pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Study on the Manifestation of Trust in Speech
Authors: Lara Gauder, Leonardo Pepino, Pablo Riera, Silvina Brussino, Jazmín Vidal, Agustín Gravano, Luciana Ferrer
Date: 2021-02-09 00:00:00

Research has shown that trust is an essential aspect of human-computer interaction directly determining the degree to which the person is willing to use a system. An automatic prediction of the level of trust that a user has on a certain system could be used to attempt to correct potential distrust by having the system take relevant actions like, for example, apologizing or explaining its decisions. In this work, we explore the feasibility of automatically detecting the level of trust that a user has on a virtual assistant (VA) based on their speech. We developed a novel protocol for collecting speech data from subjects induced to have different degrees of trust in the skills of a VA. The protocol consists of an interactive session where the subject is asked to respond to a series of factual questions with the help of a virtual assistant. In order to induce subjects to either trust or distrust the VA's skills, they are first informed that the VA was previously rated by other users as being either good or bad; subsequently, the VA answers the subjects' questions consistently to its alleged abilities. All interactions are speech-based, with subjects and VAs communicating verbally, which allows the recording of speech produced under different trust conditions. Using this protocol, we collected a speech corpus in Argentine Spanish. We show clear evidence that the protocol effectively succeeded in influencing subjects into the desired mental state of either trusting or distrusting the agent's skills, and present results of a perceptual study of the degree of trust performed by expert listeners. Finally, we found that the subject's speech can be used to detect which type of VA they were using, which could be considered a proxy for the user's trust toward the VA's abilities, with an accuracy up to 76%, compared to a random baseline of 50%.
Learning to Detect Specular Highlights from Real-world Images
Authors: Gang Fu, Qing Zhang, QiFeng Lin, Lei Zhu, and Chunaxia Xiao
Date: 2020-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Highlight Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Specular highlight detection is a challenging problem, and has many applications such as shiny object detection and light source estimation. Although various highlight detection methods have been proposed, they fail to disambiguate bright material surfaces from highlights, and cannot handle non-white-balanced images. Moreover, at present, there is still no benchmark dataset for highlight detection. In this paper, we present a large-scale real-world highlight dataset containing a rich variety of material categories, with diverse highlight shapes and appearances, in which each image is with an annotated ground-truth mask. Based on the dataset, we develop a deep learning-based specular highlight detection network (SHDNet) leveraging multi-scale context contrasted features to accurately detect specular highlights of varying scales. In addition, we design a binary cross-entropy (BCE) loss and an intersection-over-union edge (IoUE) loss for our network. Compared with existing highlight detection methods, our method can accurately detect highlights of different sizes, while effectively excluding the non- highlight regions, such as bright materials, non-specular as well as colored lighting, and even light sources.
Evolving Fuzzy System Applied to Battery Charge Capacity Prediction for Fault Prognostics
Authors: Murilo Osorio Camargos, Iury Bessa, Luiz A. Q. Cordovil Junior, Pedro Henrique Silva Coutinho, Daniel Furtado Leite, Reinaldo Martinez Palhares
Date: 2021-02-18 00:00:00

This paper addresses the use of data-driven evolving techniques applied to fault prognostics. In such problems, accurate predictions of multiple steps ahead are essential for the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation of a given asset. The fault prognostics' solutions must be able to model the typical nonlinear behavior of the degradation processes of these assets, and be adaptable to each unit's particularities. In this context, the Evolving Fuzzy Systems (EFSs) are models capable of representing such behaviors, in addition of being able to deal with non-stationary behavior, also present in these problems. Moreover, a methodology to recursively track the model's estimation error is presented as a way to quantify uncertainties that are propagated in the long-term predictions. The well-established NASA's Li-ion batteries data set is used to evaluate the models. The experiments indicate that generic EFSs can take advantage of both historical and stream data to estimate the RUL and its uncertainty.
Multi-Person Continuous Tracking and Identification from mm-Wave micro-Doppler Signatures
Authors: Jacopo Pegoraro, Francesca Meneghello, Michele Rossi
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: User Identification

