pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Perceptual Learned Source-Channel Coding for High-Fidelity Image Semantic Transmission
Authors: Jun Wang, Sixian Wang, Jincheng Dai, Zhongwei Si, Dekun Zhou, Kai Niu
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, MS-SSIM, SSIM, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

As one novel approach to realize end-to-end wireless image semantic transmission, deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (deep JSCC) method is emerging in both deep learning and communication communities. However, current deep JSCC image transmission systems are typically optimized for traditional distortion metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) or multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM). But for low transmission rates, due to the imperfect wireless channel, these distortion metrics lose significance as they favor pixel-wise preservation. To account for human visual perception in semantic communications, it is of great importance to develop new deep JSCC systems optimized beyond traditional PSNR and MS-SSIM metrics. In this paper, we introduce adversarial losses to optimize deep JSCC, which tends to preserve global semantic information and local texture. Our new deep JSCC architecture combines encoder, wireless channel, decoder/generator, and discriminator, which are jointly learned under both perceptual and adversarial losses. Our method yields human visually much more pleasing results than state-of-the-art engineered image coded transmission systems and traditional deep JSCC systems. A user study confirms that achieving the perceptually similar end-to-end image transmission quality, the proposed method can save about 50\% wireless channel bandwidth cost.
Learn to Cluster Faces via Pairwise Classification
Authors: Junfu Liu, Di Qiu, Pengfei Yan, Xiaolin Wei
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Classification, Clustering, Face Clustering

Face clustering plays an essential role in exploiting massive unlabeled face data. Recently, graph-based face clustering methods are getting popular for their satisfying performances. However, they usually suffer from excessive memory consumption especially on large-scale graphs, and rely on empirical thresholds to determine the connectivities between samples in inference, which restricts their applications in various real-world scenes. To address such problems, in this paper, we explore face clustering from the pairwise angle. Specifically, we formulate the face clustering task as a pairwise relationship classification task, avoiding the memory-consuming learning on large-scale graphs. The classifier can directly determine the relationship between samples and is enhanced by taking advantage of the contextual information. Moreover, to further facilitate the efficiency of our method, we propose a rank-weighted density to guide the selection of pairs sent to the classifier. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performances on several public clustering benchmarks at the fastest speed and shows a great advantage in comparison with graph-based clustering methods on memory consumption.
Dual-Perspective Semantic-Aware Representation Blending for Multi-Label Image Recognition with Partial Labels
Authors: Tao Pu, Tianshui Chen, Hefeng Wu, Yukai Shi, Zhijing Yang, Liang Lin
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-Label Image Recognition, Multi-label Image Recognition with Partial Labels

Despite achieving impressive progress, current multi-label image recognition (MLR) algorithms heavily depend on large-scale datasets with complete labels, making collecting large-scale datasets extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive. Training the multi-label image recognition models with partial labels (MLR-PL) is an alternative way, in which merely some labels are known while others are unknown for each image. However, current MLP-PL algorithms rely on pre-trained image similarity models or iteratively updating the image classification models to generate pseudo labels for the unknown labels. Thus, they depend on a certain amount of annotations and inevitably suffer from obvious performance drops, especially when the known label proportion is low. To address this dilemma, we propose a dual-perspective semantic-aware representation blending (DSRB) that blends multi-granularity category-specific semantic representation across different images, from instance and prototype perspective respectively, to transfer information of known labels to complement unknown labels. Specifically, an instance-perspective representation blending (IPRB) module is designed to blend the representations of the known labels in an image with the representations of the corresponding unknown labels in another image to complement these unknown labels. Meanwhile, a prototype-perspective representation blending (PPRB) module is introduced to learn more stable representation prototypes for each category and blends the representation of unknown labels with the prototypes of corresponding labels, in a location-sensitive manner, to complement these unknown labels. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO, Visual Genome, and Pascal VOC 2007 datasets show that the proposed DSRB consistently outperforms current state-of-the-art algorithms on all known label proportion settings.
Exploring Map-based Features for Efficient Attention-based Vehicle Motion Prediction
Authors: Carlos Gómez-Huélamo, Marcos V. Conde, Miguel Ortiz
Date: 2022-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, motion prediction, Self-Driving Cars

