pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DiMBERT: Learning Vision-Language Grounded Representations with Disentangled Multimodal-Attention
Authors: Fenglin Liu, Xian Wu, Shen Ge, Xuancheng Ren, Wei Fan, Xu sun, Yuexian Zou
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence, Sequence-to-sequence Language Modeling, Visual Storytelling

Vision-and-language (V-L) tasks require the system to understand both vision content and natural language, thus learning fine-grained joint representations of vision and language (a.k.a. V-L representations) is of paramount importance. Recently, various pre-trained V-L models are proposed to learn V-L representations and achieve improved results in many tasks. However, the mainstream models process both vision and language inputs with the same set of attention matrices. As a result, the generated V-L representations are entangled in one common latent space. To tackle this problem, we propose DiMBERT (short for Disentangled Multimodal-Attention BERT), which is a novel framework that applies separated attention spaces for vision and language, and the representations of multi-modalities can thus be disentangled explicitly. To enhance the correlation between vision and language in disentangled spaces, we introduce the visual concepts to DiMBERT which represent visual information in textual format. In this manner, visual concepts help to bridge the gap between the two modalities. We pre-train DiMBERT on a large amount of image-sentence pairs on two tasks: bidirectional language modeling and sequence-to-sequence language modeling. After pre-train, DiMBERT is further fine-tuned for the downstream tasks. Experiments show that DiMBERT sets new state-of-the-art performance on three tasks (over four datasets), including both generation tasks (image captioning and visual storytelling) and classification tasks (referring expressions). The proposed DiM (short for Disentangled Multimodal-Attention) module can be easily incorporated into existing pre-trained V-L models to boost their performance, up to a 5% increase on the representative task. Finally, we conduct a systematic analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of our DiM and the introduced visual concepts.
U-Net-based Models for Skin Lesion Segmentation: More Attention and Augmentation
Authors: Pooya Mohammadi Kazaj, MohammadHossein Koosheshi, Ali Shahedi, Alireza Vafaei Sadr
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Segmentation, Skin Lesion Segmentation

According to WHO[1], since the 1970s, diagnosis of melanoma skin cancer has been more frequent. However, if detected early, the 5-year survival rate for melanoma can increase to 99 percent. In this regard, skin lesion segmentation can be pivotal in monitoring and treatment planning. In this work, ten models and four augmentation configurations are trained on the ISIC 2016 dataset. The performance and overfitting are compared utilizing five metrics. Our results show that the U-Net-Resnet50 and the R2U-Net have the highest metrics value, along with two data augmentation scenarios. We also investigate CBAM and AG blocks in the U-Net architecture, which enhances segmentation performance at a meager computational cost. In addition, we propose using pyramid, AG, and CBAM blocks in a sequence, which significantly surpasses the results of using the two individually. Finally, our experiments show that models that have exploited attention modules successfully overcome common skin lesion segmentation problems. Lastly, in the spirit of reproducible research, we implement models and codes publicly available.
Incorporating Crowdsourced Annotator Distributions into Ensemble Modeling to Improve Classification Trustworthiness for Ancient Greek Papyri
Authors: Graham West, Matthew I. Swindall, Ben Keener, Timothy Player, Alex C. Williams, James H. Brusuelas, John F. Wallin
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00

Performing classification on noisy, crowdsourced image datasets can prove challenging even for the best neural networks. Two issues which complicate the problem on such datasets are class imbalance and ground-truth uncertainty in labeling. The AL-ALL and AL-PUB datasets - consisting of tightly cropped, individual characters from images of ancient Greek papyri - are strongly affected by both issues. The application of ensemble modeling to such datasets can help identify images where the ground-truth is questionable and quantify the trustworthiness of those samples. As such, we apply stacked generalization consisting of nearly identical ResNets with different loss functions: one utilizing sparse cross-entropy (CXE) and the other Kullback-Liebler Divergence (KLD). Both networks use labels drawn from a crowd-sourced consensus. This consensus is derived from a Normalized Distribution of Annotations (NDA) based on all annotations for a given character in the dataset. For the second network, the KLD is calculated with respect to the NDA. For our ensemble model, we apply a k-nearest neighbors model to the outputs of the CXE and KLD networks. Individually, the ResNet models have approximately 93% accuracy, while the ensemble model achieves an accuracy of > 95%, increasing the classification trustworthiness. We also perform an analysis of the Shannon entropy of the various models' output distributions to measure classification uncertainty. Our results suggest that entropy is useful for predicting model misclassifications.
Improving Hyperspectral Adversarial Robustness Under Multiple Attacks
Authors: Nicholas Soucy, Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Semantic Segmentation, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Semantic segmentation models classifying hyperspectral images (HSI) are vulnerable to adversarial examples. Traditional approaches to adversarial robustness focus on training or retraining a single network on attacked data, however, in the presence of multiple attacks these approaches decrease in performance compared to networks trained individually on each attack. To combat this issue we propose an Adversarial Discriminator Ensemble Network (ADE-Net) which focuses on attack type detection and adversarial robustness under a unified model to preserve per data-type weight optimally while robustifiying the overall network. In the proposed method, a discriminator network is used to separate data by attack type into their specific attack-expert ensemble network.
Digital twins of physical printing-imaging channel
Authors: Yury Belousov, Brian Pulfer, Roman Chaban, Joakim Tutt, Olga Taran, Taras Holotyak, Slava Voloshynovskiy
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Copy Detection, Decoder, Image-to-Image Translation

