pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PanGu-Coder: Program Synthesis with Function-Level Language Modeling
Authors: Fenia Christopoulou, Gerasimos Lampouras, Milan Gritta, Guchun Zhang, Yinpeng Guo, Zhongqi Li, Qi Zhang, Meng Xiao, Bo Shen, Lin Li, Hao Yu, Li Yan, Pingyi Zhou, Xin Wang, Yuchi Ma, Ignacio Iacobacci, Yasheng Wang, Guangtai Liang, Jiansheng Wei, Xin Jiang, Qianxiang Wang, Qun Liu
Date: 2022-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Program Synthesis, Text-to-Code Generation

We present PanGu-Coder, a pretrained decoder-only language model adopting the PanGu-Alpha architecture for text-to-code generation, i.e. the synthesis of programming language solutions given a natural language problem description. We train PanGu-Coder using a two-stage strategy: the first stage employs Causal Language Modelling (CLM) to pre-train on raw programming language data, while the second stage uses a combination of Causal Language Modelling and Masked Language Modelling (MLM) training objectives that focus on the downstream task of text-to-code generation and train on loosely curated pairs of natural language program definitions and code functions. Finally, we discuss PanGu-Coder-FT, which is fine-tuned on a combination of competitive programming problems and code with continuous integration tests. We evaluate PanGu-Coder with a focus on whether it generates functionally correct programs and demonstrate that it achieves equivalent or better performance than similarly sized models, such as CodeX, while attending a smaller context window and training on less data.
Applying Spatiotemporal Attention to Identify Distracted and Drowsy Driving with Vision Transformers
Authors: Samay Lakhani
Date: 2022-07-22 00:00:00

A 20% rise in car crashes in 2021 compared to 2020 has been observed as a result of increased distraction and drowsiness. Drowsy and distracted driving are the cause of 45% of all car crashes. As a means to decrease drowsy and distracted driving, detection methods using computer vision can be designed to be low-cost, accurate, and minimally invasive. This work investigated the use of the vision transformer to outperform state-of-the-art accuracy from 3D-CNNs. Two separate transformers were trained for drowsiness and distractedness. The drowsy video transformer model was trained on the National Tsing-Hua University Drowsy Driving Dataset (NTHU-DDD) with a Video Swin Transformer model for 10 epochs on two classes -- drowsy and non-drowsy simulated over 10.5 hours. The distracted video transformer was trained on the Driver Monitoring Dataset (DMD) with Video Swin Transformer for 50 epochs over 9 distraction-related classes. The accuracy of the drowsiness model reached 44% and a high loss value on the test set, indicating overfitting and poor model performance. Overfitting indicates limited training data and applied model architecture lacked quantifiable parameters to learn. The distracted model outperformed state-of-the-art models on DMD reaching 97.5%, indicating that with sufficient data and a strong architecture, transformers are suitable for unfit driving detection. Future research should use newer and stronger models such as TokenLearner to achieve higher accuracy and efficiency, merge existing datasets to expand to detecting drunk driving and road rage to create a comprehensive solution to prevent traffic crashes, and deploying a functioning prototype to revolutionize the automotive safety industry.
Towards Fairness-Aware Multi-Objective Optimization
Authors: Guo Yu, Lianbo Ma, Wei Du, Wenli Du, Yaochu Jin
Date: 2022-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Fairness, Multiobjective Optimization

Recent years have seen the rapid development of fairness-aware machine learning in mitigating unfairness or discrimination in decision-making in a wide range of applications. However, much less attention has been paid to the fairness-aware multi-objective optimization, which is indeed commonly seen in real life, such as fair resource allocation problems and data driven multi-objective optimization problems. This paper aims to illuminate and broaden our understanding of multi-objective optimization from the perspective of fairness. To this end, we start with a discussion of user preferences in multi-objective optimization and then explore its relationship to fairness in machine learning and multi-objective optimization. Following the above discussions, representative cases of fairness-aware multiobjective optimization are presented, further elaborating the importance of fairness in traditional multi-objective optimization, data-driven optimization and federated optimization. Finally, challenges and opportunities in fairness-aware multi-objective optimization are addressed. We hope that this article makes a small step forward towards understanding fairness in the context of optimization and promote research interest in fairness-aware multi-objective optimization.
Complementing Semi-Supervised Learning with Uncertainty Quantification
Authors: Ehsan Kazemi
Date: 2022-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

