pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Revisiting the Importance of Amplifying Bias for Debiasing
Authors: Jungsoo Lee, Jeonghoon Park, Daeyoung Kim, Juyoung Lee, Edward Choi, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, image-classification, Image Classification

In image classification, "debiasing" aims to train a classifier to be less susceptible to dataset bias, the strong correlation between peripheral attributes of data samples and a target class. For example, even if the frog class in the dataset mainly consists of frog images with a swamp background (i.e., bias-aligned samples), a debiased classifier should be able to correctly classify a frog at a beach (i.e., bias-conflicting samples). Recent debiasing approaches commonly use two components for debiasing, a biased model $f_B$ and a debiased model $f_D$. $f_B$ is trained to focus on bias-aligned samples (i.e., overfitted to the bias) while $f_D$ is mainly trained with bias-conflicting samples by concentrating on samples which $f_B$ fails to learn, leading $f_D$ to be less susceptible to the dataset bias. While the state-of-the-art debiasing techniques have aimed to better train $f_D$, we focus on training $f_B$, an overlooked component until now. Our empirical analysis reveals that removing the bias-conflicting samples from the training set for $f_B$ is important for improving the debiasing performance of $f_D$. This is due to the fact that the bias-conflicting samples work as noisy samples for amplifying the bias for $f_B$ since those samples do not include the bias attribute. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective data sample selection method which removes the bias-conflicting samples to construct a bias-amplified dataset for training $f_B$. Our data sample selection method can be directly applied to existing reweighting-based debiasing approaches, obtaining consistent performance boost and achieving the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
IFRNet: Intermediate Feature Refine Network for Efficient Frame Interpolation
Authors: Lingtong Kong, Boyuan Jiang, Donghao Luo, Wenqing Chu, Xiaoming Huang, Ying Tai, Chengjie Wang, Jie Yang
Date: 2022-05-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Decoder, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Frame Interpolation

Prevailing video frame interpolation algorithms, that generate the intermediate frames from consecutive inputs, typically rely on complex model architectures with heavy parameters or large delay, hindering them from diverse real-time applications. In this work, we devise an efficient encoder-decoder based network, termed IFRNet, for fast intermediate frame synthesizing. It first extracts pyramid features from given inputs, and then refines the bilateral intermediate flow fields together with a powerful intermediate feature until generating the desired output. The gradually refined intermediate feature can not only facilitate intermediate flow estimation, but also compensate for contextual details, making IFRNet do not need additional synthesis or refinement module. To fully release its potential, we further propose a novel task-oriented optical flow distillation loss to focus on learning the useful teacher knowledge towards frame synthesizing. Meanwhile, a new geometry consistency regularization term is imposed on the gradually refined intermediate features to keep better structure layout. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the excellent performance and fast inference speed of proposed approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/ltkong218/IFRNet.
Neural Copula: A unified framework for estimating generic high-dimensional Copula functions
Authors: Zhi Zeng, Ting Wang
Date: 2022-05-23 00:00:00

The Copula is widely used to describe the relationship between the marginal distribution and joint distribution of random variables. The estimation of high-dimensional Copula is difficult, and most existing solutions rely either on simplified assumptions or on complicating recursive decompositions. Therefore, people still hope to obtain a generic Copula estimation method with both universality and simplicity. To reach this goal, a novel neural network-based method (named Neural Copula) is proposed in this paper. In this method, a hierarchical unsupervised neural network is constructed to estimate the marginal distribution function and the Copula function by solving differential equations. In the training program, various constraints are imposed on both the neural network and its derivatives. The Copula estimated by the proposed method is smooth and has an analytic expression. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on both real-world datasets and complex numerical simulations. Experimental results show that Neural Copula's fitting quality for complex distributions is much better than classical methods. The relevant code for the experiments is available on GitHub. (We encourage the reader to run the program for a better understanding of the proposed method).
High-Order-Interaction for weakly supervised Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
Authors: Nanyu Li, Junzhen Wang, Zhimin Luo, Zhun Zhong, Shaozi Li
Date: 2021-11-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: Neurocomputing 2021 11
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Classification, Fine-Grained Image Recognition, Fine-Grained Visual Categorization, Triplet, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Fine-Grained Visual Categorization (FGVC) is a challenging task due to the large intra-subcategory and small inter-subcategory variances. Recent studies tackle this task through a weakly supervised manner without using the part annotation from the experts. Of those, methods based on bilinear pooling are one of the main categories for computing the interaction between deep features and have shown high effectiveness. However, these methods mainly focus on the correlation within one specific layer but largely ignore the high interactions between multiple layers. In this study, we argue that considering the high interaction between the features from multiple layers can help to learn more distinguishing fine-grained features. To this end, we propose a High-Order-Interaction (HOI) method for FGVC. In our HOI, an efficient cross-layer trilinear pooling is introduced to calculate the third-order interaction between three different layers. Third-order interactions of different combinations are then fused to form the final representation. HOI can produce more discriminative representations and be readily integrated with the two popular techniques, attention mechanism and triplet loss, to obtain superposed improvement. Extensive experiments conducted on four FGVC datasets show the great superiority of our method over bilinear-based methods and demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the state of the art.
Max-min threshold-based cancelable biometric templates for low-end devices
Authors: Gourav Siddhad, Pritee Khanna
Date: 2022-05-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: Journal of Electronic Imaging 2022 5

