pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Bridging the Gap between Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence: A Ten Commandment Framework for Human-Like Intelligence
Authors: Ananta Nair, Farnoush Banaei-Kashani
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00

The field of artificial intelligence has seen explosive growth and exponential success. The last phase of development showcased deep learnings ability to solve a variety of difficult problems across a multitude of domains. Many of these networks met and exceeded human benchmarks by becoming experts in the domains in which they are trained. Though the successes of artificial intelligence have begun to overshadow its failures, there is still much that separates current artificial intelligence tools from becoming the exceptional general learners that humans are. In this paper, we identify the ten commandments upon which human intelligence is systematically and hierarchically built. We believe these commandments work collectively to serve as the essential ingredients that lead to the emergence of higher-order cognition and intelligence. This paper discusses a computational framework that could house these ten commandments and suggests new architectural modifications that could lead to the development of smarter, more explainable, and generalizable artificial systems inspired by a neuromorphic approach.
A Mixing Time Lower Bound for a Simplified Version of BART
Authors: Omer Ronen, Theo Saarinen, Yan Shuo Tan, James Duncan, Bin Yu
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, regression

Bayesian Additive Regression Trees (BART) is a popular Bayesian non-parametric regression algorithm. The posterior is a distribution over sums of decision trees, and predictions are made by averaging approximate samples from the posterior. The combination of strong predictive performance and the ability to provide uncertainty measures has led BART to be commonly used in the social sciences, biostatistics, and causal inference. BART uses Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to obtain approximate posterior samples over a parameterized space of sums of trees, but it has often been observed that the chains are slow to mix. In this paper, we provide the first lower bound on the mixing time for a simplified version of BART in which we reduce the sum to a single tree and use a subset of the possible moves for the MCMC proposal distribution. Our lower bound for the mixing time grows exponentially with the number of data points. Inspired by this new connection between the mixing time and the number of data points, we perform rigorous simulations on BART. We show qualitatively that BART's mixing time increases with the number of data points. The slow mixing time of the simplified BART suggests a large variation between different runs of the simplified BART algorithm and a similar large variation is known for BART in the literature. This large variation could result in a lack of stability in the models, predictions, and posterior intervals obtained from the BART MCMC samples. Our lower bound and simulations suggest increasing the number of chains with the number of data points.
Robust Imitation of a Few Demonstrations with a Backwards Model
Authors: Jung Yeon Park, Lawson L. S. Wong
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Imitation Learning

Behavior cloning of expert demonstrations can speed up learning optimal policies in a more sample-efficient way over reinforcement learning. However, the policy cannot extrapolate well to unseen states outside of the demonstration data, creating covariate shift (agent drifting away from demonstrations) and compounding errors. In this work, we tackle this issue by extending the region of attraction around the demonstrations so that the agent can learn how to get back onto the demonstrated trajectories if it veers off-course. We train a generative backwards dynamics model and generate short imagined trajectories from states in the demonstrations. By imitating both demonstrations and these model rollouts, the agent learns the demonstrated paths and how to get back onto these paths. With optimal or near-optimal demonstrations, the learned policy will be both optimal and robust to deviations, with a wider region of attraction. On continuous control domains, we evaluate the robustness when starting from different initial states unseen in the demonstration data. While both our method and other imitation learning baselines can successfully solve the tasks for initial states in the training distribution, our method exhibits considerably more robustness to different initial states.
Learning Less Generalizable Patterns with an Asymmetrically Trained Double Classifier for Better Test-Time Adaptation
Authors: Thomas Duboudin, Emmanuel Dellandréa, Corentin Abgrall, Gilles Hénaff, Liming Chen
Date: 2022-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Test-time Adaptation

Deep neural networks often fail to generalize outside of their training distribution, in particular when only a single data domain is available during training. While test-time adaptation has yielded encouraging results in this setting, we argue that, to reach further improvements, these approaches should be combined with training procedure modifications aiming to learn a more diverse set of patterns. Indeed, test-time adaptation methods usually have to rely on a limited representation because of the shortcut learning phenomenon: only a subset of the available predictive patterns is learned with standard training. In this paper, we first show that the combined use of existing training-time strategies, and test-time batch normalization, a simple adaptation method, does not always improve upon the test-time adaptation alone on the PACS benchmark. Furthermore, experiments on Office-Home show that very few training-time methods improve upon standard training, with or without test-time batch normalization. We therefore propose a novel approach using a pair of classifiers and a shortcut patterns avoidance loss that mitigates the shortcut learning behavior by reducing the generalization ability of the secondary classifier, using the additional shortcut patterns avoidance loss that encourages the learning of samples specific patterns. The primary classifier is trained normally, resulting in the learning of both the natural and the more complex, less generalizable, features. Our experiments show that our method improves upon the state-of-the-art results on both benchmarks and benefits the most to test-time batch normalization.
G-PECNet: Towards a Generalizable Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction System
Authors: Aryan Garg, Renu M. Rameshan
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Data Augmentation, Outlier Detection, Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Trajectory Prediction

