pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fast AdvProp
Authors: Jieru Mei, Yucheng Han, Yutong Bai, Yixiao Zhang, Yingwei Li, Xianhang Li, Alan Yuille, Cihang Xie
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Data Augmentation, object-detection, Object Detection

Adversarial Propagation (AdvProp) is an effective way to improve recognition models, leveraging adversarial examples. Nonetheless, AdvProp suffers from the extremely slow training speed, mainly because: a) extra forward and backward passes are required for generating adversarial examples; b) both original samples and their adversarial counterparts are used for training (i.e., 2$\times$ data). In this paper, we introduce Fast AdvProp, which aggressively revamps AdvProp's costly training components, rendering the method nearly as cheap as the vanilla training. Specifically, our modifications in Fast AdvProp are guided by the hypothesis that disentangled learning with adversarial examples is the key for performance improvements, while other training recipes (e.g., paired clean and adversarial training samples, multi-step adversarial attackers) could be largely simplified. Our empirical results show that, compared to the vanilla training baseline, Fast AdvProp is able to further model performance on a spectrum of visual benchmarks, without incurring extra training cost. Additionally, our ablations find Fast AdvProp scales better if larger models are used, is compatible with existing data augmentation methods (i.e., Mixup and CutMix), and can be easily adapted to other recognition tasks like object detection. The code is available here: https://github.com/meijieru/fast_advprop.
Making the Most of Text Semantics to Improve Biomedical Vision--Language Processing
Authors: Benedikt Boecking, Naoto Usuyama, Shruthi Bannur, Daniel C. Castro, Anton Schwaighofer, Stephanie Hyland, Maria Wetscherek, Tristan Naumann, Aditya Nori, Javier Alvarez-Valle, Hoifung Poon, Ozan Oktay
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Medical Image Classification, Natural Language Inference, Phrase Grounding, Pneumonia Detection

Multi-modal data abounds in biomedicine, such as radiology images and reports. Interpreting this data at scale is essential for improving clinical care and accelerating clinical research. Biomedical text with its complex semantics poses additional challenges in vision--language modelling compared to the general domain, and previous work has used insufficiently adapted models that lack domain-specific language understanding. In this paper, we show that principled textual semantic modelling can substantially improve contrastive learning in self-supervised vision--language processing. We release a language model that achieves state-of-the-art results in radiology natural language inference through its improved vocabulary and novel language pretraining objective leveraging semantics and discourse characteristics in radiology reports. Further, we propose a self-supervised joint vision--language approach with a focus on better text modelling. It establishes new state of the art results on a wide range of publicly available benchmarks, in part by leveraging our new domain-specific language model. We release a new dataset with locally-aligned phrase grounding annotations by radiologists to facilitate the study of complex semantic modelling in biomedical vision--language processing. A broad evaluation, including on this new dataset, shows that our contrastive learning approach, aided by textual-semantic modelling, outperforms prior methods in segmentation tasks, despite only using a global-alignment objective.
Parametric Level-sets Enhanced To Improve Reconstruction (PaLEnTIR)
Authors: Ege Ozsar, Misha Kilmer, Eric Miller, Eric de Sturler, Arvind Saibaba
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

We introduce PaLEnTIR, a significantly enhanced parametric level-set (PaLS) method addressing the restoration and reconstruction of piecewise constant objects. Our key contribution involves a unique PaLS formulation utilizing a single level-set function to restore scenes containing multi-contrast piecewise-constant objects without requiring knowledge of the number of objects or their contrasts. Unlike standard PaLS methods employing radial basis functions (RBFs), our model integrates anisotropic basis functions (ABFs), thereby expanding its capacity to represent a wider class of shapes. Furthermore, PaLEnTIR improves the conditioning of the Jacobian matrix, required as part of the parameter identification process, and consequently accelerates optimization methods. We validate PaLEnTIR's efficacy through diverse experiments encompassing sparse and limited angle of view X-ray computed tomography (2D and 3D), nonlinear diffuse optical tomography (DOT), denoising, and deconvolution tasks using both real and simulated data sets.
Weighted Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model for Roadside LiDAR Object Detection
Authors: Tianya Zhang, Yi Ge, Peter J. Jin
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, object-detection, Object Detection

