pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ML4CO: Is GCNN All You Need? Graph Convolutional Neural Networks Produce Strong Baselines For Combinatorial Optimization Problems, If Tuned and Trained Properly, on Appropriate Data
Authors: Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi, Yong Zhang
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: All, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Combinatorial Optimization

The 2021 NeurIPS Machine Learning for Combinatorial Optimization (ML4CO) competition was designed with the goal of improving state-of-the-art combinatorial optimization solvers by replacing key heuristic components with machine learning models. The competition's main scientific question was the following: is machine learning a viable option for improving traditional combinatorial optimization solvers on specific problem distributions, when historical data is available? This was motivated by the fact that in many practical scenarios, the data changes only slightly between the repetitions of a combinatorial optimization problem, and this is an area where machine learning models are particularly powerful at. This paper summarizes the solution and lessons learned by the Huawei EI-OROAS team in the dual task of the competition. The submission of our team achieved the second place in the final ranking, with a very close distance to the first spot. In addition, our solution was ranked first consistently for several weekly leaderboard updates before the final evaluation. We provide insights gained from a large number of experiments, and argue that a simple Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCNNs) can achieve state-of-the-art results if trained and tuned properly.
Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning with Knowledge Graphs: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Jiaoyan Chen, Yuxia Geng, Zhuo Chen, Jeff Z. Pan, Yuan He, Wen Zhang, Ian Horrocks, Huajun Chen
Date: 2021-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Few-Shot Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modelling, Question Answering, text-classification, Text Classification, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Word Embeddings, Zero-Shot Learning

Machine learning especially deep neural networks have achieved great success but many of them often rely on a number of labeled samples for supervision. As sufficient labeled training data are not always ready due to e.g., continuously emerging prediction targets and costly sample annotation in real world applications, machine learning with sample shortage is now being widely investigated. Among all these studies, many prefer to utilize auxiliary information including those in the form of Knowledge Graph (KG) to reduce the reliance on labeled samples. In this survey, we have comprehensively reviewed over 90 papers about KG-aware research for two major sample shortage settings -- zero-shot learning (ZSL) where some classes to be predicted have no labeled samples, and few-shot learning (FSL) where some classes to be predicted have only a small number of labeled samples that are available. We first introduce KGs used in ZSL and FSL as well as their construction methods, and then systematically categorize and summarize KG-aware ZSL and FSL methods, dividing them into different paradigms such as the mapping-based, the data augmentation, the propagation-based and the optimization-based. We next present different applications, including not only KG augmented prediction tasks such as image classification, question answering, text classification and knowledge extraction, but also KG completion tasks, and some typical evaluation resources for each task. We eventually discuss some challenges and open problems from different perspectives.
Fine-grained Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Duo Wang, Salah Karout
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Self-Supervised Learning

Multi-Modal Self-Supervised Learning from videos has been shown to improve model's performance on various downstream tasks. However, such Self-Supervised pre-training requires large batch sizes and a large amount of computation resources due to the noise present in the uncurated data. This is partly due to the fact that the prevalent training scheme is trained on coarse-grained setting, in which vectors representing the whole video clips or natural language sentences are used for computing similarity. Such scheme makes training noisy as part of the video clips can be totally not correlated with the other-modality input such as text description. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained multi-modal self-supervised training scheme that computes the similarity between embeddings at finer-scale (such as individual feature map embeddings and embeddings of phrases), and uses attention mechanisms to reduce noisy pairs' weighting in the loss function. We show that with the proposed pre-training scheme, we can train smaller models, with smaller batch-size and much less computational resources to achieve downstream tasks performances comparable to State-Of-The-Art, for tasks including action recognition and text-image retrievals.
NinjaDesc: Content-Concealing Visual Descriptors via Adversarial Learning
Authors: Tony Ng, Hyo Jin Kim, Vincent Lee, Daniel DeTone, Tsun-Yi Yang, Tianwei Shen, Eddy Ilg, Vassileios Balntas, Krystian Mikolajczyk, Chris Sweeney
Date: 2021-12-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Camera Localization, Image Reconstruction

