pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Autonomous learning of multiple, context-dependent tasks
Authors: Vieri Giuliano Santucci, Davide Montella, Bruno Castro da Silva, Gianluca Baldassarre
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

When facing the problem of autonomously learning multiple tasks with reinforcement learning systems, researchers typically focus on solutions where just one parametrised policy per task is sufficient to solve them. However, in complex environments presenting different contexts, the same task might need a set of different skills to be solved. These situations pose two challenges: (a) to recognise the different contexts that need different policies; (b) quickly learn the policies to accomplish the same tasks in the new discovered contexts. These two challenges are even harder if faced within an open-ended learning framework where an agent has to autonomously discover the goals that it might accomplish in a given environment, and also to learn the motor skills to accomplish them. We propose a novel open-ended learning robot architecture, C-GRAIL, that solves the two challenges in an integrated fashion. In particular, the architecture is able to detect new relevant contests, and ignore irrelevant ones, on the basis of the decrease of the expected performance for a given goal. Moreover, the architecture can quickly learn the policies for the new contexts by exploiting transfer learning importing knowledge from already acquired policies. The architecture is tested in a simulated robotic environment involving a robot that autonomously learns to reach relevant target objects in the presence of multiple obstacles generating several different obstacles. The proposed architecture outperforms other models not using the proposed autonomous context-discovery and transfer-learning mechanisms.
A Temporal Neural Network Architecture for Online Learning
Authors: James E. Smith
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Decoder

A long-standing proposition is that by emulating the operation of the brain's neocortex, a spiking neural network (SNN) can achieve similar desirable features: flexible learning, speed, and efficiency. Temporal neural networks (TNNs) are SNNs that communicate and process information encoded as relative spike times (in contrast to spike rates). A TNN architecture is proposed, and, as a proof-of-concept, TNN operation is demonstrated within the larger context of online supervised classification. First, through unsupervised learning, a TNN partitions input patterns into clusters based on similarity. The TNN then passes a cluster identifier to a simple online supervised decoder which finishes the classification task. The TNN learning process adjusts synaptic weights by using only signals local to each synapse, and clustering behavior emerges globally. The system architecture is described at an abstraction level analogous to the gate and register transfer levels in conventional digital design. Besides features of the overall architecture, several TNN components are new to this work. Although not addressed directly, the overall research objective is a direct hardware implementation of TNNs. Consequently, all the architecture elements are simple, and processing is done at very low precision.
SFTrack++: A Fast Learnable Spectral Segmentation Approach for Space-Time Consistent Tracking
Authors: Elena Burceanu
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Object, Object Tracking

We propose an object tracking method, SFTrack++, that smoothly learns to preserve the tracked object consistency over space and time dimensions by taking a spectral clustering approach over the graph of pixels from the video, using a fast 3D filtering formulation for finding the principal eigenvector of this graph's adjacency matrix. To better capture complex aspects of the tracked object, we enrich our formulation to multi-channel inputs, which permit different points of view for the same input. The channel inputs are in our experiments, the output of multiple tracking methods. After combining them, instead of relying only on hidden layers representations to predict a good tracking bounding box, we explicitly learn an intermediate, more refined one, namely the segmentation map of the tracked object. This prevents the rough common bounding box approach to introduce noise and distractors in the learning process. We test our method, SFTrack++, on five tracking benchmarks: OTB, UAV, NFS, GOT-10k, and TrackingNet, using five top trackers as input. Our experimental results validate the pre-registered hypothesis. We obtain consistent and robust results, competitive on the three traditional benchmarks (OTB, UAV, NFS) and significantly on top of others (by over $1.1\%$ on accuracy) on GOT-10k and TrackingNet, which are newer, larger, and more varied datasets.
Deep orthogonal linear networks are shallow
Authors: Pierre Ablin
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

We consider the problem of training a deep orthogonal linear network, which consists of a product of orthogonal matrices, with no non-linearity in-between. We show that training the weights with Riemannian gradient descent is equivalent to training the whole factorization by gradient descent. This means that there is no effect of overparametrization and implicit bias at all in this setting: training such a deep, overparametrized, network is perfectly equivalent to training a one-layer shallow network.
Fast and Complete: Enabling Complete Neural Network Verification with Rapid and Massively Parallel Incomplete Verifiers
Authors: Kaidi Xu, huan zhang, Shiqi Wang, Yihan Wang, Suman Jana, Xue Lin, Cho-Jui Hsieh
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2021 1
Tasks: GPU