In this paper, we address the problem of modeling a printing-imaging channel built on a machine learning approach a.k.a. digital twin for anti-counterfeiting applications based on copy detection patterns (CDP). The digital twin is formulated on an information-theoretic framework called Turbo that uses variational approximations of mutual information developed for both encoder and decoder in a two-directional information passage. The proposed model generalizes several state-of-the-art architectures such as adversarial autoencoder (AAE), CycleGAN and adversarial latent space autoencoder (ALAE). This model can be applied to any type of printing and imaging and it only requires training data consisting of digital templates or artworks that are sent to a printing device and data acquired by an imaging device. Moreover, these data can be paired, unpaired or hybrid paired-unpaired which makes the proposed architecture very flexible and scalable to many practical setups. We demonstrate the impact of various architectural factors, metrics and discriminators on the overall system performance in the task of generation/prediction of printed CDP from their digital counterparts and vice versa. We also compare the proposed system with several state-of-the-art methods used for image-to-image translation applications.
Impact of PolSAR pre-processing and balancing methods on complex-valued neural networks segmentation tasks
Authors: José Agustin Barrachina, Chengfang Ren, Christèle Morisseau, Gilles Vieillard, Jean-Philippe Ovarlez
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, valid

In this paper, we investigated the semantic segmentation of Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) using Complex-Valued Neural Network (CVNN). Although the coherency matrix is more widely used as the input of CVNN, the Pauli vector has recently been shown to be a valid alternative. We exhaustively compare both methods for six model architectures, three complex-valued, and their respective real-equivalent models. We are comparing, therefore, not only the input representation impact but also the complex- against the real-valued models. We then argue that the dataset splitting produces a high correlation between training and validation sets, saturating the task and thus achieving very high performance. We, therefore, use a different data pre-processing technique designed to reduce this effect and reproduce the results with the same configurations as before (input representation and model architectures). After seeing that the performance per class is highly different according to class occurrences, we propose two methods for reducing this gap and performing the results for all input representations, models, and dataset pre-processing.
Fashion-Specific Attributes Interpretation via Dual Gaussian Visual-Semantic Embedding
Authors: Ryotaro Shimizu, Masanari Kimura, Masayuki Goto
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Several techniques to map various types of components, such as words, attributes, and images, into the embedded space have been studied. Most of them estimate the embedded representation of target entity as a point in the projective space. Some models, such as Word2Gauss, assume a probability distribution behind the embedded representation, which enables the spread or variance of the meaning of embedded target components to be captured and considered in more detail. We examine the method of estimating embedded representations as probability distributions for the interpretation of fashion-specific abstract and difficult-to-understand terms. Terms, such as "casual," "adult-casual,'' "beauty-casual," and "formal," are extremely subjective and abstract and are difficult for both experts and non-experts to understand, which discourages users from trying new fashion. We propose an end-to-end model called dual Gaussian visual-semantic embedding, which maps images and attributes in the same projective space and enables the interpretation of the meaning of these terms by its broad applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through multifaceted experiments involving image and attribute mapping, image retrieval and re-ordering techniques, and a detailed theoretical/analytical discussion of the distance measure included in the loss function.
Teacher-Student Architecture for Knowledge Learning: A Survey
Authors: Chengming Hu, Xuan Li, Dan Liu, Xi Chen, Ju Wang, Xue Liu
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Multi-Task Learning, Survey

