pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Now You See Me: Robust approach to Partial Occlusions
Authors: Karthick Prasad Gunasekaran, Nikita Jaiman
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, image-classification, Image Classification

Occlusions of objects is one of the indispensable problems in Computer vision. While Convolutional Neural Net-works (CNNs) provide various state of the art approaches for regular image classification, they however, prove to be not as effective for the classification of images with partial occlusions. Partial occlusion is scenario where an object is occluded partially by some other object/space. This problem when solved,holds tremendous potential to facilitate various scenarios. We in particular are interested in autonomous driving scenario and its implications in the same. Autonomous vehicle research is one of the hot topics of this decade, there are ample situations of partial occlusions of a driving sign or a person or other objects at different angles. Considering its prime importance in situations which can be further extended to video analytics of traffic data to handle crimes, anticipate income levels of various groups etc.,this holds the potential to be exploited in many ways. In this paper, we introduce our own synthetically created dataset by utilising Stanford Car Dataset and adding occlusions of various sizes and nature to it. On this created dataset, we conducted a comprehensive analysis using various state of the art CNN models such as VGG-19, ResNet 50/101, GoogleNet, DenseNet 121. We further in depth study the effect of varying occlusion proportions and nature on the performance of these models by fine tuning and training these from scratch on dataset and how is it likely to perform when trained in different scenarios, i.e., performance when training with occluded images and unoccluded images, which model is more robust to partial occlusions and soon.
You Never Get a Second Chance To Make a Good First Impression: Seeding Active Learning for 3D Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Nermin Samet, Oriane Siméoni, Gilles Puy, Georgy Ponimatkin, Renaud Marlet, Vincent Lepetit
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Active Learning, Diversity, Semantic Segmentation

We propose SeedAL, a method to seed active learning for efficient annotation of 3D point clouds for semantic segmentation. Active Learning (AL) iteratively selects relevant data fractions to annotate within a given budget, but requires a first fraction of the dataset (a 'seed') to be already annotated to estimate the benefit of annotating other data fractions. We first show that the choice of the seed can significantly affect the performance of many AL methods. We then propose a method for automatically constructing a seed that will ensure good performance for AL. Assuming that images of the point clouds are available, which is common, our method relies on powerful unsupervised image features to measure the diversity of the point clouds. It selects the point clouds for the seed by optimizing the diversity under an annotation budget, which can be done by solving a linear optimization problem. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to random seeding and existing methods on both the S3DIS and SemanticKitti datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/nerminsamet/seedal.
Improving Classification Neural Networks by using Absolute activation function (MNIST/LeNET-5 example)
Authors: Oleg I. Berngardt
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification

The paper discusses the use of the Absolute activation function in classification neural networks. An examples are shown of using this activation function in simple and more complex problems. Using as a baseline LeNet-5 network for solving the MNIST problem, the efficiency of Absolute activation function is shown in comparison with the use of Tanh, ReLU and SeLU activations. It is shown that in deep networks Absolute activation does not cause vanishing and exploding gradients, and therefore Absolute activation can be used in both simple and deep neural networks. Due to high volatility of training networks with Absolute activation, a special modification of ADAM training algorithm is used, that estimates lower bound of accuracy at any test dataset using validation dataset analysis at each training epoch, and uses this value to stop/decrease learning rate, and re-initializes ADAM algorithm between these steps. It is shown that solving the MNIST problem with the LeNet-like architectures based on Absolute activation allows to significantly reduce the number of trained parameters in the neural network with improving the prediction accuracy.
Score-Based Diffusion Models as Principled Priors for Inverse Imaging
Authors: Berthy T. Feng, Jamie Smith, Michael Rubinstein, Huiwen Chang, Katherine L. Bouman, William T. Freeman
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Deblurring, Denoising, Variational Inference

Priors are essential for reconstructing images from noisy and/or incomplete measurements. The choice of the prior determines both the quality and uncertainty of recovered images. We propose turning score-based diffusion models into principled image priors ("score-based priors") for analyzing a posterior of images given measurements. Previously, probabilistic priors were limited to handcrafted regularizers and simple distributions. In this work, we empirically validate the theoretically-proven probability function of a score-based diffusion model. We show how to sample from resulting posteriors by using this probability function for variational inference. Our results, including experiments on denoising, deblurring, and interferometric imaging, suggest that score-based priors enable principled inference with a sophisticated, data-driven image prior.
Speed Is All You Need: On-Device Acceleration of Large Diffusion Models via GPU-Aware Optimizations
Authors: Yu-Hui Chen, Raman Sarokin, Juhyun Lee, Jiuqiang Tang, Chuo-Ling Chang, Andrei Kulik, Matthias Grundmann
Date: 2023-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: All, GPU, Quantization