Background modeling is widely used for intelligent surveillance systems to detect moving targets by subtracting the static background components. Most roadside LiDAR object detection methods filter out foreground points by comparing new data points to pre-trained background references based on descriptive statistics over many frames (e.g., voxel density, number of neighbors, maximum distance). However, these solutions are inefficient under heavy traffic, and parameter values are hard to transfer from one scenario to another. In early studies, the probabilistic background modeling methods widely used for the video-based system were considered unsuitable for roadside LiDAR surveillance systems due to the sparse and unstructured point cloud data. In this paper, the raw LiDAR data were transformed into a structured representation based on the elevation and azimuth value of each LiDAR point. With this high-order tensor representation, we break the barrier to allow efficient high-dimensional multivariate analysis for roadside LiDAR background modeling. The Bayesian Nonparametric (BNP) approach integrates the intensity value and 3D measurements to exploit the measurement data using 3D and intensity info entirely. The proposed method was compared against two state-of-the-art roadside LiDAR background models, computer vision benchmark, and deep learning baselines, evaluated at point, object, and path levels under heavy traffic and challenging weather. This multimodal Weighted Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) can handle dynamic backgrounds with noisy measurements and substantially enhances the infrastructure-based LiDAR object detection, whereby various 3D modeling for smart city applications could be created.
MultiPathGAN: Structure Preserving Stain Normalization using Unsupervised Multi-domain Adversarial Network with Perception Loss
Authors: Haseeb Nazki, Ognjen Arandjelović, InHwa Um, David Harrison
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, whole slide images

Histopathology relies on the analysis of microscopic tissue images to diagnose disease. A crucial part of tissue preparation is staining whereby a dye is used to make the salient tissue components more distinguishable. However, differences in laboratory protocols and scanning devices result in significant confounding appearance variation in the corresponding images. This variation increases both human error and the inter-rater variability, as well as hinders the performance of automatic or semi-automatic methods. In the present paper we introduce an unsupervised adversarial network to translate (and hence normalize) whole slide images across multiple data acquisition domains. Our key contributions are: (i) an adversarial architecture which learns across multiple domains with a single generator-discriminator network using an information flow branch which optimizes for perceptual loss, and (ii) the inclusion of an additional feature extraction network during training which guides the transformation network to keep all the structural features in the tissue image intact. We: (i) demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method firstly on H\&E slides of 120 cases of kidney cancer, as well as (ii) show the benefits of the approach on more general problems, such as flexible illumination based natural image enhancement and light source adaptation.
Multi-Scale Features and Parallel Transformers Based Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Abhisek Keshari, Komal, Sadbhawna, Badri Subudhi
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment

With the increase in multimedia content, the type of distortions associated with multimedia is also increasing. This problem of image quality assessment is expanded well in the PIPAL dataset, which is still an open problem to solve for researchers. Although, recently proposed transformers networks have already been used in the literature for image quality assessment. At the same time, we notice that multi-scale feature extraction has proven to be a promising approach for image quality assessment. However, the way transformer networks are used for image quality assessment until now lacks these properties of multi-scale feature extraction. We utilized this fact in our approach and proposed a new architecture by integrating these two promising quality assessment techniques of images. Our experimentation on various datasets, including the PIPAL dataset, demonstrates that the proposed integration technique outperforms existing algorithms. The source code of the proposed algorithm is available online: https://github.com/KomalPal9610/IQA
Multi-Focus Image Fusion based on Gradient Transform
Authors: Sultan Sevgi Turgut, Mustafa Oral
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi Focus Image Fusion

Multi-focus image fusion is a challenging field of study that aims to provide a completely focused image by integrating focused and un-focused pixels. Most existing methods suffer from shift variance, misregistered images, and data-dependent. In this study, we introduce a novel gradient information-based multi-focus image fusion method that is robust for the aforementioned problems. The proposed method first generates gradient images from original images by using Halftoning-Inverse Halftoning (H-IH) transform. Then, Energy of Gradient (EOG) and Standard Deviation functions are used as the focus measurement on the gradient images to form a fused image. Finally, in order to enhance the fused image a decision fusion approach is applied with the majority voting method. The proposed method is compared with 17 different novel and conventional techniques both visually and objectively. For objective evaluation, 6 different quantitative metrics are used. It is observed that the proposed method is promising according to visual evaluation and 83.3% success is achieved by being first in five out of six metrics according to objective evaluation.
Attention in Reasoning: Dataset, Analysis, and Modeling
Authors: Shi Chen, Ming Jiang, Jinhui Yang, Qi Zhao
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

While attention has been an increasingly popular component in deep neural networks to both interpret and boost the performance of models, little work has examined how attention progresses to accomplish a task and whether it is reasonable. In this work, we propose an Attention with Reasoning capability (AiR) framework that uses attention to understand and improve the process leading to task outcomes. We first define an evaluation metric based on a sequence of atomic reasoning operations, enabling a quantitative measurement of attention that considers the reasoning process. We then collect human eye-tracking and answer correctness data, and analyze various machine and human attention mechanisms on their reasoning capability and how they impact task performance. To improve the attention and reasoning ability of visual question answering models, we propose to supervise the learning of attention progressively along the reasoning process and to differentiate the correct and incorrect attention patterns. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in analyzing and modeling attention with better reasoning capability and task performance. The code and data are available at https://github.com/szzexpoi/AiR
Time-based Self-supervised Learning for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy
Authors: Guillem Pascual, Pablo Laiz, Albert García, Hagen Wenzek, Jordi Vitrià, Santi Seguí
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Self-Supervised Learning

