writing style, such as dot and comma or 0, O, and o, which is a challenge for HME recognition systems to handle without using contextual information. To address this problem, this paper presents a Transformer-based Math Language Model (TMLM). Based on the self-attention mechanism, the high-level representation of an input token in a sequence of tokens is computed by how it is related to the previous tokens. Thus, TMLM can capture long dependencies and correlations among symbols and relations in a mathematical expression (ME). We trained the proposed language model using a corpus of approximately 70,000 LaTeX sequences provided in CROHME 2016. TMLM achieved the perplexity of 4.42, which outperformed the previous math language models, i.e., the N-gram and recurrent neural network-based language models. In addition, we combine TMLM into a stochastic context-free grammar-based HME recognition system using a weighting parameter to re-rank the top-10 best candidates. The expression rates on the testing sets of CROHME 2016 and CROHME 2019 were improved by 2.97 and 0.83 percentage points, respectively.
Learning Fair Face Representation With Progressive Cross Transformer
Authors: Yong Li, Yufei Sun, Zhen Cui, Shiguang Shan, Jian Yang
Date: 2021-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Face Recognition

Face recognition (FR) has made extraordinary progress owing to the advancement of deep convolutional neural networks. However, demographic bias among different racial cohorts still challenges the practical face recognition system. The race factor has been proven to be a dilemma for fair FR (FFR) as the subject-related specific attributes induce the classification bias whilst carrying some useful cues for FR. To mitigate racial bias and meantime preserve robust FR, we abstract face identity-related representation as a signal denoising problem and propose a progressive cross transformer (PCT) method for fair face recognition. Originating from the signal decomposition theory, we attempt to decouple face representation into i) identity-related components and ii) noisy/identity-unrelated components induced by race. As an extension of signal subspace decomposition, we formulate face decoupling as a generalized functional expression model to cross-predict face identity and race information. The face expression model is further concretized by designing dual cross-transformers to distill identity-related components and suppress racial noises. In order to refine face representation, we take a progressive face decoupling way to learn identity/race-specific transformations, so that identity-unrelated components induced by race could be better disentangled. We evaluate the proposed PCT on the public fair face recognition benchmarks (BFW, RFW) and verify that PCT is capable of mitigating bias in face recognition while achieving state-of-the-art FR performance. Besides, visualization results also show that the attention maps in PCT can well reveal the race-related/biased facial regions.
Simple black-box universal adversarial attacks on medical image classification based on deep neural networks
Authors: Kazuki Koga, Kazuhiro Takemoto
Date: 2021-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification

Universal adversarial attacks, which hinder most deep neural network (DNN) tasks using only a small single perturbation called a universal adversarial perturbation (UAP), is a realistic security threat to the practical application of a DNN. In particular, such attacks cause serious problems in medical imaging. Given that computer-based systems are generally operated under a black-box condition in which only queries on inputs are allowed and outputs are accessible, the impact of UAPs seems to be limited because well-used algorithms for generating UAPs are limited to a white-box condition in which adversaries can access the model weights and loss gradients. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that UAPs are easily generatable using a relatively small dataset under black-box conditions. In particular, we propose a method for generating UAPs using a simple hill-climbing search based only on DNN outputs and demonstrate the validity of the proposed method using representative DNN-based medical image classifications. Black-box UAPs can be used to conduct both non-targeted and targeted attacks. Overall, the black-box UAPs showed high attack success rates (40% to 90%), although some of them had relatively low success rates because the method only utilizes limited information to generate UAPs. The vulnerability of black-box UAPs was observed in several model architectures. The results indicate that adversaries can also generate UAPs through a simple procedure under the black-box condition to foil or control DNN-based medical image diagnoses, and that UAPs are a more realistic security threat.
An Image-based Generator Architecture for Synthetic Image Refinement
Authors: Alex Nasser
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00

Proposed are alternative generator architectures for Boundary Equilibrium Generative Adversarial Networks, motivated by Learning from Simulated and Unsupervised Images through Adversarial Training. It disentangles the need for a noise-based latent space. The generator will operate mainly as a refiner network to gain a photo-realistic presentation of the given synthetic images. It also attempts to resolve the latent space's poorly understood properties by eliminating the need for noise injection and replacing it with an image-based concept. The new flexible and simple generator architecture will also give the power to control the trade-off between restrictive refinement and expressiveness ability. Contrary to other available methods, this architecture will not require a paired or unpaired dataset of real and synthetic images for the training phase. Only a relatively small set of real images would suffice.
First Order Locally Orderless Registration
Authors: Sune Darkner, Jose D Tascon, Francois Lauze
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Image Registration

