pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Denoising modulo samples: k-NN regression and tightness of SDP relaxation
Authors: Michaël Fanuel, Hemant Tyagi
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, regression

Many modern applications involve the acquisition of noisy modulo samples of a function $f$, with the goal being to recover estimates of the original samples of $f$. For a Lipschitz function $f:[0,1]^d \to \mathbb{R}$, suppose we are given the samples $y_i = (f(x_i) + \eta_i)\bmod 1; \quad i=1,\dots,n$ where $\eta_i$ denotes noise. Assuming $\eta_i$ are zero-mean i.i.d Gaussian's, and $x_i$'s form a uniform grid, we derive a two-stage algorithm that recovers estimates of the samples $f(x_i)$ with a uniform error rate $O((\frac{\log n}{n})^{\frac{1}{d+2}})$ holding with high probability. The first stage involves embedding the points on the unit complex circle, and obtaining denoised estimates of $f(x_i)\bmod 1$ via a $k$NN (nearest neighbor) estimator. The second stage involves a sequential unwrapping procedure which unwraps the denoised mod $1$ estimates from the first stage. The estimates of the samples $f(x_i)$ can be subsequently utilized to construct an estimate of the function $f$, with the aforementioned uniform error rate. Recently, Cucuringu and Tyagi proposed an alternative way of denoising modulo $1$ data which works with their representation on the unit complex circle. They formulated a smoothness regularized least squares problem on the product manifold of unit circles, where the smoothness is measured with respect to the Laplacian of a proximity graph $G$ involving the $x_i$'s. This is a nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP) hence they proposed solving its semidefinite program (SDP) based relaxation. We derive sufficient conditions under which the SDP is a tight relaxation of the QCQP. Hence under these conditions, the global solution of QCQP can be obtained in polynomial time.
Globally-scalable Automated Target Recognition (GATR)
Authors: Gary Chern, Austen Groener, Michael Harner, Tyler Kuhns, Andy Lam, Stephen O'Neill, Mark Pritt
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, object-detection, Object Detection, Real-Time Object Detection

GATR (Globally-scalable Automated Target Recognition) is a Lockheed Martin software system for real-time object detection and classification in satellite imagery on a worldwide basis. GATR uses GPU-accelerated deep learning software to quickly search large geographic regions. On a single GPU it processes imagery at a rate of over 16 square km/sec (or more than 10 Mpixels/sec), and it requires only two hours to search the entire state of Pennsylvania for gas fracking wells. The search time scales linearly with the geographic area, and the processing rate scales linearly with the number of GPUs. GATR has a modular, cloud-based architecture that uses the Maxar GBDX platform and provides an ATR analytic as a service. Applications include broad area search, watch boxes for monitoring ports and airfields, and site characterization. ATR is performed by deep learning models including RetinaNet and Faster R-CNN. Results are presented for the detection of aircraft and fracking wells and show that the recalls exceed 90% even in geographic regions never seen before. GATR is extensible to new targets, such as cars and ships, and it also handles radar and infrared imagery.
Presentation a Trust Walker for rating prediction in Recommender System with Biased Random Walk: Effects of H-index Centrality, Similarity in Items and Friends
Authors: Saman Forouzandeh, Mehrdad Rostami, Kamal Berahmand
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Recommendation Systems

The use of recommender systems has increased dramatically to assist online social network users in the decision-making process and selecting appropriate items. On the other hand, due to many different items, users cannot score a wide range of them, and usually, there is a scattering problem for the matrix created for users. To solve the problem, the trust-based recommender systems are applied to predict the score of the desired item for the user. Various criteria have been considered to define trust, and the degree of trust between users is usually calculated based on these criteria. In this regard, it is impossible to obtain the degree of trust for all users because of the large number of them in social networks. Also, for this problem, researchers use different modes of the Random Walk algorithm to randomly visit some users, study their behavior, and gain the degree of trust between them. In the present study, a trust-based recommender system is presented that predicts the score of items that the target user has not rated, and if the item is not found, it offers the user the items dependent on that item that are also part of the user's interests. In a trusted network, by weighting the edges between the nodes, the degree of trust is determined, and a TrustWalker is developed, which uses the Biased Random Walk (BRW) algorithm to move between the nodes. The weight of the edges is effective in the selection of random steps. The implementation and evaluation of the present research method have been carried out on three datasets named Epinions, Flixster, and FilmTrust; the results reveal the high efficiency of the proposed method.
Generalized Multi-Output Gaussian Process Censored Regression
Authors: Daniele Gammelli, Kasper Pryds Rolsted, Dario Pacino, Filipe Rodrigues
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Stochastic Optimization