State-of-the-art machine learning models, and especially deep learning ones, are significantly data-hungry; they require vast amounts of manually labeled samples to function correctly. However, in most medical imaging fields, obtaining said data can be challenging. Not only the volume of data is a problem, but also the imbalances within its classes; it is common to have many more images of healthy patients than of those with pathology. Computer-aided diagnostic systems suffer from these issues, usually over-designing their models to perform accurately. This work proposes using self-supervised learning for wireless endoscopy videos by introducing a custom-tailored method that does not initially need labels or appropriate balance. We prove that using the inferred inherent structure learned by our method, extracted from the temporal axis, improves the detection rate on several domain-specific applications even under severe imbalance.
Transformer Decoders with MultiModal Regularization for Cross-Modal Food Retrieval
Authors: Mustafa Shukor, Guillaume Couairon, Asya Grechka, Matthieu Cord
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Retrieval, Triplet

Cross-modal image-recipe retrieval has gained significant attention in recent years. Most work focuses on improving cross-modal embeddings using unimodal encoders, that allow for efficient retrieval in large-scale databases, leaving aside cross-attention between modalities which is more computationally expensive. We propose a new retrieval framework, T-Food (Transformer Decoders with MultiModal Regularization for Cross-Modal Food Retrieval) that exploits the interaction between modalities in a novel regularization scheme, while using only unimodal encoders at test time for efficient retrieval. We also capture the intra-dependencies between recipe entities with a dedicated recipe encoder, and propose new variants of triplet losses with dynamic margins that adapt to the difficulty of the task. Finally, we leverage the power of the recent Vision and Language Pretraining (VLP) models such as CLIP for the image encoder. Our approach outperforms existing approaches by a large margin on the Recipe1M dataset. Specifically, we achieve absolute improvements of 8.1 % (72.6 R@1) and +10.9 % (44.6 R@1) on the 1k and 10k test sets respectively. The code is available here:https://github.com/mshukor/TFood
Complete identification of complex salt geometries from inaccurate migrated subsurface offset gathers using deep learning
Authors: Ana Paula O. Muller, Jesse C. Costa, Clecio R. Bom, Elisangela L. Faria, Matheus Klatt, Gabriel Teixeira, Marcelo P. de Albuquerque, Marcio P. de Albuquerque
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00

Delimiting salt inclusions from migrated images is a time-consuming activity that relies on highly human-curated analysis and is subject to interpretation errors or limitations of the methods available. We propose to use migrated images produced from an inaccurate velocity model (with a reasonable approximation of sediment velocity, but without salt inclusions) to predict the correct salt inclusions shape using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Our approach relies on subsurface Common Image Gathers to focus the sediments' reflections around the zero offset and to spread the energy of salt reflections over large offsets. Using synthetic data, we trained a U-Net to use common-offset subsurface images as input channels for the CNN and the correct salt-masks as network output. The network learned to predict the salt inclusions masks with high accuracy; moreover, it also performed well when applied to synthetic benchmark data sets that were not previously introduced. Our training process tuned the U-Net to successfully learn the shape of complex salt bodies from partially focused subsurface offset images.
FS-NCSR: Increasing Diversity of the Super-Resolution Space via Frequency Separation and Noise-Conditioned Normalizing Flow
Authors: Ki-Ung Song, Dongseok Shim, Kang-wook Kim, Jae-young Lee, Younggeun Kim
Date: 2022-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Super-Resolution

