pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Designing an Improved Deep Learning-based Model for COVID-19 Recognition in Chest X-ray Images: A Knowledge Distillation Approach
Authors: AmirReza BabaAhmadi, Sahar Khalafi, Masoud ShariatPanahi, Moosa Ayati
Date: 2023-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

COVID-19 has adversely affected humans and societies in different aspects. Numerous people have perished due to inaccurate COVID-19 identification and, consequently, a lack of appropriate medical treatment. Numerous solutions based on manual and automatic feature extraction techniques have been investigated to address this issue by researchers worldwide. Typically, automatic feature extraction methods, particularly deep learning models, necessitate a powerful hardware system to perform the necessary computations. Unfortunately, many institutions and societies cannot benefit from these advancements due to the prohibitively high cost of high-quality hardware equipment. As a result, this study focused on two primary goals: first, lowering the computational costs associated with running the proposed model on embedded devices, mobile devices, and conventional computers; and second, improving the model's performance in comparison to previously published methods (at least performs on par with state-of-the-art models) in order to ensure its performance and accuracy for the medical recognition task. This study used two neural networks to improve feature extraction from our dataset: VGG19 and ResNet50V2. Both of these networks are capable of providing semantic features from the nominated dataset. To this end, An alternative network was considered, namely MobileNetV2, which excels at extracting semantic features while requiring minimal computation on mobile and embedded devices. Knowledge distillation (KD) was used to transfer knowledge from the teacher network (concatenated ResNet50V2 and VGG19) to the student network (MobileNetV2) to improve MobileNetV2 performance and to achieve a robust and accurate model for the COVID-19 identification task from chest X-ray images.
Augmenting Ego-Vehicle for Traffic Near-Miss and Accident Classification Dataset using Manipulating Conditional Style Translation
Authors: Hilmil Pradana, Minh-Son Dao, Koji Zettsu
Date: 2023-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation, Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation, Video Classification

To develop the advanced self-driving systems, many researchers are focusing to alert all possible traffic risk cases from closed-circuit television (CCTV) and dashboard-mounted cameras. Most of these methods focused on identifying frame-by-frame in which an anomaly has occurred, but they are unrealized, which road traffic participant can cause ego-vehicle leading into collision because of available annotation dataset only to detect anomaly on traffic video. Near-miss is one type of accident and can be defined as a narrowly avoided accident. However, there is no difference between accident and near-miss at the time before the accident happened, so our contribution is to redefine the accident definition and re-annotate the accident inconsistency on DADA-2000 dataset together with near-miss. By extending the start and end time of accident duration, our annotation can precisely cover all ego-motions during an incident and consistently classify all possible traffic risk accidents including near-miss to give more critical information for real-world driving assistance systems. The proposed method integrates two different components: conditional style translation (CST) and separable 3-dimensional convolutional neural network (S3D). CST architecture is derived by unsupervised image-to-image translation networks (UNIT) used for augmenting the re-annotation DADA-2000 dataset to increase the number of traffic risk accident videos and to generalize the performance of video classification model on different types of conditions while S3D is useful for video classification to prove dataset re-annotation consistency. In evaluation, the proposed method achieved a significant improvement result by 10.25% positive margin from the baseline model for accuracy on cross-validation analysis.
RUPNet: Residual upsampling network for real-time polyp segmentation
Authors: Nikhil Kumar Tomar, Ulas Bagci, Debesh Jha
Date: 2023-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Medical Image Segmentation

Colorectal cancer is among the most prevalent cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Detection and removal of polyps at an early stage can help reduce mortality and even help in spreading over adjacent organs. Early polyp detection could save the lives of millions of patients over the world as well as reduce the clinical burden. However, the detection polyp rate varies significantly among endoscopists. There is numerous deep learning-based method proposed, however, most of the studies improve accuracy. Here, we propose a novel architecture, Residual Upsampling Network (RUPNet) for colon polyp segmentation that can process in real-time and show high recall and precision. The proposed architecture, RUPNet, is an encoder-decoder network that consists of three encoders, three decoder blocks, and some additional upsampling blocks at the end of the network. With an image size of $512 \times 512$, the proposed method achieves an excellent real-time operation speed of 152.60 frames per second with an average dice coefficient of 0.7658, mean intersection of union of 0.6553, sensitivity of 0.8049, precision of 0.7995, and F2-score of 0.9361. The results suggest that RUPNet can give real-time feedback while retaining high accuracy indicating a good benchmark for early polyp detection.
3DAvatarGAN: Bridging Domains for Personalized Editable Avatars
Authors: Rameen Abdal, Hsin-Ying Lee, Peihao Zhu, Menglei Chai, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Peter Wonka, Sergey Tulyakov
Date: 2023-01-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1

