pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Shrinking unit: a Graph Convolution-Based Unit for CNN-like 3D Point Cloud Feature Extractors
Authors: Alberto Tamajo, Bastian Plaß, Thomas Klauer
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00

3D point clouds have attracted increasing attention in architecture, engineering, and construction due to their high-quality object representation and efficient acquisition methods. Consequently, many point cloud feature detection methods have been proposed in the literature to automate some workflows, such as their classification or part segmentation. Nevertheless, the performance of point cloud automated systems significantly lags behind their image counterparts. While part of this failure stems from the irregularity, unstructuredness, and disorder of point clouds, which makes the task of point cloud feature detection significantly more challenging than the image one, we argue that a lack of inspiration from the image domain might be the primary cause of such a gap. Indeed, given the overwhelming success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in image feature detection, it seems reasonable to design their point cloud counterparts, but none of the proposed approaches closely resembles them. Specifically, even though many approaches generalise the convolution operation in point clouds, they fail to emulate the CNNs multiple-feature detection and pooling operations. For this reason, we propose a graph convolution-based unit, dubbed Shrinking unit, that can be stacked vertically and horizontally for the design of CNN-like 3D point cloud feature extractors. Given that self, local and global correlations between points in a point cloud convey crucial spatial geometric information, we also leverage them during the feature extraction process. We evaluate our proposal by designing a feature extractor model for the ModelNet-10 benchmark dataset and achieve 90.64% classification accuracy, demonstrating that our innovative idea is effective. Our code is available at github.com/albertotamajo/Shrinking-unit.
EasyRec: An easy-to-use, extendable and efficient framework for building industrial recommendation systems
Authors: Mengli Cheng, Yue Gao, Guoqiang Liu, Hongsheng Jin, Xiaowen Zhang
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Recommendation Systems

We present EasyRec, an easy-to-use, extendable and efficient recommendation framework for building industrial recommendation systems. Our EasyRec framework is superior in the following aspects: first, EasyRec adopts a modular and pluggable design pattern to reduce the efforts to build custom models; second, EasyRec implements hyper-parameter optimization and feature selection algorithms to improve model performance automatically; third, EasyRec applies online learning to fast adapt to the ever-changing data distribution. The code is released: https://github.com/alibaba/EasyRec.
Generalized Parametric Contrastive Learning
Authors: Jiequan Cui, Zhisheng Zhong, Zhuotao Tian, Shu Liu, Bei Yu, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Domain Generalization, Image Classification, Long-tail Learning, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we propose the Generalized Parametric Contrastive Learning (GPaCo/PaCo) which works well on both imbalanced and balanced data. Based on theoretical analysis, we observe that supervised contrastive loss tends to bias high-frequency classes and thus increases the difficulty of imbalanced learning. We introduce a set of parametric class-wise learnable centers to rebalance from an optimization perspective. Further, we analyze our GPaCo/PaCo loss under a balanced setting. Our analysis demonstrates that GPaCo/PaCo can adaptively enhance the intensity of pushing samples of the same class close as more samples are pulled together with their corresponding centers and benefit hard example learning. Experiments on long-tailed benchmarks manifest the new state-of-the-art for long-tailed recognition. On full ImageNet, models from CNNs to vision transformers trained with GPaCo loss show better generalization performance and stronger robustness compared with MAE models. Moreover, GPaCo can be applied to the semantic segmentation task and obvious improvements are observed on the 4 most popular benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/Parametric-Contrastive-Learning.
Real-RawVSR: Real-World Raw Video Super-Resolution with a Benchmark Dataset
Authors: Huanjing Yue, Zhiming Zhang, Jingyu Yang
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution, Video Super-Resolution

