pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Comparative Analysis of Deep Reinforcement Learning-enabled Freeway Decision-making for Automated Vehicles
Authors: Teng Liu, Yuyou Yang, Wenxuan Xiao, Xiaolin Tang, Mingzhu Yin
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Self-Learning

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has emerged as a pervasive and potent methodology for addressing artificial intelligence challenges. Due to its substantial potential for autonomous self-learning and self-improvement, DRL finds broad applications across various research domains. This article undertakes a comprehensive comparison of several DRL approaches con-cerning the decision-making challenges encountered by autono-mous vehicles on freeways. These techniques encompass common deep Q-learning (DQL), double deep Q-learning (DDQL), dueling deep Q-learning, and prioritized replay deep Q-learning. Initially, the reinforcement learning (RL) framework is introduced, fol-lowed by a mathematical establishment of the implementations of the aforementioned DRL methods. Subsequently, a freeway driving scenario for automated vehicles is constructed, wherein the decision-making problem is reformulated as a control opti-mization challenge. Finally, a series of simulation experiments are conducted to assess the control performance of these DRL-enabled decision-making strategies. This culminates in a comparative analysis, which seeks to elucidate the connection between autonomous driving outcomes and the learning char-acteristics inherent to these DRL techniques.
Weakly Supervised Construction of ASR Systems with Massive Video Data
Authors: Mengli Cheng, Chengyu Wang, Xu Hu, Jun Huang, Xiaobo Wang
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Unsupervised Pre-training

Building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems from scratch is significantly challenging, mostly due to the time-consuming and financially-expensive process of annotating a large amount of audio data with transcripts. Although several unsupervised pre-training models have been proposed, applying such models directly might still be sub-optimal if more labeled, training data could be obtained without a large cost. In this paper, we present a weakly supervised framework for constructing ASR systems with massive video data. As videos often contain human-speech audios aligned with subtitles, we consider videos as an important knowledge source, and propose an effective approach to extract high-quality audios aligned with transcripts from videos based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The underlying ASR model can be fine-tuned to fit any domain-specific target training datasets after weakly supervised pre-training. Extensive experiments show that our framework can easily produce state-of-the-art results on six public datasets for Mandarin speech recognition.
An improved Bayesian TRIE based model for SMS text normalization
Authors: Abhinava Sikdar, Niladri Chatterjee
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Normalization

Normalization of SMS text, commonly known as texting language, is being pursued for more than a decade. A probabilistic approach based on the Trie data structure was proposed in literature which was found to be better performing than HMM based approaches proposed earlier in predicting the correct alternative for an out-of-lexicon word. However, success of the Trie based approach depends largely on how correctly the underlying probabilities of word occurrences are estimated. In this work we propose a structural modification to the existing Trie-based model along with a novel training algorithm and probability generation scheme. We prove two theorems on statistical properties of the proposed Trie and use them to claim that is an unbiased and consistent estimator of the occurrence probabilities of the words. We further fuse our model into the paradigm of noisy channel based error correction and provide a heuristic to go beyond a Damerau Levenshtein distance of one. We also run simulations to support our claims and show superiority of the proposed scheme over previous works.
Faster Stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonconvex Optimization
Authors: Feihu Huang, Songcan Chen, Heng Huang
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a faster stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for nonconvex optimization by using a new stochastic path-integrated differential estimator (SPIDER), called as SPIDER-ADMM. Moreover, we prove that the SPIDER-ADMM achieves a record-breaking incremental first-order oracle (IFO) complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n+n^{1/2}\epsilon^{-1})$ for finding an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point, which improves the deterministic ADMM by a factor $\mathcal{O}(n^{1/2})$, where $n$ denotes the sample size. As one of major contribution of this paper, we provide a new theoretical analysis framework for nonconvex stochastic ADMM methods with providing the optimal IFO complexity. Based on this new analysis framework, we study the unsolved optimal IFO complexity of the existing non-convex SVRG-ADMM and SAGA-ADMM methods, and prove they have the optimal IFO complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n+n^{2/3}\epsilon^{-1})$. Thus, the SPIDER-ADMM improves the existing stochastic ADMM methods by a factor of $\mathcal{O}(n^{1/6})$. Moreover, we extend SPIDER-ADMM to the online setting, and propose a faster online SPIDER-ADMM. Our theoretical analysis shows that the online SPIDER-ADMM has the IFO complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-\frac{3}{2}})$, which improves the existing best results by a factor of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-\frac{1}{2}})$. Finally, the experimental results on benchmark datasets validate that the proposed algorithms have faster convergence rate than the existing ADMM algorithms for nonconvex optimization.
Tracking Emerges by Looking Around Static Scenes, with Neural 3D Mapping
Authors: Adam W. Harley, Shrinidhi K. Lakshmikanth, Paul Schydlo, Katerina Fragkiadaki
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: 3D Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