Modern 3D-GANs synthesize geometry and texture by training on large-scale datasets with a consistent structure. Training such models on stylized, artistic data, with often unknown, highly variable geometry, and camera information has not yet been shown possible. Can we train a 3D GAN on such artistic data, while maintaining multi-view consistency and texture quality? To this end, we propose an adaptation framework, where the source domain is a pre-trained 3D-GAN, while the target domain is a 2D-GAN trained on artistic datasets. We then distill the knowledge from a 2D generator to the source 3D generator. To do that, we first propose an optimization-based method to align the distributions of camera parameters across domains. Second, we propose regularizations necessary to learn high-quality texture, while avoiding degenerate geometric solutions, such as flat shapes. Third, we show a deformation-based technique for modeling exaggerated geometry of artistic domains, enabling -- as a byproduct -- personalized geometric editing. Finally, we propose a novel inversion method for 3D-GANs linking the latent spaces of the source and the target domains. Our contributions -- for the first time -- allow for the generation, editing, and animation of personalized artistic 3D avatars on artistic datasets.
Design of Arabic Sign Language Recognition Model
Authors: Muhammad Al-Barham, Ahmad Jamal, Musa Al-Yaman
Date: 2023-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Augmentation, model, Sign Language Recognition

Deaf people are using sign language for communication, and it is a combination of gestures, movements, postures, and facial expressions that correspond to alphabets and words in spoken languages. The proposed Arabic sign language recognition model helps deaf and hard hearing people communicate effectively with ordinary people. The recognition has four stages of converting the alphabet into letters as follows: Image Loading stage, which loads the images of Arabic sign language alphabets that were used later to train and test the model, a pre-processing stage which applies image processing techniques such as normalization, Image augmentation, resizing, and filtering to extract the features which are necessary to accomplish the recognition perfectly, a training stage which is achieved by deep learning techniques like CNN, a testing stage which demonstrates how effectively the model performs for images did not see it before, and the model was built and tested mainly using PyTorch library. The model is tested on ArASL2018, consisting of 54,000 images for 32 alphabet signs gathered from 40 signers, and the dataset has two sets: training dataset and testing dataset. We had to ensure that the system is reliable in terms of accuracy, time, and flexibility of use explained in detail in this report. Finally, the future work will be a model that converts Arabic sign language into Arabic text.
In Defense of Structural Symbolic Representation for Video Event-Relation Prediction
Authors: Andrew Lu, Xudong Lin, Yulei Niu, Shih-Fu Chang
Date: 2023-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Relation, Relation Prediction

Understanding event relationships in videos requires a model to understand the underlying structures of events (i.e. the event type, the associated argument roles, and corresponding entities) and factual knowledge for reasoning. Structural symbolic representation (SSR) based methods directly take event types and associated argument roles/entities as inputs to perform reasoning. However, the state-of-the-art video event-relation prediction system shows the necessity of using continuous feature vectors from input videos; existing methods based solely on SSR inputs fail completely, even when given oracle event types and argument roles. In this paper, we conduct an extensive empirical analysis to answer the following questions: 1) why SSR-based method failed; 2) how to understand the evaluation setting of video event relation prediction properly; 3) how to uncover the potential of SSR-based methods. We first identify suboptimal training settings as causing the failure of previous SSR-based video event prediction models. Then through qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show how evaluation that takes only video as inputs is currently unfeasible, as well as the reliance on oracle event information to obtain an accurate evaluation. Based on these findings, we propose to further contextualize the SSR-based model to an Event-Sequence Model and equip it with more factual knowledge through a simple yet effective way of reformulating external visual commonsense knowledge bases into an event-relation prediction pretraining dataset. The resultant new state-of-the-art model eventually establishes a 25% Macro-accuracy performance boost.
Diffused Heads: Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Talking-Face Generation
Authors: Michał Stypułkowski, Konstantinos Vougioukas, Sen He, Maciej Zięba, Stavros Petridis, Maja Pantic
Date: 2023-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, Talking Face Generation, Video Generation