First Order Locally Orderless Registration (FLOR) is a scale-space framework for image density estimation used for defining image similarity, mainly for Image Registration. The Locally Orderless Registration framework was designed in principle to use zeroth-order information, providing image density estimates over three scales: image scale, intensity scale, and integration scale. We extend it to take first-order information into account and hint at higher-order information. We show how standard similarity measures extend into the framework. We study especially Sum of Squared Differences (SSD) and Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC) but present the theory of how Normalised Mutual Information (NMI) can be included.
Optimal MRI Undersampling Patterns for Ultimate Benefit of Medical Vision Tasks
Authors: Artem Razumov, Oleg Y. Rogov, Dmitry V. Dylov
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Segmentation

To accelerate MRI, the field of compressed sensing is traditionally concerned with optimizing the image quality after a partial undersampling of the measurable $\textit{k}$-space. In our work, we propose to change the focus from the quality of the reconstructed image to the quality of the downstream image analysis outcome. Specifically, we propose to optimize the patterns according to how well a sought-after pathology could be detected or localized in the reconstructed images. We find the optimal undersampling patterns in $\textit{k}$-space that maximize target value functions of interest in commonplace medical vision problems (reconstruction, segmentation, and classification) and propose a new iterative gradient sampling routine universally suitable for these tasks. We validate the proposed MRI acceleration paradigm on three classical medical datasets, demonstrating a noticeable improvement of the target metrics at the high acceleration factors (for the segmentation problem at $\times$16 acceleration, we report up to 12% improvement in Dice score over the other undersampling patterns).
FLAME-in-NeRF : Neural control of Radiance Fields for Free View Face Animation
Authors: ShahRukh Athar, Zhixin Shu, Dimitris Samaras
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Model, NeRF, Neural Rendering, Novel View Synthesis

This paper presents a neural rendering method for controllable portrait video synthesis. Recent advances in volumetric neural rendering, such as neural radiance fields (NeRF), has enabled the photorealistic novel view synthesis of static scenes with impressive results. However, modeling dynamic and controllable objects as part of a scene with such scene representations is still challenging. In this work, we design a system that enables both novel view synthesis for portrait video, including the human subject and the scene background, and explicit control of the facial expressions through a low-dimensional expression representation. We leverage the expression space of a 3D morphable face model (3DMM) to represent the distribution of human facial expressions, and use it to condition the NeRF volumetric function. Furthermore, we impose a spatial prior brought by 3DMM fitting to guide the network to learn disentangled control for scene appearance and facial actions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on free view synthesis of portrait videos with expression controls. To train a scene, our method only requires a short video of a subject captured by a mobile device.
Depth Infused Binaural Audio Generation using Hierarchical Cross-Modal Attention
Authors: Kranti Kumar Parida, Siddharth Srivastava, Neeraj Matiyali, Gaurav Sharma
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Generation, Decoder

Binaural audio gives the listener the feeling of being in the recording place and enhances the immersive experience if coupled with AR/VR. But the problem with binaural audio recording is that it requires a specialized setup which is not possible to fabricate within handheld devices as compared to traditional mono audio that can be recorded with a single microphone. In order to overcome this drawback, prior works have tried to uplift the mono recorded audio to binaural audio as a post processing step conditioning on the visual input. But all the prior approaches missed other most important information required for the task, i.e. distance of different sound producing objects from the recording setup. In this work, we argue that the depth map of the scene can act as a proxy for encoding distance information of objects in the scene and show that adding depth features along with image features improves the performance both qualitatively and quantitatively. We propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture, where we use a hierarchical attention mechanism to encode the image and depth feature extracted from individual transformer backbone, with audio features at each layer of the decoder.
Interpreting Generative Adversarial Networks for Interactive Image Generation
Authors: Bolei Zhou
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Significant progress has been made by the advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for image generation. However, there lacks enough understanding of how a realistic image is generated by the deep representations of GANs from a random vector. This chapter gives a summary of recent works on interpreting deep generative models. The methods are categorized into the supervised, the unsupervised, and the embedding-guided approaches. We will see how the human-understandable concepts that emerge in the learned representation can be identified and used for interactive image generation and editing.
How Self-Supervised Learning Can be Used for Fine-Grained Head Pose Estimation?
Authors: Mahdi Pourmirzaei, Farzaneh Esmaili, Ebrahim Mousavi, Sasan Karamizadeh, Seyedehsamaneh Shojaeilangari
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Head Pose Estimation, Multi-Task Learning, Pose Estimation, Self-Supervised Learning, Transfer Learning