Formal verification of neural networks (NNs) is a challenging and important problem. Existing efficient complete solvers typically require the branch-and-bound (BaB) process, which splits the problem domain into sub-domains and solves each sub-domain using faster but weaker incomplete verifiers, such as Linear Programming (LP) on linearly relaxed sub-domains. In this paper, we propose to use the backward mode linear relaxation based perturbation analysis (LiRPA) to replace LP during the BaB process, which can be efficiently implemented on the typical machine learning accelerators such as GPUs and TPUs. However, unlike LP, LiRPA when applied naively can produce much weaker bounds and even cannot check certain conflicts of sub-domains during splitting, making the entire procedure incomplete after BaB. To address these challenges, we apply a fast gradient based bound tightening procedure combined with batch splits and the design of minimal usage of LP bound procedure, enabling us to effectively use LiRPA on the accelerator hardware for the challenging complete NN verification problem and significantly outperform LP-based approaches. On a single GPU, we demonstrate an order of magnitude speedup compared to existing LP-based approaches.
Generalized Pose-and-Scale Estimation using 4-Point Congruence Constraints
Authors: Victor Fragoso, Sudipta Sinha
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

We present gP4Pc, a new method for computing the absolute pose of a generalized camera with unknown internal scale from four corresponding 3D point-and-ray pairs. Unlike most pose-and-scale methods, gP4Pc is based on constraints arising from the congruence of shapes defined by two sets of four points related by an unknown similarity transformation. By choosing a novel parametrization for the problem, we derive a system of four quadratic equations in four scalar variables. The variables represent the distances of 3D points along the rays from the camera centers. After solving this system via Groebner basis-based automatic polynomial solvers, we compute the similarity transformation using an efficient 3D point-point alignment method. We also propose a specialized variant of our solver for the case of coplanar points, which is computationally very efficient and about 3x faster than the fastest existing solver. Our experiments on real and synthetic datasets, demonstrate that gP4Pc is among the fastest methods in terms of total running time when used within a RANSAC framework, while achieving competitive numerical stability, accuracy, and robustness to noise.
Leveraging Regular Fundus Images for Training UWF Fundus Diagnosis Models via Adversarial Learning and Pseudo-Labeling
Authors: Lie Ju, Xin Wang, Xin Zhao, Paul Bonnington, Tom Drummond, ZongYuan Ge
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Lesion Detection

Recently, ultra-widefield (UWF) 200\degree~fundus imaging by Optos cameras has gradually been introduced because of its broader insights for detecting more information on the fundus than regular 30 degree - 60 degree fundus cameras. Compared with UWF fundus images, regular fundus images contain a large amount of high-quality and well-annotated data. Due to the domain gap, models trained by regular fundus images to recognize UWF fundus images perform poorly. Hence, given that annotating medical data is labor intensive and time consuming, in this paper, we explore how to leverage regular fundus images to improve the limited UWF fundus data and annotations for more efficient training. We propose the use of a modified cycle generative adversarial network (CycleGAN) model to bridge the gap between regular and UWF fundus and generate additional UWF fundus images for training. A consistency regularization term is proposed in the loss of the GAN to improve and regulate the quality of the generated data. Our method does not require that images from the two domains be paired or even that the semantic labels be the same, which provides great convenience for data collection. Furthermore, we show that our method is robust to noise and errors introduced by the generated unlabeled data with the pseudo-labeling technique. We evaluated the effectiveness of our methods on several common fundus diseases and tasks, such as diabetic retinopathy (DR) classification, lesion detection and tessellated fundus segmentation. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method simultaneously achieves superior generalizability of the learned representations and performance improvements in multiple tasks.
Post or Tweet: Lessons from a Study of Facebook and Twitter Usage
Authors: Tasos Spiliotopoulos, Ian Oakley
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00

This workshop paper reports on an ongoing mixed-methods study on the two arguably most popular social network sites, Facebook and Twitter, for the same users. The overarching goal of the study is to shed light into the nuances of social media selection and cross-platform use by combining survey data about participants' motivations with usage data collected via API extraction. We describe the set-up of the study and focus our discussion on the challenges and insights relating to participant recruiting and data collection, handling and dimensionalizing usage data, and comparing usage data across sites.
CASTELO: Clustered Atom Subtypes aidEd Lead Optimization -- a combined machine learning and molecular modeling method
Authors: Leili Zhang, Giacomo Domeniconi, Chih-Chieh Yang, Seung-gu Kang, Ruhong Zhou, Guojing Cong
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering, Drug Discovery