Navigating dynamic physical environments without obstructing or damaging human assets is of quintessential importance for social robots. In this work, we solve autonomous drone navigation's sub-problem of predicting out-of-domain human and agent trajectories using a deep generative model. Our method: General-PECNet or G-PECNet observes an improvement of 9.5\% on the Final Displacement Error (FDE) on 2020's benchmark: PECNet through a combination of architectural improvements inspired by periodic activation functions and synthetic trajectory (data) augmentations using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Additionally, we propose a simple geometry-inspired metric for trajectory non-linearity and outlier detection, helpful for the task. Code available at https://github.com/Aryan-Garg/PECNet-Pedestrian-Trajectory-Prediction.git
Artificial intelligence and renegotiation of commercial lease contracts affected by pandemic-related contingencies from Covid-19. The project A.I.A.Co
Authors: Maurizio Parton, Marco Angelone, Carlo Metta, Stefania D'Ovidio, Roberta Massarelli, Luca Moscardelli, Gianluca Amato
Date: 2022-10-14 00:00:00

This paper aims to investigate the possibility of using artificial intelligence (AI) to resolve the legal issues raised by the Covid-19 emergency about the fate of continuing execution contracts, or those with deferred or periodic execution, as well as, more generally, to deal with exceptional events and contingencies. We first study whether the Italian legal system allows for ''maintenance'' remedies to cope with contingencies and to avoid the termination of the contract, while ensuring effective protection of the interests of both parties. We then give a complete and technical description of an AI-based predictive framework, aimed at assisting both the Magistrate (in the course of litigation) and the parties themselves (in out-of-court proceedings) in the redetermination of the rent of commercial lease contracts. This framework, called A.I.A.Co. for Artificial Intelligence for contract law Against Covid-19, has been developed under the Italian grant ''Fondo Integrativo Speciale per la Ricerca''.
A Tri-Layer Plugin to Improve Occluded Detection
Authors: Guanqi Zhan, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Detecting occluded objects still remains a challenge for state-of-the-art object detectors. The objective of this work is to improve the detection for such objects, and thereby improve the overall performance of a modern object detector. To this end we make the following four contributions: (1) We propose a simple 'plugin' module for the detection head of two-stage object detectors to improve the recall of partially occluded objects. The module predicts a tri-layer of segmentation masks for the target object, the occluder and the occludee, and by doing so is able to better predict the mask of the target object. (2) We propose a scalable pipeline for generating training data for the module by using amodal completion of existing object detection and instance segmentation training datasets to establish occlusion relationships. (3) We also establish a COCO evaluation dataset to measure the recall performance of partially occluded and separated objects. (4) We show that the plugin module inserted into a two-stage detector can boost the performance significantly, by only fine-tuning the detection head, and with additional improvements if the entire architecture is fine-tuned. COCO results are reported for Mask R-CNN with Swin-T or Swin-S backbones, and Cascade Mask R-CNN with a Swin-B backbone.
How Would The Viewer Feel? Estimating Wellbeing From Video Scenarios
Authors: Mantas Mazeika, Eric Tang, Andy Zou, Steven Basart, Jun Shern Chan, Dawn Song, David Forsyth, Jacob Steinhardt, Dan Hendrycks
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Understanding

In recent years, deep neural networks have demonstrated increasingly strong abilities to recognize objects and activities in videos. However, as video understanding becomes widely used in real-world applications, a key consideration is developing human-centric systems that understand not only the content of the video but also how it would affect the wellbeing and emotional state of viewers. To facilitate research in this setting, we introduce two large-scale datasets with over 60,000 videos manually annotated for emotional response and subjective wellbeing. The Video Cognitive Empathy (VCE) dataset contains annotations for distributions of fine-grained emotional responses, allowing models to gain a detailed understanding of affective states. The Video to Valence (V2V) dataset contains annotations of relative pleasantness between videos, which enables predicting a continuous spectrum of wellbeing. In experiments, we show how video models that are primarily trained to recognize actions and find contours of objects can be repurposed to understand human preferences and the emotional content of videos. Although there is room for improvement, predicting wellbeing and emotional response is on the horizon for state-of-the-art models. We hope our datasets can help foster further advances at the intersection of commonsense video understanding and human preference learning.
ARAH: Animatable Volume Rendering of Articulated Human SDFs
Authors: Shaofei Wang, Katja Schwarz, Andreas Geiger, Siyu Tang
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

