pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GPUNet: Searching the Deployable Convolution Neural Networks for GPUs
Authors: Linnan Wang, Chenhan Yu, Satish Salian, Slawomir Kierat, Szymon Migacz, Alex Fit Florea
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Neural Architecture Search

Customizing Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) for production use has been a challenging task for DL practitioners. This paper intends to expedite the model customization with a model hub that contains the optimized models tiered by their inference latency using Neural Architecture Search (NAS). To achieve this goal, we build a distributed NAS system to search on a novel search space that consists of prominent factors to impact latency and accuracy. Since we target GPU, we name the NAS optimized models as GPUNet, which establishes a new SOTA Pareto frontier in inference latency and accuracy. Within 1$ms$, GPUNet is 2x faster than EfficientNet-X and FBNetV3 with even better accuracy. We also validate GPUNet on detection tasks, and GPUNet consistently outperforms EfficientNet-X and FBNetV3 on COCO detection tasks in both latency and accuracy. All of these data validate that our NAS system is effective and generic to handle different design tasks. With this NAS system, we expand GPUNet to cover a wide range of latency targets such that DL practitioners can deploy our models directly in different scenarios.
Discrete models of continuous behavior of collective adaptive systems
Authors: Peter Fettke, Wolfgang Reisig
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00

Artificial ants are "small" units, moving autonomously on a shared, dynamically changing "space", directly or indirectly exchanging some kind of information. Artificial ants are frequently conceived as a paradigm for collective adaptive systems. In this paper, we discuss means to represent continuous moves of "ants" in discrete models. More generally, we challenge the role of the notion of "time" in artificial ant systems and models. We suggest a modeling framework that structures behavior along causal dependencies, and not along temporal relations. We present all arguments by help of a simple example. As a modeling framework we employ Heraklit; an emerging framework that already has proven its worth in many contexts.
Function Decomposition Tree with Causality-First Perspective and Systematic Description of Problems in Materials Informatics
Authors: Hiori Kino, Hieu-Chi Dam, Takashi Miyake, Riichiro Mizoguchi
Date: 2022-04-26 00:00:00

As interdisciplinary science is flourishing because of materials informatics and additional factors; a systematic way is required for expressing knowledge and facilitating communication between scientists in various fields. A function decomposition tree is such a representation, but domain scientists face difficulty in constructing it. Thus, this study cites the general problems encountered by beginners in generating function decomposition trees and proposes a new function decomposition representation method based on a causality-first perspective for resolution of these problems. The causality-first decomposition tree was obtained from a workflow expressed according to the processing sequence. Moreover, we developed a program that performed automatic conversion using the features of the causality-first decomposition trees. The proposed method was applied to materials informatics to demonstrate the systematic representation of expert knowledge and its usefullness.
Quantifying Health Inequalities Induced by Data and AI Models
Authors: Honghan Wu, Minhong Wang, Aneeta Sylolypavan, Sarah Wild
Date: 2022-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

AI technologies are being increasingly tested and applied in critical environments including healthcare. Without an effective way to detect and mitigate AI induced inequalities, AI might do more harm than good, potentially leading to the widening of underlying inequalities. This paper proposes a generic allocation-deterioration framework for detecting and quantifying AI induced inequality. Specifically, AI induced inequalities are quantified as the area between two allocation-deterioration curves. To assess the framework's performance, experiments were conducted on ten synthetic datasets (N>33,000) generated from HiRID - a real-world Intensive Care Unit (ICU) dataset, showing its ability to accurately detect and quantify inequality proportionally to controlled inequalities. Extensive analyses were carried out to quantify health inequalities (a) embedded in two real-world ICU datasets; (b) induced by AI models trained for two resource allocation scenarios. Results showed that compared to men, women had up to 33% poorer deterioration in markers of prognosis when admitted to HiRID ICUs. All four AI models assessed were shown to induce significant inequalities (2.45% to 43.2%) for non-White compared to White patients. The models exacerbated data embedded inequalities significantly in 3 out of 8 assessments, one of which was >9 times worse. The codebase is at https://github.com/knowlab/DAindex-Framework.
Incomplete Gamma Kernels: Generalizing Locally Optimal Projection Operators
Authors: Patrick Stotko, Michael Weinmann, Reinhard Klein
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Surface Reconstruction