Super-resolution suffers from an innate ill-posed problem that a single low-resolution (LR) image can be from multiple high-resolution (HR) images. Recent studies on the flow-based algorithm solve this ill-posedness by learning the super-resolution space and predicting diverse HR outputs. Unfortunately, the diversity of the super-resolution outputs is still unsatisfactory, and the outputs from the flow-based model usually suffer from undesired artifacts which causes low-quality outputs. In this paper, we propose FS-NCSR which produces diverse and high-quality super-resolution outputs using frequency separation and noise conditioning compared to the existing flow-based approaches. As the sharpness and high-quality detail of the image rely on its high-frequency information, FS-NCSR only estimates the high-frequency information of the high-resolution outputs without redundant low-frequency components. Through this, FS-NCSR significantly improves the diversity score without significant image quality degradation compared to the NCSR, the winner of the previous NTIRE 2021 challenge.
Addressing Tactic Volatility in Self-Adaptive Systems Using Evolved Recurrent Neural Networks and Uncertainty Reduction Tactics
Authors: Aizaz Ul Haq, Niranjana Deshpande, AbdElRahman ElSaid, Travis Desell, Daniel E. Krutz
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Self-adaptive systems frequently use tactics to perform adaptations. Tactic examples include the implementation of additional security measures when an intrusion is detected, or activating a cooling mechanism when temperature thresholds are surpassed. Tactic volatility occurs in real-world systems and is defined as variable behavior in the attributes of a tactic, such as its latency or cost. A system's inability to effectively account for tactic volatility adversely impacts its efficiency and resiliency against the dynamics of real-world environments. To enable systems' efficiency against tactic volatility, we propose a Tactic Volatility Aware (TVA-E) process utilizing evolved Recurrent Neural Networks (eRNN) to provide accurate tactic predictions. TVA-E is also the first known process to take advantage of uncertainty reduction tactics to provide additional information to the decision-making process and reduce uncertainty. TVA-E easily integrates into popular adaptation processes enabling it to immediately benefit a large number of existing self-adaptive systems. Simulations using 52,106 tactic records demonstrate that: I) eRNN is an effective prediction mechanism, II) TVA-E represents an improvement over existing state-of-the-art processes in accounting for tactic volatility, and III) Uncertainty reduction tactics are beneficial in accounting for tactic volatility. The developed dataset and tool can be found at https://tacticvolatility.github.io/
Deep learning techniques for energy clustering in the CMS ECAL
Authors: Davide Valsecchi
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Learning

The reconstruction of electrons and photons in CMS depends on topological clustering of the energy deposited by an incident particle in different crystals of the electromagnetic calorimeter (ECAL). These clusters are formed by aggregating neighbouring crystals according to the expected topology of an electromagnetic shower in the ECAL. The presence of upstream material (beampipe, tracker and support structures) causes electrons and photons to start showering before reaching the calorimeter. This effect, combined with the 3.8T CMS magnetic field, leads to energy being spread in several clusters around the primary one. It is essential to recover the energy contained in these satellite clusters in order to achieve the best possible energy resolution for physics analyses. Historically satellite clusters have been associated to the primary cluster using a purely topological algorithm which does not attempt to remove spurious energy deposits from additional pileup interactions (PU). The performance of this algorithm is expected to degrade during LHC Run 3 (2022+) because of the larger average PU levels and the increasing levels of noise due to the ageing of the ECAL detector. New methods are being investigated that exploit state-of-the-art deep learning architectures like Graph Neural Networks (GNN) and self-attention algorithms. These more sophisticated models improve the energy collection and are more resilient to PU and noise, helping to preserve the electron and photon energy resolution achieved during LHC Runs 1 and 2. This work will cover the challenges of training the models as well the opportunity that this new approach offers to unify the ECAL energy measurement with the particle identification steps used in the global CMS photon and electron reconstruction.
Dynamical simulation via quantum machine learning with provable generalization
Authors: Joe Gibbs, Zoë Holmes, Matthias C. Caro, Nicholas Ezzell, Hsin-Yuan Huang, Lukasz Cincio, Andrew T. Sornborger, Patrick J. Coles
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Generalization Bounds, Quantum Machine Learning

Much attention has been paid to dynamical simulation and quantum machine learning (QML) independently as applications for quantum advantage, while the possibility of using QML to enhance dynamical simulations has not been thoroughly investigated. Here we develop a framework for using QML methods to simulate quantum dynamics on near-term quantum hardware. We use generalization bounds, which bound the error a machine learning model makes on unseen data, to rigorously analyze the training data requirements of an algorithm within this framework. This provides a guarantee that our algorithm is resource-efficient, both in terms of qubit and data requirements. Our numerics exhibit efficient scaling with problem size, and we simulate 20 times longer than Trotterization on IBMQ-Bogota.
Out-of-distribution generalization for learning quantum dynamics
Authors: Matthias C. Caro, Hsin-Yuan Huang, Nicholas Ezzell, Joe Gibbs, Andrew T. Sornborger, Lukasz Cincio, Patrick J. Coles, Zoë Holmes
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Quantum Machine Learning

Generalization bounds are a critical tool to assess the training data requirements of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). Recent work has established guarantees for in-distribution generalization of quantum neural networks (QNNs), where training and testing data are drawn from the same data distribution. However, there are currently no results on out-of-distribution generalization in QML, where we require a trained model to perform well even on data drawn from a different distribution to the training distribution. Here, we prove out-of-distribution generalization for the task of learning an unknown unitary. In particular, we show that one can learn the action of a unitary on entangled states having trained only product states. Since product states can be prepared using only single-qubit gates, this advances the prospects of learning quantum dynamics on near term quantum hardware, and further opens up new methods for both the classical and quantum compilation of quantum circuits.