Although Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have shown a strong capacity to solve large-scale problems in many areas, such DNNs with voluminous parameters are hard to be deployed in a real-time system. To tackle this issue, Teacher-Student architectures were first utilized in knowledge distillation, where simple student networks can achieve comparable performance to deep teacher networks. Recently, Teacher-Student architectures have been effectively and widely embraced on various knowledge learning objectives, including knowledge distillation, knowledge expansion, knowledge adaption, and multi-task learning. With the help of Teacher-Student architectures, current studies are able to achieve multiple knowledge-learning objectives through lightweight and effective student networks. Different from the existing knowledge distillation surveys, this survey detailedly discusses Teacher-Student architectures with multiple knowledge learning objectives. In addition, we systematically introduce the knowledge construction and optimization process during the knowledge learning and then analyze various Teacher-Student architectures and effective learning schemes that have been leveraged to learn representative and robust knowledge. This paper also summarizes the latest applications of Teacher-Student architectures based on different purposes (i.e., classification, recognition, and generation). Finally, the potential research directions of knowledge learning are investigated on the Teacher-Student architecture design, the quality of knowledge, and the theoretical studies of regression-based learning, respectively. With this comprehensive survey, both industry practitioners and the academic community can learn insightful guidelines about Teacher-Student architectures on multiple knowledge learning objectives.
ProbNeRF: Uncertainty-Aware Inference of 3D Shapes from 2D Images
Authors: Matthew D. Hoffman, Tuan Anh Le, Pavel Sountsov, Christopher Suter, Ben Lee, Vikash K. Mansinghka, Rif A. Saurous
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, NeRF

The problem of inferring object shape from a single 2D image is underconstrained. Prior knowledge about what objects are plausible can help, but even given such prior knowledge there may still be uncertainty about the shapes of occluded parts of objects. Recently, conditional neural radiance field (NeRF) models have been developed that can learn to infer good point estimates of 3D models from single 2D images. The problem of inferring uncertainty estimates for these models has received less attention. In this work, we propose probabilistic NeRF (ProbNeRF), a model and inference strategy for learning probabilistic generative models of 3D objects' shapes and appearances, and for doing posterior inference to recover those properties from 2D images. ProbNeRF is trained as a variational autoencoder, but at test time we use Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) for inference. Given one or a few 2D images of an object (which may be partially occluded), ProbNeRF is able not only to accurately model the parts it sees, but also to propose realistic and diverse hypotheses about the parts it does not see. We show that key to the success of ProbNeRF are (i) a deterministic rendering scheme, (ii) an annealed-HMC strategy, (iii) a hypernetwork-based decoder architecture, and (iv) doing inference over a full set of NeRF weights, rather than just a low-dimensional code.
Accelerating Diffusion Models via Pre-segmentation Diffusion Sampling for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Xutao Guo, Yanwu Yang, Chenfei Ye, Shang Lu, Yang Xiang, Ting Ma
Date: 2022-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Denoising, Image Generation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Based on the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), medical image segmentation can be described as a conditional image generation task, which allows to compute pixel-wise uncertainty maps of the segmentation and allows an implicit ensemble of segmentations to boost the segmentation performance. However, DDPM requires many iterative denoising steps to generate segmentations from Gaussian noise, resulting in extremely inefficient inference. To mitigate the issue, we propose a principled acceleration strategy, called pre-segmentation diffusion sampling DDPM (PD-DDPM), which is specially used for medical image segmentation. The key idea is to obtain pre-segmentation results based on a separately trained segmentation network, and construct noise predictions (non-Gaussian distribution) according to the forward diffusion rule. We can then start with noisy predictions and use fewer reverse steps to generate segmentation results. Experiments show that PD-DDPM yields better segmentation results over representative baseline methods even if the number of reverse steps is significantly reduced. Moreover, PD-DDPM is orthogonal to existing advanced segmentation models, which can be combined to further improve the segmentation performance.
A deep scalable neural architecture for soil properties estimation from spectral information
Authors: Flavio Piccoli, Micol Rossini, Roberto Colombo, Raimondo Schettini, Paolo Napoletano
Date: 2022-10-26 00:00:00

In this paper we propose an adaptive deep neural architecture for the prediction of multiple soil characteristics from the analysis of hyperspectral signatures. The proposed method overcomes the limitations of previous methods in the state of art: (i) it allows to predict multiple soil variables at once; (ii) it permits to backtrace the spectral bands that most contribute to the estimation of a given variable; (iii) it is based on a flexible neural architecture capable of automatically adapting to the spectral library under analysis. The proposed architecture is experimented on LUCAS, a large laboratory dataset and on a dataset achieved by simulating PRISMA hyperspectral sensor. 'Results, compared with other state-of-the-art methods confirm the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Nesterov Meets Optimism: Rate-Optimal Separable Minimax Optimization
Authors: Chris Junchi Li, Angela Yuan, Gauthier Gidel, Quanquan Gu, Michael I. Jordan
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00

