pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TB-Net: A Three-Stream Boundary-Aware Network for Fine-Grained Pavement Disease Segmentation
Authors: Yujia Zhang, Qianzhong Li, Xiaoguang Zhao, Min Tan
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00

Regular pavement inspection plays a significant role in road maintenance for safety assurance. Existing methods mainly address the tasks of crack detection and segmentation that are only tailored for long-thin crack disease. However, there are many other types of diseases with a wider variety of sizes and patterns that are also essential to segment in practice, bringing more challenges towards fine-grained pavement inspection. In this paper, our goal is not only to automatically segment cracks, but also to segment other complex pavement diseases as well as typical landmarks (markings, runway lights, etc.) and commonly seen water/oil stains in a single model. To this end, we propose a three-stream boundary-aware network (TB-Net). It consists of three streams fusing the low-level spatial and the high-level contextual representations as well as the detailed boundary information. Specifically, the spatial stream captures rich spatial features. The context stream, where an attention mechanism is utilized, models the contextual relationships over local features. The boundary stream learns detailed boundaries using a global-gated convolution to further refine the segmentation outputs. The network is trained using a dual-task loss in an end-to-end manner, and experiments on a newly collected fine-grained pavement disease dataset show the effectiveness of our TB-Net.
Depthwise Multiception Convolution for Reducing Network Parameters without Sacrificing Accuracy
Authors: Guoqing Bao, Manuel B. Graeber, Xiuying Wang
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00

Deep convolutional neural networks have been proven successful in multiple benchmark challenges in recent years. However, the performance improvements are heavily reliant on increasingly complex network architecture and a high number of parameters, which require ever increasing amounts of storage and memory capacity. Depthwise separable convolution (DSConv) can effectively reduce the number of required parameters through decoupling standard convolution into spatial and cross-channel convolution steps. However, the method causes a degradation of accuracy. To address this problem, we present depthwise multiception convolution, termed Multiception, which introduces layer-wise multiscale kernels to learn multiscale representations of all individual input channels simultaneously. We have carried out the experiment on four benchmark datasets, i.e. Cifar-10, Cifar-100, STL-10 and ImageNet32x32, using five popular CNN models, Multiception achieved accuracy promotion in all models and demonstrated higher accuracy performance compared to related works. Meanwhile, Multiception significantly reduces the number of parameters of standard convolution-based models by 32.48% on average while still preserving accuracy.
Data--driven Image Restoration with Option--driven Learning for Big and Small Astronomical Image Datasets
Authors: Peng Jia, Ruiyu Ning, Ruiqi Sun, Xiaoshan Yang, Dongmei Cai
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

Image restoration methods are commonly used to improve the quality of astronomical images. In recent years, developments of deep neural networks and increments of the number of astronomical images have evoked a lot of data--driven image restoration methods. However, most of these methods belong to supervised learning algorithms, which require paired images either from real observations or simulated data as training set. For some applications, it is hard to get enough paired images from real observations and simulated images are quite different from real observed ones. In this paper, we propose a new data--driven image restoration method based on generative adversarial networks with option--driven learning. Our method uses several high resolution images as references and applies different learning strategies when the number of reference images is different. For sky surveys with variable observation conditions, our method can obtain very stable image restoration results, regardless of the number of reference images.
When Optimizing $f$-divergence is Robust with Label Noise
Authors: Jiaheng Wei, Yang Liu
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: Image Classification, Learning with noisy labels

We show when maximizing a properly defined $f$-divergence measure with respect to a classifier's predictions and the supervised labels is robust with label noise. Leveraging its variational form, we derive a nice decoupling property for a family of $f$-divergence measures when label noise presents, where the divergence is shown to be a linear combination of the variational difference defined on the clean distribution and a bias term introduced due to the noise. The above derivation helps us analyze the robustness of different $f$-divergence functions. With established robustness, this family of $f$-divergence functions arises as useful metrics for the problem of learning with noisy labels, which do not require the specification of the labels' noise rate. When they are possibly not robust, we propose fixes to make them so. In addition to the analytical results, we present thorough experimental evidence. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCSC-REAL/Robust-f-divergence-measures.
Deeply-Supervised Density Regression for Automatic Cell Counting in Microscopy Images
Authors: Shenghua He, Kyaw Thu Minn, Lilianna Solnica-Krezel, Mark A. Anastasio, Hua Li
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Cell Counting, Medical Diagnosis, regression