The problem of fully supervised classification is that it requires a tremendous amount of annotated data, however, in many datasets a large portion of data is unlabeled. To alleviate this problem semi-supervised learning (SSL) leverages the knowledge of the classifier on the labeled domain and extrapolates it to the unlabeled domain which has a supposedly similar distribution as annotated data. Recent success on SSL methods crucially hinges on thresholded pseudo labeling and thereby consistency regularization for the unlabeled domain. However, the existing methods do not incorporate the uncertainty of the pseudo labels or unlabeled samples in the training process which are due to the noisy labels or out of distribution samples owing to strong augmentations. Inspired by the recent developments in SSL, our goal in this paper is to propose a novel unsupervised uncertainty-aware objective that relies on aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty quantification. Complementing the recent techniques in SSL with the proposed uncertainty-aware loss function our approach outperforms or is on par with the state-of-the-art over standard SSL benchmarks while being computationally lightweight. Our results outperform the state-of-the-art results on complex datasets such as CIFAR-100 and Mini-ImageNet.
A Theoretical Framework for Inference and Learning in Predictive Coding Networks
Authors: Beren Millidge, Yuhang Song, Tommaso Salvatori, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Rafal Bogacz
Date: 2022-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Predictive coding (PC) is an influential theory in computational neuroscience, which argues that the cortex forms unsupervised world models by implementing a hierarchical process of prediction error minimization. PC networks (PCNs) are trained in two phases. First, neural activities are updated to optimize the network's response to external stimuli. Second, synaptic weights are updated to consolidate this change in activity -- an algorithm called \emph{prospective configuration}. While previous work has shown how in various limits, PCNs can be found to approximate backpropagation (BP), recent work has demonstrated that PCNs operating in this standard regime, which does not approximate BP, nevertheless obtain competitive training and generalization performance to BP-trained networks while outperforming them on tasks such as online, few-shot, and continual learning, where brains are known to excel. Despite this promising empirical performance, little is understood theoretically about the properties and dynamics of PCNs in this regime. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the properties of PCNs trained with prospective configuration. We first derive analytical results concerning the inference equilibrium for PCNs and a previously unknown close connection relationship to target propagation (TP). Secondly, we provide a theoretical analysis of learning in PCNs as a variant of generalized expectation-maximization and use that to prove the convergence of PCNs to critical points of the BP loss function, thus showing that deep PCNs can, in theory, achieve the same generalization performance as BP, while maintaining their unique advantages.
AutoDiCE: Fully Automated Distributed CNN Inference at the Edge
Authors: Xiaotian Guo, Andy D. Pimentel, Todor Stefanov
Date: 2022-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, image-classification, Image Classification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Deep Learning approaches based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are extensively utilized and very successful in a wide range of application areas, including image classification and speech recognition. For the execution of trained CNNs, i.e. model inference, we nowadays witness a shift from the Cloud to the Edge. Unfortunately, deploying and inferring large, compute and memory intensive CNNs on edge devices is challenging because these devices typically have limited power budgets and compute/memory resources. One approach to address this challenge is to leverage all available resources across multiple edge devices to deploy and execute a large CNN by properly partitioning the CNN and running each CNN partition on a separate edge device. Although such distribution, deployment, and execution of large CNNs on multiple edge devices is a desirable and beneficial approach, there currently does not exist a design and programming framework that takes a trained CNN model, together with a CNN partitioning specification, and fully automates the CNN model splitting and deployment on multiple edge devices to facilitate distributed CNN inference at the Edge. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel framework, called AutoDiCE, for automated splitting of a CNN model into a set of sub-models and automated code generation for distributed and collaborative execution of these sub-models on multiple, possibly heterogeneous, edge devices, while supporting the exploitation of parallelism among and within the edge devices. Our experimental results show that AutoDiCE can deliver distributed CNN inference with reduced energy consumption and memory usage per edge device, and improved overall system throughput at the same time.
OpenFilter: A Framework to Democratize Research Access to Social Media AR Filters
Authors: Piera Riccio, Bill Psomas, Francesco Galati, Francisco Escolano, Thomas Hofmann, Nuria Oliver
Date: 2022-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

Augmented Reality or AR filters on selfies have become very popular on social media platforms for a variety of applications, including marketing, entertainment and aesthetics. Given the wide adoption of AR face filters and the importance of faces in our social structures and relations, there is increased interest by the scientific community to analyze the impact of such filters from a psychological, artistic and sociological perspective. However, there are few quantitative analyses in this area mainly due to a lack of publicly available datasets of facial images with applied AR filters. The proprietary, close nature of most social media platforms does not allow users, scientists and practitioners to access the code and the details of the available AR face filters. Scraping faces from these platforms to collect data is ethically unacceptable and should, therefore, be avoided in research. In this paper, we present OpenFilter, a flexible framework to apply AR filters available in social media platforms on existing large collections of human faces. Moreover, we share FairBeauty and B-LFW, two beautified versions of the publicly available FairFace and LFW datasets and we outline insights derived from the analysis of these beautified datasets.
A Variant of Concurrent Constraint Programming on GPU
Authors: Pierre Talbot, Frédéric Pinel, Pascal Bouvry
Date: 2022-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU

The number of cores on graphical computing units (GPUs) is reaching thousands nowadays, whereas the clock speed of processors stagnates. Unfortunately, constraint programming solvers do not take advantage yet of GPU parallelism. One reason is that constraint solvers were primarily designed within the mental frame of sequential computation. To solve this issue, we take a step back and contribute to a simple, intrinsically parallel, lock-free and formally correct programming language based on concurrent constraint programming. We then re-examine parallel constraint solving on GPUs within this formalism, and develop Turbo, a simple constraint solver entirely programmed on GPUs. Turbo validates the correctness of our approach and compares positively to a parallel CPU-based solver.
C3-SL: Circular Convolution-Based Batch-Wise Compression for Communication-Efficient Split Learning
Authors: Cheng-Yen Hsieh, Yu-Chuan Chuang, An-Yeu, Wu
Date: 2022-07-25 00:00:00

Most existing studies improve the efficiency of Split learning (SL) by compressing the transmitted features. However, most works focus on dimension-wise compression that transforms high-dimensional features into a low-dimensional space. In this paper, we propose circular convolution-based batch-wise compression for SL (C3-SL) to compress multiple features into one single feature. To avoid information loss while merging multiple features, we exploit the quasi-orthogonality of features in high-dimensional space with circular convolution and superposition. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore the potential of batch-wise compression under the SL scenario. Based on the simulation results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, our method achieves a 16x compression ratio with negligible accuracy drops compared with the vanilla SL. Moreover, C3-SL significantly reduces 1152x memory and 2.25x computation overhead compared to the state-of-the-art dimension-wise compression method.
Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images
Authors: Jianyi Wang, Kelvin C. K. Chan, Chen Change Loy
Date: 2022-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment, Video Quality Assessment

Measuring the perception of visual content is a long-standing problem in computer vision. Many mathematical models have been developed to evaluate the look or quality of an image. Despite the effectiveness of such tools in quantifying degradations such as noise and blurriness levels, such quantification is loosely coupled with human language. When it comes to more abstract perception about the feel of visual content, existing methods can only rely on supervised models that are explicitly trained with labeled data collected via laborious user study. In this paper, we go beyond the conventional paradigms by exploring the rich visual language prior encapsulated in Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models for assessing both the quality perception (look) and abstract perception (feel) of images in a zero-shot manner. In particular, we discuss effective prompt designs and show an effective prompt pairing strategy to harness the prior. We also provide extensive experiments on controlled datasets and Image Quality Assessment (IQA) benchmarks. Our results show that CLIP captures meaningful priors that generalize well to different perceptual assessments. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/IceClear/CLIP-IQA.
Dynamic 3D Scene Analysis by Point Cloud Accumulation
Authors: Shengyu Huang, Zan Gojcic, Jiahui Huang, Andreas Wieser, Konrad Schindler
Date: 2022-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Semantic Segmentation, Surface Reconstruction

Multi-beam LiDAR sensors, as used on autonomous vehicles and mobile robots, acquire sequences of 3D range scans ("frames"). Each frame covers the scene sparsely, due to limited angular scanning resolution and occlusion. The sparsity restricts the performance of downstream processes like semantic segmentation or surface reconstruction. Luckily, when the sensor moves, frames are captured from a sequence of different viewpoints. This provides complementary information and, when accumulated in a common scene coordinate frame, yields a denser sampling and a more complete coverage of the underlying 3D scene. However, often the scanned scenes contain moving objects. Points on those objects are not correctly aligned by just undoing the scanner's ego-motion. In the present paper, we explore multi-frame point cloud accumulation as a mid-level representation of 3D scan sequences, and develop a method that exploits inductive biases of outdoor street scenes, including their geometric layout and object-level rigidity. Compared to state-of-the-art scene flow estimators, our proposed approach aims to align all 3D points in a common reference frame correctly accumulating the points on the individual objects. Our approach greatly reduces the alignment errors on several benchmark datasets. Moreover, the accumulated point clouds benefit high-level tasks like surface reconstruction.
CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset
Authors: Hao Zhu, Wayne Wu, Wentao Zhu, Liming Jiang, Siwei Tang, Li Zhang, Ziwei Liu, Chen Change Loy
Date: 2022-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Diversity, Face Generation, Unconditional Video Generation, Video Generation