In the light of recent analyses on privacy-concerning scene revelation from visual descriptors, we develop descriptors that conceal the input image content. In particular, we propose an adversarial learning framework for training visual descriptors that prevent image reconstruction, while maintaining the matching accuracy. We let a feature encoding network and image reconstruction network compete with each other, such that the feature encoder tries to impede the image reconstruction with its generated descriptors, while the reconstructor tries to recover the input image from the descriptors. The experimental results demonstrate that the visual descriptors obtained with our method significantly deteriorate the image reconstruction quality with minimal impact on correspondence matching and camera localization performance.
Multimodal Personality Recognition using Cross-Attention Transformer and Behaviour Encoding
Authors: Tanay Agrawal, Dhruv Agarwal, Michal Balazia, Neelabh Sinha, Francois Bremond
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00

Personality computing and affective computing have gained recent interest in many research areas. The datasets for the task generally have multiple modalities like video, audio, language and bio-signals. In this paper, we propose a flexible model for the task which exploits all available data. The task involves complex relations and to avoid using a large model for video processing specifically, we propose the use of behaviour encoding which boosts performance with minimal change to the model. Cross-attention using transformers has become popular in recent times and is utilised for fusion of different modalities. Since long term relations may exist, breaking the input into chunks is not desirable, thus the proposed model processes the entire input together. Our experiments show the importance of each of the above contributions
Neuroevolution deep learning architecture search for estimation of river surface elevation from photogrammetric Digital Surface Models
Authors: Radosław Szostak, Marcin Pietroń, Mirosław Zimnoch, Przemysław Wachniew, Paweł Ćwiąkała, Edyta Puniach
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00

Development of the new methods of surface water observation is crucial in the perspective of increasingly frequent extreme hydrological events related to global warming and increasing demand for water. Orthophotos and digital surface models (DSMs) obtained using UAV photogrammetry can be used to determine the Water Surface Elevation (WSE) of a river. However, this task is difficult due to disturbances of the water surface on DSMs caused by limitations of photogrammetric algorithms. In this study, machine learning was used to extract a WSE value from disturbed photogrammetric data. A brand new dataset has been prepared specifically for this purpose by hydrology and photogrammetry experts. The new method is an important step toward automating water surface level measurements with high spatial and temporal resolution. Such data can be used to validate and calibrate of hydrological, hydraulic and hydrodynamic models making hydrological forecasts more accurate, in particular predicting extreme and dangerous events such as floods or droughts. For our knowledge this is the first approach in which dataset was created for this purpose and deep learning models were used for this task. Additionally, neuroevolution algorithm was set to explore different architectures to find local optimal models and non-gradient search was performed to fine-tune the model parameters. The achieved results have better accuracy compared to manual methods of determining WSE from photogrammetric DSMs.
A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Solving the Traveling Salesman Problem with Drone
Authors: Aigerim Bogyrbayeva, Taehyun Yoon, Hanbum Ko, Sungbin Lim, Hyokun Yun, Changhyun Kwon
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Computational Efficiency, Decoder, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Traveling Salesman Problem

Reinforcement learning has recently shown promise in learning quality solutions in many combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, the attention-based encoder-decoder models show high effectiveness on various routing problems, including the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Unfortunately, they perform poorly for the TSP with Drone (TSP-D), requiring routing a heterogeneous fleet of vehicles in coordination -- a truck and a drone. In TSP-D, the two vehicles are moving in tandem and may need to wait at a node for the other vehicle to join. State-less attention-based decoder fails to make such coordination between vehicles. We propose a hybrid model that uses an attention encoder and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network decoder, in which the decoder's hidden state can represent the sequence of actions made. We empirically demonstrate that such a hybrid model improves upon a purely attention-based model for both solution quality and computational efficiency. Our experiments on the min-max Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (mmCVRP) also confirm that the hybrid model is more suitable for the coordinated routing of multiple vehicles than the attention-based model. The proposed model demonstrates comparable results as the operations research baseline methods.
Diformer: Directional Transformer for Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Minghan Wang, Jiaxin Guo, Yuxia Wang, Daimeng Wei, Hengchao Shang, Chang Su, Yimeng Chen, Yinglu Li, Min Zhang, Shimin Tao, Hao Yang
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: EAMT 2022 6
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Translation