In recent years, real image super-resolution (SR) has achieved promising results due to the development of SR datasets and corresponding real SR methods. In contrast, the field of real video SR is lagging behind, especially for real raw videos. Considering the superiority of raw image SR over sRGB image SR, we construct a real-world raw video SR (Real-RawVSR) dataset and propose a corresponding SR method. We utilize two DSLR cameras and a beam-splitter to simultaneously capture low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) raw videos with 2x, 3x, and 4x magnifications. There are 450 video pairs in our dataset, with scenes varying from indoor to outdoor, and motions including camera and object movements. To our knowledge, this is the first real-world raw VSR dataset. Since the raw video is characterized by the Bayer pattern, we propose a two-branch network, which deals with both the packed RGGB sequence and the original Bayer pattern sequence, and the two branches are complementary to each other. After going through the proposed co-alignment, interaction, fusion, and reconstruction modules, we generate the corresponding HR sRGB sequence. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms benchmark real and synthetic video SR methods with either raw or sRGB inputs. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zmzhang1998/Real-RawVSR.
PL-EVIO: Robust Monocular Event-based Visual Inertial Odometry with Point and Line Features
Authors: Weipeng Guan, Peiyu Chen, Yuhan Xie, Peng Lu
Date: 2022-09-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Event cameras are motion-activated sensors that capture pixel-level illumination changes instead of the intensity image with a fixed frame rate. Compared with the standard cameras, it can provide reliable visual perception during high-speed motions and in high dynamic range scenarios. However, event cameras output only a little information or even noise when the relative motion between the camera and the scene is limited, such as in a still state. While standard cameras can provide rich perception information in most scenarios, especially in good lighting conditions. These two cameras are exactly complementary. In this paper, we proposed a robust, high-accurate, and real-time optimization-based monocular event-based visual-inertial odometry (VIO) method with event-corner features, line-based event features, and point-based image features. The proposed method offers to leverage the point-based features in the nature scene and line-based features in the human-made scene to provide more additional structure or constraints information through well-design feature management. Experiments in the public benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art image-based or event-based VIO. Finally, we used our method to demonstrate an onboard closed-loop autonomous quadrotor flight and large-scale outdoor experiments. Videos of the evaluations are presented on our project website: https://b23.tv/OE3QM6j
Global Semantic Descriptors for Zero-Shot Action Recognition
Authors: Valter Estevam, Rayson Laroca, Helio Pedrini, David Menotti
Date: 2022-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition, Descriptive, Zero-Shot Action Recognition

The success of Zero-shot Action Recognition (ZSAR) methods is intrinsically related to the nature of semantic side information used to transfer knowledge, although this aspect has not been primarily investigated in the literature. This work introduces a new ZSAR method based on the relationships of actions-objects and actions-descriptive sentences. We demonstrate that representing all object classes using descriptive sentences generates an accurate object-action affinity estimation when a paraphrase estimation method is used as an embedder. We also show how to estimate probabilities over the set of action classes based only on a set of sentences without hard human labeling. In our method, the probabilities from these two global classifiers (i.e., which use features computed over the entire video) are combined, producing an efficient transfer knowledge model for action classification. Our results are state-of-the-art in the Kinetics-400 dataset and are competitive on UCF-101 under the ZSAR evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/valterlej/objsentzsar
Face Super-Resolution Using Stochastic Differential Equations
Authors: Marcelo dos Santos, Rayson Laroca, Rafael O. Ribeiro, João Neves, Hugo Proença, David Menotti
Date: 2022-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Graph Generation, Image Super-Resolution, SSIM, Super-Resolution

Diffusion models have proven effective for various applications such as images, audio and graph generation. Other important applications are image super-resolution and the solution of inverse problems. More recently, some works have used stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to generalize diffusion models to continuous time. In this work, we introduce SDEs to generate super-resolution face images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time SDEs have been used for such an application. The proposed method provides an improved peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), and consistency than the existing super-resolution methods based on diffusion models. In particular, we also assess the potential application of this method for the face recognition task. A generic facial feature extractor is used to compare the super-resolution images with the ground truth and superior results were obtained compared with other methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/marcelowds/sr-sde
It Takes Two: Learning to Plan for Human-Robot Cooperative Carrying
Authors: Eley Ng, Ziang Liu, Monroe Kennedy III
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Cooperative table-carrying is a complex task due to the continuous nature of the action and state-spaces, multimodality of strategies, and the need for instantaneous adaptation to other agents. In this work, we present a method for predicting realistic motion plans for cooperative human-robot teams on the task. Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network (VRNN) to model the variation in the trajectory of a human-robot team across time, we are able to capture the distribution over the team's future states while leveraging information from interaction history. The key to our approach is leveraging human demonstration data to generate trajectories that synergize well with humans during test time in a receding horizon fashion. Comparison between a baseline, sampling-based planner RRT (Rapidly-exploring Random Trees) and the VRNN planner in centralized planning shows that the VRNN generates motion more similar to the distribution of human-human demonstrations than the RRT. Results in a human-in-the-loop user study show that the VRNN planner outperforms decentralized RRT on task-related metrics, and is significantly more likely to be perceived as human than the RRT planner. Finally, we demonstrate the VRNN planner on a real robot paired with a human teleoperating another robot.
Environmental and Social Sustainability of Creative-Ai
Authors: André Holzapfel, Petra Jääskeläinen, Anna-Kaisa Kaila
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00

