pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Hysteretic Q-learning Coordination Framework for Emerging Mobility Systems in Smart Cities
Authors: Behdad Chalaki, Andreas A. Malikopoulos
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) can alleviate traffic congestion, air pollution, and improve safety. In this paper, we provide a decentralized coordination framework for CAVs at a signal-free intersection to minimize travel time and improve fuel efficiency. We employ a simple yet powerful reinforcement learning approach, an off-policy temporal difference learning called Q-learning, enhanced with a coordination mechanism to address this problem. Then, we integrate a first-in-first-out queuing policy to improve the performance of our system. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach through simulation and comparison with the classical optimal control method based on Pontryagin's minimum principle.
LBGP: Learning Based Goal Planning for Autonomous Following in Front
Authors: Payam Nikdel, Richard Vaughan, Mo Chen
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Navigate, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Trajectory Planning

This paper investigates a hybrid solution which combines deep reinforcement learning (RL) and classical trajectory planning for the following in front application. Here, an autonomous robot aims to stay ahead of a person as the person freely walks around. Following in front is a challenging problem as the user's intended trajectory is unknown and needs to be estimated, explicitly or implicitly, by the robot. In addition, the robot needs to find a feasible way to safely navigate ahead of human trajectory. Our deep RL module implicitly estimates human trajectory and produces short-term navigational goals to guide the robot. These goals are used by a trajectory planner to smoothly navigate the robot to the short-term goals, and eventually in front of the user. We employ curriculum learning in the deep RL module to efficiently achieve a high return. Our system outperforms the state-of-the-art in following ahead and is more reliable compared to end-to-end alternatives in both the simulation and real world experiments. In contrast to a pure deep RL approach, we demonstrate zero-shot transfer of the trained policy from simulation to the real world.
PubSqueezer: A Text-Mining Web Tool to Transform Unstructured Documents into Structured Data
Authors: Alberto Calderone
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Sentence

The amount of scientific papers published every day is daunting and constantly increasing. Keeping up with literature represents a challenge. If one wants to start exploring new topics it is hard to have a big picture without reading lots of articles. Furthermore, as one reads through literature, making mental connections is crucial to ask new questions which might lead to discoveries. In this work, I present a web tool which uses a Text Mining strategy to transform large collections of unstructured biomedical articles into structured data. Generated results give a quick overview on complex topics which can possibly suggest not explicitly reported information. In particular, I show two Data Science analyses. First, I present a literature based rare diseases network build using this tool in the hope that it will help clarify some aspects of these less popular pathologies. Secondly, I show how a literature based analysis conducted with PubSqueezer results allows to describe known facts about SARS-CoV-2. In one sentence, data generated with PubSqueezer make it easy to use scientific literate in any computational analysis such as machine learning, natural language processing etc. Availability: http://www.pubsqueezer.com
Uncertainty-Aware Vehicle Orientation Estimation for Joint Detection-Prediction Models
Authors: Henggang Cui, Fang-Chieh Chou, Jake Charland, Carlos Vallespi-Gonzalez, Nemanja Djuric
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: motion prediction, object-detection, Object Detection, Prediction

Object detection is a critical component of a self-driving system, tasked with inferring the current states of the surrounding traffic actors. While there exist a number of studies on the problem of inferring the position and shape of vehicle actors, understanding actors' orientation remains a challenge for existing state-of-the-art detectors. Orientation is an important property for downstream modules of an autonomous system, particularly relevant for motion prediction of stationary or reversing actors where current approaches struggle. We focus on this task and present a method that extends the existing models that perform joint object detection and motion prediction, allowing us to more accurately infer vehicle orientations. In addition, the approach is able to quantify prediction uncertainty, outputting the probability that the inferred orientation is flipped, which allows for improved motion prediction and safer autonomous operations. Empirical results show the benefits of the approach, obtaining state-of-the-art performance on the open-sourced nuScenes data set.
Improving RNN Transducer Based ASR with Auxiliary Tasks
Authors: Chunxi Liu, Frank Zhang, Duc Le, Suyoun Kim, Yatharth Saraf, Geoffrey Zweig
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models with a single neural network have recently demonstrated state-of-the-art results compared to conventional hybrid speech recognizers. Specifically, recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) has shown competitive ASR performance on various benchmarks. In this work, we examine ways in which RNN-T can achieve better ASR accuracy via performing auxiliary tasks. We propose (i) using the same auxiliary task as primary RNN-T ASR task, and (ii) performing context-dependent graphemic state prediction as in conventional hybrid modeling. In transcribing social media videos with varying training data size, we first evaluate the streaming ASR performance on three languages: Romanian, Turkish and German. We find that both proposed methods provide consistent improvements. Next, we observe that both auxiliary tasks demonstrate efficacy in learning deep transformer encoders for RNN-T criterion, thus achieving competitive results - 2.0%/4.2% WER on LibriSpeech test-clean/other - as compared to prior top performing models.
Minimax Group Fairness: Algorithms and Experiments
Authors: Emily Diana, Wesley Gill, Michael Kearns, Krishnaram Kenthapadi, Aaron Roth
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