Autoregressive (AR) and Non-autoregressive (NAR) models have their own superiority on the performance and latency, combining them into one model may take advantage of both. Current combination frameworks focus more on the integration of multiple decoding paradigms with a unified generative model, e.g. Masked Language Model. However, the generalization can be harmful to the performance due to the gap between training objective and inference. In this paper, we aim to close the gap by preserving the original objective of AR and NAR under a unified framework. Specifically, we propose the Directional Transformer (Diformer) by jointly modelling AR and NAR into three generation directions (left-to-right, right-to-left and straight) with a newly introduced direction variable, which works by controlling the prediction of each token to have specific dependencies under that direction. The unification achieved by direction successfully preserves the original dependency assumption used in AR and NAR, retaining both generalization and performance. Experiments on 4 WMT benchmarks demonstrate that Diformer outperforms current united-modelling works with more than 1.5 BLEU points for both AR and NAR decoding, and is also competitive to the state-of-the-art independent AR and NAR models.
MOSAIC: Mobile Segmentation via decoding Aggregated Information and encoded Context
Authors: Weijun Wang, Andrew Howard
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We present a next-generation neural network architecture, MOSAIC, for efficient and accurate semantic image segmentation on mobile devices. MOSAIC is designed using commonly supported neural operations by diverse mobile hardware platforms for flexible deployment across various mobile platforms. With a simple asymmetric encoder-decoder structure which consists of an efficient multi-scale context encoder and a light-weight hybrid decoder to recover spatial details from aggregated information, MOSAIC achieves new state-of-the-art performance while balancing accuracy and computational cost. Deployed on top of a tailored feature extraction backbone based on a searched classification network, MOSAIC achieves a 5% absolute accuracy gain surpassing the current industry standard MLPerf models and state-of-the-art architectures.
An Alternate Policy Gradient Estimator for Softmax Policies
Authors: Shivam Garg, Samuele Tosatto, Yangchen Pan, Martha White, A. Rupam Mahmood
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00

Policy gradient (PG) estimators are ineffective in dealing with softmax policies that are sub-optimally saturated, which refers to the situation when the policy concentrates its probability mass on sub-optimal actions. Sub-optimal policy saturation may arise from bad policy initialization or sudden changes in the environment that occur after the policy has already converged. Current softmax PG estimators require a large number of updates to overcome policy saturation, which causes low sample efficiency and poor adaptability to new situations. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel PG estimator for softmax policies that utilizes the bias in the critic estimate and the noise present in the reward signal to escape the saturated regions of the policy parameter space. Our theoretical analysis and experiments, conducted on bandits and various reinforcement learning environments, show that this new estimator is significantly more robust to policy saturation.
Recur, Attend or Convolve? On Whether Temporal Modeling Matters for Cross-Domain Robustness in Action Recognition
Authors: Sofia Broomé, Ernest Pokropek, Boyu Li, Hedvig Kjellström
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Domain Generalization, Inductive Bias

Most action recognition models today are highly parameterized, and evaluated on datasets with appearance-wise distinct classes. It has also been shown that 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) tend to be biased toward texture rather than shape in still image recognition tasks, in contrast to humans. Taken together, this raises suspicion that large video models partly learn spurious spatial texture correlations rather than to track relevant shapes over time to infer generalizable semantics from their movement. A natural way to avoid parameter explosion when learning visual patterns over time is to make use of recurrence. Biological vision consists of abundant recurrent circuitry, and is superior to computer vision in terms of domain shift generalization. In this article, we empirically study whether the choice of low-level temporal modeling has consequences for texture bias and cross-domain robustness. In order to enable a light-weight and systematic assessment of the ability to capture temporal structure, not revealed from single frames, we provide the Temporal Shape (TS) dataset, as well as modified domains of Diving48 allowing for the investigation of spatial texture bias in video models. The combined results of our experiments indicate that sound physical inductive bias such as recurrence in temporal modeling may be advantageous when robustness to domain shift is important for the task.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Driving: A Comprehensive Overview and Field Guide for Future Research Directions
Authors: Shahin Atakishiyev, Mohammad Salameh, Hengshuai Yao, Randy Goebel
Date: 2021-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Decision Making, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Autonomous driving has achieved significant milestones in research and development over the last two decades. There is increasing interest in the field as the deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) promises safer and more ecologically friendly transportation systems. With the rapid progress in computationally powerful artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, AVs can sense their environment with high precision, make safe real-time decisions, and operate reliably without human intervention. However, intelligent decision-making in such vehicles is not generally understandable by humans in the current state of the art, and such deficiency hinders this technology from being socially acceptable. Hence, aside from making safe real-time decisions, AVs must also explain their AI-guided decision-making process in order to be regulatory compliant across many jurisdictions. Our study sheds comprehensive light on the development of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches for AVs. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we provide a thorough overview of the state-of-the-art and emerging approaches for XAI-based autonomous driving. We then propose a conceptual framework that considers the essential elements for explainable end-to-end autonomous driving. Finally, we present XAI-based prospective directions and emerging paradigms for future directions that hold promise for enhancing transparency, trustworthiness, and societal acceptance of AVs.
Decompose the Sounds and Pixels, Recompose the Events
Authors: Varshanth R. Rao, Md Ibrahim Khalil, Haoda Li, Peng Dai, Juwei Lu
Date: 2021-12-21 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a framework centering around a novel architecture called the Event Decomposition Recomposition Network (EDRNet) to tackle the Audio-Visual Event (AVE) localization problem in the supervised and weakly supervised settings. AVEs in the real world exhibit common unravelling patterns (termed as Event Progress Checkpoints (EPC)), which humans can perceive through the cooperation of their auditory and visual senses. Unlike earlier methods which attempt to recognize entire event sequences, the EDRNet models EPCs and inter-EPC relationships using stacked temporal convolutions. Based on the postulation that EPC representations are theoretically consistent for an event category, we introduce the State Machine Based Video Fusion, a novel augmentation technique that blends source videos using different EPC template sequences. Additionally, we design a new loss function called the Land-Shore-Sea loss to compactify continuous foreground and background representations. Lastly, to alleviate the issue of confusing events during weak supervision, we propose a prediction stabilization method called Bag to Instance Label Correction. Experiments on the AVE dataset show that our collective framework outperforms the state-of-the-art by a sizable margin.
SeMask: Semantically Masked Transformers for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jitesh Jain, Anukriti Singh, Nikita Orlov, Zilong Huang, Jiachen Li, Steven Walton, Humphrey Shi
Date: 2021-12-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: arXiv 2021 12
Tasks: Decoder, Semantic Segmentation