In this work, we investigate the use of backscattered mm-wave radio signals for the joint tracking and recognition of identities of humans as they move within indoor environments. We build a system that effectively works with multiple persons concurrently sharing and freely moving within the same indoor space. This leads to a complicated setting, which requires one to deal with the randomness and complexity of the resulting (composite) backscattered signal. The proposed system combines several processing steps: at first, the signal is filtered to remove artifacts, reflections and random noise that do not originate from humans. Hence, a density-based classification algorithm is executed to separate the Doppler signatures of different users. The final blocks are trajectory tracking and user identification, respectively based on Kalman filters and deep neural networks. Our results demonstrate that the integration of the last-mentioned processing stages is critical towards achieving robustness and accuracy in multi-user settings. Our technique is tested both on a single-target public dataset, for which it outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and on our own measurements, obtained with a 77 GHz radar on multiple subjects simultaneously moving in two different indoor environments. The system works in an online fashion, permitting the continuous identification of multiple subjects with accuracies up to 98%, e.g., with four subjects sharing the same physical space, and with a small accuracy reduction when tested with unseen data from a challenging real-life scenario that was not part of the model learning phase.
Incremental Learning and State-Space Evolving Fuzzy Control of Nonlinear Time-Varying Systems with Unknown Model
Authors: Daniel Leite, Pedro Coutinho, Iury Bessa, Murilo Camargos, Luiz Cordovil Junior, Reinaldo Palhares
Date: 2021-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning

We present a method for incremental modeling and time-varying control of unknown nonlinear systems. The method combines elements of evolving intelligence, granular machine learning, and multi-variable control. We propose a State-Space Fuzzy-set-Based evolving Modeling (SS-FBeM) approach. The resulting fuzzy model is structurally and parametrically developed from a data stream with focus on memory and data coverage. The fuzzy controller also evolves, based on the data instances and fuzzy model parameters. Its local gains are redesigned in real-time -- whenever the corresponding local fuzzy models change -- from the solution of a linear matrix inequality problem derived from a fuzzy Lyapunov function and bounded input conditions. We have shown one-step prediction and asymptotic stabilization of the Henon chaos.
MSR-GAN: Multi-Segment Reconstruction via Adversarial Learning
Authors: Mona Zehni, Zhizhen Zhao
Date: 2021-02-18 00:00:00

Multi-segment reconstruction (MSR) is the problem of estimating a signal given noisy partial observations. Here each observation corresponds to a randomly located segment of the signal. While previous works address this problem using template or moment-matching, in this paper we address MSR from an unsupervised adversarial learning standpoint, named MSR-GAN. We formulate MSR as a distribution matching problem where the goal is to recover the signal and the probability distribution of the segments such that the distribution of the generated measurements following a known forward model is close to the real observations. This is achieved once a min-max optimization involving a generator-discriminator pair is solved. MSR-GAN is mainly inspired by CryoGAN [1]. However, in MSR-GAN we no longer assume the probability distribution of the latent variables, i.e. segment locations, is given and seek to recover it alongside the unknown signal. For this purpose, we show that the loss at the generator side originally is non-differentiable with respect to the segment distribution. Thus, we propose to approximate it using Gumbel-Softmax reparametrization trick. Our proposed solution is generalizable to a wide range of inverse problems. Our simulation results and comparison with various baselines verify the potential of our approach in different settings.
Harnessing Tensor Structures -- Multi-Mode Reservoir Computing and Its Application in Massive MIMO
Authors: Zhou Zhou, Lingjia Liu, Jiarui Xu
Date: 2021-01-25 00:00:00

In this paper, we introduce a new neural network (NN) structure, multi-mode reservoir computing (Multi-Mode RC). It inherits the dynamic mechanism of RC and processes the forward path and loss optimization of the NN using tensor as the underlying data format. Multi-Mode RC exhibits less complexity compared with conventional RC structures (e.g. single-mode RC) with comparable generalization performance. Furthermore, we introduce an alternating least square-based learning algorithm for Multi-Mode RC as well as conduct the associated theoretical analysis. The result can be utilized to guide the configuration of NN parameters to sufficiently circumvent over-fitting issues. As a key application, we consider the symbol detection task in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) systems with massive MIMO employed at the base stations (BSs). Thanks to the tensor structure of massive MIMO-OFDM signals, our online learning-based symbol detection method generalizes well in terms of bit error rate even using a limited online training set. Evaluation results suggest that the Multi-Mode RC-based learning framework can efficiently and effectively combat practical constraints of wireless systems (i.e. channel state information (CSI) errors and hardware non-linearity) to enable robust and adaptive learning-based communications over the air.
Optimizing Unlicensed Band Spectrum Sharing With Subspace-Based Pareto Tracing
Authors: Zachary J. Grey, Susanna Mosleh, Jacob D. Rezac, Yao Ma, Jason B. Coder, Andrew M. Dienstfrey
Date: 2021-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