We consider a recently introduced framework in which fairness is measured by worst-case outcomes across groups, rather than by the more standard differences between group outcomes. In this framework we provide provably convergent oracle-efficient learning algorithms (or equivalently, reductions to non-fair learning) for minimax group fairness. Here the goal is that of minimizing the maximum loss across all groups, rather than equalizing group losses. Our algorithms apply to both regression and classification settings and support both overall error and false positive or false negative rates as the fairness measure of interest. They also support relaxations of the fairness constraints, thus permitting study of the tradeoff between overall accuracy and minimax fairness. We compare the experimental behavior and performance of our algorithms across a variety of fairness-sensitive data sets and show empirical cases in which minimax fairness is strictly and strongly preferable to equal outcome notions.
IMU-Assisted Learning of Single-View Rolling Shutter Correction
Authors: Jiawei Mo, Md Jahidul Islam, Junaed Sattar
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Prediction, Rolling Shutter Correction

Rolling shutter distortion is highly undesirable for photography and computer vision algorithms (e.g., visual SLAM) because pixels can be potentially captured at different times and poses. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network to predict depth and row-wise pose from a single image for rolling shutter correction. Our contribution in this work is to incorporate inertial measurement unit (IMU) data into the pose refinement process, which, compared to the state-of-the-art, greatly enhances the pose prediction. The improved accuracy and robustness make it possible for numerous vision algorithms to use imagery captured by rolling shutter cameras and produce highly accurate results. We also extend a dataset to have real rolling shutter images, IMU data, depth maps, camera poses, and corresponding global shutter images for rolling shutter correction training. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method by evaluating the performance of Direct Sparse Odometry (DSO) algorithm on rolling shutter imagery corrected using the proposed approach. Results show marked improvements of the DSO algorithm over using uncorrected imagery, validating the proposed approach.
Can Human Sex Be Learned Using Only 2D Body Keypoint Estimations?
Authors: Kristijan Bartol, Tomislav Pribanic, David Bojanic, Tomislav Petkovic
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00

In this paper, we analyze human male and female sex recognition problem and present a fully automated classification system using only 2D keypoints. The keypoints represent human joints. A keypoint set consists of 15 joints and the keypoint estimations are obtained using an OpenPose 2D keypoint detector. We learn a deep learning model to distinguish males and females using the keypoints as input and binary labels as output. We use two public datasets in the experimental section - 3DPeople and PETA. On PETA dataset, we report a 77% accuracy. We provide model performance details on both PETA and 3DPeople. To measure the effect of noisy 2D keypoint detections on the performance, we run separate experiments on 3DPeople ground truth and noisy keypoint data. Finally, we extract a set of factors that affect the classification accuracy and propose future work. The advantage of the approach is that the input is small and the architecture is simple, which enables us to run many experiments and keep the real-time performance in inference. The source code, with the experiments and data preparation scripts, are available on GitHub (https://github.com/kristijanbartol/human-sex-classifier).
Smart Time-Multiplexing of Quads Solves the Multicamera Interference Problem
Authors: Tomislav Pribanic, Tomislav Petkovic, David Bojanic, Kristijan Bartol
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00

Time-of-flight (ToF) cameras are becoming increasingly popular for 3D imaging. Their optimal usage has been studied from the several aspects. One of the open research problems is the possibility of a multicamera interference problem when two or more ToF cameras are operating simultaneously. In this work we present an efficient method to synchronize multiple operating ToF cameras. Our method is based on the time-division multiplexing, but unlike traditional time multiplexing, it does not decrease the effective camera frame rate. Additionally, for unsynchronized cameras, we provide a robust method to extract from their corresponding video streams, frames which are not subject to multicamera interference problem. We demonstrate our approach through a series of experiments and with a different level of support available for triggering, ranging from a hardware triggering to purely random software triggering.
Identifying and interpreting tuning dimensions in deep networks
Authors: Nolan S. Dey, J. Eric Taylor, Bryan P. Tripp, Alexander Wong, Graham W. Taylor
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop SVRHM 2020 12
Tasks: Attribute

