pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Rotom: A Meta-Learned Data Augmentation Framework for Entity Matching, Data Cleaning, Text Classification, and Beyond
Authors: Zhengjie Miao, Yuliang Li and Xiaolan Wang
Date: 2021-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Proceedings of the International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD) 2021 6
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Entity Resolution, Management, Meta-Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

Deep Learning revolutionizes almost all fields of computer science including data management. However, the demand for high-quality training data is slowing down deep neural nets' wider adoption. To this end, data augmentation (DA), which generates more labeled examples from existing ones, becomes a common technique. Meanwhile, the risk of creating noisy examples and the large space of hyper-parameters make DA less attractive in practice. We introduce Rotom, a multi-purpose data augmentation framework for a range of data management and mining tasks including entity matching, data cleaning, and text classification. Rotom features InvDA, a new DA operator that generates natural yet diverse augmented examples by formulating DA as a seq2seq task. The key technical novelty of Rotom is a meta-learning framework that automatically learns a policy for combining examples from different DA operators, whereby combinatorially reduces the hyper-parameters space. Our experimental results show that Rotom effectively improves a model's performance by combining multiple DA operators, even when applying them individually does not yield performance improvement. With this strength, Rotom outperforms the state-of-the-art entity matching and data cleaning systems in the low-resource settings as well as two recently proposed DA techniques for text classification.
Audio-Driven Facial Animation by Joint End-to-End Learning of Pose and Emotion
Authors: Tero Karras, Timo Aila, Samuli Laine, Antti Herva, Jaakko Lehtinen
Date: 2017-07-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: SIGGRAPH 2017 7
Tasks: Face Model

We present a machine learning technique for driving 3D facial animation by audio input in real time and with low latency. Our deep neural network learns a mapping from input waveforms to the 3D vertex coordinates of a face model, and simultaneously discovers a compact, latent code that disambiguates the variations in facial expression that cannot be explained by the audio alone. During inference, the latent code can be used as an intuitive control for the emotional state of the face puppet. We train our network with 3–5 minutes of high-quality animation data obtained using traditional, vision-based performance capture methods. Even though our primary goal is to model the speaking style of a single actor, our model yields reasonable results even when driven with audio from other speakers with different gender, accent, or language, as we demonstrate with a user study. The results are applicable to in-game dialogue, low-cost localization, virtual reality avatars, and telepresence
A Recurrent Model for Collective Entity Linking with Adaptive Features
Authors: Xiaoling Zhou, Yukai Miao, Wei Wang, Jianbin Qin
Date: 2020-04-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: AAAI 2020 4
Tasks: Deep Learning, Entity Disambiguation, Entity Linking, Learning-To-Rank

The vast amount of web data enables us to build knowledge bases with unprecedented quality and coverage. Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) is an important task that automatically resolves ambiguous mentions in free text to correct target entries in the knowledge base. Traditional machine learning based methods for NED were outperformed and made obsolete by the state-of-the-art deep learning based models. However, deep learning models are more complex, requiring large amount of training data and lengthy training and parameter tuning time. In this paper, we revisit traditional machine learning techniques and propose a light-weight, tuneable and time-efficient method without using deep learning or deep learning generated features. We propose novel adaptive features that focus on extracting discriminative features to better model similarities between candidate entities and the mention’s context. We learn a local ranking model based on traditional and the new adaptive features based on the learning-to-rank framework. While arriving at linking decisions individually via the local model, our method also takes into consideration the correlation between decisions by running multiple recurrent global models, which can be deemed as a learned local search method. Our method attains performances comparable to the state-of-the-art deep learning-based methods on NED benchmark datasets while being significantly faster to train.
SegViT: Semantic Segmentation with Plain Vision Transformers
Authors: BoWen Zhang, Zhi Tian, Quan Tang, Xiangxiang Chu, Xiaolin Wei, Chunhua Shen, Yifan Liu
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We explore the capability of plain Vision Transformers (ViTs) for semantic segmentation and propose the SegVit. Previous ViT-based segmentation networks usually learn a pixel-level representation from the output of the ViT. Differently, we make use of the fundamental component -- attention mechanism, to generate masks for semantic segmentation. Specifically, we propose the Attention-to-Mask (ATM) module, in which the similarity maps between a set of learnable class tokens and the spatial feature maps are transferred to the segmentation masks. Experiments show that our proposed SegVit using the ATM module outperforms its counterparts using the plain ViT backbone on the ADE20K dataset and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on COCO-Stuff-10K and PASCAL-Context datasets. Furthermore, to reduce the computational cost of the ViT backbone, we propose query-based down-sampling (QD) and query-based up-sampling (QU) to build a Shrunk structure. With the proposed Shrunk structure, the model can save up to $40\%$ computations while maintaining competitive performance.
TetGAN: A Convolutional Neural Network for Tetrahedral Mesh Generation
Authors: William Gao, April Wang, Gal Metzer, Raymond A. Yeh, Rana Hanocka
Date: 2022-10-11 00:00:00