The recent developments of artificial intelligence increase its capability for the creation of arts in both largely autonomous and collaborative contexts. In both contexts, Ai aims to imitate, combine, and extend existing artistic styles, and can transform creative practices. In our ongoing research, we investigate such Creative-Ai from sustainability and ethical perspectives. The two main focus areas are understanding the environmental sustainability aspects (material, practices) in the context of artistic processes that involve Creative-Ai, and ethical issues related to who gets to be involved in the creation process (power, authorship, ownership). This paper provides an outline of our ongoing research in these two directions. We will present our interdisciplinary approach, which combines interviews, workshops, online ethnography, and energy measurements, to address our research questions: How is Creative-Ai currently used by artist communities, and which future applications do artists imagine? When Ai is applied to creating art, how might it impact the economy and environment? And, how can answers to these questions guide requirements for intellectual property regimes for Creative-Ai?
Learning and Deploying Robust Locomotion Policies with Minimal Dynamics Randomization
Authors: Luigi Campanaro, Siddhant Gangapurwala, Wolfgang Merkt, Ioannis Havoutis
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Domain Adaptation

Training deep reinforcement learning (DRL) locomotion policies often require massive amounts of data to converge to the desired behaviour. In this regard, simulators provide a cheap and abundant source. For successful sim-to-real transfer, exhaustively engineered approaches such as system identification, dynamics randomization, and domain adaptation are generally employed. As an alternative, we investigate a simple strategy of random force injection (RFI) to perturb system dynamics during training. We show that the application of random forces enables us to emulate dynamics randomization. This allows us to obtain locomotion policies that are robust to variations in system dynamics. We further extend RFI, referred to as extended random force injection (ERFI), by introducing an episodic actuation offset. We demonstrate that ERFI provides additional robustness for variations in system mass offering on average a 53% improved performance over RFI. We also show that ERFI is sufficient to perform a successful sim-to-real transfer on two different quadrupedal platforms, ANYmal C and Unitree A1, even for perceptive locomotion over uneven terrain in outdoor environments.
Automatic Identification and Classification of Share Buybacks and their Effect on Short-, Mid- and Long-Term Returns
Authors: Thilo Reintjes
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00

This thesis investigates share buybacks, specifically share buyback announcements. It addresses how to recognize such announcements, the excess return of share buybacks, and the prediction of returns after a share buyback announcement. We illustrate two NLP approaches for the automated detection of share buyback announcements. Even with very small amounts of training data, we can achieve an accuracy of up to 90%. This thesis utilizes these NLP methods to generate a large dataset consisting of 57,155 share buyback announcements. By analyzing this dataset, this thesis aims to show that most companies, which have a share buyback announced are underperforming the MSCI World. A minority of companies, however, significantly outperform the MSCI World. This significant overperformance leads to a net gain when looking at the averages of all companies. If the benchmark index is adjusted for the respective size of the companies, the average overperformance disappears, and the majority underperforms even greater. However, it was found that companies that announce a share buyback with a volume of at least 1% of their market cap, deliver, on average, a significant overperformance, even when using an adjusted benchmark. It was also found that companies that announce share buybacks in times of crisis emerge better than the overall market. Additionally, the generated dataset was used to train 72 machine learning models. Through this, it was able to find many strategies that could achieve an accuracy of up to 77% and generate great excess returns. A variety of performance indicators could be improved across six different time frames and a significant overperformance was identified. This was achieved by training several models for different tasks and time frames as well as combining these different models, generating significant improvement by fusing weak learners, in order to create one strong learner.
Efficient Multi-Prize Lottery Tickets: Enhanced Accuracy, Training, and Inference Speed
Authors: Hao Cheng, Pu Zhao, Yize Li, Xue Lin, James Diffenderfer, Ryan Goldhahn, Bhavya Kailkhura
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00

Recently, Diffenderfer and Kailkhura proposed a new paradigm for learning compact yet highly accurate binary neural networks simply by pruning and quantizing randomly weighted full precision neural networks. However, the accuracy of these multi-prize tickets (MPTs) is highly sensitive to the optimal prune ratio, which limits their applicability. Furthermore, the original implementation did not attain any training or inference speed benefits. In this report, we discuss several improvements to overcome these limitations. We show the benefit of the proposed techniques by performing experiments on CIFAR-10.
Abductive forgetting
Authors: Paolo Liberatore
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00

Abductive forgetting is removing variables from a logical formula while maintaining its abductive explanations. It is defined in either of two ways, depending on its intended application. Both differ from the usual forgetting, which maintains consequences rather than explanations. Differently from that, abductive forgetting from a propositional formula may not be expressed by any propositional formula. A necessary and sufficient condition tells when it is. Checking this condition is \P{3}-complete, and is in \P{4} if minimality of explanations is required. A way to guarantee expressibility of abductive forgetting is to switch from propositional to default logic. Another is to introduce new variables.
Fast-FNet: Accelerating Transformer Encoder Models via Efficient Fourier Layers
Authors: Nurullah Sevim, Ege Ozan Özyedek, Furkan Şahinuç, Aykut Koç
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00