In neuroscience, a tuning dimension is a stimulus attribute that accounts for much of the activation variance of a group of neurons. These are commonly used to decipher the responses of such groups. While researchers have attempted to manually identify an analogue to these tuning dimensions in deep neural networks, we are unaware of an automatic way to discover them. This work contributes an unsupervised framework for identifying and interpreting "tuning dimensions" in deep networks. Our method correctly identifies the tuning dimensions of a synthetic Gabor filter bank and tuning dimensions of the first two layers of InceptionV1 trained on ImageNet.
End-to-end Deep Learning Methods for Automated Damage Detection in Extreme Events at Various Scales
Authors: Yongsheng Bai, Halil Sezen, Alper Yilmaz
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Robust Mask R-CNN (Mask Regional Convolu-tional Neural Network) methods are proposed and tested for automatic detection of cracks on structures or their components that may be damaged during extreme events, such as earth-quakes. We curated a new dataset with 2,021 labeled images for training and validation and aimed to find end-to-end deep neural networks for crack detection in the field. With data augmentation and parameters fine-tuning, Path Aggregation Network (PANet) with spatial attention mechanisms and High-resolution Network (HRNet) are introduced into Mask R-CNNs. The tests on three public datasets with low- or high-resolution images demonstrate that the proposed methods can achieve a big improvement over alternative networks, so the proposed method may be sufficient for crack detection for a variety of scales in real applications.
Explain by Evidence: An Explainable Memory-based Neural Network for Question Answering
Authors: Quan Tran, Nhan Dam, Tuan Lai, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Le, Nham Le, Dinh Phung
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Question Answering

Interpretability and explainability of deep neural networks are challenging due to their scale, complexity, and the agreeable notions on which the explaining process rests. Previous work, in particular, has focused on representing internal components of neural networks through human-friendly visuals and concepts. On the other hand, in real life, when making a decision, human tends to rely on similar situations and/or associations in the past. Hence arguably, a promising approach to make the model transparent is to design it in a way such that the model explicitly connects the current sample with the seen ones, and bases its decision on these samples. Grounded on that principle, we propose in this paper an explainable, evidence-based memory network architecture, which learns to summarize the dataset and extract supporting evidences to make its decision. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular question answering datasets (i.e. TrecQA and WikiQA). Via further analysis, we show that this model can reliably trace the errors it has made in the validation step to the training instances that might have caused these errors. We believe that this error-tracing capability provides significant benefit in improving dataset quality in many applications.
Machine Generation and Detection of Arabic Manipulated and Fake News
Authors: El Moatez Billah Nagoudi, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Tariq Alhindi, Hasan Cavusoglu
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING (WANLP) 2020 12
Tasks: Fake News Detection, POS

Fake news and deceptive machine-generated text are serious problems threatening modern societies, including in the Arab world. This motivates work on detecting false and manipulated stories online. However, a bottleneck for this research is lack of sufficient data to train detection models. We present a novel method for automatically generating Arabic manipulated (and potentially fake) news stories. Our method is simple and only depends on availability of true stories, which are abundant online, and a part of speech tagger (POS). To facilitate future work, we dispense with both of these requirements altogether by providing AraNews, a novel and large POS-tagged news dataset that can be used off-the-shelf. Using stories generated based on AraNews, we carry out a human annotation study that casts light on the effects of machine manipulation on text veracity. The study also measures human ability to detect Arabic machine manipulated text generated by our method. Finally, we develop the first models for detecting manipulated Arabic news and achieve state-of-the-art results on Arabic fake news detection (macro F1=70.06). Our models and data are publicly available.
Towards Keypoint Guided Self-Supervised Depth Estimation
Authors: Kristijan Bartol, David Bojanic, Tomislav Petkovic, Tomislav Pribanic, Yago Diez Donoso
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation

This paper proposes to use keypoints as a self-supervision clue for learning depth map estimation from a collection of input images. As ground truth depth from real images is difficult to obtain, there are many unsupervised and self-supervised approaches to depth estimation that have been proposed. Most of these unsupervised approaches use depth map and ego-motion estimations to reproject the pixels from the current image into the adjacent image from the image collection. Depth and ego-motion estimations are evaluated based on pixel intensity differences between the correspondent original and reprojected pixels. Instead of reprojecting the individual pixels, we propose to first select image keypoints in both images and then reproject and compare the correspondent keypoints of the two images. The keypoints should describe the distinctive image features well. By learning a deep model with and without the keypoint extraction technique, we show that using the keypoints improve the depth estimation learning. We also propose some future directions for keypoint-guided learning of structure-from-motion problems.
Mining Functionally Related Genes with Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Kaiyu Shen, Razvan Bunescu, Sarah E. Wyatt
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00