Finetuning a pretrained backbone in the encoder part of an image transformer network has been the traditional approach for the semantic segmentation task. However, such an approach leaves out the semantic context that an image provides during the encoding stage. This paper argues that incorporating semantic information of the image into pretrained hierarchical transformer-based backbones while finetuning improves the performance considerably. To achieve this, we propose SeMask, a simple and effective framework that incorporates semantic information into the encoder with the help of a semantic attention operation. In addition, we use a lightweight semantic decoder during training to provide supervision to the intermediate semantic prior maps at every stage. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating semantic priors enhances the performance of the established hierarchical encoders with a slight increase in the number of FLOPs. We provide empirical proof by integrating SeMask into Swin Transformer and Mix Transformer backbones as our encoder paired with different decoders. Our framework achieves a new state-of-the-art of 58.25% mIoU on the ADE20K dataset and improvements of over 3% in the mIoU metric on the Cityscapes dataset. The code and checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/SeMask-Segmentation .
JoJoGAN: One Shot Face Stylization
Authors: Min Jin Chong, David Forsyth
Date: 2021-12-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: arXiv 2021 12
Tasks: Image Stylization, One-Shot Face Stylization

A style mapper applies some fixed style to its input images (so, for example, taking faces to cartoons). This paper describes a simple procedure -- JoJoGAN -- to learn a style mapper from a single example of the style. JoJoGAN uses a GAN inversion procedure and StyleGAN's style-mixing property to produce a substantial paired dataset from a single example style. The paired dataset is then used to fine-tune a StyleGAN. An image can then be style mapped by GAN-inversion followed by the fine-tuned StyleGAN. JoJoGAN needs just one reference and as little as 30 seconds of training time. JoJoGAN can use extreme style references (say, animal faces) successfully. Furthermore, one can control what aspects of the style are used and how much of the style is applied. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation show that JoJoGAN produces high quality high resolution images that vastly outperform the current state-of-the-art.
Adaptive Modeling Against Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Zhiwen Yan, Teck Khim Ng
Date: 2021-12-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense, Deep Learning

Adversarial training, the process of training a deep learning model with adversarial data, is one of the most successful adversarial defense methods for deep learning models. We have found that the robustness to white-box attack of an adversarially trained model can be further improved if we fine tune this model in inference stage to adapt to the adversarial input, with the extra information in it. We introduce an algorithm that "post trains" the model at inference stage between the original output class and a "neighbor" class, with existing training data. The accuracy of pre-trained Fast-FGSM CIFAR10 classifier base model against white-box projected gradient attack (PGD) can be significantly improved from 46.8% to 64.5% with our algorithm.