When modelling censored observations, a typical approach in current regression methods is to use a censored-Gaussian (i.e. Tobit) model to describe the conditional output distribution. In this paper, as in the case of missing data, we argue that exploiting correlations between multiple outputs can enable models to better address the bias introduced by censored data. To do so, we introduce a heteroscedastic multi-output Gaussian process model which combines the non-parametric flexibility of GPs with the ability to leverage information from correlated outputs under input-dependent noise conditions. To address the resulting inference intractability, we further devise a variational bound to the marginal log-likelihood suitable for stochastic optimization. We empirically evaluate our model against other generative models for censored data on both synthetic and real world tasks and further show how it can be generalized to deal with arbitrary likelihood functions. Results show how the added flexibility allows our model to better estimate the underlying non-censored (i.e. true) process under potentially complex censoring dynamics.
Distributed Variable-Baseline Stereo SLAM from two UAVs
Authors: Marco Karrer, Margarita Chli
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

VIO has been widely used and researched to control and aid the automation of navigation of robots especially in the absence of absolute position measurements, such as GPS. However, when observable landmarks in the scene lie far away from the robot's sensor suite, as it is the case at high altitude flights, the fidelity of estimates and the observability of the metric scale degrades greatly for these methods. Aiming to tackle this issue, in this article, we employ two UAVs equipped with one monocular camera and one IMU each, to exploit their view overlap and relative distance measurements between them using UWB modules onboard to enable collaborative VIO. In particular, we propose a novel, distributed fusion scheme enabling the formation of a virtual stereo camera rig with adjustable baseline from the two UAVs. In order to control the \gls{uav} agents autonomously, we propose a decentralized collaborative estimation scheme, where each agent hold its own local map, achieving an average pose estimation latency of 11ms, while ensuring consistency of the agents' estimates via consensus based optimization. Following a thorough evaluation on photorealistic simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach at high altitude flights of up to 160m, going significantly beyond the capabilities of state-of-the-art VIO methods. Finally, we show the advantage of actively adjusting the baseline on-the-fly over a fixed, target baseline, reducing the error in our experiments by a factor of two.
Automatic selection of basis-adaptive sparse polynomial chaos expansions for engineering applications
Authors: Nora Lüthen, Stefano Marelli, Bruno Sudret
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Experimental Design, Uncertainty Quantification

Sparse polynomial chaos expansions (PCE) are an efficient and widely used surrogate modeling method in uncertainty quantification for engineering problems with computationally expensive models. To make use of the available information in the most efficient way, several approaches for so-called basis-adaptive sparse PCE have been proposed to determine the set of polynomial regressors ("basis") for PCE adaptively. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners identify the most suitable methods for constructing a surrogate PCE for their model. We describe three state-of-the-art basis-adaptive approaches from the recent sparse PCE literature and conduct an extensive benchmark in terms of global approximation accuracy on a large set of computational models. Investigating the synergies between sparse regression solvers and basis adaptivity schemes, we find that the choice of the proper solver and basis-adaptive scheme is very important, as it can result in more than one order of magnitude difference in performance. No single method significantly outperforms the others, but dividing the analysis into classes (regarding input dimension and experimental design size), we are able to identify specific sparse solver and basis adaptivity combinations for each class that show comparatively good performance. To further improve on these findings, we introduce a novel solver and basis adaptivity selection scheme guided by cross-validation error. We demonstrate that this automatic selection procedure provides close-to-optimal results in terms of accuracy, and significantly more robust solutions, while being more general than the case-by-case recommendations obtained by the benchmark.
The Grievance Dictionary: Understanding Threatening Language Use
Authors: Isabelle van der Vegt, Maximilian Mozes, Bennett Kleinberg, Paul Gill
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00

This paper introduces the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary which can be used to automatically understand language use in the context of grievance-fuelled violence threat assessment. We describe the development the dictionary, which was informed by suggestions from experienced threat assessment practitioners. These suggestions and subsequent human and computational word list generation resulted in a dictionary of 20,502 words annotated by 2,318 participants. The dictionary was validated by applying it to texts written by violent and non-violent individuals, showing strong evidence for a difference between populations in several dictionary categories. Further classification tasks showed promising performance, but future improvements are still needed. Finally, we provide instructions and suggestions for the use of the Grievance Dictionary by security professionals and (violence) researchers.
XCM: An Explainable Convolutional Neural Network for Multivariate Time Series Classification
Authors: Kevin Fauvel, Tao Lin, Véronique Masson, Élisa Fromont, Alexandre Termier
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