Talking face generation has historically struggled to produce head movements and natural facial expressions without guidance from additional reference videos. Recent developments in diffusion-based generative models allow for more realistic and stable data synthesis and their performance on image and video generation has surpassed that of other generative models. In this work, we present an autoregressive diffusion model that requires only one identity image and audio sequence to generate a video of a realistic talking human head. Our solution is capable of hallucinating head movements, facial expressions, such as blinks, and preserving a given background. We evaluate our model on two different datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results on both of them.
Difference of Anisotropic and Isotropic TV for Segmentation under Blur and Poisson Noise
Authors: Kevin Bui, Yifei Lou, Fredrick Park, Jack Xin
Date: 2023-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, image smoothing, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we aim to segment an image degraded by blur and Poisson noise. We adopt a smoothing-and-thresholding (SaT) segmentation framework that finds a piecewise-smooth solution, followed by $k$-means clustering to segment the image. Specifically for the image smoothing step, we replace the least-squares fidelity for Gaussian noise in the Mumford-Shah model with a maximum posterior (MAP) term to deal with Poisson noise and we incorporate the weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation (AITV) as a regularization to promote the sparsity of image gradients. For such a nonconvex model, we develop a specific splitting scheme and utilize a proximal operator to apply the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Convergence analysis is provided to validate the efficacy of the ADMM scheme. Numerical experiments on various segmentation scenarios (grayscale/color and multiphase) showcase that our proposed method outperforms a number of segmentation methods, including the original SaT.
Safer Together: Machine Learning Models Trained on Shared Accident Datasets Predict Construction Injuries Better than Company-Specific Models
Authors: Antoine J. -P. Tixier, Matthew R. Hallowell
Date: 2023-01-09 00:00:00

In this study, we capitalized on a collective dataset repository of 57k accidents from 9 companies belonging to 3 domains and tested whether models trained on multiple datasets (generic models) predicted safety outcomes better than the company-specific models. We experimented with full generic models (trained on all data), per-domain generic models (construction, electric T&D, oil & gas), and with ensembles of generic and specific models. Results are very positive, with generic models outperforming the company-specific models in most cases while also generating finer-grained, hence more useful, forecasts. Successful generic models remove the needs for training company-specific models, saving a lot of time and resources, and give small companies, whose accident datasets are too limited to train their own models, access to safety outcome predictions. It may still however be advantageous to train specific models to get an extra boost in performance through ensembling with the generic models. Overall, by learning lessons from a pool of datasets whose accumulated experience far exceeds that of any single company, and making these lessons easily accessible in the form of simple forecasts, generic models tackle the holy grail of safety cross-organizational learning and dissemination in the construction industry.
Simple Binary Hypothesis Testing under Local Differential Privacy and Communication Constraints
Authors: Ankit Pensia, Amir R. Asadi, Varun Jog, Po-Ling Loh
Date: 2023-01-09 00:00:00

We study simple binary hypothesis testing under both local differential privacy (LDP) and communication constraints. We qualify our results as either minimax optimal or instance optimal: the former hold for the set of distribution pairs with prescribed Hellinger divergence and total variation distance, whereas the latter hold for specific distribution pairs. For the sample complexity of simple hypothesis testing under pure LDP constraints, we establish instance-optimal bounds for distributions with binary support; minimax-optimal bounds for general distributions; and (approximately) instance-optimal, computationally efficient algorithms for general distributions. When both privacy and communication constraints are present, we develop instance-optimal, computationally efficient algorithms that achieve the minimum possible sample complexity (up to universal constants). Our results on instance-optimal algorithms hinge on identifying the extreme points of the joint range set $\mathcal A$ of two distributions $p$ and $q$, defined as $\mathcal A := \{(\mathbf T p, \mathbf T q) | \mathbf T \in \mathcal C\}$, where $\mathcal C$ is the set of channels characterizing the constraints.
Physics-Informed Kernel Embeddings: Integrating Prior System Knowledge with Data-Driven Control
Authors: Adam J. Thorpe, Cyrus Neary, Franck Djeumou, Meeko M. K. Oishi, Ufuk Topcu
Date: 2023-01-09 00:00:00

Data-driven control algorithms use observations of system dynamics to construct an implicit model for the purpose of control. However, in practice, data-driven techniques often require excessive sample sizes, which may be infeasible in real-world scenarios where only limited observations of the system are available. Furthermore, purely data-driven methods often neglect useful a priori knowledge, such as approximate models of the system dynamics. We present a method to incorporate such prior knowledge into data-driven control algorithms using kernel embeddings, a nonparametric machine learning technique based in the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Our proposed approach incorporates prior knowledge of the system dynamics as a bias term in the kernel learning problem. We formulate the biased learning problem as a least-squares problem with a regularization term that is informed by the dynamics, that has an efficiently computable, closed-form solution. Through numerical experiments, we empirically demonstrate the improved sample efficiency and out-of-sample generalization of our approach over a purely data-driven baseline. We demonstrate an application of our method to control through a target tracking problem with nonholonomic dynamics, and on spring-mass-damper and F-16 aircraft state prediction tasks.
Differentiable Simulations for Enhanced Sampling of Rare Events
Authors: Martin Šípka, Johannes C. B. Dietschreit, Lukáš Grajciar, Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli
Date: 2023-01-09 00:00:00

