pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Theory of Intelligences
Authors: Michael E. Hochberg
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00

Intelligence is a human construct to represent the ability to achieve goals. Given this wide berth, intelligence has been defined countless times, studied in a variety of ways and represented using numerous measures. Understanding intelligence ultimately requires theory and quantification, both of which have proved elusive. I develop a framework -- the Theory of Intelligences (TIS) -- that applies across all systems from physics, to biology, humans and AI. TIS likens intelligence to a calculus, differentiating, correlating and integrating information. Intelligence operates at many levels and scales and TIS distils these into a parsimonious macroscopic framework centered on solving, planning and their optimization to accomplish goals. Notably, intelligence can be expressed in informational units or in units relative to goal difficulty, the latter defined as complexity relative to system (individual or benchmarked) ability. I present general equations for intelligence and its components, and a simple expression for the evolution of intelligence traits. The measures developed here could serve to gauge different facets of intelligence for any step-wise transformation of information. I argue that proxies such as environment, technology, society and collectives are essential to a general theory of intelligence and to possible evolutionary transitions in intelligence, particularly in humans. I conclude with testable predictions of TIS and offer several speculations.
Self-Supervised Learning for Endoscopic Video Analysis
Authors: Roy Hirsch, Mathilde Caron, Regev Cohen, Amir Livne, Ron Shapiro, Tomer Golany, Roman Goldenberg, Daniel Freedman, Ehud Rivlin
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Surgical phase recognition, Transfer Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has led to important breakthroughs in computer vision by allowing learning from large amounts of unlabeled data. As such, it might have a pivotal role to play in biomedicine where annotating data requires a highly specialized expertise. Yet, there are many healthcare domains for which SSL has not been extensively explored. One such domain is endoscopy, minimally invasive procedures which are commonly used to detect and treat infections, chronic inflammatory diseases or cancer. In this work, we study the use of a leading SSL framework, namely Masked Siamese Networks (MSNs), for endoscopic video analysis such as colonoscopy and laparoscopy. To fully exploit the power of SSL, we create sizable unlabeled endoscopic video datasets for training MSNs. These strong image representations serve as a foundation for secondary training with limited annotated datasets, resulting in state-of-the-art performance in endoscopic benchmarks like surgical phase recognition during laparoscopy and colonoscopic polyp characterization. Additionally, we achieve a 50% reduction in annotated data size without sacrificing performance. Thus, our work provides evidence that SSL can dramatically reduce the need of annotated data in endoscopy.
With a Little Help from your own Past: Prototypical Memory Networks for Image Captioning
Authors: Manuele Barraco, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Decoder, Image Captioning

Image captioning, like many tasks involving vision and language, currently relies on Transformer-based architectures for extracting the semantics in an image and translating it into linguistically coherent descriptions. Although successful, the attention operator only considers a weighted summation of projections of the current input sample, therefore ignoring the relevant semantic information which can come from the joint observation of other samples. In this paper, we devise a network which can perform attention over activations obtained while processing other training samples, through a prototypical memory model. Our memory models the distribution of past keys and values through the definition of prototype vectors which are both discriminative and compact. Experimentally, we assess the performance of the proposed model on the COCO dataset, in comparison with carefully designed baselines and state-of-the-art approaches, and by investigating the role of each of the proposed components. We demonstrate that our proposal can increase the performance of an encoder-decoder Transformer by 3.7 CIDEr points both when training in cross-entropy only and when fine-tuning with self-critical sequence training. Source code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/PMA-Net.
Open-set Face Recognition with Neural Ensemble, Maximal Entropy Loss and Feature Augmentation
Authors: Rafael Henrique Vareto, Manuel Günther, William Robson Schwartz
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Image Classification, open-set classification, Open Set Learning

Open-set face recognition refers to a scenario in which biometric systems have incomplete knowledge of all existing subjects. Therefore, they are expected to prevent face samples of unregistered subjects from being identified as previously enrolled identities. This watchlist context adds an arduous requirement that calls for the dismissal of irrelevant faces by focusing mainly on subjects of interest. As a response, this work introduces a novel method that associates an ensemble of compact neural networks with a margin-based cost function that explores additional samples. Supplementary negative samples can be obtained from external databases or synthetically built at the representation level in training time with a new mix-up feature augmentation approach. Deep neural networks pre-trained on large face datasets serve as the preliminary feature extraction module. We carry out experiments on well-known LFW and IJB-C datasets where results show that the approach is able to boost closed and open-set identification rates.
SafeAR: Safe Algorithmic Recourse by Risk-Aware Policies
Authors: Haochen Wu, Shubham Sharma, Sunandita Patra, Sriram Gopalakrishnan
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00