The rapid development and application of foundation models have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. Large diffusion models have gained significant attention for their ability to generate photorealistic images and support various tasks. On-device deployment of these models provides benefits such as lower server costs, offline functionality, and improved user privacy. However, common large diffusion models have over 1 billion parameters and pose challenges due to restricted computational and memory resources on devices. We present a series of implementation optimizations for large diffusion models that achieve the fastest reported inference latency to-date (under 12 seconds for Stable Diffusion 1.4 without int8 quantization on Samsung S23 Ultra for a 512x512 image with 20 iterations) on GPU-equipped mobile devices. These enhancements broaden the applicability of generative AI and improve the overall user experience across a wide range of devices.
AutoNeRF: Training Implicit Scene Representations with Autonomous Agents
Authors: Pierre Marza, Laetitia Matignon, Olivier Simonin, Dhruv Batra, Christian Wolf, Devendra Singh Chaplot
Date: 2023-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

Implicit representations such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have been shown to be very effective at novel view synthesis. However, these models typically require manual and careful human data collection for training. In this paper, we present AutoNeRF, a method to collect data required to train NeRFs using autonomous embodied agents. Our method allows an agent to explore an unseen environment efficiently and use the experience to build an implicit map representation autonomously. We compare the impact of different exploration strategies including handcrafted frontier-based exploration, end-to-end and modular approaches composed of trained high-level planners and classical low-level path followers. We train these models with different reward functions tailored to this problem and evaluate the quality of the learned representations on four different downstream tasks: classical viewpoint rendering, map reconstruction, planning, and pose refinement. Empirical results show that NeRFs can be trained on actively collected data using just a single episode of experience in an unseen environment, and can be used for several downstream robotic tasks, and that modular trained exploration models outperform other classical and end-to-end baselines. Finally, we show that AutoNeRF can reconstruct large-scale scenes, and is thus a useful tool to perform scene-specific adaptation as the produced 3D environment models can be loaded into a simulator to fine-tune a policy of interest.
Adapting model-based deep learning to multiple acquisition conditions: Ada-MoDL
Authors: Aniket Pramanik, Sampada Bhave, Saurav Sajib, Samir D. Sharma, Mathews Jacob
Date: 2023-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Purpose: The aim of this work is to introduce a single model-based deep network that can provide high-quality reconstructions from undersampled parallel MRI data acquired with multiple sequences, acquisition settings and field strengths. Methods: A single unrolled architecture, which offers good reconstructions for multiple acquisition settings, is introduced. The proposed scheme adapts the model to each setting by scaling the CNN features and the regularization parameter with appropriate weights. The scaling weights and regularization parameter are derived using a multi-layer perceptron model from conditional vectors, which represents the specific acquisition setting. The perceptron parameters and the CNN weights are jointly trained using data from multiple acquisition settings, including differences in field strengths, acceleration, and contrasts. The conditional network is validated using datasets acquired with different acquisition settings. Results: The comparison of the adaptive framework, which trains a single model using the data from all the settings, shows that it can offer consistently improved performance for each acquisition condition. The comparison of the proposed scheme with networks that are trained independently for each acquisition setting shows that it requires less training data per acquisition setting to offer good performance. Conclusion: The Ada-MoDL framework enables the use of a single model-based unrolled network for multiple acquisition settings. In addition to eliminating the need to train and store multiple networks for different acquisition settings, this approach reduces the training data needed for each acquisition setting.
Advances in Deep Concealed Scene Understanding
Authors: Deng-Ping Fan, Ge-Peng Ji, Peng Xu, Ming-Ming Cheng, Christos Sakaridis, Luc van Gool
Date: 2023-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation, Survey