Motion prediction (MP) of multiple agents is a crucial task in arbitrarily complex environments, from social robots to self-driving cars. Current approaches tackle this problem using end-to-end networks, where the input data is usually a rendered top-view of the scene and the past trajectories of all the agents; leveraging this information is a must to obtain optimal performance. In that sense, a reliable Autonomous Driving (AD) system must produce reasonable predictions on time, however, despite many of these approaches use simple ConvNets and LSTMs, models might not be efficient enough for real-time applications when using both sources of information (map and trajectory history). Moreover, the performance of these models highly depends on the amount of training data, which can be expensive (particularly the annotated HD maps). In this work, we explore how to achieve competitive performance on the Argoverse 1.0 Benchmark using efficient attention-based models, which take as input the past trajectories and map-based features from minimal map information to ensure efficient and reliable MP. These features represent interpretable information as the driveable area and plausible goal points, in opposition to black-box CNN-based methods for map processing.
Designing an Efficient End-to-end Machine Learning Pipeline for Real-time Empty-shelf Detection
Authors: Dipendra Jha, Ata Mahjoubfar, Anupama Joshi
Date: 2022-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

On-Shelf Availability (OSA) of products in retail stores is a critical business criterion in the fast moving consumer goods and retails sector. When a product is out-of-stock (OOS) and a customer cannot find it on its designed shelf, this motivates the customer to store-switching or buying nothing, which causes fall in future sales and demands. Retailers are employing several approaches to detect empty shelves and ensure high OSA of products; however, such methods are generally ineffective and infeasible since they are either manual, expensive or less accurate. Recently machine learning based solutions have been proposed, but they suffer from high computational cost and low accuracy problem due to lack of large annotated datasets of on-shelf products. Here, we present an elegant approach for designing an end-to-end machine learning (ML) pipeline for real-time empty shelf detection. Considering the strong dependency between the quality of ML models and the quality of data, we focus on the importance of proper data collection, cleaning and correct data annotation before delving into modeling. Since an empty-shelf detection solution should be computationally-efficient for real-time predictions, we explore different run-time optimizations to improve the model performance. Our dataset contains 1000 images, collected and annotated by following well-defined guidelines. Our low-latency model achieves a mean average F1-score of 68.5%, and can process up to 67 images/s on Intel Xeon Gold and up to 860 images/s on an A100 GPU.
Online Deep Equilibrium Learning for Regularization by Denoising
Authors: Jiaming Liu, Xiaojian Xu, Weijie Gan, Shirin Shoushtari, Ulugbek S. Kamilov
Date: 2022-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Plug-and-Play Priors (PnP) and Regularization by Denoising (RED) are widely-used frameworks for solving imaging inverse problems by computing fixed-points of operators combining physical measurement models and learned image priors. While traditional PnP/RED formulations have focused on priors specified using image denoisers, there is a growing interest in learning PnP/RED priors that are end-to-end optimal. The recent Deep Equilibrium Models (DEQ) framework has enabled memory-efficient end-to-end learning of PnP/RED priors by implicitly differentiating through the fixed-point equations without storing intermediate activation values. However, the dependence of the computational/memory complexity of the measurement models in PnP/RED on the total number of measurements leaves DEQ impractical for many imaging applications. We propose ODER as a new strategy for improving the efficiency of DEQ through stochastic approximations of the measurement models. We theoretically analyze ODER giving insights into its convergence and ability to approximate the traditional DEQ approach. Our numerical results suggest the potential improvements in training/testing complexity due to ODER on three distinct imaging applications.
People counting system for retail analytics using edge AI
Authors: Karthik Reddy Kanjula, Vishnu Vardhan Reddy, Jnanesh K P, Jeffy S Abraham, Tanuja K
Date: 2022-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

Developments in IoT applications are playing an important role in our day-to-day life, starting from business predictions to self driving cars. One of the area, most influenced by the field of AI and IoT is retail analytics. In Retail Analytics, Conversion Rates - a metric which is most often used by retail stores to measure how many people have visited the store and how many purchases has happened. This retail conversion rate assess the marketing operations, increasing stock, store outlet and running promotions ..etc. Our project intends to build a cost-effective people counting system with AI at Edge, where it calculates Conversion rates using total number of people counted by the system and number of transactions for the day, which helps in providing analytical insights for retail store optimization with a very minimum hardware requirements.
Towards Diverse and Natural Scene-aware 3D Human Motion Synthesis
Authors: Jingbo Wang, Yu Rong, Jingyuan Liu, Sijie Yan, Dahua Lin, Bo Dai
Date: 2022-05-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Diversity, Motion Synthesis