We present TetGAN, a convolutional neural network designed to generate tetrahedral meshes. We represent shapes using an irregular tetrahedral grid which encodes an occupancy and displacement field. Our formulation enables defining tetrahedral convolution, pooling, and upsampling operations to synthesize explicit mesh connectivity with variable topological genus. The proposed neural network layers learn deep features over each tetrahedron and learn to extract patterns within spatial regions across multiple scales. We illustrate the capabilities of our technique to encode tetrahedral meshes into a semantically meaningful latent-space which can be used for shape editing and synthesis. Our project page is at https://threedle.github.io/tetGAN/.
Travel the Same Path: A Novel TSP Solving Strategy
Authors: Pingbang Hu
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Graph Neural Network, Imitation Learning, Traveling Salesman Problem

In this paper, we provide a novel strategy for solving Traveling Salesman Problem, which is a famous combinatorial optimization problem studied intensely in the TCS community. In particular, we consider the imitation learning framework, which helps a deterministic algorithm making good choices whenever it needs to, resulting in a speed up while maintaining the exactness of the solution without suffering from the unpredictability and a potential large deviation. Furthermore, we demonstrate a strong generalization ability of a graph neural network trained under the imitation learning framework. Specifically, the model is capable of solving a large instance of TSP faster than the baseline while has only seen small TSP instances when training.
Long-Form Video-Language Pre-Training with Multimodal Temporal Contrastive Learning
Authors: Yuchong Sun, Hongwei Xue, Ruihua Song, Bei Liu, Huan Yang, Jianlong Fu
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Form, Question Answering, Retrieval, Video Question Answering, Video Retrieval

Large-scale video-language pre-training has shown significant improvement in video-language understanding tasks. Previous studies of video-language pretraining mainly focus on short-form videos (i.e., within 30 seconds) and sentences, leaving long-form video-language pre-training rarely explored. Directly learning representation from long-form videos and language may benefit many long-form video-language understanding tasks. However, it is challenging due to the difficulty of modeling long-range relationships and the heavy computational burden caused by more frames. In this paper, we introduce a Long-Form VIdeo-LAnguage pre-training model (LF-VILA) and train it on a large-scale long-form video and paragraph dataset constructed from an existing public dataset. To effectively capture the rich temporal dynamics and to better align video and language in an efficient end-to-end manner, we introduce two novel designs in our LF-VILA model. We first propose a Multimodal Temporal Contrastive (MTC) loss to learn the temporal relation across different modalities by encouraging fine-grained alignment between long-form videos and paragraphs. Second, we propose a Hierarchical Temporal Window Attention (HTWA) mechanism to effectively capture long-range dependency while reducing computational cost in Transformer. We fine-tune the pre-trained LF-VILA model on seven downstream long-form video-language understanding tasks of paragraph-to-video retrieval and long-form video question-answering, and achieve new state-of-the-art performances. Specifically, our model achieves 16.1% relative improvement on ActivityNet paragraph-to-video retrieval task and 2.4% on How2QA task, respectively. We release our code, dataset, and pre-trained models at https://github.com/microsoft/XPretrain.
Towards Theoretically Inspired Neural Initialization Optimization
Authors: Yibo Yang, Hong Wang, Haobo Yuan, Zhouchen Lin
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00

Automated machine learning has been widely explored to reduce human efforts in designing neural architectures and looking for proper hyperparameters. In the domain of neural initialization, however, similar automated techniques have rarely been studied. Most existing initialization methods are handcrafted and highly dependent on specific architectures. In this paper, we propose a differentiable quantity, named GradCosine, with theoretical insights to evaluate the initial state of a neural network. Specifically, GradCosine is the cosine similarity of sample-wise gradients with respect to the initialized parameters. By analyzing the sample-wise optimization landscape, we show that both the training and test performance of a network can be improved by maximizing GradCosine under gradient norm constraint. Based on this observation, we further propose the neural initialization optimization (NIO) algorithm. Generalized from the sample-wise analysis into the real batch setting, NIO is able to automatically look for a better initialization with negligible cost compared with the training time. With NIO, we improve the classification performance of a variety of neural architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. Moreover, we find that our method can even help to train large vision Transformer architecture without warmup.
Predictive Querying for Autoregressive Neural Sequence Models
Authors: Alex Boyd, Sam Showalter, Stephan Mandt, Padhraic Smyth
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