Drug discovery is a multi-stage process that comprises two costly major steps: pre-clinical research and clinical trials. Among its stages, lead optimization easily consumes more than half of the pre-clinical budget. We propose a combined machine learning and molecular modeling approach that automates lead optimization workflow \textit{in silico}. The initial data collection is achieved with physics-based molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. Contact matrices are calculated as the preliminary features extracted from the simulations. To take advantage of the temporal information from the simulations, we enhanced contact matrices data with temporal dynamism representation, which are then modeled with unsupervised convolutional variational autoencoder (CVAE). Finally, conventional clustering method and CVAE-based clustering method are compared with metrics to rank the submolecular structures and propose potential candidates for lead optimization. With no need for extensive structure-activity relationship database, our method provides new hints for drug modification hotspots which can be used to improve drug efficacy. Our workflow can potentially reduce the lead optimization turnaround time from months/years to days compared with the conventional labor-intensive process and thus can potentially become a valuable tool for medical researchers.
Navigating the GAN Parameter Space for Semantic Image Editing
Authors: Anton Cherepkov, Andrey Voynov, Artem Babenko
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Image Restoration, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are currently an indispensable tool for visual editing, being a standard component of image-to-image translation and image restoration pipelines. Furthermore, GANs are especially useful for controllable generation since their latent spaces contain a wide range of interpretable directions, well suited for semantic editing operations. By gradually changing latent codes along these directions, one can produce impressive visual effects, unattainable without GANs. In this paper, we significantly expand the range of visual effects achievable with the state-of-the-art models, like StyleGAN2. In contrast to existing works, which mostly operate by latent codes, we discover interpretable directions in the space of the generator parameters. By several simple methods, we explore this space and demonstrate that it also contains a plethora of interpretable directions, which are an excellent source of non-trivial semantic manipulations. The discovered manipulations cannot be achieved by transforming the latent codes and can be used to edit both synthetic and real images. We release our code and models and hope they will serve as a handy tool for further efforts on GAN-based image editing.
Spherical Interpolated Convolutional Network with Distance-Feature Density for 3D Semantic Segmentation of Point Clouds
Authors: Guangming Wang, Yehui Yang, Huixin Zhang, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Feature Correlation, Semantic Segmentation

The semantic segmentation of point clouds is an important part of the environment perception for robots. However, it is difficult to directly adopt the traditional 3D convolution kernel to extract features from raw 3D point clouds because of the unstructured property of point clouds. In this paper, a spherical interpolated convolution operator is proposed to replace the traditional grid-shaped 3D convolution operator. This newly proposed feature extraction operator improves the accuracy of the network and reduces the parameters of the network. In addition, this paper analyzes the defect of point cloud interpolation methods based on the distance as the interpolation weight and proposes the self-learned distance-feature density by combining the distance and the feature correlation. The proposed method makes the feature extraction of spherical interpolated convolution network more rational and effective. The effectiveness of the proposed network is demonstrated on the 3D semantic segmentation task of point clouds. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves good performance on the ScanNet dataset and Paris-Lille-3D dataset.
Connecting Context-specific Adaptation in Humans to Meta-learning
Authors: Rachit Dubey, Erin Grant, Michael Luo, Karthik Narasimhan, Thomas Griffiths
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Cognitive control, the ability of a system to adapt to the demands of a task, is an integral part of cognition. A widely accepted fact about cognitive control is that it is context-sensitive: Adults and children alike infer information about a task's demands from contextual cues and use these inferences to learn from ambiguous cues. However, the precise way in which people use contextual cues to guide adaptation to a new task remains poorly understood. This work connects the context-sensitive nature of cognitive control to a method for meta-learning with context-conditioned adaptation. We begin by identifying an essential difference between human learning and current approaches to meta-learning: In contrast to humans, existing meta-learning algorithms do not make use of task-specific contextual cues but instead rely exclusively on online feedback in the form of task-specific labels or rewards. To remedy this, we introduce a framework for using contextual information about a task to guide the initialization of task-specific models before adaptation to online feedback. We show how context-conditioned meta-learning can capture human behavior in a cognitive task and how it can be scaled to improve the speed of learning in various settings, including few-shot classification and low-sample reinforcement learning. Our work demonstrates that guiding meta-learning with task information can capture complex, human-like behavior, thereby deepening our understanding of cognitive control.
Enhancing Diversity in Teacher-Student Networks via Asymmetric branches for Unsupervised Person Re-identification
Authors: Hao Chen, Benoit Lagadec, Francois Bremond
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Domain Adaptation, Person Re-Identification, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

The objective of unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) is to learn discriminative features without labor-intensive identity annotations. State-of-the-art unsupervised Re-ID methods assign pseudo labels to unlabeled images in the target domain and learn from these noisy pseudo labels. Recently introduced Mean Teacher Model is a promising way to mitigate the label noise. However, during the training, self-ensembled teacher-student networks quickly converge to a consensus which leads to a local minimum. We explore the possibility of using an asymmetric structure inside neural network to address this problem. First, asymmetric branches are proposed to extract features in different manners, which enhances the feature diversity in appearance signatures. Then, our proposed cross-branch supervision allows one branch to get supervision from the other branch, which transfers distinct knowledge and enhances the weight diversity between teacher and student networks. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method can significantly surpass the performance of previous work on both unsupervised domain adaptation and fully unsupervised Re-ID tasks.
Image Generators with Conditionally-Independent Pixel Synthesis
Authors: Ivan Anokhin, Kirill Demochkin, Taras Khakhulin, Gleb Sterkin, Victor Lempitsky, Denis Korzhenkov
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: Image Generation