The ability to synthesize long-term human motion sequences in real-world scenes can facilitate numerous applications. Previous approaches for scene-aware motion synthesis are constrained by pre-defined target objects or positions and thus limit the diversity of human-scene interactions for synthesized motions. In this paper, we focus on the problem of synthesizing diverse scene-aware human motions under the guidance of target action sequences. To achieve this, we first decompose the diversity of scene-aware human motions into three aspects, namely interaction diversity (e.g. sitting on different objects with different poses in the given scenes), path diversity (e.g. moving to the target locations following different paths), and the motion diversity (e.g. having various body movements during moving). Based on this factorized scheme, a hierarchical framework is proposed, with each sub-module responsible for modeling one aspect. We assess the effectiveness of our framework on two challenging datasets for scene-aware human motion synthesis. The experiment results show that the proposed framework remarkably outperforms previous methods in terms of diversity and naturalness.
Mitigating barren plateaus of variational quantum eigensolvers
Authors: Xia Liu, Geng Liu, Jiaxin Huang, Hao-Kai Zhang, Xin Wang
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are expected to establish valuable applications on near-term quantum computers. However, recent works have pointed out that the performance of VQAs greatly relies on the expressibility of the ansatzes and is seriously limited by optimization issues such as barren plateaus (i.e., vanishing gradients). This work proposes the state efficient ansatz (SEA) for accurate ground state preparation with improved trainability. We show that the SEA can generate an arbitrary pure state with much fewer parameters than a universal ansatz, making it efficient for tasks like ground state estimation. Then, we prove that barren plateaus can be efficiently mitigated by the SEA and the trainability can be further improved most quadratically by flexibly adjusting the entangling capability of the SEA. Finally, we investigate a plethora of examples in ground state estimation where we obtain significant improvements in the magnitude of cost gradient and the convergence speed.
Verifying Learning-Based Robotic Navigation Systems
Authors: Guy Amir, Davide Corsi, Raz Yerushalmi, Luca Marzari, David Harel, Alessandro Farinelli, Guy Katz
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Model Selection, Navigate

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has become a dominant deep-learning paradigm for tasks where complex policies are learned within reactive systems. Unfortunately, these policies are known to be susceptible to bugs. Despite significant progress in DNN verification, there has been little work demonstrating the use of modern verification tools on real-world, DRL-controlled systems. In this case study, we attempt to begin bridging this gap, and focus on the important task of mapless robotic navigation -- a classic robotics problem, in which a robot, usually controlled by a DRL agent, needs to efficiently and safely navigate through an unknown arena towards a target. We demonstrate how modern verification engines can be used for effective model selection, i.e., selecting the best available policy for the robot in question from a pool of candidate policies. Specifically, we use verification to detect and rule out policies that may demonstrate suboptimal behavior, such as collisions and infinite loops. We also apply verification to identify models with overly conservative behavior, thus allowing users to choose superior policies, which might be better at finding shorter paths to a target. To validate our work, we conducted extensive experiments on an actual robot, and confirmed that the suboptimal policies detected by our method were indeed flawed. We also demonstrate the superiority of our verification-driven approach over state-of-the-art, gradient attacks. Our work is the first to establish the usefulness of DNN verification in identifying and filtering out suboptimal DRL policies in real-world robots, and we believe that the methods presented here are applicable to a wide range of systems that incorporate deep-learning-based agents.
Selective Classification Via Neural Network Training Dynamics
Authors: Stephan Rabanser, Anvith Thudi, Kimia Hamidieh, Adam Dziedzic, Nicolas Papernot
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Selective classification is the task of rejecting inputs a model would predict incorrectly on through a trade-off between input space coverage and model accuracy. Current methods for selective classification impose constraints on either the model architecture or the loss function; this inhibits their usage in practice. In contrast to prior work, we show that state-of-the-art selective classification performance can be attained solely from studying the (discretized) training dynamics of a model. We propose a general framework that, for a given test input, monitors metrics capturing the disagreement with the final predicted label over intermediate models obtained during training; we then reject data points exhibiting too much disagreement at late stages in training. In particular, we instantiate a method that tracks when the label predicted during training stops disagreeing with the final predicted label. Our experimental evaluation shows that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy/coverage trade-offs on typical selective classification benchmarks.
Learning ReLU networks to high uniform accuracy is intractable
Authors: Julius Berner, Philipp Grohs, Felix Voigtlaender
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Statistical learning theory provides bounds on the necessary number of training samples needed to reach a prescribed accuracy in a learning problem formulated over a given target class. This accuracy is typically measured in terms of a generalization error, that is, an expected value of a given loss function. However, for several applications -- for example in a security-critical context or for problems in the computational sciences -- accuracy in this sense is not sufficient. In such cases, one would like to have guarantees for high accuracy on every input value, that is, with respect to the uniform norm. In this paper we precisely quantify the number of training samples needed for any conceivable training algorithm to guarantee a given uniform accuracy on any learning problem formulated over target classes containing (or consisting of) ReLU neural networks of a prescribed architecture. We prove that, under very general assumptions, the minimal number of training samples for this task scales exponentially both in the depth and the input dimension of the network architecture.
Semantic Parsing of Interpage Relations
Authors: Mehmet Arif Demirtaş, Berke Oral, Mehmet Yasin Akpınar, Onur Deniz
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Dependency Parsing, Page Stream Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Parsing