With the growing use of machine learning (ML) models in critical domains such as finance and healthcare, the need to offer recourse for those adversely affected by the decisions of ML models has become more important; individuals ought to be provided with recommendations on actions to take for improving their situation and thus receiving a favorable decision. Prior work on sequential algorithmic recourse -- which recommends a series of changes -- focuses on action feasibility and uses the proximity of feature changes to determine action costs. However, the uncertainties of feature changes and the risk of higher than average costs in recourse have not been considered. It is undesirable if a recourse could (with some probability) result in a worse situation from which recovery requires an extremely high cost. It is essential to incorporate risks when computing and evaluating recourse. We call the recourse computed with such risk considerations as Safe Algorithmic Recourse (SafeAR). The objective is to empower people to choose a recourse based on their risk tolerance. In this work, we discuss and show how existing recourse desiderata can fail to capture the risk of higher costs. We present a method to compute recourse policies that consider variability in cost and connect algorithmic recourse literature with risk-sensitive reinforcement learning. We also adopt measures "Value at Risk" and "Conditional Value at Risk" from the financial literature to summarize risk concisely. We apply our method to two real-world datasets and compare policies with different risk-aversion levels using risk measures and recourse desiderata (sparsity and proximity).
RemovalNet: DNN Fingerprint Removal Attacks
Authors: Hongwei Yao, Zheng Li, Kunzhe Huang, Jian Lou, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization

With the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) remarkably improving, DNNs have been widely used in many areas. Consequently, the DNN model has become a valuable asset, and its intellectual property is safeguarded by ownership verification techniques (e.g., DNN fingerprinting). However, the feasibility of the DNN fingerprint removal attack and its potential influence remains an open problem. In this paper, we perform the first comprehensive investigation of DNN fingerprint removal attacks. Generally, the knowledge contained in a DNN model can be categorized into general semantic and fingerprint-specific knowledge. To this end, we propose a min-max bilevel optimization-based DNN fingerprint removal attack named RemovalNet, to evade model ownership verification. The lower-level optimization is designed to remove fingerprint-specific knowledge. While in the upper-level optimization, we distill the victim model's general semantic knowledge to maintain the surrogate model's performance. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the fidelity, effectiveness, and efficiency of the RemovalNet against four advanced defense methods on six metrics. The empirical results demonstrate that (1) the RemovalNet is effective. After our DNN fingerprint removal attack, the model distance between the target and surrogate models is x100 times higher than that of the baseline attacks, (2) the RemovalNet is efficient. It uses only 0.2% (400 samples) of the substitute dataset and 1,000 iterations to conduct our attack. Besides, compared with advanced model stealing attacks, the RemovalNet saves nearly 85% of computational resources at most, (3) the RemovalNet achieves high fidelity that the created surrogate model maintains high accuracy after the DNN fingerprint removal process. Our code is available at: https://github.com/grasses/RemovalNet.
Trustworthy Representation Learning Across Domains
Authors: Ronghang Zhu, Dongliang Guo, Daiqing Qi, Zhixuan Chu, Xiang Yu, Sheng Li
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Representation Learning

As AI systems have obtained significant performance to be deployed widely in our daily live and human society, people both enjoy the benefits brought by these technologies and suffer many social issues induced by these systems. To make AI systems good enough and trustworthy, plenty of researches have been done to build guidelines for trustworthy AI systems. Machine learning is one of the most important parts for AI systems and representation learning is the fundamental technology in machine learning. How to make the representation learning trustworthy in real-world application, e.g., cross domain scenarios, is very valuable and necessary for both machine learning and AI system fields. Inspired by the concepts in trustworthy AI, we proposed the first trustworthy representation learning across domains framework which includes four concepts, i.e, robustness, privacy, fairness, and explainability, to give a comprehensive literature review on this research direction. Specifically, we first introduce the details of the proposed trustworthy framework for representation learning across domains. Second, we provide basic notions and comprehensively summarize existing methods for the trustworthy framework from four concepts. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
Physics informed Neural Networks applied to the description of wave-particle resonance in kinetic simulations of fusion plasmas
Authors: Jai Kumar, David Zarzoso, Virginie Grandgirard, Jan Ebert, Stefan Kesselheim
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00