Existing image generator networks rely heavily on spatial convolutions and, optionally, self-attention blocks in order to gradually synthesize images in a coarse-to-fine manner. Here, we present a new architecture for image generators, where the color value at each pixel is computed independently given the value of a random latent vector and the coordinate of that pixel. No spatial convolutions or similar operations that propagate information across pixels are involved during the synthesis. We analyze the modeling capabilities of such generators when trained in an adversarial fashion, and observe the new generators to achieve similar generation quality to state-of-the-art convolutional generators. We also investigate several interesting properties unique to the new architecture.
Gradient Descent for Deep Matrix Factorization: Dynamics and Implicit Bias towards Low Rank
Authors: Hung-Hsu Chou, Carsten Gieshoff, Johannes Maly, Holger Rauhut
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Denoising

In deep learning, it is common to use more network parameters than training points. In such scenarioof over-parameterization, there are usually multiple networks that achieve zero training error so that thetraining algorithm induces an implicit bias on the computed solution. In practice, (stochastic) gradientdescent tends to prefer solutions which generalize well, which provides a possible explanation of thesuccess of deep learning. In this paper we analyze the dynamics of gradient descent in the simplifiedsetting of linear networks and of an estimation problem. Although we are not in an overparameterizedscenario, our analysis nevertheless provides insights into the phenomenon of implicit bias. In fact, wederive a rigorous analysis of the dynamics of vanilla gradient descent, and characterize the dynamicalconvergence of the spectrum. We are able to accurately locate time intervals where the effective rankof the iterates is close to the effective rank of a low-rank projection of the ground-truth matrix. Inpractice, those intervals can be used as criteria for early stopping if a certain regularity is desired. Wealso provide empirical evidence for implicit bias in more general scenarios, such as matrix sensing andrandom initialization. This suggests that deep learning prefers trajectories whose complexity (measuredin terms of effective rank) is monotonically increasing, which we believe is a fundamental concept for thetheoretical understanding of deep learning.
Robust Autonomous Landing of UAV in Non-Cooperative Environments based on Dynamic Time Camera-LiDAR Fusion
Authors: Lyujie Chen, Xiaming Yuan, Yao Xiao, Yiding Zhang, Jihong Zhu
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Completion

Selecting safe landing sites in non-cooperative environments is a key step towards the full autonomy of UAVs. However, the existing methods have the common problems of poor generalization ability and robustness. Their performance in unknown environments is significantly degraded and the error cannot be self-detected and corrected. In this paper, we construct a UAV system equipped with low-cost LiDAR and binocular cameras to realize autonomous landing in non-cooperative environments by detecting the flat and safe ground area. Taking advantage of the non-repetitive scanning and high FOV coverage characteristics of LiDAR, we come up with a dynamic time depth completion algorithm. In conjunction with the proposed self-evaluation method of the depth map, our model can dynamically select the LiDAR accumulation time at the inference phase to ensure an accurate prediction result. Based on the depth map, the high-level terrain information such as slope, roughness, and the size of the safe area are derived. We have conducted extensive autonomous landing experiments in a variety of familiar or completely unknown environments, verifying that our model can adaptively balance the accuracy and speed, and the UAV can robustly select a safe landing site.
Reinforcement Learning-based Joint Path and Energy Optimization of Cellular-Connected Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Authors: Arash Hooshmand
Date: 2020-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have attracted considerable research interest recently. Especially when it comes to the realm of Internet of Things, the UAVs with Internet connectivity are one of the main demands. Furthermore, the energy constraint i.e. battery limit is a bottle-neck of the UAVs that can limit their applications. We try to address and solve the energy problem. Therefore, a path planning method for a cellular-connected UAV is proposed that will enable the UAV to plan its path in an area much larger than its battery range by getting recharged in certain positions equipped with power stations (PSs). In addition to the energy constraint, there are also no-fly zones; for example, due to Air to Air (A2A) and Air to Ground (A2G) interference or for lack of necessary connectivity that impose extra constraints in the trajectory optimization of the UAV. No-fly zones determine the infeasible areas that should be avoided. We have used a reinforcement learning (RL) hierarchically to extend typical short-range path planners to consider battery recharge and solve the problem of UAVs in long missions. The problem is simulated for the UAV that flies over a large area, and Q-learning algorithm could enable the UAV to find the optimal path and recharge policy.