Multivariate Time Series (MTS) classification has gained importance over the past decade with the increase in the number of temporal datasets in multiple domains. The current state-of-the-art MTS classifier is a heavyweight deep learning approach, which outperforms the second-best MTS classifier only on large datasets. Moreover, this deep learning approach cannot provide faithful explanations as it relies on post hoc model-agnostic explainability methods, which could prevent its use in numerous applications. In this paper, we present XCM, an eXplainable Convolutional neural network for MTS classification. XCM is a new compact convolutional neural network which extracts information relative to the observed variables and time directly from the input data. Thus, XCM architecture enables a good generalization ability on both large and small datasets, while allowing the full exploitation of a faithful post hoc model-specific explainability method (Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping) by precisely identifying the observed variables and timestamps of the input data that are important for predictions. We first show that XCM outperforms the state-of-the-art MTS classifiers on both the large and small public UEA datasets. Then, we illustrate how XCM reconciles performance and explainability on a synthetic dataset and show that XCM enables a more precise identification of the regions of the input data that are important for predictions compared to the current deep learning MTS classifier also providing faithful explainability. Finally, we present how XCM can outperform the current most accurate state-of-the-art algorithm on a real-world application while enhancing explainability by providing faithful and more informative explanations.
MAT: Motion-Aware Multi-Object Tracking
Authors: Shoudong Han, Piao Huang, Hongwei Wang, En Yu, Donghaisheng Liu, Xiaofeng Pan, Jun Zhao
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

Modern multi-object tracking (MOT) systems usually model the trajectories by associating per-frame detections. However, when camera motion, fast motion, and occlusion challenges occur, it is difficult to ensure long-range tracking or even the tracklet purity, especially for small objects. Although re-identification is often employed, due to noisy partial-detections, similar appearance, and lack of temporal-spatial constraints, it is not only unreliable and time-consuming, but still cannot address the false negatives for occluded and blurred objects. In this paper, we propose an enhanced MOT paradigm, namely Motion-Aware Tracker (MAT), focusing more on various motion patterns of different objects. The rigid camera motion and nonrigid pedestrian motion are blended compatibly to form the integrated motion localization module. Meanwhile, we introduce the dynamic reconnection context module, which aims to balance the robustness of long-range motion-based reconnection, and includes the cyclic pseudo-observation updating strategy to smoothly fill in the tracking fragments caused by occlusion or blur. Additionally, the 3D integral image module is presented to efficiently cut useless track-detection association connections with temporal-spatial constraints. Extensive experiments on MOT16 and MOT17 challenging benchmarks demonstrate that our MAT approach can achieve the superior performance by a large margin with high efficiency, in contrast to other state-of-the-art trackers.
Fully automated analysis of muscle architecture from B-mode ultrasound images with deep learning
Authors: Neil J. Cronin, Taija Finni, Olivier Seynnes
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU

B-mode ultrasound is commonly used to image musculoskeletal tissues, but one major bottleneck is data interpretation, and analyses of muscle thickness, pennation angle and fascicle length are often still performed manually. In this study we trained deep neural networks (based on U-net) to detect muscle fascicles and aponeuroses using a set of labelled musculoskeletal ultrasound images. We then compared neural network predictions on new, unseen images to those obtained via manual analysis and two existing semi/automated analysis approaches (SMA and Ultratrack). With a GPU, inference time for a single image with the new approach was around 0.7s, compared to 4.6s with a CPU. Our method detects the locations of the superficial and deep aponeuroses, as well as multiple fascicle fragments per image. For single images, the method gave similar results to those produced by a non-trainable automated method (SMA; mean difference in fascicle length: 1.1 mm) or human manual analysis (mean difference: 2.1 mm). Between-method differences in pennation angle were within 1$^\circ$, and mean differences in muscle thickness were less than 0.2 mm. Similarly, for videos, there was strong overlap between the results produced with Ultratrack and our method, with a mean ICC of 0.73, despite the fact that the analysed trials included hundreds of frames. Our method is fully automated and open source, and can estimate fascicle length, pennation angle and muscle thickness from single images or videos, as well as from multiple superficial muscles. We also provide all necessary code and training data for custom model development.
Hard Occlusions in Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Thijs P. Kuipers, Devanshu Arya, Deepak K. Gupta
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking

Visual object tracking is among the hardest problems in computer vision, as trackers have to deal with many challenging circumstances such as illumination changes, fast motion, occlusion, among others. A tracker is assessed to be good or not based on its performance on the recent tracking datasets, e.g., VOT2019, and LaSOT. We argue that while the recent datasets contain large sets of annotated videos that to some extent provide a large bandwidth for training data, the hard scenarios such as occlusion and in-plane rotation are still underrepresented. For trackers to be brought closer to the real-world scenarios and deployed in safety-critical devices, even the rarest hard scenarios must be properly addressed. In this paper, we particularly focus on hard occlusion cases and benchmark the performance of recent state-of-the-art trackers (SOTA) on them. We created a small-scale dataset containing different categories within hard occlusions, on which the selected trackers are evaluated. Results show that hard occlusions remain a very challenging problem for SOTA trackers. Furthermore, it is observed that tracker performance varies wildly between different categories of hard occlusions, where a top-performing tracker on one category performs significantly worse on a different category. The varying nature of tracker performance based on specific categories suggests that the common tracker rankings using averaged single performance scores are not adequate to gauge tracker performance in real-world scenarios.
The use of Recommender Systems in web technology and an in-depth analysis of Cold State problem
Authors: Denis Selimi, Krenare Pireva Nuci
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In the WWW (World Wide Web), dynamic development and spread of data has resulted a tremendous amount of information available on the Internet, yet user is unable to find relevant information in a short span of time. Consequently, a system called recommendation system developed to help users find their infromation with ease through their browsing activities. In other words, recommender systems are tools for interacting with large amount of information that provide personalized view for prioritizing items likely to be of keen for users. They have developed over the years in artificial intelligence techniques that include machine learning and data mining amongst many to mention. Furthermore, the recommendation systems have personalized on an e-commerce, on-line applications such as Amazon.com, Netflix, and Booking.com. As a result, this has inspired many researchers to extend the reach of recommendation systems into new sets of challenges and problem areas that are yet to be truly solved, primarily a problem with the case of making a recommendation to a new user that is called cold-state (i.e. cold-start) user problem where the new user might likely not yield much of information searched. Therfore, the purpose of this paper is to tackle the said cold-start problem with a few effecient methods and challenges, as well as identify and overview the current state of recommendation system as a whole
A framework for reinforcement learning with autocorrelated actions
Authors: Marcin Szulc, Jakub Łyskawa, Paweł Wawrzyński
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The subject of this paper is reinforcement learning. Policies are considered here that produce actions based on states and random elements autocorrelated in subsequent time instants. Consequently, an agent learns from experiments that are distributed over time and potentially give better clues to policy improvement. Also, physical implementation of such policies, e.g. in robotics, is less problematic, as it avoids making robots shake. This is in opposition to most RL algorithms which add white noise to control causing unwanted shaking of the robots. An algorithm is introduced here that approximately optimizes the aforementioned policy. Its efficiency is verified for four simulated learning control problems (Ant, HalfCheetah, Hopper, and Walker2D) against three other methods (PPO, SAC, ACER). The algorithm outperforms others in three of these problems.
Self-supervised Depth Denoising Using Lower- and Higher-quality RGB-D sensors
Authors: Akhmedkhan Shabanov, Ilya Krotov, Nikolay Chinaev, Vsevolod Poletaev, Sergei Kozlukov, Igor Pasechnik, Bulat Yakupov, Artsiom Sanakoyeu, Vadim Lebedev, Dmitry Ulyanov
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction, Denoising, Face Identification, Object Reconstruction

Consumer-level depth cameras and depth sensors embedded in mobile devices enable numerous applications, such as AR games and face identification. However, the quality of the captured depth is sometimes insufficient for 3D reconstruction, tracking and other computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised depth denoising approach to denoise and refine depth coming from a low quality sensor. We record simultaneous RGB-D sequences with unzynchronized lower- and higher-quality cameras and solve a challenging problem of aligning sequences both temporally and spatially. We then learn a deep neural network to denoise the lower-quality depth using the matched higher-quality data as a source of supervision signal. We experimentally validate our method against state-of-the-art filtering-based and deep denoising techniques and show its application for 3D object reconstruction tasks where our approach leads to more detailed fused surfaces and better tracking.
Brain2Word: Decoding Brain Activity for Language Generation
Authors: Nicolas Affolter, Beni Egressy, Damian Pascual, Roger Wattenhofer
Date: 2020-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Decoding, Text Generation, Word Embeddings

Brain decoding, understood as the process of mapping brain activities to the stimuli that generated them, has been an active research area in the last years. In the case of language stimuli, recent studies have shown that it is possible to decode fMRI scans into an embedding of the word a subject is reading. However, such word embeddings are designed for natural language processing tasks rather than for brain decoding. Therefore, they limit our ability to recover the precise stimulus. In this work, we propose to directly classify an fMRI scan, mapping it to the corresponding word within a fixed vocabulary. Unlike existing work, we evaluate on scans from previously unseen subjects. We argue that this is a more realistic setup and we present a model that can decode fMRI data from unseen subjects. Our model achieves 5.22% Top-1 and 13.59% Top-5 accuracy in this challenging task, significantly outperforming all the considered competitive baselines. Furthermore, we use the decoded words to guide language generation with the GPT-2 model. This way, we advance the quest for a system that translates brain activities into coherent text.