The Vlasov-Poisson system is employed in its reduced form version (1D1V) as a test bed for the applicability of Physics Informed Neural Network (PINN) to the wave-particle resonance. Two examples are explored: the Landau damping and the bump-on-tail instability. PINN is first tested as a compression method for the solution of the Vlasov-Poisson system and compared to the standard neural networks. Second, the application of PINN to solving the Vlasov-Poisson system is also presented with the special emphasis on the integral part, which motivates the implementation of a PINN variant, called Integrable PINN (I-PINN), based on the automatic-differentiation to solve the partial differential equation and on the automatic-integration to solve the integral equation.
Handling the inconsistency of systems of $\min\rightarrow$ fuzzy relational equations
Authors: Ismaïl Baaj
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00

In this article, we study the inconsistency of systems of $\min-\rightarrow$ fuzzy relational equations. We give analytical formulas for computing the Chebyshev distances $\nabla = \inf_{d \in \mathcal{D}} \Vert \beta - d \Vert$ associated to systems of $\min-\rightarrow$ fuzzy relational equations of the form $\Gamma \Box_{\rightarrow}^{\min} x = \beta$, where $\rightarrow$ is a residual implicator among the G\"odel implication $\rightarrow_G$, the Goguen implication $\rightarrow_{GG}$ or Lukasiewicz's implication $\rightarrow_L$ and $\mathcal{D}$ is the set of second members of consistent systems defined with the same matrix $\Gamma$. The main preliminary result that allows us to obtain these formulas is that the Chebyshev distance $\nabla$ is the lower bound of the solutions of a vector inequality, whatever the residual implicator used. Finally, we show that, in the case of the $\min-\rightarrow_{G}$ system, the Chebyshev distance $\nabla$ may be an infimum, while it is always a minimum for $\min-\rightarrow_{GG}$ and $\min-\rightarrow_{L}$ systems.
Inferring gender from name: a large scale performance evaluation study
Authors: Kriste Krstovski, Yao Lu, Ye Xu
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sociology

A person's gender is a crucial piece of information when performing research across a wide range of scientific disciplines, such as medicine, sociology, political science, and economics, to name a few. However, in increasing instances, especially given the proliferation of big data, gender information is not readily available. In such cases researchers need to infer gender from readily available information, primarily from persons' names. While inferring gender from name may raise some ethical questions, the lack of viable alternatives means that researchers have to resort to such approaches when the goal justifies the means - in the majority of such studies the goal is to examine patterns and determinants of gender disparities. The necessity of name-to-gender inference has generated an ever-growing domain of algorithmic approaches and software products. These approaches have been used throughout the world in academia, industry, governmental and non-governmental organizations. Nevertheless, the existing approaches have yet to be systematically evaluated and compared, making it challenging to determine the optimal approach for future research. In this work, we conducted a large scale performance evaluation of existing approaches for name-to-gender inference. Analysis are performed using a variety of large annotated datasets of names. We further propose two new hybrid approaches that achieve better performance than any single existing approach.
Modeling Bends in Popular Music Guitar Tablatures
Authors: Alexandre D'Hooge, Louis Bigo, Ken Déguernel
Date: 2023-08-22 00:00:00

Tablature notation is widely used in popular music to transcribe and share guitar musical content. As a complement to standard score notation, tablatures transcribe performance gesture information including finger positions and a variety of guitar-specific playing techniques such as slides, hammer-on/pull-off or bends.This paper focuses on bends, which enable to progressively shift the pitch of a note, therefore circumventing physical limitations of the discrete fretted fingerboard. In this paper, we propose a set of 25 high-level features, computed for each note of the tablature, to study how bend occurrences can be predicted from their past and future short-term context. Experiments are performed on a corpus of 932 lead guitar tablatures of popular music and show that a decision tree successfully predicts bend occurrences with an F1 score of 0.71 anda limited amount of false positive predictions, demonstrating promising applications to assist the arrangement of non-guitar music into guitar tablatures.
FedDAT: An Approach for Foundation Model Finetuning in Multi-Modal Heterogeneous Federated Learning
Authors: Haokun Chen, Yao Zhang, Denis Krompass, Jindong Gu, Volker Tresp
Date: 2023-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