To meet the ever-growing demands of data throughput for forthcoming and deployed wireless networks, new wireless technologies like Long-Term Evolution License-Assisted Access (LTE-LAA) operate in shared and unlicensed bands. However, the LAA network must co-exist with incumbent IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi systems. We consider a coexistence scenario where multiple LAA and Wi-Fi links share an unlicensed band. We aim to improve this coexistence by maximizing the key performance indicators (KPIs) of these networks simultaneously via dimension reduction and multi-criteria optimization. These KPIs are network throughputs as a function of medium access control protocols and physical layer parameters. We perform an exploratory analysis of coexistence behavior by approximating active subspaces to identify low-dimensional structure in the optimization criteria, i.e., few linear combinations of parameters for simultaneously maximizing KPIs. We leverage an aggregate low-dimensional subspace parametrized by approximated active subspaces of throughputs to facilitate multi-criteria optimization. The low-dimensional subspace approximations inform visualizations revealing convex KPIs over mixed active coordinates leading to an analytic Pareto trace of near-optimal solutions.
FedMood: Federated Learning on Mobile Health Data for Mood Detection
Authors: Xiaohang Xu, Hao Peng, Lichao Sun, Md Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan, Lianzhong Liu, Lifang He
Date: 2021-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Depression Detection, Federated Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Depression is one of the most common mental illness problems, and the symptoms shown by patients are not consistent, making it difficult to diagnose in the process of clinical practice and pathological research. Although researchers hope that artificial intelligence can contribute to the diagnosis and treatment of depression, the traditional centralized machine learning needs to aggregate patient data, and the data privacy of patients with mental illness needs to be strictly confidential, which hinders machine learning algorithms clinical application. To solve the problem of privacy of the medical history of patients with depression, we implement federated learning to analyze and diagnose depression. First, we propose a general multi-view federated learning framework using multi-source data, which can extend any traditional machine learning model to support federated learning across different institutions or parties. Secondly, we adopt late fusion methods to solve the problem of inconsistent time series of multi-view data. Finally, we compare the federated framework with other cooperative learning frameworks in performance and discuss the related results.
AI Can Stop Mass Shootings, and More
Authors: Selmer Bringsjord, Naveen Sundar Govindarajulu, Michael Giancola
Date: 2021-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

We propose to build directly upon our longstanding, prior r&d in AI/machine ethics in order to attempt to make real the blue-sky idea of AI that can thwart mass shootings, by bringing to bear its ethical reasoning. The r&d in question is overtly and avowedly logicist in form, and since we are hardly the only ones who have established a firm foundation in the attempt to imbue AI's with their own ethical sensibility, the pursuit of our proposal by those in different methodological camps should, we believe, be considered as well. We seek herein to make our vision at least somewhat concrete by anchoring our exposition to two simulations, one in which the AI saves the lives of innocents by locking out a malevolent human's gun, and a second in which this malevolent agent is allowed by the AI to be neutralized by law enforcement. Along the way, some objections are anticipated, and rebutted.
SNUNet-CD: A Densely Connected Siamese Network for Change Detection of VHR Images
Authors: Sheng Fang; Kaiyu Li; Jinyuan Shao; Zhe Li
Date: 2021-02-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Decoder

Change detection is an important task in remote sensing (RS) image analysis. It is widely used in natural disaster monitoring and assessment, land resource planning, and other fields. As a pixel-to-pixel prediction task, change detection is sensitive about the utilization of the original position information. Recent change detection methods always focus on the extraction of deep change semantic feature, but ignore the importance of shallow-layer information containing high-resolution and fine-grained features, this often leads to the uncertainty of the pixels at the edge of the changed target and the determination miss of small targets. In this letter, we propose a densely connected siamese network for change detection, namely SNUNet-CD (the combination of Siamese network and NestedUNet). SNUNet-CD alleviates the loss of localization information in the deep layers of neural network through compact information transmission between encoder and decoder, and between decoder and decoder. In addition, Ensemble Channel Attention Module (ECAM) is proposed for deep supervision. Through ECAM, the most representative features of different semantic levels can be refined and used for the final classification. Experimental results show that our method improves greatly on many evaluation criteria and has a better tradeoff between accuracy and calculation amount than other state-of-the-art (SOTA) change detection methods.
Distributionally Consistent Simulation of Naturalistic Driving Environment for Autonomous Vehicle Testing
Authors: Xintao Yan, Shuo Feng, Haowei Sun, Henry X. Liu
Date: 2021-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles

Microscopic traffic simulation provides a controllable, repeatable, and efficient testing environment for autonomous vehicles (AVs). To evaluate AVs' safety performance unbiasedly, the probability distributions of environment statistics in the simulated naturalistic driving environment (NDE) need to be consistent with those from the real-world driving environment. However, although human driving behaviors have been extensively investigated in the transportation engineering field, most existing models were developed for traffic flow analysis without considering the distributional consistency of driving behaviors, which could cause significant evaluation biasedness for AV testing. To fill this research gap, a distributional consistent NDE modeling framework is proposed in this paper. Using large-scale naturalistic driving data, empirical distributions are obtained to construct the stochastic human driving behavior models under different conditions. To address the error accumulation problem during the simulation, an optimization-based method is further designed to refine the empirical behavior models. Specifically, the vehicle state evolution is modeled as a Markov chain and its stationary distribution is twisted to match the distribution from the real-world driving environment. The framework is evaluated in the case study of a multi-lane highway driving simulation, where the distributional accuracy of the generated NDE is validated and the safety performance of an AV model is effectively evaluated.
What's All the FUSS About Free Universal Sound Separation Data?
Authors: Scott Wisdom, Hakan Erdogan, Daniel Ellis, Romain Serizel, Nicolas Turpault, Eduardo Fonseca, Justin Salamon, Prem Seetharaman, John Hershey
Date: 2020-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Data Augmentation