Accurately counting the number of cells in microscopy images is required in many medical diagnosis and biological studies. This task is tedious, time-consuming, and prone to subjective errors. However, designing automatic counting methods remains challenging due to low image contrast, complex background, large variance in cell shapes and counts, and significant cell occlusions in two-dimensional microscopy images. In this study, we proposed a new density regression-based method for automatically counting cells in microscopy images. The proposed method processes two innovations compared to other state-of-the-art density regression-based methods. First, the density regression model (DRM) is designed as a concatenated fully convolutional regression network (C-FCRN) to employ multi-scale image features for the estimation of cell density maps from given images. Second, auxiliary convolutional neural networks (AuxCNNs) are employed to assist in the training of intermediate layers of the designed C-FCRN to improve the DRM performance on unseen datasets. Experimental studies evaluated on four datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.
Domain-Aware Unsupervised Hyperspectral Reconstruction for Aerial Image Dehazing
Authors: Aditya Mehta, Harsh Sinha, Murari Mandal, Pratik Narang
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Dehazing, Image-to-Image Translation, SSIM

Haze removal in aerial images is a challenging problem due to considerable variation in spatial details and varying contrast. Changes in particulate matter density often lead to degradation in visibility. Therefore, several approaches utilize multi-spectral data as auxiliary information for haze removal. In this paper, we propose SkyGAN for haze removal in aerial images. SkyGAN consists of 1) a domain-aware hazy-to-hyperspectral (H2H) module, and 2) a conditional GAN (cGAN) based multi-cue image-to-image translation module (I2I) for dehazing. The proposed H2H module reconstructs several visual bands from RGB images in an unsupervised manner, which overcomes the lack of hazy hyperspectral aerial image datasets. The module utilizes task supervision and domain adaptation in order to create a "hyperspectral catalyst" for image dehazing. The I2I module uses the hyperspectral catalyst along with a 12-channel multi-cue input and performs effective image dehazing by utilizing the entire visual spectrum. In addition, this work introduces a new dataset, called Hazy Aerial-Image (HAI) dataset, that contains more than 65,000 pairs of hazy and ground truth aerial images with realistic, non-homogeneous haze of varying density. The performance of SkyGAN is evaluated on the recent SateHaze1k dataset as well as the HAI dataset. We also present a comprehensive evaluation of HAI dataset with a representative set of state-of-the-art techniques in terms of PSNR and SSIM.
Identifying Mislabeled Images in Supervised Learning Utilizing Autoencoder
Authors: Yunhao Yang, Andrew Whinston
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Clustering, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Supervised learning is based on the assumption that the ground truth in the training data is accurate. However, this may not be guaranteed in real-world settings. Inaccurate training data will result in some unexpected predictions. In image classification, incorrect labels may cause the classification model to be inaccurate as well. In this paper, I am going to apply unsupervised techniques to the training data before training the classification network. A convolutional autoencoder is applied to encode and reconstruct images. The encoder will project the image data on to latent space. In the latent space, image features are preserved in a lower dimension. The assumption is that data samples with similar features are likely to have the same label. Noised samples can be classified in the latent space by the Density-Base Scan (DBSCAN) clustering algorithm. These incorrectly labeled data are visualized as outliers in the latent space. Therefore, the outliers identified by the DBSCAN algorithm can be classified as incorrectly labeled samples. After the outliers are detected, all the outliers are treated as mislabeled data samples and removed from the dataset. Thus the training data can be directly used in training the supervised learning network. The algorithm can detect and remove above 67\% of mislabeled data in the experimental dataset.
ROBIN: a Graph-Theoretic Approach to Reject Outliers in Robust Estimation using Invariants
Authors: Jingnan Shi, Heng Yang, Luca Carlone
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00

Many estimation problems in robotics, computer vision, and learning require estimating unknown quantities in the face of outliers. Outliers are typically the result of incorrect data association or feature matching, and it is common to have problems where more than 90% of the measurements used for estimation are outliers. While current approaches for robust estimation are able to deal with moderate amounts of outliers, they fail to produce accurate estimates in the presence of many outliers. This paper develops an approach to prune outliers. First, we develop a theory of invariance that allows us to quickly check if a subset of measurements are mutually compatible without explicitly solving the estimation problem. Second, we develop a graph-theoretic framework, where measurements are modeled as vertices and mutual compatibility is captured by edges. We generalize existing results showing that the inliers form a clique in this graph and typically belong to the maximum clique. We also show that in practice the maximum k-core of the compatibility graph provides an approximation of the maximum clique, while being faster to compute in large problems. These two contributions leads to ROBIN, our approach to Reject Outliers Based on INvariants, which allows us to quickly prune outliers in generic estimation problems. We demonstrate ROBIN in four geometric perception problems and show it boosts robustness of existing solvers while running in milliseconds in large problems.
Fair Machine Learning Under Partial Compliance
Authors: Jessica Dai, Sina Fazelpour, Zachary C. Lipton
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness

Typically, fair machine learning research focuses on a single decisionmaker and assumes that the underlying population is stationary. However, many of the critical domains motivating this work are characterized by competitive marketplaces with many decisionmakers. Realistically, we might expect only a subset of them to adopt any non-compulsory fairness-conscious policy, a situation that political philosophers call partial compliance. This possibility raises important questions: how does the strategic behavior of decision subjects in partial compliance settings affect the allocation outcomes? If k% of employers were to voluntarily adopt a fairness-promoting intervention, should we expect k% progress (in aggregate) towards the benefits of universal adoption, or will the dynamics of partial compliance wash out the hoped-for benefits? How might adopting a global (versus local) perspective impact the conclusions of an auditor? In this paper, we propose a simple model of an employment market, leveraging simulation as a tool to explore the impact of both interaction effects and incentive effects on outcomes and auditing metrics. Our key findings are that at equilibrium: (1) partial compliance (k% of employers) can result in far less than proportional (k%) progress towards the full compliance outcomes; (2) the gap is more severe when fair employers match global (vs local) statistics; (3) choices of local vs global statistics can paint dramatically different pictures of the performance vis-a-vis fairness desiderata of compliant versus non-compliant employers; and (4) partial compliance to local parity measures can induce extreme segregation.
Strawberry Detection Using a Heterogeneous Multi-Processor Platform
Authors: Samuel Brandenburg, Pedro Machado, Nikesh Lama, T. M. McGinnity
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00

Over the last few years, the number of precision farming projects has increased specifically in harvesting robots and many of which have made continued progress from identifying crops to grasping the desired fruit or vegetable. One of the most common issues found in precision farming projects is that successful application is heavily dependent not just on identifying the fruit but also on ensuring that localisation allows for accurate navigation. These issues become significant factors when the robot is not operating in a prearranged environment, or when vegetation becomes too thick, thus covering crop. Moreover, running a state-of-the-art deep learning algorithm on an embedded platform is also very challenging, resulting most of the times in low frame rates. This paper proposes using the You Only Look Once version 3 (YOLOv3) Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) in combination with utilising image processing techniques for the application of precision farming robots targeting strawberry detection, accelerated on a heterogeneous multiprocessor platform. The results show a performance acceleration by five times when implemented on a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) when compared with the same algorithm running on the processor side with an accuracy of 78.3\% over the test set comprised of 146 images.
Thermal Prediction for Efficient Energy Management of Clouds using Machine Learning
Authors: Shashikant Ilager, Kotagiri Ramamohanarao, Rajkumar Buyya
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, energy management, Management, Prediction, Scheduling

Thermal management in the hyper-scale cloud data centers is a critical problem. Increased host temperature creates hotspots which significantly increases cooling cost and affects reliability. Accurate prediction of host temperature is crucial for managing the resources effectively. Temperature estimation is a non-trivial problem due to thermal variations in the data center. Existing solutions for temperature estimation are inefficient due to their computational complexity and lack of accurate prediction. However, data-driven machine learning methods for temperature prediction is a promising approach. In this regard, we collect and study data from a private cloud and show the presence of thermal variations. We investigate several machine learning models to accurately predict the host temperature. Specifically, we propose a gradient boosting machine learning model for temperature prediction. The experiment results show that our model accurately predicts the temperature with the average RMSE value of 0.05 or an average prediction error of 2.38 degree Celsius, which is 6 degree Celsius less as compared to an existing theoretical model. In addition, we propose a dynamic scheduling algorithm to minimize the peak temperature of hosts. The results show that our algorithm reduces the peak temperature by 6.5 degree Celsius and consumes 34.5% less energy as compared to the baseline algorithm.
A Reinforcement Learning Approach to the Orienteering Problem with Time Windows
Authors: Ricardo Gama, Hugo L. Fernandes
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The Orienteering Problem with Time Windows (OPTW) is a combinatorial optimization problem where the goal is to maximize the total score collected from different visited locations. The application of neural network models to combinatorial optimization has recently shown promising results in dealing with similar problems, like the Travelling Salesman Problem. A neural network allows learning solutions using reinforcement learning or supervised learning, depending on the available data. After the learning stage, it can be generalized and quickly fine-tuned to further improve performance and personalization. The advantages are evident since, for real-world applications, solution quality, personalization, and execution times are all important factors that should be taken into account. This study explores the use of Pointer Network models trained using reinforcement learning to solve the OPTW problem. We propose a modified architecture that leverages Pointer Networks to better address problems related with dynamic time-dependent constraints. Among its various applications, the OPTW can be used to model the Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP). We train the Pointer Network with the TTDP problem in mind, by sampling variables that can change across tourists visiting a particular instance-region: starting position, starting time, available time, and the scores given to each point of interest. Once a model-region is trained, it can infer a solution for a particular tourist using beam search. We based the assessment of our approach on several existing benchmark OPTW instances. We show that it generalizes across different tourists that visit each region and that it generally outperforms the most commonly used heuristic, while computing the solution in realistic times.
Acoustics Based Intent Recognition Using Discovered Phonetic Units for Low Resource Languages
Authors: Akshat Gupta, Xinjian Li, Sai Krishna Rallabandi, Alan W Black
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Cross-Lingual Transfer, intent-classification, Intent Classification, Intent Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

