pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Developability Approximation for Neural Implicits through Rank Minimization
Authors: Pratheba Selvaraju
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing

Developability refers to the process of creating a surface without any tearing or shearing from a two-dimensional plane. It finds practical applications in the fabrication industry. An essential characteristic of a developable 3D surface is its zero Gaussian curvature, which means that either one or both of the principal curvatures are zero. This paper introduces a method for reconstructing an approximate developable surface from a neural implicit surface. The central idea of our method involves incorporating a regularization term that operates on the second-order derivatives of the neural implicits, effectively promoting zero Gaussian curvature. Implicit surfaces offer the advantage of smoother deformation with infinite resolution, overcoming the high polygonal constraints of state-of-the-art methods using discrete representations. We draw inspiration from the properties of surface curvature and employ rank minimization techniques derived from compressed sensing. Experimental results on both developable and non-developable surfaces, including those affected by noise, validate the generalizability of our method.
From Sky to the Ground: A Large-scale Benchmark and Simple Baseline Towards Real Rain Removal
Authors: Yun Guo, Xueyao Xiao, Yi Chang, Shumin Deng, Luxin Yan
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Diversity, Rain Removal, Single Image Deraining

Learning-based image deraining methods have made great progress. However, the lack of large-scale high-quality paired training samples is the main bottleneck to hamper the real image deraining (RID). To address this dilemma and advance RID, we construct a Large-scale High-quality Paired real rain benchmark (LHP-Rain), including 3000 video sequences with 1 million high-resolution (1920*1080) frame pairs. The advantages of the proposed dataset over the existing ones are three-fold: rain with higher-diversity and larger-scale, image with higher-resolution and higher-quality ground-truth. Specifically, the real rains in LHP-Rain not only contain the classical rain streak/veiling/occlusion in the sky, but also the \textbf{splashing on the ground} overlooked by deraining community. Moreover, we propose a novel robust low-rank tensor recovery model to generate the GT with better separating the static background from the dynamic rain. In addition, we design a simple transformer-based single image deraining baseline, which simultaneously utilize the self-attention and cross-layer attention within the image and rain layer with discriminative feature representation. Extensive experiments verify the superiority of the proposed dataset and deraining method over state-of-the-art.
DefCor-Net: Physics-Aware Ultrasound Deformation Correction
Authors: Zhongliang Jiang, Yue Zhou, Dongliang Cao, Nassir Navab
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy

The recovery of morphologically accurate anatomical images from deformed ones is challenging in ultrasound (US) image acquisition, but crucial to accurate and consistent diagnosis, particularly in the emerging field of computer-assisted diagnosis. This article presents a novel anatomy-aware deformation correction approach based on a coarse-to-fine, multi-scale deep neural network (DefCor-Net). To achieve pixel-wise performance, DefCor-Net incorporates biomedical knowledge by estimating pixel-wise stiffness online using a U-shaped feature extractor. The deformation field is then computed using polynomial regression by integrating the measured force applied by the US probe. Based on real-time estimation of pixel-by-pixel tissue properties, the learning-based approach enables the potential for anatomy-aware deformation correction. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed DefCor-Net, images recorded at multiple locations on forearms and upper arms of six volunteers are used to train and validate DefCor-Net. The results demonstrate that DefCor-Net can significantly improve the accuracy of deformation correction to recover the original geometry (Dice Coefficient: from $14.3\pm20.9$ to $82.6\pm12.1$ when the force is $6N$).
High-Throughput and Accurate 3D Scanning of Cattle Using Time-of-Flight Sensors and Deep Learning
Authors: Gbenga Omotara, Seyed Mohamad Ali Tousi, Jared Decker, Derek Brake, Guilherme N. DeSouza
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00

We introduce a high throughput 3D scanning solution specifically designed to precisely measure cattle phenotypes. This scanner leverages an array of depth sensors, i.e. time-of-flight (Tof) sensors, each governed by dedicated embedded devices. The system excels at generating high-fidelity 3D point clouds, thus facilitating an accurate mesh that faithfully reconstructs the cattle geometry on the fly. In order to evaluate the performance of our system, we have implemented a two-fold validation process. Initially, we test the scanner's competency in determining volume and surface area measurements within a controlled environment featuring known objects. Secondly, we explore the impact and necessity of multi-device synchronization when operating a series of time-of-flight sensors. Based on the experimental results, the proposed system is capable of producing high-quality meshes of untamed cattle for livestock studies.
Distributionally Robust Classification on a Data Budget
Authors: Benjamin Feuer, Ameya Joshi, Minh Pham, Chinmay Hegde
Date: 2023-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Robust classification