Concealed scene understanding (CSU) is a hot computer vision topic aiming to perceive objects exhibiting camouflage. The current boom in terms of techniques and applications warrants an up-to-date survey. This can help researchers to better understand the global CSU field, including both current achievements and remaining challenges. This paper makes four contributions: (1) For the first time, we present a comprehensive survey of deep learning techniques aimed at CSU, including a taxonomy, task-specific challenges, and ongoing developments. (2) To allow for an authoritative quantification of the state-of-the-art, we offer the largest and latest benchmark for concealed object segmentation (COS). (3) To evaluate the generalizability of deep CSU in practical scenarios, we collect the largest concealed defect segmentation dataset termed CDS2K with the hard cases from diversified industrial scenarios, on which we construct a comprehensive benchmark. (4) We discuss open problems and potential research directions for CSU. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/DengPingFan/CSU, which will be updated continuously to watch and summarize the advancements in this rapidly evolving field.
DPAF: Image Synthesis via Differentially Private Aggregation in Forward Phase
Authors: Chih-Hsun Lin, Chia-Yi Hsu, Chia-Mu Yu, Yang Cao, Chun-Ying Huang
Date: 2023-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Differentially private synthetic data is a promising alternative for sensitive data release. Many differentially private generative models have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, they all suffer from the low utility of the synthetic data, particularly for images of high resolutions. Here, we propose DPAF, an effective differentially private generative model for high-dimensional image synthesis. Different from the prior private stochastic gradient descent-based methods that add Gaussian noises in the backward phase during the model training, DPAF adds a differentially private feature aggregation in the forward phase, bringing advantages, including the reduction of information loss in gradient clipping and low sensitivity for the aggregation. Moreover, as an improper batch size has an adverse impact on the utility of synthetic data, DPAF also tackles the problem of setting a proper batch size by proposing a novel training strategy that asymmetrically trains different parts of the discriminator. We extensively evaluate different methods on multiple image datasets (up to images of 128x128 resolution) to demonstrate the performance of DPAF.
Learning Self-Supervised Representations for Label Efficient Cross-Domain Knowledge Transfer on Diabetic Retinopathy Fundus Images
Authors: Ekta Gupta, Varun Gupta, Muskaan Chopra, Prakash Chandra Chhipa, Marcus Liwicki
Date: 2023-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Multi-class Classification, Representation Learning, Transfer Learning

This work presents a novel label-efficient selfsupervised representation learning-based approach for classifying diabetic retinopathy (DR) images in cross-domain settings. Most of the existing DR image classification methods are based on supervised learning which requires a lot of time-consuming and expensive medical domain experts-annotated data for training. The proposed approach uses the prior learning from the source DR image dataset to classify images drawn from the target datasets. The image representations learned from the unlabeled source domain dataset through contrastive learning are used to classify DR images from the target domain dataset. Moreover, the proposed approach requires a few labeled images to perform successfully on DR image classification tasks in cross-domain settings. The proposed work experiments with four publicly available datasets: EyePACS, APTOS 2019, MESSIDOR-I, and Fundus Images for self-supervised representation learning-based DR image classification in cross-domain settings. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on binary and multiclassification of DR images, even in cross-domain settings. The proposed method outperforms the existing DR image binary and multi-class classification methods proposed in the literature. The proposed method is also validated qualitatively using class activation maps, revealing that the method can learn explainable image representations. The source code and trained models are published on GitHub.
ExCalibR: Expected Calibration of Recommendations
Authors: Pannagadatta Shivaswamy
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Movie Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

In many recommender systems and search problems, presenting a well balanced set of results can be an important goal in addition to serving highly relevant content. For example, in a movie recommendation system, it may be helpful to achieve a certain balance of different genres, likewise, it may be important to balance between highly popular versus highly personalized shows. Such balances could be thought across many categories and may be required for enhanced user experience, business considerations, fairness objectives etc. In this paper, we consider the problem of calibrating with respect to any given categories over items. We propose a way to balance a trade-off between relevance and calibration via a Linear Programming optimization problem where we learn a doubly stochastic matrix to achieve optimal balance in expectation. We then realize the learned policy using the Birkhoff-von Neumann decomposition of a doubly stochastic matrix. Several optimizations are considered over the proposed basic approach to make it fast. The experiments show that the proposed formulation can achieve a much better trade-off compared to many other baselines. This paper does not prescribe the exact categories to calibrate over (such as genres) universally for applications. This is likely dependent on the particular task or business objective. The main contribution of the paper is that it proposes a framework that can be applied to a variety of problems and demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed method using a few use-cases.
Synthpop++: A Hybrid Framework for Generating A Country-scale Synthetic Population
Authors: Bhavesh Neekhra, Kshitij Kapoor, Debayan Gupta
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Decision Making