We present incomplete gamma kernels, a generalization of Locally Optimal Projection (LOP) operators. In particular, we reveal the relation of the classical localized $ L_1 $ estimator, used in the LOP operator for point cloud denoising, to the common Mean Shift framework via a novel kernel. Furthermore, we generalize this result to a whole family of kernels that are built upon the incomplete gamma function and each represents a localized $ L_p $ estimator. By deriving various properties of the kernel family concerning distributional, Mean Shift induced, and other aspects such as strict positive definiteness, we obtain a deeper understanding of the operator's projection behavior. From these theoretical insights, we illustrate several applications ranging from an improved Weighted LOP (WLOP) density weighting scheme and a more accurate Continuous LOP (CLOP) kernel approximation to the definition of a novel set of robust loss functions. These incomplete gamma losses include the Gaussian and LOP loss as special cases and can be applied to various tasks including normal filtering. Furthermore, we show that the novel kernels can be included as priors into neural networks. We demonstrate the effects of each application in a range of quantitative and qualitative experiments that highlight the benefits induced by our modifications.
Detection Recovery in Online Multi-Object Tracking with Sparse Graph Tracker
Authors: Jeongseok Hyun, Myunggu Kang, Dongyoon Wee, Dit-yan Yeung
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: motion prediction, Multi-Object Tracking, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking, Online Multi-Object Tracking

In existing joint detection and tracking methods, pairwise relational features are used to match previous tracklets to current detections. However, the features may not be discriminative enough for a tracker to identify a target from a large number of detections. Selecting only high-scored detections for tracking may lead to missed detections whose confidence score is low. Consequently, in the online setting, this results in disconnections of tracklets which cannot be recovered. In this regard, we present Sparse Graph Tracker (SGT), a novel online graph tracker using higher-order relational features which are more discriminative by aggregating the features of neighboring detections and their relations. SGT converts video data into a graph where detections, their connections, and the relational features of two connected nodes are represented by nodes, edges, and edge features, respectively. The strong edge features allow SGT to track targets with tracking candidates selected by top-K scored detections with large K. As a result, even low-scored detections can be tracked, and the missed detections are also recovered. The robustness of K value is shown through the extensive experiments. In the MOT16/17/20 and HiEve Challenge, SGT outperforms the state-of-the-art trackers with real-time inference speed. Especially, a large improvement in MOTA is shown in the MOT20 and HiEve Challenge. Code is available at https://github.com/HYUNJS/SGT.
Monocular 3D Fingerprint Reconstruction and Unwarping
Authors: Zhe Cui, Jianjiang Feng, Jie zhou
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Shape from Texture

Compared with contact-based fingerprint acquisition techniques, contactless acquisition has the advantages of less skin distortion, larger fingerprint area, and hygienic acquisition. However, perspective distortion is a challenge in contactless fingerprint recognition, which changes ridge orientation, frequency, and minutiae location, and thus causes degraded recognition accuracy. We propose a learning based shape from texture algorithm to reconstruct a 3D finger shape from a single image and unwarp the raw image to suppress perspective distortion. Experimental results on contactless fingerprint databases show that the proposed method has high 3D reconstruction accuracy. Matching experiments on contactless-contact and contactless-contactless matching prove that the proposed method improves matching accuracy.
Leaf Tar Spot Detection Using RGB Images
Authors: Sriram Baireddy, Da-Young Lee, Carlos Gongora-Canul, Christian D. Cruz, Edward J. Delp
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: TAR

Tar spot disease is a fungal disease that appears as a series of black circular spots containing spores on corn leaves. Tar spot has proven to be an impactful disease in terms of reducing crop yield. To quantify disease progression, experts usually have to visually phenotype leaves from the plant. This process is very time-consuming and is difficult to incorporate in any high-throughput phenotyping system. Deep neural networks could provide quick, automated tar spot detection with sufficient ground truth. However, manually labeling tar spots in images to serve as ground truth is also tedious and time-consuming. In this paper we first describe an approach that uses automated image analysis tools to generate ground truth images that are then used for training a Mask R-CNN. We show that a Mask R-CNN can be used effectively to detect tar spots in close-up images of leaf surfaces. We additionally show that the Mask R-CNN can also be used for in-field images of whole leaves to capture the number of tar spots and area of the leaf infected by the disease.
Answer-Me: Multi-Task Open-Vocabulary Visual Question Answering
Authors: AJ Piergiovanni, Wei Li, Weicheng Kuo, Mohammad Saffar, Fred Bertsch, Anelia Angelova
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Captioning, Question Answering, Visual Entailment, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Visual Reasoning, Zero-shot Generalization