We hypothesize that an agent that can look around in static scenes can learn rich visual representations applicable to 3D object tracking in complex dynamic scenes. We are motivated in this pursuit by the fact that the physical world itself is mostly static, and multiview correspondence labels are relatively cheap to collect in static scenes, e.g., by triangulation. We propose to leverage multiview data of \textit{static points} in arbitrary scenes (static or dynamic), to learn a neural 3D mapping module which produces features that are correspondable across time. The neural 3D mapper consumes RGB-D data as input, and produces a 3D voxel grid of deep features as output. We train the voxel features to be correspondable across viewpoints, using a contrastive loss, and correspondability across time emerges automatically. At test time, given an RGB-D video with approximate camera poses, and given the 3D box of an object to track, we track the target object by generating a map of each timestep and locating the object's features within each map. In contrast to models that represent video streams in 2D or 2.5D, our model's 3D scene representation is disentangled from projection artifacts, is stable under camera motion, and is robust to partial occlusions. We test the proposed architectures in challenging simulated and real data, and show that our unsupervised 3D object trackers outperform prior unsupervised 2D and 2.5D trackers, and approach the accuracy of supervised trackers. This work demonstrates that 3D object trackers can emerge without tracking labels, through multiview self-supervision on static data.
Music SketchNet: Controllable Music Generation via Factorized Representations of Pitch and Rhythm
Authors: Ke Chen, Cheng-i Wang, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Shlomo Dubnov
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation, Rhythm

Drawing an analogy with automatic image completion systems, we propose Music SketchNet, a neural network framework that allows users to specify partial musical ideas guiding automatic music generation. We focus on generating the missing measures in incomplete monophonic musical pieces, conditioned on surrounding context, and optionally guided by user-specified pitch and rhythm snippets. First, we introduce SketchVAE, a novel variational autoencoder that explicitly factorizes rhythm and pitch contour to form the basis of our proposed model. Then we introduce two discriminative architectures, SketchInpainter and SketchConnector, that in conjunction perform the guided music completion, filling in representations for the missing measures conditioned on surrounding context and user-specified snippets. We evaluate SketchNet on a standard dataset of Irish folk music and compare with models from recent works. When used for music completion, our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art both in terms of objective metrics and subjective listening tests. Finally, we demonstrate that our model can successfully incorporate user-specified snippets during the generation process.
Design and Deployment of Photo2Building: A Cloud-based Procedural Modeling Tool as a Service
Authors: Manush Bhatt, Rajesh Kalyanam, Gen Nishida, Liu He, Christopher May, Dev Niyogi, Daniel Aliaga
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00

We present a Photo2Building tool to create a plausible 3D model of a building from only a single photograph. Our tool is based on a prior desktop version which, as described in this paper, is converted into a client-server model, with job queuing, web-page support, and support of concurrent usage. The reported cloud-based web-accessible tool can reconstruct a building in 40 seconds on average and costing only 0.60 USD with current pricing. This provides for an extremely scalable and possibly widespread tool for creating building models for use in urban design and planning applications. With the growing impact of rapid urbanization on weather and climate and resource availability, access to such a service is expected to help a wide variety of users such as city planners, urban meteorologists worldwide in the quest to improved prediction of urban weather and designing climate-resilient cities of the future.
Learning Discriminative Feature with CRF for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation
Authors: Mingmin Zhen, Shiwei Li, Lei Zhou, Jiaxiang Shang, Haoan Feng, Tian Fang, Long Quan
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: RGB Salient Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce a novel network, called discriminative feature network (DFNet), to address the unsupervised video object segmentation task. To capture the inherent correlation among video frames, we learn discriminative features (D-features) from the input images that reveal feature distribution from a global perspective. The D-features are then used to establish correspondence with all features of test image under conditional random field (CRF) formulation, which is leveraged to enforce consistency between pixels. The experiments verify that DFNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin with a mean IoU score of 83.4% and ranks first on the DAVIS-2016 leaderboard while using much fewer parameters and achieving much more efficient performance in the inference phase. We further evaluate DFNet on the FBMS dataset and the video saliency dataset ViSal, reaching a new state-of-the-art. To further demonstrate the generalizability of our framework, DFNet is also applied to the image object co-segmentation task. We perform experiments on a challenging dataset PASCAL-VOC and observe the superiority of DFNet. The thorough experiments verify that DFNet is able to capture and mine the underlying relations of images and discover the common foreground objects.
Safety design concepts for statistical machine learning components toward accordance with functional safety standards
Authors: Akihisa Morikawa, Yutaka Matsubara
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