The cost of head pose labeling is the main challenge of improving the fine-grained Head Pose Estimation (HPE). Although Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) can be a solution to the lack of huge amounts of labeled data, its efficacy for fine-grained HPE is not yet fully explored. This study aims to assess the usage of SSL in fine-grained HPE based on two scenarios: (1) using SSL for weights pre-training procedure, and (2) leveraging auxiliary SSL losses besides HPE. We design a Hybrid Multi-Task Learning (HMTL) architecture based on the ResNet50 backbone in which both strategies are applied. Our experimental results reveal that the combination of both scenarios is the best for HPE. Together, the average error rate is reduced up to 23.1% for AFLW2000 and 14.2% for BIWI benchmark compared to the baseline. Moreover, it is found that some SSL methods are more suitable for transfer learning, while others may be effective when they are considered as auxiliary tasks incorporated into supervised learning. Finally, it is shown that by using the proposed HMTL architecture, the average error is reduced with different types of initial weights: random, ImageNet and SSL pre-trained weights.
On the Effect of Pruning on Adversarial Robustness
Authors: Artur Jordao, Helio Pedrini
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Pruning is a well-known mechanism for reducing the computational cost of deep convolutional networks. However, studies have shown the potential of pruning as a form of regularization, which reduces overfitting and improves generalization. We demonstrate that this family of strategies provides additional benefits beyond computational performance and generalization. Our analyses reveal that pruning structures (filters and/or layers) from convolutional networks increase not only generalization but also robustness to adversarial images (natural images with content modified). Such achievements are possible since pruning reduces network capacity and provides regularization, which have been proven effective tools against adversarial images. In contrast to promising defense mechanisms that require training with adversarial images and careful regularization, we show that pruning obtains competitive results considering only natural images (e.g., the standard and low-cost training). We confirm these findings on several adversarial attacks and architectures; thus suggesting the potential of pruning as a novel defense mechanism against adversarial images.
Differentiable Surface Rendering via Non-Differentiable Sampling
Authors: Forrester Cole, Kyle Genova, Avneesh Sud, Daniel Vlasic, Zhoutong Zhang
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Inverse Rendering, NeRF

We present a method for differentiable rendering of 3D surfaces that supports both explicit and implicit representations, provides derivatives at occlusion boundaries, and is fast and simple to implement. The method first samples the surface using non-differentiable rasterization, then applies differentiable, depth-aware point splatting to produce the final image. Our approach requires no differentiable meshing or rasterization steps, making it efficient for large 3D models and applicable to isosurfaces extracted from implicit surface definitions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for implicit-, mesh-, and parametric-surface-based inverse rendering and neural-network training applications. In particular, we show for the first time efficient, differentiable rendering of an isosurface extracted from a neural radiance field (NeRF), and demonstrate surface-based, rather than volume-based, rendering of a NeRF.
MetaPose: Fast 3D Pose from Multiple Views without 3D Supervision
Authors: Ben Usman, Andrea Tagliasacchi, Kate Saenko, Avneesh Sud
Date: 2021-08-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Weakly-supervised 3D Human Pose Estimation

In the era of deep learning, human pose estimation from multiple cameras with unknown calibration has received little attention to date. We show how to train a neural model to perform this task with high precision and minimal latency overhead. The proposed model takes into account joint location uncertainty due to occlusion from multiple views, and requires only 2D keypoint data for training. Our method outperforms both classical bundle adjustment and weakly-supervised monocular 3D baselines on the well-established Human3.6M dataset, as well as the more challenging in-the-wild Ski-Pose PTZ dataset.
Controlling the False Split Rate in Tree-Based Aggregation
Authors: Simeng Shao, Jacob Bien, Adel Javanmard
Date: 2021-08-11 00:00:00

In many domains, data measurements can naturally be associated with the leaves of a tree, expressing the relationships among these measurements. For example, companies belong to industries, which in turn belong to ever coarser divisions such as sectors; microbes are commonly arranged in a taxonomic hierarchy from species to kingdoms; street blocks belong to neighborhoods, which in turn belong to larger-scale regions. The problem of tree-based aggregation that we consider in this paper asks which of these tree-defined subgroups of leaves should really be treated as a single entity and which of these entities should be distinguished from each other. We introduce the "false split rate", an error measure that describes the degree to which subgroups have been split when they should not have been. We then propose a multiple hypothesis testing algorithm for tree-based aggregation, which we prove controls this error measure. We focus on two main examples of tree-based aggregation, one which involves aggregating means and the other which involves aggregating regression coefficients. We apply this methodology to aggregate stocks based on their volatility and to aggregate neighborhoods of New York City based on taxi fares.
The Forgotten Role of Search Queries in IR-based Bug Localization: An Empirical Study
Authors: Mohammad Masudur Rahman, Foutse khomh, Shamima Yeasmin, Chanchal K. Roy
Date: 2021-08-11 00:00:00