The study of biological processes can greatly benefit from tools that automatically predict gene functions or directly cluster genes based on shared functionality. Existing data mining methods predict protein functionality by exploiting data obtained from high-throughput experiments or meta-scale information from public databases. Most existing prediction tools are targeted at predicting protein functions that are described in the gene ontology (GO). However, in many cases biologists wish to discover functionally related genes for which GO terms are inadequate. In this paper, we introduce a rich set of features and use them in conjunction with semisupervised learning approaches in order to expand an initial set of seed genes to a larger cluster of functionally related genes. Among all the semi-supervised methods that were evaluated, the framework of learning with positive and unlabeled examples (LPU) is shown to be especially appropriate for mining functionally related genes. When evaluated on experimentally validated benchmark data, the LPU approaches1 significantly outperform a standard supervised learning algorithm as well as an established state-of-the-art method. Given an initial set of seed genes, our best performing approach could be used to mine functionally related genes in a wide range of organisms.
HoVer: A Dataset for Many-Hop Fact Extraction And Claim Verification
Authors: Yichen Jiang, Shikha Bordia, Zheng Zhong, Charles Dognin, Maneesh Singh, Mohit Bansal
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: Articles, Claim Verification, Fact Verification, Retrieval

We introduce HoVer (HOppy VERification), a dataset for many-hop evidence extraction and fact verification. It challenges models to extract facts from several Wikipedia articles that are relevant to a claim and classify whether the claim is Supported or Not-Supported by the facts. In HoVer, the claims require evidence to be extracted from as many as four English Wikipedia articles and embody reasoning graphs of diverse shapes. Moreover, most of the 3/4-hop claims are written in multiple sentences, which adds to the complexity of understanding long-range dependency relations such as coreference. We show that the performance of an existing state-of-the-art semantic-matching model degrades significantly on our dataset as the number of reasoning hops increases, hence demonstrating the necessity of many-hop reasoning to achieve strong results. We hope that the introduction of this challenging dataset and the accompanying evaluation task will encourage research in many-hop fact retrieval and information verification. We make the HoVer dataset publicly available at https://hover-nlp.github.io
RealAnt: An Open-Source Low-Cost Quadruped for Education and Research in Real-World Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Rinu Boney, Jussi Sainio, Mikko Kaivola, Arno Solin, Juho Kannala
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Current robot platforms available for research are either very expensive or unable to handle the abuse of exploratory controls in reinforcement learning. We develop RealAnt, a minimal low-cost physical version of the popular `Ant' benchmark used in reinforcement learning. RealAnt costs only $\sim$350 EUR (\$410) in materials and can be assembled in less than an hour. We validate the platform with reinforcement learning experiments and provide baseline results on a set of benchmark tasks. We demonstrate that the RealAnt robot can learn to walk from scratch from less than 10 minutes of experience. We also provide simulator versions of the robot (with the same dimensions, state-action spaces, and delayed noisy observations) in the MuJoCo and PyBullet simulators. We open-source hardware designs, supporting software, and baseline results for educational use and reproducible research.
MorphEyes: Variable Baseline Stereo For Quadrotor Navigation
Authors: Nitin J. Sanket, Chahat Deep Singh, Varun Asthana, Cornelia Fermüller, Yiannis Aloimonos
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation

Morphable design and depth-based visual control are two upcoming trends leading to advancements in the field of quadrotor autonomy. Stereo-cameras have struck the perfect balance of weight and accuracy of depth estimation but suffer from the problem of depth range being limited and dictated by the baseline chosen at design time. In this paper, we present a framework for quadrotor navigation based on a stereo camera system whose baseline can be adapted on-the-fly. We present a method to calibrate the system at a small number of discrete baselines and interpolate the parameters for the entire baseline range. We present an extensive theoretical analysis of calibration and synchronization errors. We showcase three different applications of such a system for quadrotor navigation: (a) flying through a forest, (b) flying through an unknown shaped/location static/dynamic gap, and (c) accurate 3D pose detection of an independently moving object. We show that our variable baseline system is more accurate and robust in all three scenarios. To our knowledge, this is the first work that applies the concept of morphable design to achieve a variable baseline stereo vision system on a quadrotor.
Statistical analysis of Wasserstein GANs with applications to time series forecasting
Authors: Moritz Haas, Stefan Richter
Date: 2020-11-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

We provide statistical theory for conditional and unconditional Wasserstein generative adversarial networks (WGANs) in the framework of dependent observations. We prove upper bounds for the excess Bayes risk of the WGAN estimators with respect to a modified Wasserstein-type distance. Furthermore, we formalize and derive statements on the weak convergence of the estimators and use them to develop confidence intervals for new observations. The theory is applied to the special case of high-dimensional time series forecasting. We analyze the behavior of the estimators in simulations based on synthetic data and investigate a real data example with temperature data. The dependency of the data is quantified with absolutely regular beta-mixing coefficients.