Page-level analysis of documents has been a topic of interest in digitization efforts, and multimodal approaches have been applied to both classification and page stream segmentation. In this work, we focus on capturing finer semantic relations between pages of a multi-page document. To this end, we formalize the task as semantic parsing of interpage relations and we propose an end-to-end approach for interpage dependency extraction, inspired by the dependency parsing literature. We further design a multi-task training approach to jointly optimize for page embeddings to be used in segmentation, classification, and parsing of the page dependencies using textual and visual features extracted from the pages. Moreover, we also combine the features from two modalities to obtain multimodal page embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to extract rich semantic interpage relations from multi-page documents. Our experimental results show that the proposed method increased LAS by 41 percentage points for semantic parsing, increased accuracy by 33 percentage points for page stream segmentation, and 45 percentage points for page classification over a naive baseline.
SFP: State-free Priors for Exploration in Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Marco Bagatella, Sammy Christen, Otmar Hilliges
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Efficient Exploration, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Efficient exploration is a crucial challenge in deep reinforcement learning. Several methods, such as behavioral priors, are able to leverage offline data in order to efficiently accelerate reinforcement learning on complex tasks. However, if the task at hand deviates excessively from the demonstrated task, the effectiveness of such methods is limited. In our work, we propose to learn features from offline data that are shared by a more diverse range of tasks, such as correlation between actions and directedness. Therefore, we introduce state-free priors, which directly model temporal consistency in demonstrated trajectories, and are capable of driving exploration in complex tasks, even when trained on data collected on simpler tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a novel integration scheme for action priors in off-policy reinforcement learning by dynamically sampling actions from a probabilistic mixture of policy and action prior. We compare our approach against strong baselines and provide empirical evidence that it can accelerate reinforcement learning in long-horizon continuous control tasks under sparse reward settings.
Subspace clustering in high-dimensions: Phase transitions & Statistical-to-Computational gap
Authors: Luca Pesce, Bruno Loureiro, Florent Krzakala, Lenka Zdeborová
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

A simple model to study subspace clustering is the high-dimensional $k$-Gaussian mixture model where the cluster means are sparse vectors. Here we provide an exact asymptotic characterization of the statistically optimal reconstruction error in this model in the high-dimensional regime with extensive sparsity, i.e. when the fraction of non-zero components of the cluster means $\rho$, as well as the ratio $\alpha$ between the number of samples and the dimension are fixed, while the dimension diverges. We identify the information-theoretic threshold below which obtaining a positive correlation with the true cluster means is statistically impossible. Additionally, we investigate the performance of the approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm analyzed via its state evolution, which is conjectured to be optimal among polynomial algorithm for this task. We identify in particular the existence of a statistical-to-computational gap between the algorithm that require a signal-to-noise ratio $\lambda_{\text{alg}} \ge k / \sqrt{\alpha} $ to perform better than random, and the information theoretic threshold at $\lambda_{\text{it}} \approx \sqrt{-k \rho \log{\rho}} / \sqrt{\alpha}$. Finally, we discuss the case of sub-extensive sparsity $\rho$ by comparing the performance of the AMP with other sparsity-enhancing algorithms, such as sparse-PCA and diagonal thresholding.
On the Inconsistency of Kernel Ridgeless Regression in Fixed Dimensions
Authors: Daniel Beaglehole, Mikhail Belkin, Parthe Pandit
Date: 2022-05-26 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Translation

``Benign overfitting'', the ability of certain algorithms to interpolate noisy training data and yet perform well out-of-sample, has been a topic of considerable recent interest. We show, using a fixed design setup, that an important class of predictors, kernel machines with translation-invariant kernels, does not exhibit benign overfitting in fixed dimensions. In particular, the estimated predictor does not converge to the ground truth with increasing sample size, for any non-zero regression function and any (even adaptive) bandwidth selection. To prove these results, we give exact expressions for the generalization error, and its decomposition in terms of an approximation error and an estimation error that elicits a trade-off based on the selection of the kernel bandwidth. Our results apply to commonly used translation-invariant kernels such as Gaussian, Laplace, and Cauchy.