Being light-weight and cost-effective, IR-based approaches for bug localization have shown promise in finding software bugs. However, the accuracy of these approaches heavily depends on their used bug reports. A significant number of bug reports contain only plain natural language texts. According to existing studies, IR-based approaches cannot perform well when they use these bug reports as search queries. On the other hand, there is a piece of recent evidence that suggests that even these natural language-only reports contain enough good keywords that could help localize the bugs successfully. On one hand, these findings suggest that natural language-only bug reports might be a sufficient source for good query keywords. On the other hand, they cast serious doubt on the query selection practices in the IR-based bug localization. In this article, we attempted to clear the sky on this aspect by conducting an in-depth empirical study that critically examines the state-of-the-art query selection practices in IR-based bug localization. In particular, we use a dataset of 2,320 bug reports, employ ten existing approaches from the literature, exploit the Genetic Algorithm-based approach to construct optimal, near-optimal search queries from these bug reports, and then answer three research questions. We confirmed that the state-of-the-art query construction approaches are indeed not sufficient for constructing appropriate queries (for bug localization) from certain natural language-only bug reports although they contain such queries. We also demonstrate that optimal queries and non-optimal queries chosen from bug report texts are significantly different in terms of several keyword characteristics, which has led us to actionable insights. Furthermore, we demonstrate 27%--34% improvement in the performance of non-optimal queries through the application of our actionable insights to them.
Truncated Emphatic Temporal Difference Methods for Prediction and Control
Authors: Shangtong Zhang, Shimon Whiteson
Date: 2021-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Emphatic Temporal Difference (TD) methods are a class of off-policy Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods involving the use of followon traces. Despite the theoretical success of emphatic TD methods in addressing the notorious deadly triad of off-policy RL, there are still two open problems. First, followon traces typically suffer from large variance, making them hard to use in practice. Second, though Yu (2015) confirms the asymptotic convergence of some emphatic TD methods for prediction problems, there is still no finite sample analysis for any emphatic TD method for prediction, much less control. In this paper, we address those two open problems simultaneously via using truncated followon traces in emphatic TD methods. Unlike the original followon traces, which depend on all previous history, truncated followon traces depend on only finite history, reducing variance and enabling the finite sample analysis of our proposed emphatic TD methods for both prediction and control.
Explaining Algorithmic Fairness Through Fairness-Aware Causal Path Decomposition
Authors: Weishen Pan, Sen Cui, Jiang Bian, ChangShui Zhang, Fei Wang
Date: 2021-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fairness, Feature Importance

Algorithmic fairness has aroused considerable interests in data mining and machine learning communities recently. So far the existing research has been mostly focusing on the development of quantitative metrics to measure algorithm disparities across different protected groups, and approaches for adjusting the algorithm output to reduce such disparities. In this paper, we propose to study the problem of identification of the source of model disparities. Unlike existing interpretation methods which typically learn feature importance, we consider the causal relationships among feature variables and propose a novel framework to decompose the disparity into the sum of contributions from fairness-aware causal paths, which are paths linking the sensitive attribute and the final predictions, on the graph. We also consider the scenario when the directions on certain edges within those paths cannot be determined. Our framework is also model agnostic and applicable to a variety of quantitative disparity measures. Empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world data sets are provided to show that our method can provide precise and comprehensive explanations to the model disparities.
Machine Learning Model Drift Detection Via Weak Data Slices
Authors: Samuel Ackerman, Parijat Dube, Eitan Farchi, Orna Raz, Marcel Zalmanovici
Date: 2021-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Drift Detection

Detecting drift in performance of Machine Learning (ML) models is an acknowledged challenge. For ML models to become an integral part of business applications it is essential to detect when an ML model drifts away from acceptable operation. However, it is often the case that actual labels are difficult and expensive to get, for example, because they require expert judgment. Therefore, there is a need for methods that detect likely degradation in ML operation without labels. We propose a method that utilizes feature space rules, called data slices, for drift detection. We provide experimental indications that our method is likely to identify that the ML model will likely change in performance, based on changes in the underlying data.