Population censuses are vital to public policy decision-making. They provide insight into human resources, demography, culture, and economic structure at local, regional, and national levels. However, such surveys are very expensive (especially for low and middle-income countries with high populations, such as India), time-consuming, and may also raise privacy concerns, depending upon the kinds of data collected. In light of these issues, we introduce SynthPop++, a novel hybrid framework, which can combine data from multiple real-world surveys (with different, partially overlapping sets of attributes) to produce a real-scale synthetic population of humans. Critically, our population maintains family structures comprising individuals with demographic, socioeconomic, health, and geolocation attributes: this means that our ``fake'' people live in realistic locations, have realistic families, etc. Such data can be used for a variety of purposes: we explore one such use case, Agent-based modelling of infectious disease in India. To gauge the quality of our synthetic population, we use both machine learning and statistical metrics. Our experimental results show that synthetic population can realistically simulate the population for various administrative units of India, producing real-scale, detailed data at the desired level of zoom -- from cities, to districts, to states, eventually combining to form a country-scale synthetic population.
Ordinal time series analysis with the R package otsfeatures
Authors: Ángel López Oriona, José Antonio Vilar Fernández
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Outlier Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The 21st century has witnessed a growing interest in the analysis of time series data. Whereas most of the literature on the topic deals with real-valued time series, ordinal time series have typically received much less attention. However, the development of specific analytical tools for the latter objects has substantially increased in recent years. The R package otsfeatures attempts to provide a set of simple functions for analyzing ordinal time series. In particular, several commands allowing the extraction of well-known statistical features and the execution of inferential tasks are available for the user. The output of several functions can be employed to perform traditional machine learning tasks including clustering, classification or outlier detection. otsfeatures also incorporates two datasets of financial time series which were used in the literature for clustering purposes, as well as three interesting synthetic databases. The main properties of the package are described and its use is illustrated through several examples. Researchers from a broad variety of disciplines could benefit from the powerful tools provided by otsfeatures.
Fuzzy clustering of ordinal time series based on two novel distances with economic applications
Authors: Ángel López Oriona, Christian Weiss, José Antonio Vilar
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Time Series, Time Series Clustering

Time series clustering is a central machine learning task with applications in many fields. While the majority of the methods focus on real-valued time series, very few works consider series with discrete response. In this paper, the problem of clustering ordinal time series is addressed. To this aim, two novel distances between ordinal time series are introduced and used to construct fuzzy clustering procedures. Both metrics are functions of the estimated cumulative probabilities, thus automatically taking advantage of the ordering inherent to the series' range. The resulting clustering algorithms are computationally efficient and able to group series generated from similar stochastic processes, reaching accurate results even though the series come from a wide variety of models. Since the dynamic of the series may vary over the time, we adopt a fuzzy approach, thus enabling the procedures to locate each series into several clusters with different membership degrees. An extensive simulation study shows that the proposed methods outperform several alternative procedures. Weighted versions of the clustering algorithms are also presented and their advantages with respect to the original methods are discussed. Two specific applications involving economic time series illustrate the usefulness of the proposed approaches.
Uni-QSAR: an Auto-ML Tool for Molecular Property Prediction
Authors: Zhifeng Gao, Xiaohong Ji, Guojiang Zhao, Hongshuai Wang, Hang Zheng, Guolin Ke, Linfeng Zhang
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, Model Selection, Molecular Property Prediction, molecular representation, Property Prediction, Representation Learning

Recently deep learning based quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) models has shown surpassing performance than traditional methods for property prediction tasks in drug discovery. However, most DL based QSAR models are restricted to limited labeled data to achieve better performance, and also are sensitive to model scale and hyper-parameters. In this paper, we propose Uni-QSAR, a powerful Auto-ML tool for molecule property prediction tasks. Uni-QSAR combines molecular representation learning (MRL) of 1D sequential tokens, 2D topology graphs, and 3D conformers with pretraining models to leverage rich representation from large-scale unlabeled data. Without any manual fine-tuning or model selection, Uni-QSAR outperforms SOTA in 21/22 tasks of the Therapeutic Data Commons (TDC) benchmark under designed parallel workflow, with an average performance improvement of 6.09\%. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical usefulness of Uni-QSAR in drug discovery domains.