We present Answer-Me, a task-aware multi-task framework which unifies a variety of question answering tasks, such as, visual question answering, visual entailment, visual reasoning. In contrast to previous works using contrastive or generative captioning training, we propose a novel and simple recipe to pre-train a vision-language joint model, which is multi-task as well. The pre-training uses only noisy image captioning data, and is formulated to use the entire architecture end-to-end with both a strong language encoder and decoder. Our results show state-of-the-art performance, zero-shot generalization, robustness to forgetting, and competitive single-task results across a variety of question answering tasks. Our multi-task mixture training learns from tasks of various question intents and thus generalizes better, including on zero-shot vision-language tasks. We conduct experiments in the challenging multi-task and open-vocabulary settings and across a variety of datasets and tasks, such as VQA2.0, SNLI-VE, NLVR2, GQA. We observe that the proposed approach is able to generalize to unseen tasks and that more diverse mixtures lead to higher accuracy in both known and novel tasks.
Understanding CNNs from excitations
Authors: Zijian Ying, Qianmu Li, Zhichao Lian, Jun Hou, Tong Lin, Tao Wang
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

Saliency maps have proven to be a highly efficacious approach for explicating the decisions of Convolutional Neural Networks. However, extant methodologies predominantly rely on gradients, which constrain their ability to explicate complex models. Furthermore, such approaches are not fully adept at leveraging negative gradient information to improve interpretive veracity. In this study, we present a novel concept, termed positive and negative excitation, which enables the direct extraction of positive and negative excitation for each layer, thus enabling complete layer-by-layer information utilization sans gradients. To organize these excitations into final saliency maps, we introduce a double-chain backpropagation procedure. A comprehensive experimental evaluation, encompassing both binary classification and multi-classification tasks, was conducted to gauge the effectiveness of our proposed method. Encouragingly, the results evince that our approach offers a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods in terms of salient pixel removal, minor pixel removal, and inconspicuous adversarial perturbation generation guidance. Additionally, we verify the correlation between positive and negative excitations.
Revisiting Gaussian Neurons for Online Clustering with Unknown Number of Clusters
Authors: Ole Christian Eidheim
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Online Clustering

Despite the recent success of artificial neural networks, more biologically plausible learning methods may be needed to resolve the weaknesses of backpropagation trained models such as catastrophic forgetting and adversarial attacks. Although these weaknesses are not specifically addressed, a novel local learning rule is presented that performs online clustering with an upper limit on the number of clusters to be found rather than a fixed cluster count. Instead of using orthogonal weight or output activation constraints, activation sparsity is achieved by mutual repulsion of lateral Gaussian neurons ensuring that multiple neuron centers cannot occupy the same location in the input domain. An update method is also presented for adjusting the widths of the Gaussian neurons in cases where the data samples can be represented by means and variances. The algorithms were applied on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets to create filters capturing the input patterns of pixel patches of various sizes. The experimental results demonstrate stability in the learned parameters across a large number of training samples.
On the generalization capabilities of FSL methods through domain adaptation: a case study in endoscopic kidney stone image classification
Authors: Mauricio Mendez-Ruiz, Francisco Lopez-Tiro, Jonathan El-Beze, Vincent Estrade, Gilberto Ochoa-Ruiz1, Jacques Hubert, Andres Mendez-Vazquez, Christian Daul
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Domain Adaptation, Few-Shot Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Meta-Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning has shown great promise in diverse areas of computer vision, such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation, among many others. However, as it has been repeatedly demonstrated, deep learning methods trained on a dataset do not generalize well to datasets from other domains or even to similar datasets, due to data distribution shifts. In this work, we propose the use of a meta-learning based few-shot learning approach to alleviate these problems. In order to demonstrate its efficacy, we use two datasets of kidney stones samples acquired with different endoscopes and different acquisition conditions. The results show how such methods are indeed capable of handling domain-shifts by attaining an accuracy of 74.38% and 88.52% in the 5-way 5-shot and 5-way 20-shot settings respectively. Instead, in the same dataset, traditional Deep Learning (DL) methods attain only an accuracy of 45%.
Cross-Domain Correlation Distillation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Nighttime Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Huan Gao, Jichang Guo, Guoli Wang, Qian Zhang
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Adaptation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

The performance of nighttime semantic segmentation is restricted by the poor illumination and a lack of pixel-wise annotation, which severely limit its application in autonomous driving. Existing works, e.g., using the twilight as the intermediate target domain to perform the adaptation from daytime to nighttime, may fail to cope with the inherent difference between datasets caused by the camera equipment and the urban style. Faced with these two types of domain shifts, i.e., the illumination and the inherent difference of the datasets, we propose a novel domain adaptation framework via cross-domain correlation distillation, called CCDistill. The invariance of illumination or inherent difference between two images is fully explored so as to make up for the lack of labels for nighttime images. Specifically, we extract the content and style knowledge contained in features, calculate the degree of inherent or illumination difference between two images. The domain adaptation is achieved using the invariance of the same kind of difference. Extensive experiments on Dark Zurich and ACDC demonstrate that CCDistill achieves the state-of-the-art performance for nighttime semantic segmentation. Notably, our method is a one-stage domain adaptation network which can avoid affecting the inference time. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/ghuan99/CCDistill.
Stability-driven Contact Reconstruction From Monocular Color Images
Authors: Zimeng Zhao, Binghui Zuo, Wei Xie, Yangang Wang
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Object