Combining human body models with differentiable rendering has recently enabled animatable avatars of clothed humans from sparse sets of multi-view RGB videos. While state-of-the-art approaches achieve realistic appearance with neural radiance fields (NeRF), the inferred geometry often lacks detail due to missing geometric constraints. Further, animating avatars in out-of-distribution poses is not yet possible because the mapping from observation space to canonical space does not generalize faithfully to unseen poses. In this work, we address these shortcomings and propose a model to create animatable clothed human avatars with detailed geometry that generalize well to out-of-distribution poses. To achieve detailed geometry, we combine an articulated implicit surface representation with volume rendering. For generalization, we propose a novel joint root-finding algorithm for simultaneous ray-surface intersection search and correspondence search. Our algorithm enables efficient point sampling and accurate point canonicalization while generalizing well to unseen poses. We demonstrate that our proposed pipeline can generate clothed avatars with high-quality pose-dependent geometry and appearance from a sparse set of multi-view RGB videos. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on geometry and appearance reconstruction while creating animatable avatars that generalize well to out-of-distribution poses beyond the small number of training poses.
ULN: Towards Underspecified Vision-and-Language Navigation
Authors: Weixi Feng, Tsu-Jui Fu, Yujie Lu, William Yang Wang
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Vision and Language Navigation

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a task to guide an embodied agent moving to a target position using language instructions. Despite the significant performance improvement, the wide use of fine-grained instructions fails to characterize more practical linguistic variations in reality. To fill in this gap, we introduce a new setting, namely Underspecified vision-and-Language Navigation (ULN), and associated evaluation datasets. ULN evaluates agents using multi-level underspecified instructions instead of purely fine-grained or coarse-grained, which is a more realistic and general setting. As a primary step toward ULN, we propose a VLN framework that consists of a classification module, a navigation agent, and an Exploitation-to-Exploration (E2E) module. Specifically, we propose to learn Granularity Specific Sub-networks (GSS) for the agent to ground multi-level instructions with minimal additional parameters. Then, our E2E module estimates grounding uncertainty and conducts multi-step lookahead exploration to improve the success rate further. Experimental results show that existing VLN models are still brittle to multi-level language underspecification. Our framework is more robust and outperforms the baselines on ULN by ~10% relative success rate across all levels.
Otsu based Differential Evolution Method for Image Segmentation
Authors: Afreen Shaikh, Sharmila Botcha, Murali Krishna
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper proposes an OTSU based differential evolution method for satellite image segmentation and compares it with four other methods such as Modified Artificial Bee Colony Optimizer (MABC), Artificial Bee Colony (ABC), Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) using the objective function proposed by Otsu for optimal multilevel thresholding. The experiments conducted and their results illustrate that our proposed DE and OTSU algorithm segmentation can effectively and precisely segment the input image, close to results obtained by the other methods. In the proposed DE and OTSU algorithm, instead of passing the fitness function variables, the entire image is passed as an input to the DE algorithm after obtaining the threshold values for the input number of levels in the OTSU algorithm. The image segmentation results are obtained after learning about the image instead of learning about the fitness variables. In comparison to other segmentation methods examined, the proposed DE and OTSU algorithm yields promising results with minimized computational time compared to some algorithms.
Perceptual Grouping in Contrastive Vision-Language Models
Authors: Kanchana Ranasinghe, Brandon McKinzie, Sachin Ravi, Yinfei Yang, Alexander Toshev, Jonathon Shlens
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Object Localization, Representation Learning, Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Semantic Segmentation with Language-image Pre-training

Recent advances in zero-shot image recognition suggest that vision-language models learn generic visual representations with a high degree of semantic information that may be arbitrarily probed with natural language phrases. Understanding an image, however, is not just about understanding what content resides within an image, but importantly, where that content resides. In this work we examine how well vision-language models are able to understand where objects reside within an image and group together visually related parts of the imagery. We demonstrate how contemporary vision and language representation learning models based on contrastive losses and large web-based data capture limited object localization information. We propose a minimal set of modifications that results in models that uniquely learn both semantic and spatial information. We measure this performance in terms of zero-shot image recognition, unsupervised bottom-up and top-down semantic segmentations, as well as robustness analyses. We find that the resulting model achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of unsupervised segmentation, and demonstrate that the learned representations are uniquely robust to spurious correlations in datasets designed to probe the causal behavior of vision models.
Nighttime Dehaze-Enhancement
Authors: Harshan Baskar, Anirudh S Chakravarthy, Prateek Garg, Divyam Goel, Abhijith S Raj, Kshitij Kumar, Lakshya, Ravichandra Parvatham, V Sushant, Bijay Kumar Rout
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, SSIM