In recent years, curial incidents and accidents have been reported due to un-intended control caused by misjudgment of statistical machine learning (SML), which include deep learning. The international functional safety standards for Electric/Electronic/Programmable (E/E/P) systems have been widely spread to improve safety. However, most of them do not recom-mended to use SML in safety critical systems so far. In practical the new concepts and methods are urgently required to enable SML to be safely used in safety critical systems. In this paper, we organize five kinds of technical safety concepts (TSCs) for SML components toward accordance with functional safety standards. We discuss not only quantitative evaluation criteria, but also development process based on XAI (eXplainable Artificial Intelligence) and Automotive SPICE to improve explainability and reliability in development phase. Fi-nally, we briefly compare the TSCs in cost and difficulty, and expect to en-courage further discussion in many communities and domain.
Robust Uncertainty-Aware Multiview Triangulation
Authors: Seong Hun Lee, Javier Civera
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00

We propose a robust and efficient method for multiview triangulation and uncertainty estimation. Our contribution is threefold: First, we propose an outlier rejection scheme using two-view RANSAC with the midpoint method. By prescreening the two-view samples prior to triangulation, we achieve the state-of-the-art efficiency. Second, we compare different local optimization methods for refining the initial solution and the inlier set. With an iterative update of the inlier set, we show that the optimization provides significant improvement in accuracy and robustness. Third, we model the uncertainty of a triangulated point as a function of three factors: the number of cameras, the mean reprojection error and the maximum parallax angle. Learning this model allows us to quickly interpolate the uncertainty at test time. We validate our method through an extensive evaluation.
Reinforced Epidemic Control: Saving Both Lives and Economy
Authors: Sirui Song, Zefang Zong, Yong Li, Xue Liu, Yang Yu
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Saving lives or economy is a dilemma for epidemic control in most cities while smart-tracing technology raises people's privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a solution for the life-or-economy dilemma that does not require private data. We bypass the private-data requirement by suppressing epidemic transmission through a dynamic control on inter-regional mobility that only relies on Origin-Designation (OD) data. We develop DUal-objective Reinforcement-Learning Epidemic Control Agent (DURLECA) to search mobility-control policies that can simultaneously minimize infection spread and maximally retain mobility. DURLECA hires a novel graph neural network, namely Flow-GNN, to estimate the virus-transmission risk induced by urban mobility. The estimated risk is used to support a reinforcement learning agent to generate mobility-control actions. The training of DURLECA is guided with a well-constructed reward function, which captures the natural trade-off relation between epidemic control and mobility retaining. Besides, we design two exploration strategies to improve the agent's searching efficiency and help it get rid of local optimums. Extensive experimental results on a real-world OD dataset show that DURLECA is able to suppress infections at an extremely low level while retaining 76\% of the mobility in the city. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/anyleopeace/DURLECA/.
Geometric Interpretations of the Normalized Epipolar Error
Authors: Seong Hun Lee, Javier Civera
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00

In this work, we provide geometric interpretations of the normalized epipolar error. Most notably, we show that it is directly related to the following quantities: (1) the shortest distance between the two backprojected rays, (2) the dihedral angle between the two bounding epipolar planes, and (3) the $L_1$-optimal angular reprojection error.
An Application of ASP in Nuclear Engineering: Explaining the Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident Scenario
Authors: B. N. Hanna, L. T. Trieu, T. C. Son, N. T. Dinh
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00

The paper describes an ongoing effort in developing a declarative system for supporting operators in the Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) control room. The focus is on two modules: diagnosis and explanation of events that happened in NPPs. We describe an Answer Set Programming (ASP) representation of an NPP, which consists of declarations of state variables, components, their connections, and rules encoding the plant behavior. We then show how the ASP program can be used to explain the series of events that occurred in the Three Mile Island, Unit 2 (TMI-2) NPP accident, the most severe accident in the USA nuclear power plant operating history. We also describe an explanation module aimed at addressing answers to questions such as ``why an event occurs?'' or ``what should be done?'' given the collected data. This paper is *under consideration* for acceptance in TPLP Journal.
Central object segmentation by deep learning for fruits and other roundish objects
Authors: Motohisa Fukuda, Takashi Okuno, Shinya Yuki
Date: 2020-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Position, Semantic Segmentation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We present CROP (Central Roundish Object Painter), which identifies and paints the object at the center of an RGB image. Primarily CROP works for roundish fruits in various illumination conditions, but surprisingly, it could also deal with images of other organic or inorganic materials, or ones by optical and electron microscopes, although CROP was trained solely by 172 images of fruits. The method involves image segmentation by deep learning, and the architecture of the neural network is a deeper version of the original U-Net. This technique could provide us with a means of automatically collecting statistical data of fruit growth in farms. As an example, we describe our experiment of processing 510 time series photos automatically to collect the data on the size and the position of the target fruit. Our trained neural network CROP and the above automatic programs are available on GitHub with user-friendly interface programs.
Noise Contrastive Estimation for Autoencoding-based One-Class Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Jin Peng Zhou, Ga Wu, Zheda Mai, Scott Sanner
Date: 2020-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering

One-class collaborative filtering (OC-CF) is a common class of recommendation problem where only the positive class is explicitly observed (e.g., purchases, clicks). Autoencoder based recommenders such as AutoRec and variants demonstrate strong performance on many OC-CF benchmarks, but also empirically suffer from a strong popularity bias. While a careful choice of negative samples in the OC-CF setting can mitigate popularity bias, Negative Sampling (NS) is often better for training embeddings than for the end task itself. To address this, we propose a two-headed AutoRec to first train an embedding layer via one head using Negative Sampling then to train for the final task via the second head. While this NS-AutoRec improves results for AutoRec and outperforms many state-of-the-art baselines on OC-CF problems, we notice that Negative Sampling can still take a large amount of time to train. Since Negative Sampling is known to be a special case of Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE), we adapt a recently proposed closed-form NCE solution for collaborative filtering to AutoRec yielding NCE-AutoRec. Overall, we show that our novel two-headed AutoRec models (NCE-AutoRec and NS-AutoRec) successfully mitigate the popularity bias issue and maintain competitive performance in comparison to state-of-the-art recommenders on multiple real-world datasets.
Cautious Active Clustering
Authors: Alexander Cloninger, Hrushikesh Mhaskar
Date: 2020-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Clustering, General Classification

We consider the problem of classification of points sampled from an unknown probability measure on a Euclidean space. We study the question of querying the class label at a very small number of judiciously chosen points so as to be able to attach the appropriate class label to every point in the set. Our approach is to consider the unknown probability measure as a convex combination of the conditional probabilities for each class. Our technique involves the use of a highly localized kernel constructed from Hermite polynomials, in order to create a hierarchical estimate of the supports of the constituent probability measures. We do not need to make any assumptions on the nature of any of the probability measures nor know in advance the number of classes involved. We give theoretical guarantees measured by the $F$-score for our classification scheme. Examples include classification in hyper-spectral images and MNIST classification.
Late Temporal Modeling in 3D CNN Architectures with BERT for Action Recognition
Authors: M. Esat Kalfaoglu, Sinan Kalkan, A. Aydin Alatan
Date: 2020-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition

In this work, we combine 3D convolution with late temporal modeling for action recognition. For this aim, we replace the conventional Temporal Global Average Pooling (TGAP) layer at the end of 3D convolutional architecture with the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) layer in order to better utilize the temporal information with BERT's attention mechanism. We show that this replacement improves the performances of many popular 3D convolution architectures for action recognition, including ResNeXt, I3D, SlowFast and R(2+1)D. Moreover, we provide the-state-of-the-art results on both HMDB51 and UCF101 datasets with 85.10% and 98.69% top-1 accuracy, respectively. The code is publicly available.
A Combination of Theta*, ORCA and Push and Rotate for Multi-agent Navigation
Authors: Stepan Dergachev, Konstantin Yakovlev, Ryhor Prakapovich
Date: 2020-08-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance

We study the problem of multi-agent navigation in static environments when no centralized controller is present. Each agent is controlled individually and relies on three algorithmic components to achieve its goal while avoiding collisions with the other agents and the obstacles: i) individual path planning which is done by Theta* algorithm; ii) collision avoidance while path following which is performed by ORCA* algorithm; iii) locally-confined multi-agent path planning done by Push and Rotate algorithm. The latter component is crucial to avoid deadlocks in confined areas, such as narrow passages or doors. We describe how the suggested components interact and form a coherent navigation pipeline. We carry out an extensive empirical evaluation of this pipeline in simulation. The obtained results clearly demonstrate that the number of occurring deadlocks significantly decreases enabling more agents to reach their goals compared to techniques that rely on collision-avoidance only and do not include multi-agent path planning component