Physical contact provides additional constraints for hand-object state reconstruction as well as a basis for further understanding of interaction affordances. Estimating these severely occluded regions from monocular images presents a considerable challenge. Existing methods optimize the hand-object contact driven by distance threshold or prior from contact-labeled datasets. However, due to the number of subjects and objects involved in these indoor datasets being limited, the learned contact patterns could not be generalized easily. Our key idea is to reconstruct the contact pattern directly from monocular images, and then utilize the physical stability criterion in the simulation to optimize it. This criterion is defined by the resultant forces and contact distribution computed by the physics engine.Compared to existing solutions, our framework can be adapted to more personalized hands and diverse object shapes. Furthermore, an interaction dataset with extra physical attributes is created to verify the sim-to-real consistency of our methods. Through comprehensive evaluations, hand-object contact can be reconstructed with both accuracy and stability by the proposed framework.
APP-Net: Auxiliary-point-based Push and Pull Operations for Efficient Point Cloud Classification
Authors: Tao Lu, Chunxu Liu, Youxin Chen, Gangshan Wu, LiMin Wang
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Classification, 3D Point Cloud Classification, GPU, Point Cloud Classification

Aggregating neighbor features is essential for point cloud classification. In the existing work, each point in the cloud may inevitably be selected as the neighbors of multiple aggregation centers, as all centers will gather neighbor features from the whole point cloud independently. Thus each point has to participate in the calculation repeatedly and generates redundant duplicates in the memory, leading to intensive computation costs and memory consumption. Meanwhile, to pursue higher accuracy, previous methods often rely on a complex local aggregator to extract fine geometric representation, which further slows down the classification pipeline. To address these issues, we propose a new local aggregator of linear complexity for point cloud classification, coined as APP. Specifically, we introduce an auxiliary container as an anchor to exchange features between the source point and the aggregating center. Each source point pushes its feature to only one auxiliary container, and each center point pulls features from only one auxiliary container. This avoids the re-computation issue of each source point. To facilitate the learning of the local structure of cloud point, we use an online normal estimation module to provide the explainable geometric information to enhance our APP modeling capability. Our built network is more efficient than all the previous baselines with a clear margin while still consuming a lower memory. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that APP-Net reaches comparable accuracies to other networks. It can process more than 10,000 samples per second with less than 10GB of memory on a single GPU. We will release the code in https://github.com/MCG-NJU/APP-Net.
Zebra: Memory Bandwidth Reduction for CNN Accelerators With Zero Block Regularization of Activation Maps
Authors: Hsu-Tung Shih, Tian-Sheuan Chang
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00

The large amount of memory bandwidth between local buffer and external DRAM has become the speedup bottleneck of CNN hardware accelerators, especially for activation maps. To reduce memory bandwidth, we propose to learn pruning unimportant blocks dynamically with zero block regularization of activation maps (Zebra). This strategy has low computational overhead and could easily integrate with other pruning methods for better performance. The experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce 70\% of memory bandwidth for Resnet-18 on Tiny-Imagenet within 1\% accuracy drops and 2\% accuracy gain with the combination of Network Slimming.
Sparse Compressed Spiking Neural Network Accelerator for Object Detection
Authors: Hong-Han Lien, Tian-Sheuan Chang
Date: 2022-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Spiking neural networks (SNNs), which are inspired by the human brain, have recently gained popularity due to their relatively simple and low-power hardware for transmitting binary spikes and highly sparse activation maps. However, because SNNs contain extra time dimension information, the SNN accelerator will require more buffers and take longer to infer, especially for the more difficult high-resolution object detection task. As a result, this paper proposes a sparse compressed spiking neural network accelerator that takes advantage of the high sparsity of activation maps and weights by utilizing the proposed gated one-to-all product for low power and highly parallel model execution. The experimental result of the neural network shows 71.5$\%$ mAP with mixed (1,3) time steps on the IVS 3cls dataset. The accelerator with the TSMC 28nm CMOS process can achieve 1024$\times$576@29 frames per second processing when running at 500MHz with 35.88TOPS/W energy efficiency and 1.05mJ energy consumption per frame.