Transformer-based language models utilize the attention mechanism for substantial performance improvements in almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Similar attention structures are also extensively studied in several other areas. Although the attention mechanism enhances the model performances significantly, its quadratic complexity prevents efficient processing of long sequences. Recent works focused on eliminating the disadvantages of computational inefficiency and showed that transformer-based models can still reach competitive results without the attention layer. A pioneering study proposed the FNet, which replaces the attention layer with the Fourier Transform (FT) in the transformer encoder architecture. FNet achieves competitive performances concerning the original transformer encoder model while accelerating training process by removing the computational burden of the attention mechanism. However, the FNet model ignores essential properties of the FT from the classical signal processing that can be leveraged to increase model efficiency further. We propose different methods to deploy FT efficiently in transformer encoder models. Our proposed architectures have smaller number of model parameters, shorter training times, less memory usage, and some additional performance improvements. We demonstrate these improvements through extensive experiments on common benchmarks.
Do ever larger octopi still amplify reporting biases? Evidence from judgments of typical colour
Authors: Fangyu Liu, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Jeremy R. Cole, Nigel Collier
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Physical Commonsense Reasoning, Probing Language Models

Language models (LMs) trained on raw texts have no direct access to the physical world. Gordon and Van Durme (2013) point out that LMs can thus suffer from reporting bias: texts rarely report on common facts, instead focusing on the unusual aspects of a situation. If LMs are only trained on text corpora and naively memorise local co-occurrence statistics, they thus naturally would learn a biased view of the physical world. While prior studies have repeatedly verified that LMs of smaller scales (e.g., RoBERTa, GPT-2) amplify reporting bias, it remains unknown whether such trends continue when models are scaled up. We investigate reporting bias from the perspective of colour in larger language models (LLMs) such as PaLM and GPT-3. Specifically, we query LLMs for the typical colour of objects, which is one simple type of perceptually grounded physical common sense. Surprisingly, we find that LLMs significantly outperform smaller LMs in determining an object's typical colour and more closely track human judgments, instead of overfitting to surface patterns stored in texts. This suggests that very large models of language alone are able to overcome certain types of reporting bias that are characterized by local co-occurrences.
Truth and Preferences -- A Game Approach for Qualitative Choice Logic
Authors: Robert Freiman, Michael Bernreiter
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Negation

In this paper, we introduce game-theoretic semantics (GTS) for Qualitative Choice Logic (QCL), which, in order to express preferences, extends classical propositional logic with an additional connective called ordered disjunction. Firstly, we demonstrate that game semantics can capture existing degree-based semantics for QCL in a natural way. Secondly, we show that game semantics can be leveraged to derive new semantics for the language of QCL. In particular, we present a new semantics that makes use of GTS negation and, by doing so, avoids problems with negation in existing QCL-semantics.
Towards Fine-Dining Recipe Generation with Generative Pre-trained Transformers
Authors: Konstantinos Katserelis, Konstantinos Skianis
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Recipe Generation

Food is essential to human survival. So much so that we have developed different recipes to suit our taste needs. In this work, we propose a novel way of creating new, fine-dining recipes from scratch using Transformers, specifically auto-regressive language models. Given a small dataset of food recipes, we try to train models to identify cooking techniques, propose novel recipes, and test the power of fine-tuning with minimal data.
LSAP: Rethinking Inversion Fidelity, Perception and Editability in GAN Latent Space
Authors: Pu Cao, Lu Yang, Dongxu Liu, Zhiwei Liu, Shan Li, Qing Song
Date: 2022-09-26 00:00:00

As the methods evolve, inversion is mainly divided into two steps. The first step is Image Embedding, in which an encoder or optimization process embeds images to get the corresponding latent codes. Afterward, the second step aims to refine the inversion and editing results, which we named Result Refinement. Although the second step significantly improves fidelity, perception and editability are almost unchanged, deeply dependent on inverse latent codes attained in the first step. Therefore, a crucial problem is gaining the latent codes with better perception and editability while retaining the reconstruction fidelity. In this work, we first point out that these two characteristics are related to the degree of alignment (or disalignment) of the inverse codes with the synthetic distribution. Then, we propose Latent Space Alignment Inversion Paradigm (LSAP), which consists of evaluation metric and solution for this problem. Specifically, we introduce Normalized Style Space ($\mathcal{S^N}$ space) and $\mathcal{S^N}$ Cosine Distance (SNCD) to measure disalignment of inversion methods. Since our proposed SNCD is differentiable, it can be optimized in both encoder-based and optimization-based embedding methods to conduct a uniform solution. Extensive experiments in various domains demonstrate that SNCD effectively reflects perception and editability, and our alignment paradigm archives the state-of-the-art in both two steps. Code is available on https://github.com/caopulan/GANInverter/tree/main/configs/lsap.