Recently, foundation models have exhibited remarkable advancements in multi-modal learning. These models, equipped with millions (or billions) of parameters, typically require a substantial amount of data for finetuning. However, collecting and centralizing training data from diverse sectors becomes challenging due to distinct privacy regulations. Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a promising solution, enabling multiple clients to collaboratively train neural networks without centralizing their local data. To alleviate client computation burdens and communication overheads, previous works have adapted Parameter-efficient Finetuning (PEFT) methods for FL. Hereby, only a small fraction of the model parameters are optimized and communicated during federated communications. Nevertheless, most previous works have focused on a single modality and neglected one common phenomenon, i.e., the presence of data heterogeneity across the clients. Therefore, in this work, we propose a finetuning framework tailored to heterogeneous multi-modal FL, called Federated Dual-Aadapter Teacher (FedDAT). Specifically, our approach leverages a Dual-Adapter Teacher (DAT) to address data heterogeneity by regularizing the client local updates and applying Mutual Knowledge Distillation (MKD) for an efficient knowledge transfer. FedDAT is the first approach that enables an efficient distributed finetuning of foundation models for a variety of heterogeneous Vision-Language tasks. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we conduct extensive experiments on four multi-modality FL benchmarks with different types of data heterogeneity, where FedDAT substantially outperforms the existing centralized PEFT methods adapted for FL.
ROAM: Robust and Object-Aware Motion Generation Using Neural Pose Descriptors
Authors: Wanyue Zhang, Rishabh Dabral, Thomas Leimkühler, Vladislav Golyanik, Marc Habermann, Christian Theobalt
Date: 2023-08-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation, Motion Synthesis, Object

Existing automatic approaches for 3D virtual character motion synthesis supporting scene interactions do not generalise well to new objects outside training distributions, even when trained on extensive motion capture datasets with diverse objects and annotated interactions. This paper addresses this limitation and shows that robustness and generalisation to novel scene objects in 3D object-aware character synthesis can be achieved by training a motion model with as few as one reference object. We leverage an implicit feature representation trained on object-only datasets, which encodes an SE(3)-equivariant descriptor field around the object. Given an unseen object and a reference pose-object pair, we optimise for the object-aware pose that is closest in the feature space to the reference pose. Finally, we use l-NSM, i.e., our motion generation model that is trained to seamlessly transition from locomotion to object interaction with the proposed bidirectional pose blending scheme. Through comprehensive numerical comparisons to state-of-the-art methods and in a user study, we demonstrate substantial improvements in 3D virtual character motion and interaction quality and robustness to scenarios with unseen objects. Our project page is available at https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/ROAM/.
Scenimefy: Learning to Craft Anime Scene via Semi-Supervised Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Yuxin Jiang, Liming Jiang, Shuai Yang, Chen Change Loy
Date: 2023-08-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation

Automatic high-quality rendering of anime scenes from complex real-world images is of significant practical value. The challenges of this task lie in the complexity of the scenes, the unique features of anime style, and the lack of high-quality datasets to bridge the domain gap. Despite promising attempts, previous efforts are still incompetent in achieving satisfactory results with consistent semantic preservation, evident stylization, and fine details. In this study, we propose Scenimefy, a novel semi-supervised image-to-image translation framework that addresses these challenges. Our approach guides the learning with structure-consistent pseudo paired data, simplifying the pure unsupervised setting. The pseudo data are derived uniquely from a semantic-constrained StyleGAN leveraging rich model priors like CLIP. We further apply segmentation-guided data selection to obtain high-quality pseudo supervision. A patch-wise contrastive style loss is introduced to improve stylization and fine details. Besides, we contribute a high-resolution anime scene dataset to facilitate future research. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both perceptual quality and quantitative performance.
Qwen-VL: A Versatile Vision-Language Model for Understanding, Localization, Text Reading, and Beyond
Authors: Jinze Bai, Shuai Bai, Shusheng Yang, Shijie Wang, Sinan Tan, Peng Wang, Junyang Lin, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou
Date: 2023-08-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Chart Question Answering, FS-MEVQA, Image Captioning, Image Description, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, MMR total, Natural Language Visual Grounding, Question Answering, Referring Expression Segmentation, Spatial Reasoning, Visual Grounding, Visual Localization, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

In this work, we introduce the Qwen-VL series, a set of large-scale vision-language models (LVLMs) designed to perceive and understand both texts and images. Starting from the Qwen-LM as a foundation, we endow it with visual capacity by the meticulously designed (i) visual receptor, (ii) input-output interface, (iii) 3-stage training pipeline, and (iv) multilingual multimodal cleaned corpus. Beyond the conventional image description and question-answering, we implement the grounding and text-reading ability of Qwen-VLs by aligning image-caption-box tuples. The resulting models, including Qwen-VL and Qwen-VL-Chat, set new records for generalist models under similar model scales on a broad range of visual-centric benchmarks (e.g., image captioning, question answering, visual grounding) and different settings (e.g., zero-shot, few-shot). Moreover, on real-world dialog benchmarks, our instruction-tuned Qwen-VL-Chat also demonstrates superiority compared to existing vision-language chatbots. Code, demo and models are available at https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-VL.