In reasoning about sequential events it is natural to pose probabilistic queries such as "when will event A occur next" or "what is the probability of A occurring before B", with applications in areas such as user modeling, medicine, and finance. However, with machine learning shifting towards neural autoregressive models such as RNNs and transformers, probabilistic querying has been largely restricted to simple cases such as next-event prediction. This is in part due to the fact that future querying involves marginalization over large path spaces, which is not straightforward to do efficiently in such models. In this paper we introduce a general typology for predictive queries in neural autoregressive sequence models and show that such queries can be systematically represented by sets of elementary building blocks. We leverage this typology to develop new query estimation methods based on beam search, importance sampling, and hybrids. Across four large-scale sequence datasets from different application domains, as well as for the GPT-2 language model, we demonstrate the ability to make query answering tractable for arbitrary queries in exponentially-large predictive path-spaces, and find clear differences in cost-accuracy tradeoffs between search and sampling methods.
Holo-Dex: Teaching Dexterity with Immersive Mixed Reality
Authors: Sridhar Pandian Arunachalam, Irmak Güzey, Soumith Chintala, Lerrel Pinto
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixed Reality

A fundamental challenge in teaching robots is to provide an effective interface for human teachers to demonstrate useful skills to a robot. This challenge is exacerbated in dexterous manipulation, where teaching high-dimensional, contact-rich behaviors often require esoteric teleoperation tools. In this work, we present Holo-Dex, a framework for dexterous manipulation that places a teacher in an immersive mixed reality through commodity VR headsets. The high-fidelity hand pose estimator onboard the headset is used to teleoperate the robot and collect demonstrations for a variety of general-purpose dexterous tasks. Given these demonstrations, we use powerful feature learning combined with non-parametric imitation to train dexterous skills. Our experiments on six common dexterous tasks, including in-hand rotation, spinning, and bottle opening, indicate that Holo-Dex can both collect high-quality demonstration data and train skills in a matter of hours. Finally, we find that our trained skills can exhibit generalization on objects not seen in training. Videos of Holo-Dex are available at https://holo-dex.github.io.
Self-Guided Diffusion Models
Authors: Vincent Tao Hu, David W Zhang, Yuki M. Asano, Gertjan J. Burghouts, Cees G. M. Snoek
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Image Generation

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable progress in image generation quality, especially when guidance is used to control the generative process. However, guidance requires a large amount of image-annotation pairs for training and is thus dependent on their availability, correctness and unbiasedness. In this paper, we eliminate the need for such annotation by instead leveraging the flexibility of self-supervision signals to design a framework for self-guided diffusion models. By leveraging a feature extraction function and a self-annotation function, our method provides guidance signals at various image granularities: from the level of holistic images to object boxes and even segmentation masks. Our experiments on single-label and multi-label image datasets demonstrate that self-labeled guidance always outperforms diffusion models without guidance and may even surpass guidance based on ground-truth labels, especially on unbalanced data. When equipped with self-supervised box or mask proposals, our method further generates visually diverse yet semantically consistent images, without the need for any class, box, or segment label annotation. Self-guided diffusion is simple, flexible and expected to profit from deployment at scale. Source code will be at: https://taohu.me/sgdm/
Better Smatch = Better Parser? AMR evaluation is not so simple anymore
Authors: Juri Opitz, Anette Frank
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: AMR Parsing, Sentence

Recently, astonishing advances have been observed in AMR parsing, as measured by the structural Smatch metric. In fact, today's systems achieve performance levels that seem to surpass estimates of human inter annotator agreement (IAA). Therefore, it is unclear how well Smatch (still) relates to human estimates of parse quality, as in this situation potentially fine-grained errors of similar weight may impact the AMR's meaning to different degrees. We conduct an analysis of two popular and strong AMR parsers that -- according to Smatch -- reach quality levels on par with human IAA, and assess how human quality ratings relate to Smatch and other AMR metrics. Our main findings are: i) While high Smatch scores indicate otherwise, we find that AMR parsing is far from being solved: we frequently find structurally small, but semantically unacceptable errors that substantially distort sentence meaning. ii) Considering high-performance parsers, better Smatch scores may not necessarily indicate consistently better parsing quality. To obtain a meaningful and comprehensive assessment of quality differences of parse(r)s, we recommend augmenting evaluations with macro statistics, use of additional metrics, and more human analysis.
Efficient Knowledge Distillation from Model Checkpoints
Authors: Chaofei Wang, Qisen Yang, Rui Huang, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, model