Real world uses of deep learning require predictable model behavior under distribution shifts. Models such as CLIP show emergent natural distributional robustness comparable to humans, but may require hundreds of millions of training samples. Can we train robust learners in a domain where data is limited? To rigorously address this question, we introduce JANuS (Joint Annotations and Names Set), a collection of four new training datasets with images, labels, and corresponding captions, and perform a series of carefully controlled investigations of factors contributing to robustness in image classification, then compare those results to findings derived from a large-scale meta-analysis. Using this approach, we show that standard ResNet-50 trained with the cross-entropy loss on 2.4 million image samples can attain comparable robustness to a CLIP ResNet-50 trained on 400 million samples. To our knowledge, this is the first result showing (near) state-of-the-art distributional robustness on limited data budgets. Our dataset is available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/penfever/JANuS_dataset}, and the code used to reproduce our experiments can be found at \url{https://github.com/penfever/vlhub/}.
Sample-Efficient Linear Representation Learning from Non-IID Non-Isotropic Data
Authors: Thomas T. C. K. Zhang, Leonardo F. Toso, James Anderson, Nikolai Matni
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Meta-Learning, Representation Learning

A powerful concept behind much of the recent progress in machine learning is the extraction of common features across data from heterogeneous sources or tasks. Intuitively, using all of one's data to learn a common representation function benefits both computational effort and statistical generalization by leaving a smaller number of parameters to fine-tune on a given task. Toward theoretically grounding these merits, we propose a general setting of recovering linear operators $M$ from noisy vector measurements $y = Mx + w$, where the covariates $x$ may be both non-i.i.d. and non-isotropic. We demonstrate that existing isotropy-agnostic representation learning approaches incur biases on the representation update, which causes the scaling of the noise terms to lose favorable dependence on the number of source tasks. This in turn can cause the sample complexity of representation learning to be bottlenecked by the single-task data size. We introduce an adaptation, $\texttt{De-bias & Feature-Whiten}$ ($\texttt{DFW}$), of the popular alternating minimization-descent scheme proposed independently in Collins et al., (2021) and Nayer and Vaswani (2022), and establish linear convergence to the optimal representation with noise level scaling down with the $\textit{total}$ source data size. This leads to generalization bounds on the same order as an oracle empirical risk minimizer. We verify the vital importance of $\texttt{DFW}$ on various numerical simulations. In particular, we show that vanilla alternating-minimization descent fails catastrophically even for iid, but mildly non-isotropic data. Our analysis unifies and generalizes prior work, and provides a flexible framework for a wider range of applications, such as in controls and dynamical systems.
XGBD: Explanation-Guided Graph Backdoor Detection
Authors: Zihan Guan, Mengnan Du, Ninghao Liu
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Graph Learning

Backdoor attacks pose a significant security risk to graph learning models. Backdoors can be embedded into the target model by inserting backdoor triggers into the training dataset, causing the model to make incorrect predictions when the trigger is present. To counter backdoor attacks, backdoor detection has been proposed. An emerging detection strategy in the vision and NLP domains is based on an intriguing phenomenon: when training models on a mixture of backdoor and clean samples, the loss on backdoor samples drops significantly faster than on clean samples, allowing backdoor samples to be easily detected by selecting samples with the lowest loss values. However, the ignorance of topological feature information on graph data limits its detection effectiveness when applied directly to the graph domain. To this end, we propose an explanation-guided backdoor detection method to take advantage of the topological information. Specifically, we train a helper model on the graph dataset, feed graph samples into the model, and then adopt explanation methods to attribute model prediction to an important subgraph. We observe that backdoor samples have distinct attribution distribution than clean samples, so the explanatory subgraph could serve as more discriminative features for detecting backdoor samples. Comprehensive experiments on multiple popular datasets and attack methods demonstrate the effectiveness and explainability of our method. Our code is available: https://github.com/GuanZihan/GNN_backdoor_detection.
SLEM: Machine Learning for Path Modeling and Causal Inference with Super Learner Equation Modeling
Authors: Matthew J. Vowels
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

Causal inference is a crucial goal of science, enabling researchers to arrive at meaningful conclusions regarding the predictions of hypothetical interventions using observational data. Path models, Structural Equation Models (SEMs), and, more generally, Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), provide a means to unambiguously specify assumptions regarding the causal structure underlying a phenomenon. Unlike DAGs, which make very few assumptions about the functional and parametric form, SEM assumes linearity. This can result in functional misspecification which prevents researchers from undertaking reliable effect size estimation. In contrast, we propose Super Learner Equation Modeling, a path modeling technique integrating machine learning Super Learner ensembles. We empirically demonstrate its ability to provide consistent and unbiased estimates of causal effects, its competitive performance for linear models when compared with SEM, and highlight its superiority over SEM when dealing with non-linear relationships. We provide open-source code, and a tutorial notebook with example usage, accentuating the easy-to-use nature of the method.
Accurate, Explainable, and Private Models: Providing Recourse While Minimizing Training Data Leakage
Authors: Catherine Huang, Chelse Swoopes, Christina Xiao, Jiaqi Ma, Himabindu Lakkaraju
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00

