pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Distribution-preserving Incomplete Clustering with Optimal Transport
Authors: Mingjie Luo, Siwei Wang, Xinwang Liu, Wenxuan Tu, Yi Zhang, Xifeng Guo, Sihang Zhou, En Zhu
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Imputation

Clustering is a fundamental task in the computer vision and machine learning community. Although various methods have been proposed, the performance of existing approaches drops dramatically when handling incomplete high-dimensional data (which is common in real world applications). To solve the problem, we propose a novel deep incomplete clustering method, named Deep Distribution-preserving Incomplete Clustering with Optimal Transport (DDIC-OT). To avoid insufficient sample utilization in existing methods limited by few fully-observed samples, we propose to measure distribution distance with the optimal transport for reconstruction evaluation instead of traditional pixel-wise loss function. Moreover, the clustering loss of the latent feature is introduced to regularize the embedding with more discrimination capability. As a consequence, the network becomes more robust against missing features and the unified framework which combines clustering and sample imputation enables the two procedures to negotiate to better serve for each other. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed network achieves superior and stable clustering performance improvement against existing state-of-the-art incomplete clustering methods over different missing ratios.
Deepened Graph Auto-Encoders Help Stabilize and Enhance Link Prediction
Authors: Xinxing Wu, Qiang Cheng
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Clustering, Graph Learning, Link Prediction, Node Classification, Node Clustering, Prediction

Graph neural networks have been used for a variety of learning tasks, such as link prediction, node classification, and node clustering. Among them, link prediction is a relatively under-studied graph learning task, with current state-of-the-art models based on one- or two-layer of shallow graph auto-encoder (GAE) architectures. In this paper, we focus on addressing a limitation of current methods for link prediction, which can only use shallow GAEs and variational GAEs, and creating effective methods to deepen (variational) GAE architectures to achieve stable and competitive performance. Our proposed methods innovatively incorporate standard auto-encoders (AEs) into the architectures of GAEs, where standard AEs are leveraged to learn essential, low-dimensional representations via seamlessly integrating the adjacency information and node features, while GAEs further build multi-scaled low-dimensional representations via residual connections to learn a compact overall embedding for link prediction. Empirically, extensive experiments on various benchmarking datasets verify the effectiveness of our methods and demonstrate the competitive performance of our deepened graph models for link prediction. Theoretically, we prove that our deep extensions inclusively express multiple polynomial filters with different orders.
L3CubeMahaSent: A Marathi Tweet-based Sentiment Analysis Dataset
Authors: Atharva Kulkarni, Meet Mandhane, Manali Likhitkar, Gayatri Kshirsagar, Raviraj Joshi
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL (WASSA) 2021 4
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is one of the most fundamental tasks in Natural Language Processing. Popular languages like English, Arabic, Russian, Mandarin, and also Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Tamil have seen a significant amount of work in this area. However, the Marathi language which is the third most popular language in India still lags behind due to the absence of proper datasets. In this paper, we present the first major publicly available Marathi Sentiment Analysis Dataset - L3CubeMahaSent. It is curated using tweets extracted from various Maharashtrian personalities' Twitter accounts. Our dataset consists of ~16,000 distinct tweets classified in three broad classes viz. positive, negative, and neutral. We also present the guidelines using which we annotated the tweets. Finally, we present the statistics of our dataset and baseline classification results using CNN, LSTM, ULMFiT, and BERT-based deep learning models.
Non-Autoregressive Translation by Learning Target Categorical Codes
Authors: Yu Bao, ShuJian Huang, Tong Xiao, Dongqi Wang, Xinyu Dai, Jiajun Chen
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2021 4
Tasks: Attribute, Decoder, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Translation

Non-autoregressive Transformer is a promising text generation model. However, current non-autoregressive models still fall behind their autoregressive counterparts in translation quality. We attribute this accuracy gap to the lack of dependency modeling among decoder inputs. In this paper, we propose CNAT, which learns implicitly categorical codes as latent variables into the non-autoregressive decoding. The interaction among these categorical codes remedies the missing dependencies and improves the model capacity. Experiment results show that our model achieves comparable or better performance in machine translation tasks, compared with several strong baselines.
Instant-Teaching: An End-to-End Semi-Supervised Object Detection Framework
Authors: Qiang Zhou, Chaohui Yu, Zhibin Wang, Qi Qian, Hao Li
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Supervised learning based object detection frameworks demand plenty of laborious manual annotations, which may not be practical in real applications. Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD) can effectively leverage unlabeled data to improve the model performance, which is of great significance for the application of object detection models. In this paper, we revisit SSOD and propose Instant-Teaching, a completely end-to-end and effective SSOD framework, which uses instant pseudo labeling with extended weak-strong data augmentations for teaching during each training iteration. To alleviate the confirmation bias problem and improve the quality of pseudo annotations, we further propose a co-rectify scheme based on Instant-Teaching, denoted as Instant-Teaching$^*$. Extensive experiments on both MS-COCO and PASCAL VOC datasets substantiate the superiority of our framework. Specifically, our method surpasses state-of-the-art methods by 4.2 mAP on MS-COCO when using $2\%$ labeled data. Even with full supervised information of MS-COCO, the proposed method still outperforms state-of-the-art methods by about 1.0 mAP. On PASCAL VOC, we can achieve more than 5 mAP improvement by applying VOC07 as labeled data and VOC12 as unlabeled data.
SwissDial: Parallel Multidialectal Corpus of Spoken Swiss German
Authors: Pelin Dogan-Schönberger, Julian Mäder, Thomas Hofmann
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis

Swiss German is a dialect continuum whose natively acquired dialects significantly differ from the formal variety of the language. These dialects are mostly used for verbal communication and do not have standard orthography. This has led to a lack of annotated datasets, rendering the use of many NLP methods infeasible. In this paper, we introduce the first annotated parallel corpus of spoken Swiss German across 8 major dialects, plus a Standard German reference. Our goal has been to create and to make available a basic dataset for employing data-driven NLP applications in Swiss German. We present our data collection procedure in detail and validate the quality of our corpus by conducting experiments with the recent neural models for speech synthesis.
Learning Calibrated-Guidance for Object Detection in Aerial Images
Authors: Zongqi Wei, Dong Liang, Dong Zhang, Liyan Zhang, Qixiang Geng, Mingqiang Wei, Huiyu Zhou
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Detection In Aerial Images, Oriented Object Detection

Object detection is one of the most fundamental yet challenging research topics in the domain of computer vision. Recently, the study on this topic in aerial images has made tremendous progress. However, complex background and worse imaging quality are obvious problems in aerial object detection. Most state-of-the-art approaches tend to develop elaborate attention mechanisms for the space-time feature calibrations with arduous computational complexity, while surprisingly ignoring the importance of feature calibrations in channel-wise. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective Calibrated-Guidance (CG) scheme to enhance channel communications in a feature transformer fashion, which can adaptively determine the calibration weights for each channel based on the global feature affinity correlations. Specifically, for a given set of feature maps, CG first computes the feature similarity between each channel and the remaining channels as the intermediary calibration guidance. Then, re-representing each channel by aggregating all the channels weighted together via the guidance operation. Our CG is a general module that can be plugged into any deep neural networks, which is named as CG-Net. To demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency, extensive experiments are carried out on both oriented object detection task and horizontal object detection task in aerial images. Experimental results on two challenging benchmarks (DOTA and HRSC2016) demonstrate that our CG-Net can achieve the new state-of-the-art performance in accuracy with a fair computational overhead. The source code has been open sourced at https://github.com/WeiZongqi/CG-Net
ScanMix: Learning from Severe Label Noise via Semantic Clustering and Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Ragav Sachdeva, Filipe R Cordeiro, Vasileios Belagiannis, Ian Reid, Gustavo Carneiro
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Image Classification

We propose a new training algorithm, ScanMix, that explores semantic clustering and semi-supervised learning (SSL) to allow superior robustness to severe label noise and competitive robustness to non-severe label noise problems, in comparison to the state of the art (SOTA) methods. ScanMix is based on the expectation maximisation framework, where the E-step estimates the latent variable to cluster the training images based on their appearance and classification results, and the M-step optimises the SSL classification and learns effective feature representations via semantic clustering. We present a theoretical result that shows the correctness and convergence of ScanMix, and an empirical result that shows that ScanMix has SOTA results on CIFAR-10/-100 (with symmetric, asymmetric and semantic label noise), Red Mini-ImageNet (from the Controlled Noisy Web Labels), Clothing1M and WebVision. In all benchmarks with severe label noise, our results are competitive to the current SOTA.
Multi-view analysis of unregistered medical images using cross-view transformers
Authors: Gijs van Tulder, Yao Tong, Elena Marchiori
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Image Analysis

Multi-view medical image analysis often depends on the combination of information from multiple views. However, differences in perspective or other forms of misalignment can make it difficult to combine views effectively, as registration is not always possible. Without registration, views can only be combined at a global feature level, by joining feature vectors after global pooling. We present a novel cross-view transformer method to transfer information between unregistered views at the level of spatial feature maps. We demonstrate this method on multi-view mammography and chest X-ray datasets. On both datasets, we find that a cross-view transformer that links spatial feature maps can outperform a baseline model that joins feature vectors after global pooling.
Collaborative Agent Gameplay in the Pandemic Board Game
Authors: Konstantinos Sfikas, Antonios Liapis
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Board Games