Large-scale datasets have played indispensable roles in the recent success of face generation/editing and significantly facilitated the advances of emerging research fields. However, the academic community still lacks a video dataset with diverse facial attribute annotations, which is crucial for the research on face-related videos. In this work, we propose a large-scale, high-quality, and diverse video dataset with rich facial attribute annotations, named the High-Quality Celebrity Video Dataset (CelebV-HQ). CelebV-HQ contains 35,666 video clips with the resolution of 512x512 at least, involving 15,653 identities. All clips are labeled manually with 83 facial attributes, covering appearance, action, and emotion. We conduct a comprehensive analysis in terms of age, ethnicity, brightness stability, motion smoothness, head pose diversity, and data quality to demonstrate the diversity and temporal coherence of CelebV-HQ. Besides, its versatility and potential are validated on two representative tasks, i.e., unconditional video generation and video facial attribute editing. Furthermore, we envision the future potential of CelebV-HQ, as well as the new opportunities and challenges it would bring to related research directions. Data, code, and models are publicly available. Project page: https://celebv-hq.github.io.
SegPGD: An Effective and Efficient Adversarial Attack for Evaluating and Boosting Segmentation Robustness
Authors: Jindong Gu, Hengshuang Zhao, Volker Tresp, Philip Torr
Date: 2022-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep neural network-based image classifications are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. The image classifications can be easily fooled by adding artificial small and imperceptible perturbations to input images. As one of the most effective defense strategies, adversarial training was proposed to address the vulnerability of classification models, where the adversarial examples are created and injected into training data during training. The attack and defense of classification models have been intensively studied in past years. Semantic segmentation, as an extension of classifications, has also received great attention recently. Recent work shows a large number of attack iterations are required to create effective adversarial examples to fool segmentation models. The observation makes both robustness evaluation and adversarial training on segmentation models challenging. In this work, we propose an effective and efficient segmentation attack method, dubbed SegPGD. Besides, we provide a convergence analysis to show the proposed SegPGD can create more effective adversarial examples than PGD under the same number of attack iterations. Furthermore, we propose to apply our SegPGD as the underlying attack method for segmentation adversarial training. Since SegPGD can create more effective adversarial examples, the adversarial training with our SegPGD can boost the robustness of segmentation models. Our proposals are also verified with experiments on popular Segmentation model architectures and standard segmentation datasets.
Exploiting High Quality Tactile Sensors for Simplified Grasping
Authors: Pedro Machado, T. M. McGinnity
Date: 2022-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Robots are expected to grasp a wide range of objects varying in shape, weight or material type. Providing robots with tactile capabilities similar to humans is thus essential for applications involving human-to-robot or robot-to-robot interactions, particularly in those situations where a robot is expected to grasp and manipulate complex objects not previously encountered. A critical aspect for successful object grasp and manipulation is the use of high-quality fingertips equipped with multiple high-performance sensors, distributed appropriately across a specific contact surface. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the use of two different types of commercially available robotic fingertips (BioTac and WTS-FT), each of which is equipped with multiple sensors distributed across the fingertips' contact surface. We further demonstrate that, due to the high performance of the fingertips, a complex adaptive grasping algorithm is not required for grasping of everyday objects. We conclude that a simple algorithm based on a proportional controller will suffice for many grasping applications, provided the relevant fingertips exhibit high sensitivity. In a quantified assessment, we also demonstrate that, due in part to the sensor distribution, the BioTac-based fingertip performs better than the WTS-FT device, in enabling lifting of loads up to 850g, and that the simple proportional controller can adapt the grasp even when the object is exposed to significant external vibrational challenges.
Estimación de áreas de cultivo mediante Deep Learning y programación convencional
Authors: Javier Caicedo, Pamela Acosta, Romel Pozo, Henry Guilcapi, Christian Mejia-Escobar
Date: 2022-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Artificial Intelligence has enabled the implementation of more accurate and efficient solutions to problems in various areas. In the agricultural sector, one of the main needs is to know at all times the extent of land occupied or not by crops in order to improve production and profitability. The traditional methods of calculation demand the collection of data manually and in person in the field, causing high labor costs, execution times, and inaccuracy in the results. The present work proposes a new method based on Deep Learning techniques complemented with conventional programming for the determination of the area of populated and unpopulated crop areas. We have considered as a case study one of the most recognized companies in the planting and harvesting of sugar cane in Ecuador. The strategy combines a Generative Adversarial Neural Network (GAN) that is trained on a dataset of aerial photographs of natural and urban landscapes to improve image resolution; a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained on a dataset of aerial photographs of sugar cane plots to distinguish populated or unpopulated crop areas; and a standard image processing module for the calculation of areas in a percentage manner. The experiments performed demonstrate a significant improvement in the quality of the aerial photographs as well as a remarkable differentiation between populated and unpopulated crop areas, consequently, a more accurate result of cultivated and uncultivated areas. The proposed method can be extended to the detection of possible pests, areas of weed vegetation, dynamic crop development, and both qualitative and quantitative quality control.