We introduce the Free Universal Sound Separation (FUSS) dataset, a new corpus for experiments in separating mixtures of an unknown number of sounds from an open domain of sound types. The dataset consists of 23 hours of single-source audio data drawn from 357 classes, which are used to create mixtures of one to four sources. To simulate reverberation, an acoustic room simulator is used to generate impulse responses of box shaped rooms with frequency-dependent reflective walls. Additional open-source data augmentation tools are also provided to produce new mixtures with different combinations of sources and room simulations. Finally, we introduce an open-source baseline separation model, based on an improved time-domain convolutional network (TDCN++), that can separate a variable number of sources in a mixture. This model achieves 9.8 dB of scale-invariant signal-to-noise ratio improvement (SI-SNRi) on mixtures with two to four sources, while reconstructing single-source inputs with 35.5 dB absolute SI-SNR. We hope this dataset will lower the barrier to new research and allow for fast iteration and application of novel techniques from other machine learning domains to the sound separation challenge.
Incorporating Unmodeled Dynamics Into First-Principles Models Through Machine Learning
Authors: Ward Quaghebeur, Ingmar Nopens, Bernard De Baets
Date: 2021-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

First-principles modeling of dynamical systems is a cornerstone of science and engineering and has enabled rapid development and improvement of key technologies such as chemical reactors, electrical circuits, and communication networks. In various disciplines, scientists structure the available domain knowledge into a system of differential equations. When designed, calibrated, and validated appropriately, these equations are used to analyze and predict the dynamics of the system. However, perfect knowledge is usually not accessible in real-world problems. The incorporated knowledge thus is a simplification of the real system and is limited by the underlying assumptions. This limits the extent to which the model reflects reality. The resulting lack of predictive power severely hampers the application potential of such models. Here we introduce a framework that incorporates machine learning into existing first-principles modeling. The machine learning model fills in the knowledge gaps of the first-principles model, capturing the unmodeled dynamics and thus improving the representativeness of the model. Moreover, we show that this approach lowers the data requirements, both in quantity and quality, and improves the generalization ability in comparison with a purely data-driven approach. This approach can be applied to any first-principles model with sufficient data available and has tremendous potential in many fields.
One Shot Model For COVID-19 Classification and Lesions Segmentation In Chest CT Scans Using LSTM With Attention Mechanism
Authors: Aram Ter-Sarkisov`
Date: 2021-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: COVID-19 Diagnosis, COVID-19 Image Segmentation, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Sensitivity

We present a model that fuses instance segmentation, Long Short-Term Memory Network and Attention mechanism to predict COVID-19 and segment chest CT scans. The model works by extracting a sequence of Regions of Interest that contain class-relevant information, and applies two Long Short-Term Memory networks with attention to this sequence to extract class-relevant features. The model is trained in one shot: both segmentation and classification branches, using two different sets of data. We achieve a 95.74% COVID-19 sensitivity, 98.13% Common Pneumonia sensitivity, 99.27% Control sensitivity and 98.15% class-adjusted F1 score on the main dataset of 21191 chest CT scan slices, and also run a number of ablation studies in which we achieve 97.73% COVID-19 sensitivity and 98.41% F1 score. All source code and models are available on https://github.com/AlexTS1980/COVID-LSTM-Attention.
One Shot Model For COVID-19 Classification and Lesions Segmentation In Chest CT Scans Using LSTM With Attention Mechanism
Authors: Aram Ter-Sarkisov
Date: 2021-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Sensitivity

We present a model that fuses instance segmentation, Long Short-Term Memory Network and Attention mechanism to predict COVID-19 and segment chest CT scans. The model works by extracting a sequence of Regions of Interest that contain class-relevant information, and applies two Long Short-Term Memory networks with attention to this sequence to extract class-relevant features. The model is trained in one shot: both segmentation and classification branches, using two different sets of data. We achieve a 95.74% COVID-19 sensitivity, 98.13% Common Pneumonia sensitivity, 99.27% Control sensitivity and 98.15% class-adjusted F1 score on the main dataset of 21191 chest CT scan slices, and also run a number of ablation studies in which we achieve 97.73% COVID-19 sensitivity and 98.41% F1 score. All source code and models are available on https://github.com/AlexTS1980/COVID-LSTM-Attention.