In this paper, we introduce a new computer vision task called nighttime dehaze-enhancement. This task aims to jointly perform dehazing and lightness enhancement. Our task fundamentally differs from nighttime dehazing -- our goal is to jointly dehaze and enhance scenes, while nighttime dehazing aims to dehaze scenes under a nighttime setting. In order to facilitate further research on this task, we release a new benchmark dataset called Reside-$\beta$ Night dataset, consisting of 4122 nighttime hazed images from 2061 scenes and 2061 ground truth images. Moreover, we also propose a new network called NDENet (Nighttime Dehaze-Enhancement Network), which jointly performs dehazing and low-light enhancement in an end-to-end manner. We evaluate our method on the proposed benchmark and achieve SSIM of 0.8962 and PSNR of 26.25. We also compare our network with other baseline networks on our benchmark to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We believe that nighttime dehaze-enhancement is an essential task particularly for autonomous navigation applications, and hope that our work will open up new frontiers in research. Our dataset and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance of our paper.
Number-Adaptive Prototype Learning for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yangheng Zhao, Jun Wang, Xiaolong Li, Yue Hu, Ce Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Siheng Chen
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

3D point cloud semantic segmentation is one of the fundamental tasks for 3D scene understanding and has been widely used in the metaverse applications. Many recent 3D semantic segmentation methods learn a single prototype (classifier weights) for each semantic class, and classify 3D points according to their nearest prototype. However, learning only one prototype for each class limits the model's ability to describe the high variance patterns within a class. Instead of learning a single prototype for each class, in this paper, we propose to use an adaptive number of prototypes to dynamically describe the different point patterns within a semantic class. With the powerful capability of vision transformer, we design a Number-Adaptive Prototype Learning (NAPL) model for point cloud semantic segmentation. To train our NAPL model, we propose a simple yet effective prototype dropout training strategy, which enables our model to adaptively produce prototypes for each class. The experimental results on SemanticKITTI dataset demonstrate that our method achieves 2.3% mIoU improvement over the baseline model based on the point-wise classification paradigm.
Zero-shot point cloud segmentation by transferring geometric primitives
Authors: Runnan Chen, Xinge Zhu, Nenglun Chen, Wei Li, Yuexin Ma, Ruigang Yang, Wenping Wang
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We investigate transductive zero-shot point cloud semantic segmentation, where the network is trained on seen objects and able to segment unseen objects. The 3D geometric elements are essential cues to imply a novel 3D object type. However, previous methods neglect the fine-grained relationship between the language and the 3D geometric elements. To this end, we propose a novel framework to learn the geometric primitives shared in seen and unseen categories' objects and employ a fine-grained alignment between language and the learned geometric primitives. Therefore, guided by language, the network recognizes the novel objects represented with geometric primitives. Specifically, we formulate a novel point visual representation, the similarity vector of the point's feature to the learnable prototypes, where the prototypes automatically encode geometric primitives via back-propagation. Besides, we propose a novel Unknown-aware InfoNCE Loss to fine-grained align the visual representation with language. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in the harmonic mean-intersection-over-union (hIoU), with the improvement of 17.8\%, 30.4\%, 9.2\% and 7.9\% on S3DIS, ScanNet, SemanticKITTI and nuScenes datasets, respectively. Codes are available (https://github.com/runnanchen/Zero-Shot-Point-Cloud-Segmentation)
Dense FixMatch: a simple semi-supervised learning method for pixel-wise prediction tasks
Authors: Miquel Martí i Rabadán, Alessandro Pieropan, Hossein Azizpour, Atsuto Maki
Date: 2022-10-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, image-classification, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

We propose Dense FixMatch, a simple method for online semi-supervised learning of dense and structured prediction tasks combining pseudo-labeling and consistency regularization via strong data augmentation. We enable the application of FixMatch in semi-supervised learning problems beyond image classification by adding a matching operation on the pseudo-labels. This allows us to still use the full strength of data augmentation pipelines, including geometric transformations. We evaluate it on semi-supervised semantic segmentation on Cityscapes and Pascal VOC with different percentages of labeled data and ablate design choices and hyper-parameters. Dense FixMatch significantly improves results compared to supervised learning using only labeled data, approaching its performance with 1/4 of the labeled samples.