Machine learning models are increasingly utilized across impactful domains to predict individual outcomes. As such, many models provide algorithmic recourse to individuals who receive negative outcomes. However, recourse can be leveraged by adversaries to disclose private information. This work presents the first attempt at mitigating such attacks. We present two novel methods to generate differentially private recourse: Differentially Private Model (DPM) and Laplace Recourse (LR). Using logistic regression classifiers and real world and synthetic datasets, we find that DPM and LR perform well in reducing what an adversary can infer, especially at low FPR. When training dataset size is large enough, we find particular success in preventing privacy leakage while maintaining model and recourse accuracy with our novel LR method.
RLHF-Blender: A Configurable Interactive Interface for Learning from Diverse Human Feedback
Authors: Yannick Metz, David Lindner, Raphaël Baur, Daniel Keim, Mennatallah El-Assady
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00

To use reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in practical applications, it is crucial to learn reward models from diverse sources of human feedback and to consider human factors involved in providing feedback of different types. However, the systematic study of learning from diverse types of feedback is held back by limited standardized tooling available to researchers. To bridge this gap, we propose RLHF-Blender, a configurable, interactive interface for learning from human feedback. RLHF-Blender provides a modular experimentation framework and implementation that enables researchers to systematically investigate the properties and qualities of human feedback for reward learning. The system facilitates the exploration of various feedback types, including demonstrations, rankings, comparisons, and natural language instructions, as well as studies considering the impact of human factors on their effectiveness. We discuss a set of concrete research opportunities enabled by RLHF-Blender. More information is available at https://rlhfblender.info/.
The Model Inversion Eavesdropping Attack in Semantic Communication Systems
Authors: Yuhao Chen, Qianqian Yang, Zhiguo Shi, Jiming Chen
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Communication

In recent years, semantic communication has been a popular research topic for its superiority in communication efficiency. As semantic communication relies on deep learning to extract meaning from raw messages, it is vulnerable to attacks targeting deep learning models. In this paper, we introduce the model inversion eavesdropping attack (MIEA) to reveal the risk of privacy leaks in the semantic communication system. In MIEA, the attacker first eavesdrops the signal being transmitted by the semantic communication system and then performs model inversion attack to reconstruct the raw message, where both the white-box and black-box settings are considered. Evaluation results show that MIEA can successfully reconstruct the raw message with good quality under different channel conditions. We then propose a defense method based on random permutation and substitution to defend against MIEA in order to achieve secure semantic communication. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed defense method in preventing MIEA.
Comparative Analysis of the wav2vec 2.0 Feature Extractor
Authors: Peter Vieting, Ralf Schlüter, Hermann Ney
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems typically use handcrafted feature extraction pipelines. To avoid their inherent information loss and to achieve more consistent modeling from speech to transcribed text, neural raw waveform feature extractors (FEs) are an appealing approach. Also the wav2vec 2.0 model, which has recently gained large popularity, uses a convolutional FE which operates directly on the speech waveform. However, it is not yet studied extensively in the literature. In this work, we study its capability to replace the standard feature extraction methods in a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) ASR model and compare it to an alternative neural FE. We show that both are competitive with traditional FEs on the LibriSpeech benchmark and analyze the effect of the individual components. Furthermore, we analyze the learned filters and show that the most important information for the ASR system is obtained by a set of bandpass filters.
BarlowRL: Barlow Twins for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Omer Veysel Cagatan, Baris Akgun
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

This paper introduces BarlowRL, a data-efficient reinforcement learning agent that combines the Barlow Twins self-supervised learning framework with DER (Data-Efficient Rainbow) algorithm. BarlowRL outperforms both DER and its contrastive counterpart CURL on the Atari 100k benchmark. BarlowRL avoids dimensional collapse by enforcing information spread to the whole space. This helps RL algorithms to utilize uniformly spread state representation that eventually results in a remarkable performance. The integration of Barlow Twins with DER enhances data efficiency and achieves superior performance in the RL tasks. BarlowRL demonstrates the potential of incorporating self-supervised learning techniques to improve RL algorithms.
Advancing Natural-Language Based Audio Retrieval with PaSST and Large Audio-Caption Data Sets
Authors: Paul Primus, Khaled Koutini, Gerhard Widmer
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Text to Audio Retrieval