While artificial intelligence has been applied to control players' decisions in board games for over half a century, little attention is given to games with no player competition. Pandemic is an exemplar collaborative board game where all players coordinate to overcome challenges posed by events occurring during the game's progression. This paper proposes an artificial agent which controls all players' actions and balances chances of winning versus risk of losing in this highly stochastic environment. The agent applies a Rolling Horizon Evolutionary Algorithm on an abstraction of the game-state that lowers the branching factor and simulates the game's stochasticity. Results show that the proposed algorithm can find winning strategies more consistently in different games of varying difficulty. The impact of a number of state evaluation metrics is explored, balancing between optimistic strategies that favor winning and pessimistic strategies that guard against losing.
Hierarchical Representation based Query-Specific Prototypical Network for Few-Shot Image Classification
Authors: Yaohui Li, Huaxiong Li, Haoxing Chen, Chunlin Chen
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Few-shot image classification aims at recognizing unseen categories with a small number of labeled training data. Recent metric-based frameworks tend to represent a support class by a fixed prototype (e.g., the mean of the support category) and make classification according to the similarities between query instances and support prototypes. However, discriminative dominant regions may locate uncertain areas of images and have various scales, which leads to the misaligned metric. Besides, a fixed prototype for one support category cannot fit for all query instances to accurately reflect their distances with this category, which lowers the efficiency of metric. Therefore, query-specific dominant regions in support samples should be extracted for a high-quality metric. To address these problems, we propose a Hierarchical Representation based Query-Specific Prototypical Network (QPN) to tackle the limitations by generating a region-level prototype for each query sample, which achieves both positional and dimensional semantic alignment simultaneously. Extensive experiments conducted on five benchmark datasets (including three fine-grained datasets) show that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods.
Multi-level Metric Learning for Few-shot Image Recognition
Authors: Haoxing Chen, Huaxiong Li, Yaohui Li, Chunlin Chen
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, Few-Shot Learning, Metric Learning

Few-shot learning is devoted to training a model on few samples. Most of these approaches learn a model based on a pixel-level or global-level feature representation. However, using global features may lose local information, and using pixel-level features may lose the contextual semantics of the image. Moreover, such works can only measure the relations between them on a single level, which is not comprehensive and effective. And if query images can simultaneously be well classified via three distinct level similarity metrics, the query images within a class can be more tightly distributed in a smaller feature space, generating more discriminative feature maps. Motivated by this, we propose a novel Part-level Embedding Adaptation with Graph (PEAG) method to generate task-specific features. Moreover, a Multi-level Metric Learning (MML) method is proposed, which not only calculates the pixel-level similarity but also considers the similarity of part-level features and global-level features. Extensive experiments on popular few-shot image recognition datasets prove the effectiveness of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/chenhaoxing/M2L}.
Quantum Machine Learning with HQC Architectures using non-Classically Simulable Feature Maps
Authors: Syed Farhan Ahmad, Raghav Rawat, Minal Moharir
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Quantum Machine Learning

Hybrid Quantum-Classical (HQC) Architectures are used in near-term NISQ Quantum Computers for solving Quantum Machine Learning problems. The quantum advantage comes into picture due to the exponential speedup offered over classical computing. One of the major challenges in implementing such algorithms is the choice of quantum embeddings and the use of a functionally correct quantum variational circuit. In this paper, we present an application of QSVM (Quantum Support Vector Machines) to predict if a person will require mental health treatment in the tech world in the future using the dataset from OSMI Mental Health Tech Surveys. We achieve this with non-classically simulable feature maps and prove that NISQ HQC Architectures for Quantum Machine Learning can be used alternatively to create good performance models in near-term real-world applications.
MaAST: Map Attention with Semantic Transformersfor Efficient Visual Navigation
Authors: Zachary Seymour, Kowshik Thopalli, Niluthpol Mithun, Han-Pang Chiu, Supun Samarasekera, Rakesh Kumar
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Visual Navigation

Visual navigation for autonomous agents is a core task in the fields of computer vision and robotics. Learning-based methods, such as deep reinforcement learning, have the potential to outperform the classical solutions developed for this task; however, they come at a significantly increased computational load. Through this work, we design a novel approach that focuses on performing better or comparable to the existing learning-based solutions but under a clear time/computational budget. To this end, we propose a method to encode vital scene semantics such as traversable paths, unexplored areas, and observed scene objects -- alongside raw visual streams such as RGB, depth, and semantic segmentation masks -- into a semantically informed, top-down egocentric map representation. Further, to enable the effective use of this information, we introduce a novel 2-D map attention mechanism, based on the successful multi-layer Transformer networks. We conduct experiments on 3-D reconstructed indoor PointGoal visual navigation and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We show that by using our novel attention schema and auxiliary rewards to better utilize scene semantics, we outperform multiple baselines trained with only raw inputs or implicit semantic information while operating with an 80% decrease in the agent's experience.
ProgressiveSpinalNet architecture for FC layers
Authors: Praveen Chopra
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fine-Grained Image Classification