Simulating rare events, such as the transformation of a reactant into a product in a chemical reaction typically requires enhanced sampling techniques that rely on heuristically chosen collective variables (CVs). We propose using differentiable simulations (DiffSim) for the discovery and enhanced sampling of chemical transformations without a need to resort to preselected CVs, using only a distance metric. Reaction path discovery and estimation of the biasing potential that enhances the sampling are merged into a single end-to-end problem that is solved by path-integral optimization. This is achieved by introducing multiple improvements over standard DiffSim such as partial backpropagation and graph mini-batching making DiffSim training stable and efficient. The potential of DiffSim is demonstrated in the successful discovery of transition paths for the Muller-Brown model potential as well as a benchmark chemical system - alanine dipeptide.
L-SeqSleepNet: Whole-cycle Long Sequence Modelling for Automatic Sleep Staging
Authors: Huy Phan, Kristian P. Lorenzen, Elisabeth Heremans, Oliver Y. Chén, Minh C. Tran, Philipp Koch, Alfred Mertins, Mathias Baumert, Kaare Mikkelsen, Maarten De Vos
Date: 2023-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG), Sleep Staging

Human sleep is cyclical with a period of approximately 90 minutes, implying long temporal dependency in the sleep data. Yet, exploring this long-term dependency when developing sleep staging models has remained untouched. In this work, we show that while encoding the logic of a whole sleep cycle is crucial to improve sleep staging performance, the sequential modelling approach in existing state-of-the-art deep learning models are inefficient for that purpose. We thus introduce a method for efficient long sequence modelling and propose a new deep learning model, L-SeqSleepNet, which takes into account whole-cycle sleep information for sleep staging. Evaluating L-SeqSleepNet on four distinct databases of various sizes, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance obtained by the model over three different EEG setups, including scalp EEG in conventional Polysomnography (PSG), in-ear EEG, and around-the-ear EEG (cEEGrid), even with a single EEG channel input. Our analyses also show that L-SeqSleepNet is able to alleviate the predominance of N2 sleep (the major class in terms of classification) to bring down errors in other sleep stages. Moreover the network becomes much more robust, meaning that for all subjects where the baseline method had exceptionally poor performance, their performance are improved significantly. Finally, the computation time only grows at a sub-linear rate when the sequence length increases.
A review of clustering models in educational data science towards fairness-aware learning
Authors: Tai Le Quy, Gunnar Friege, Eirini Ntoutsi
Date: 2023-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Fairness

Ensuring fairness is essential for every education system. Machine learning is increasingly supporting the education system and educational data science (EDS) domain, from decision support to educational activities and learning analytics. However, the machine learning-based decisions can be biased because the algorithms may generate the results based on students' protected attributes such as race or gender. Clustering is an important machine learning technique to explore student data in order to support the decision-maker, as well as support educational activities, such as group assignments. Therefore, ensuring high-quality clustering models along with satisfying fairness constraints are important requirements. This chapter comprehensively surveys clustering models and their fairness in EDS. We especially focus on investigating the fair clustering models applied in educational activities. These models are believed to be practical tools for analyzing students' data and ensuring fairness in EDS.
Fast and Correct Gradient-Based Optimisation for Probabilistic Programming via Smoothing
Authors: Basim Khajwal, C. -H. Luke Ong, Dominik Wagner
Date: 2023-01-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Probabilistic Programming, Variational Inference

We study the foundations of variational inference, which frames posterior inference as an optimisation problem, for probabilistic programming. The dominant approach for optimisation in practice is stochastic gradient descent. In particular, a variant using the so-called reparameterisation gradient estimator exhibits fast convergence in a traditional statistics setting. Unfortunately, discontinuities, which are readily expressible in programming languages, can compromise the correctness of this approach. We consider a simple (higher-order, probabilistic) programming language with conditionals, and we endow our language with both a measurable and a smoothed (approximate) value semantics. We present type systems which establish technical pre-conditions. Thus we can prove stochastic gradient descent with the reparameterisation gradient estimator to be correct when applied to the smoothed problem. Besides, we can solve the original problem up to any error tolerance by choosing an accuracy coefficient suitably. Empirically we demonstrate that our approach has a similar convergence as a key competitor, but is simpler, faster, and attains orders of magnitude reduction in work-normalised variance.