We propose a new first-order optimization algorithm -- AcceleratedGradient-OptimisticGradient (AG-OG) Descent Ascent -- for separable convex-concave minimax optimization. The main idea of our algorithm is to carefully leverage the structure of the minimax problem, performing Nesterov acceleration on the individual component and optimistic gradient on the coupling component. Equipped with proper restarting, we show that AG-OG achieves the optimal convergence rate (up to a constant) for a variety of settings, including bilinearly coupled strongly convex-strongly concave minimax optimization (bi-SC-SC), bilinearly coupled convex-strongly concave minimax optimization (bi-C-SC), and bilinear games. We also extend our algorithm to the stochastic setting and achieve the optimal convergence rate in both bi-SC-SC and bi-C-SC settings. AG-OG is the first single-call algorithm with optimal convergence rates in both deterministic and stochastic settings for bilinearly coupled minimax optimization problems.
Preventing Verbatim Memorization in Language Models Gives a False Sense of Privacy
Authors: Daphne Ippolito, Florian Tramèr, Milad Nasr, Chiyuan Zhang, Matthew Jagielski, Katherine Lee, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Nicholas Carlini
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization, Open-Ended Question Answering, Style Transfer

Studying data memorization in neural language models helps us understand the risks (e.g., to privacy or copyright) associated with models regurgitating training data and aids in the development of countermeasures. Many prior works -- and some recently deployed defenses -- focus on "verbatim memorization", defined as a model generation that exactly matches a substring from the training set. We argue that verbatim memorization definitions are too restrictive and fail to capture more subtle forms of memorization. Specifically, we design and implement an efficient defense that perfectly prevents all verbatim memorization. And yet, we demonstrate that this "perfect" filter does not prevent the leakage of training data. Indeed, it is easily circumvented by plausible and minimally modified "style-transfer" prompts -- and in some cases even the non-modified original prompts -- to extract memorized information. We conclude by discussing potential alternative definitions and why defining memorization is a difficult yet crucial open question for neural language models.
Unclonability and Quantum Cryptanalysis: From Foundations to Applications
Authors: Mina Doosti
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Cryptanalysis, Quantum Machine Learning

The impossibility of creating perfect identical copies of unknown quantum systems is a fundamental concept in quantum theory and one of the main non-classical properties of quantum information. This limitation imposed by quantum mechanics, famously known as the no-cloning theorem, has played a central role in quantum cryptography as a key component in the security of quantum protocols. In this thesis, we look at Unclonability in a broader context in physics and computer science and more specifically through the lens of cryptography, learnability and hardware assumptions. We introduce new notions of unclonability in the quantum world, namely quantum physical unclonability, and study the relationship with cryptographic properties and assumptions such as unforgeability, and quantum pseudorandomness. The purpose of this study is to bring new insights into the field of quantum cryptanalysis and into the notion of unclonability itself. We also discuss several applications of this new type of unclonability as a cryptographic resource for designing provably secure quantum protocols. Furthermore, we present a new practical cryptanalysis technique concerning the problem of approximate cloning of quantum states. We design a quantum machine learning-based cryptanalysis algorithm to demonstrate the power of quantum learning tools as both attack strategies and powerful tools for the practical study of quantum unclonability.
Zero-Shot Text Classification with Self-Training
Authors: Ariel Gera, Alon Halfon, Eyal Shnarch, Yotam Perlitz, Liat Ein-Dor, Noam Slonim
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Natural Language Inference, text-classification, Text Classification, Zero-Shot Text Classification

Recent advances in large pretrained language models have increased attention to zero-shot text classification. In particular, models finetuned on natural language inference datasets have been widely adopted as zero-shot classifiers due to their promising results and off-the-shelf availability. However, the fact that such models are unfamiliar with the target task can lead to instability and performance issues. We propose a plug-and-play method to bridge this gap using a simple self-training approach, requiring only the class names along with an unlabeled dataset, and without the need for domain expertise or trial and error. We show that fine-tuning the zero-shot classifier on its most confident predictions leads to significant performance gains across a wide range of text classification tasks, presumably since self-training adapts the zero-shot model to the task at hand.
Agent-Time Attention for Sparse Rewards Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jennifer She, Jayesh K. Gupta, Mykel J. Kochenderfer
Date: 2022-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Sparse and delayed rewards pose a challenge to single agent reinforcement learning. This challenge is amplified in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) where credit assignment of these rewards needs to happen not only across time, but also across agents. We propose Agent-Time Attention (ATA), a neural network model with auxiliary losses for redistributing sparse and delayed rewards in collaborative MARL. We provide a simple example that demonstrates how providing agents with their own local redistributed rewards and shared global redistributed rewards motivate different policies. We extend several MiniGrid environments, specifically MultiRoom and DoorKey, to the multi-agent sparse delayed rewards setting. We demonstrate that ATA outperforms various baselines on many instances of these environments. Source code of the experiments is available at https://github.com/jshe/agent-time-attention.