With recent advancements in language technologies, humans are now speaking to devices. Increasing the reach of spoken language technologies requires building systems in local languages. A major bottleneck here are the underlying data-intensive parts that make up such systems, including automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems that require large amounts of labelled data. With the aim of aiding development of spoken dialog systems in low resourced languages, we propose a novel acoustics based intent recognition system that uses discovered phonetic units for intent classification. The system is made up of two blocks - the first block is a universal phone recognition system that generates a transcript of discovered phonetic units for the input audio, and the second block performs intent classification from the generated phonetic transcripts. We propose a CNN+LSTM based architecture and present results for two languages families - Indic languages and Romance languages, for two different intent recognition tasks. We also perform multilingual training of our intent classifier and show improved cross-lingual transfer and zero-shot performance on an unknown language within the same language family.
Exploring the limits of Concurrency in ML Training on Google TPUs
Authors: Sameer Kumar, James Bradbury, Cliff Young, Yu Emma Wang, Anselm Levskaya, Blake Hechtman, Dehao Chen, HyoukJoong Lee, Mehmet Deveci, Naveen Kumar, Pankaj Kanwar, Shibo Wang, Skye Wanderman-Milne, Steve Lacy, Tao Wang, Tayo Oguntebi, Yazhou Zu, Yuanzhong Xu, Andy Swing
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00

Recent results in language understanding using neural networks have required training hardware of unprecedentedscale, with thousands of chips cooperating on a single training run. This paper presents techniques to scaleML models on the Google TPU Multipod, a mesh with 4096 TPU-v3 chips. We discuss model parallelism toovercome scaling limitations from the fixed batch size in data parallelism, communication/collective optimizations,distributed evaluation of training metrics, and host input processing scaling optimizations. These techniques aredemonstrated in both the TensorFlow and JAX programming frameworks. We also present performance resultsfrom the recent Google submission to the MLPerf-v0.7 benchmark contest, achieving record training times from16 to 28 seconds in four MLPerf models on the Google TPU-v3 Multipod machine.
Graph cuts always find a global optimum for Potts models (with a catch)
Authors: Hunter Lang, David Sontag, Aravindan Vijayaraghavan
Date: 2020-11-07 00:00:00

We prove that the $\alpha$-expansion algorithm for MAP inference always returns a globally optimal assignment for Markov Random Fields with Potts pairwise potentials, with a catch: the returned assignment is only guaranteed to be optimal for an instance within a small perturbation of the original problem instance. In other words, all local minima with respect to expansion moves are global minima to slightly perturbed versions of the problem. On "real-world" instances, MAP assignments of small perturbations of the problem should be very similar to the MAP assignment(s) of the original problem instance. We design an algorithm that can certify whether this is the case in practice. On several MAP inference problem instances from computer vision, this algorithm certifies that MAP solutions to all of these perturbations are very close to solutions of the original instance. These results taken together give a cohesive explanation for the good performance of "graph cuts" algorithms in practice. Every local expansion minimum is a global minimum in a small perturbation of the problem, and all of these global minima are close to the original solution.
Motion Prediction on Self-driving Cars: A Review
Authors: Shahrokh Paravarzar, Belqes Mohammad
Date: 2020-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Reinforcement Learning, motion prediction, Object Tracking, Prediction, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Self-Driving Cars

The autonomous vehicle motion prediction literature is reviewed. Motion prediction is the most challenging task in autonomous vehicles and self-drive cars. These challenges have been discussed. Later on, the state-of-theart has reviewed based on the most recent literature and the current challenges are discussed. The state-of-the-art consists of classical and physical methods, deep learning networks, and reinforcement learning. prons and cons of the methods and gap of the research presented in this review. Finally, the literature surrounding object tracking and motion will be presented. As a result, deep reinforcement learning is the best candidate to tackle self-driving cars.