Knowledge distillation is an effective approach to learn compact models (students) with the supervision of large and strong models (teachers). As empirically there exists a strong correlation between the performance of teacher and student models, it is commonly believed that a high performing teacher is preferred. Consequently, practitioners tend to use a well trained network or an ensemble of them as the teacher. In this paper, we make an intriguing observation that an intermediate model, i.e., a checkpoint in the middle of the training procedure, often serves as a better teacher compared to the fully converged model, although the former has much lower accuracy. More surprisingly, a weak snapshot ensemble of several intermediate models from a same training trajectory can outperform a strong ensemble of independently trained and fully converged models, when they are used as teachers. We show that this phenomenon can be partially explained by the information bottleneck principle: the feature representations of intermediate models can have higher mutual information regarding the input, and thus contain more "dark knowledge" for effective distillation. We further propose an optimal intermediate teacher selection algorithm based on maximizing the total task-related mutual information. Experiments verify its effectiveness and applicability.
Token-Label Alignment for Vision Transformers
Authors: Han Xiao, Wenzhao Zheng, Zheng Zhu, Jie zhou, Jiwen Lu
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Data mixing strategies (e.g., CutMix) have shown the ability to greatly improve the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). They mix two images as inputs for training and assign them with a mixed label with the same ratio. While they are shown effective for vision transformers (ViTs), we identify a token fluctuation phenomenon that has suppressed the potential of data mixing strategies. We empirically observe that the contributions of input tokens fluctuate as forward propagating, which might induce a different mixing ratio in the output tokens. The training target computed by the original data mixing strategy can thus be inaccurate, resulting in less effective training. To address this, we propose a token-label alignment (TL-Align) method to trace the correspondence between transformed tokens and the original tokens to maintain a label for each token. We reuse the computed attention at each layer for efficient token-label alignment, introducing only negligible additional training costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves the performance of ViTs on image classification, semantic segmentation, objective detection, and transfer learning tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/Euphoria16/TL-Align.
On the Effectiveness of Lipschitz-Driven Rehearsal in Continual Learning
Authors: Lorenzo Bonicelli, Matteo Boschini, Angelo Porrello, Concetto Spampinato, Simone Calderara
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Rehearsal approaches enjoy immense popularity with Continual Learning (CL) practitioners. These methods collect samples from previously encountered data distributions in a small memory buffer; subsequently, they repeatedly optimize on the latter to prevent catastrophic forgetting. This work draws attention to a hidden pitfall of this widespread practice: repeated optimization on a small pool of data inevitably leads to tight and unstable decision boundaries, which are a major hindrance to generalization. To address this issue, we propose Lipschitz-DrivEn Rehearsal (LiDER), a surrogate objective that induces smoothness in the backbone network by constraining its layer-wise Lipschitz constants w.r.t. replay examples. By means of extensive experiments, we show that applying LiDER delivers a stable performance gain to several state-of-the-art rehearsal CL methods across multiple datasets, both in the presence and absence of pre-training. Through additional ablative experiments, we highlight peculiar aspects of buffer overfitting in CL and better characterize the effect produced by LiDER. Code is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/LiDER
Self-supervised video pretraining yields robust and more human-aligned visual representations
Authors: Nikhil Parthasarathy, S. M. Ali Eslami, João Carreira, Olivier J. Hénaff
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning, Video Understanding

Humans learn powerful representations of objects and scenes by observing how they evolve over time. Yet, outside of specific tasks that require explicit temporal understanding, static image pretraining remains the dominant paradigm for learning visual foundation models. We question this mismatch, and ask whether video pretraining can yield visual representations that bear the hallmarks of human perception: generalisation across tasks, robustness to perturbations, and consistency with human judgements. To that end we propose a novel procedure for curating videos, and develop a contrastive framework which learns from the complex transformations therein. This simple paradigm for distilling knowledge from videos, called VITO, yields general representations that far outperform prior video pretraining methods on image understanding tasks, and image pretraining methods on video understanding tasks. Moreover, VITO representations are significantly more robust to natural and synthetic deformations than image-, video-, and adversarially-trained ones. Finally, VITO's predictions are strongly aligned with human judgements, surpassing models that were specifically trained for that purpose. Together, these results suggest that video pretraining could be a simple way of learning unified, robust, and human-aligned representations of the visual world.
Relational Graph Convolutional Neural Networks for Multihop Reasoning: A Comparative Study
Authors: Ieva Staliūnaitė, Philip John Gorinski, Ignacio Iacobacci
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Multihop Question Answering is a complex Natural Language Processing task that requires multiple steps of reasoning to find the correct answer to a given question. Previous research has explored the use of models based on Graph Neural Networks for tackling this task. Various architectures have been proposed, including Relational Graph Convolutional Networks (RGCN). For these many node types and relations between them have been introduced, such as simple entity co-occurrences, modelling coreferences, or "reasoning paths" from questions to answers via intermediary entities. Nevertheless, a thoughtful analysis on which relations, node types, embeddings and architecture are the most beneficial for this task is still missing. In this paper we explore a number of RGCN-based Multihop QA models, graph relations, and node embeddings, and empirically explore the influence of each on Multihop QA performance on the WikiHop dataset.