This work presents a text-to-audio-retrieval system based on pre-trained text and spectrogram transformers. Our method projects recordings and textual descriptions into a shared audio-caption space in which related examples from different modalities are close. Through a systematic analysis, we examine how each component of the system influences retrieval performance. As a result, we identify two key components that play a crucial role in driving performance: the self-attention-based audio encoder for audio embedding and the utilization of additional human-generated and synthetic data sets during pre-training. We further experimented with augmenting ClothoV2 captions with available keywords to increase their variety; however, this only led to marginal improvements. Our system ranked first in the 2023's DCASE Challenge, and it outperforms the current state of the art on the ClothoV2 benchmark by 5.6 pp. mAP@10.
OpinionConv: Conversational Product Search with Grounded Opinions
Authors: Vahid Sadiri Javadi, Martin Potthast, Lucie Flek
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

When searching for products, the opinions of others play an important role in making informed decisions. Subjective experiences about a product can be a valuable source of information. This is also true in sales conversations, where a customer and a sales assistant exchange facts and opinions about products. However, training an AI for such conversations is complicated by the fact that language models do not possess authentic opinions for their lack of real-world experience. We address this problem by leveraging product reviews as a rich source of product opinions to ground conversational AI in true subjective narratives. With OpinionConv, we develop the first conversational AI for simulating sales conversations. To validate the generated conversations, we conduct several user studies showing that the generated opinions are perceived as realistic. Our assessors also confirm the importance of opinions as an informative basis for decision-making.
Varying-coefficients for regional quantile via KNN-based LASSO with applications to health outcome study
Authors: SeYoung Park, Eun Ryung Lee, Hyokyoung G. Hong
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: quantile regression

Health outcomes, such as body mass index and cholesterol levels, are known to be dependent on age and exhibit varying effects with their associated risk factors. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for dynamic modeling of the associations between health outcomes and risk factors using varying-coefficients (VC) regional quantile regression via K-nearest neighbors (KNN) fused Lasso, which captures the time-varying effects of age. The proposed method has strong theoretical properties, including a tight estimation error bound and the ability to detect exact clustered patterns under certain regularity conditions. To efficiently solve the resulting optimization problem, we develop an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. Our empirical results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in capturing the complex age-dependent associations between health outcomes and their risk factors.
Iterative Sketching for Secure Coded Regression
Authors: Neophytos Charalambides, Hessam Mahdavifar, Mert Pilanci, Alfred O. Hero III
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Computing, Epidemiology, regression

Linear regression is a fundamental and primitive problem in supervised machine learning, with applications ranging from epidemiology to finance. In this work, we propose methods for speeding up distributed linear regression. We do so by leveraging randomized techniques, while also ensuring security and straggler resiliency in asynchronous distributed computing systems. Specifically, we randomly rotate the basis of the system of equations and then subsample blocks, to simultaneously secure the information and reduce the dimension of the regression problem. In our setup, the basis rotation corresponds to an encoded encryption in an approximate gradient coding scheme, and the subsampling corresponds to the responses of the non-straggling servers in the centralized coded computing framework. This results in a distributive iterative stochastic approach for matrix compression and steepest descent.
Studying Socially Unacceptable Discourse Classification (SUD) through different eyes: "Are we on the same page ?"
Authors: Bruno Machado Carneiro, Michele Linardi, Julien Longhi
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00

We study Socially Unacceptable Discourse (SUD) characterization and detection in online text. We first build and present a novel corpus that contains a large variety of manually annotated texts from different online sources used so far in state-of-the-art Machine learning (ML) SUD detection solutions. This global context allows us to test the generalization ability of SUD classifiers that acquire knowledge around the same SUD categories, but from different contexts. From this perspective, we can analyze how (possibly) different annotation modalities influence SUD learning by discussing open challenges and open research directions. We also provide several data insights which can support domain experts in the annotation task.
Dual input neural networks for positional sound source localization
Authors: Eric Grinstein, Vincent W. Neo, Patrick A. Naylor
Date: 2023-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Sound Source Localization

In many signal processing applications, metadata may be advantageously used in conjunction with a high dimensional signal to produce a desired output. In the case of classical Sound Source Localization (SSL) algorithms, information from a high dimensional, multichannel audio signals received by many distributed microphones is combined with information describing acoustic properties of the scene, such as the microphones' coordinates in space, to estimate the position of a sound source. We introduce Dual Input Neural Networks (DI-NNs) as a simple and effective way to model these two data types in a neural network. We train and evaluate our proposed DI-NN on scenarios of varying difficulty and realism and compare it against an alternative architecture, a classical Least-Squares (LS) method as well as a classical Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN). Our results show that the DI-NN significantly outperforms the baselines, achieving a five times lower localization error than the LS method and two times lower than the CRNN in a test dataset of real recordings.