In deeplearning models the FC (fully connected) layer has biggest important role for classification of the input based on the learned features from previous layers. The FC layers has highest numbers of parameters and fine-tuning these large numbers of parameters, consumes most of the computational resources, so in this paper it is aimed to reduce these large numbers of parameters significantly with improved performance. The motivation is inspired from SpinalNet and other biological architecture. The proposed architecture has a gradient highway between input to output layers and this solves the problem of diminishing gradient in deep networks. In this all the layers receives the input from previous layers as well as the CNN layer output and this way all layers contribute in decision making with last layer. This approach has improved classification performance over the SpinalNet architecture and has SOTA performance on many datasets such as Caltech101, KMNIST, QMNIST and EMNIST. The source code is available at https://github.com/praveenchopra/ProgressiveSpinalNet.
Natural Perturbed Training for General Robustness of Neural Network Classifiers
Authors: Sadaf Gulshad, Arnold Smeulders
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00

We focus on the robustness of neural networks for classification. To permit a fair comparison between methods to achieve robustness, we first introduce a standard based on the mensuration of a classifier's degradation. Then, we propose natural perturbed training to robustify the network. Natural perturbations will be encountered in practice: the difference of two images of the same object may be approximated by an elastic deformation (when they have slightly different viewing angles), by occlusions (when they hide differently behind objects), or by saturation, Gaussian noise etc. Training some fraction of the epochs on random versions of such variations will help the classifier to learn better. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets of varying sizes and granularity. Natural perturbed learning show better and much faster performance than adversarial training on clean, adversarial as well as natural perturbed images. It even improves general robustness on perturbations not seen during the training. For Cifar-10 and STL-10 natural perturbed training even improves the accuracy for clean data and reaches the state of the art performance. Ablation studies verify the effectiveness of natural perturbed training.
Online Convex Optimization with Continuous Switching Constraint
Authors: Guanghui Wang, Yuanyu Wan, Tianbao Yang, Lijun Zhang
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

In many sequential decision making applications, the change of decision would bring an additional cost, such as the wear-and-tear cost associated with changing server status. To control the switching cost, we introduce the problem of online convex optimization with continuous switching constraint, where the goal is to achieve a small regret given a budget on the \emph{overall} switching cost. We first investigate the hardness of the problem, and provide a lower bound of order $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ when the switching cost budget $S=\Omega(\sqrt{T})$, and $\Omega(\min\{\frac{T}{S},T\})$ when $S=O(\sqrt{T})$, where $T$ is the time horizon. The essential idea is to carefully design an adaptive adversary, who can adjust the loss function according to the cumulative switching cost of the player incurred so far based on the orthogonal technique. We then develop a simple gradient-based algorithm which enjoys the minimax optimal regret bound. Finally, we show that, for strongly convex functions, the regret bound can be improved to $O(\log T)$ for $S=\Omega(\log T)$, and $O(\min\{T/\exp(S)+S,T\})$ for $S=O(\log T)$.
ROSITA: Refined BERT cOmpreSsion with InTegrAted techniques
Authors: Yuanxin Liu, Zheng Lin, Fengcheng Yuan
Date: 2021-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Pre-trained language models of the BERT family have defined the state-of-the-arts in a wide range of NLP tasks. However, the performance of BERT-based models is mainly driven by the enormous amount of parameters, which hinders their application to resource-limited scenarios. Faced with this problem, recent studies have been attempting to compress BERT into a small-scale model. However, most previous work primarily focuses on a single kind of compression technique, and few attention has been paid to the combination of different methods. When BERT is compressed with integrated techniques, a critical question is how to design the entire compression framework to obtain the optimal performance. In response to this question, we integrate three kinds of compression methods (weight pruning, low-rank factorization and knowledge distillation (KD)) and explore a range of designs concerning model architecture, KD strategy, pruning frequency and learning rate schedule. We find that a careful choice of the designs is crucial to the performance of the compressed model. Based on the empirical findings, our best compressed model, dubbed Refined BERT cOmpreSsion with InTegrAted techniques (ROSITA), is $7.5 \times$ smaller than BERT while maintains $98.5\%$ of the performance on five tasks of the GLUE benchmark, outperforming the previous BERT compression methods with similar parameter budget. The code is available at https://github.com/llyx97/Rosita.