Biometrics are widely used in security systems, but it has drawbacks such as its nonreusability, being susceptible to getting stolen, and being prone to unauthorized access. These issues can be tackled using cancelable biometrics. In this work, features extracted using Log-Gabor filters are processed according to the proposed max-min thresholding. The resulting binary features are transformed by random projection on a key matrix to create a cancelable template. The method was carefully evaluated using publicly accessible datasets of face near-infrared, palm print, palm vein, dorsal vein, wrist vein, and knuckle print. A significant improvement in performance over many recent methods was observed. Also, the effectiveness of the generated cancelable templates was observed in the general, stolen token, and changeable scenarios. The generated template is 25% of the original input size, which makes it efficient for low-end devices.
Automatic Relation-aware Graph Network Proliferation
Authors: Shaofei Cai, Liang Li, Xinzhe Han, Jiebo Luo, Zheng-Jun Zha, Qingming Huang
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Graph Classification, Graph Learning, Graph Regression, Link Prediction, Neural Architecture Search, Node Classification, Relation

Graph neural architecture search has sparked much attention as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown powerful reasoning capability in many relational tasks. However, the currently used graph search space overemphasizes learning node features and neglects mining hierarchical relational information. Moreover, due to diverse mechanisms in the message passing, the graph search space is much larger than that of CNNs. This hinders the straightforward application of classical search strategies for exploring complicated graph search space. We propose Automatic Relation-aware Graph Network Proliferation (ARGNP) for efficiently searching GNNs with a relation-guided message passing mechanism. Specifically, we first devise a novel dual relation-aware graph search space that comprises both node and relation learning operations. These operations can extract hierarchical node/relational information and provide anisotropic guidance for message passing on a graph. Second, analogous to cell proliferation, we design a network proliferation search paradigm to progressively determine the GNN architectures by iteratively performing network division and differentiation. The experiments on six datasets for four graph learning tasks demonstrate that GNNs produced by our method are superior to the current state-of-the-art hand-crafted and search-based GNNs. Codes are available at https://github.com/phython96/ARGNP.
TransFuser: Imitation with Transformer-Based Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Kashyap Chitta, Aditya Prakash, Bernhard Jaeger, Zehao Yu, Katrin Renz, Andreas Geiger
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, CARLA longest6, Imitation Learning, Motion Forecasting, NavSim, Object Detection, Sensor Fusion

How should we integrate representations from complementary sensors for autonomous driving? Geometry-based fusion has shown promise for perception (e.g. object detection, motion forecasting). However, in the context of end-to-end driving, we find that imitation learning based on existing sensor fusion methods underperforms in complex driving scenarios with a high density of dynamic agents. Therefore, we propose TransFuser, a mechanism to integrate image and LiDAR representations using self-attention. Our approach uses transformer modules at multiple resolutions to fuse perspective view and bird's eye view feature maps. We experimentally validate its efficacy on a challenging new benchmark with long routes and dense traffic, as well as the official leaderboard of the CARLA urban driving simulator. At the time of submission, TransFuser outperforms all prior work on the CARLA leaderboard in terms of driving score by a large margin. Compared to geometry-based fusion, TransFuser reduces the average collisions per kilometer by 48%.
You Can't Count on Luck: Why Decision Transformers and RvS Fail in Stochastic Environments
Authors: Keiran Paster, Sheila Mcilraith, Jimmy Ba
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, Playing the Game of 2048

Recently, methods such as Decision Transformer that reduce reinforcement learning to a prediction task and solve it via supervised learning (RvS) have become popular due to their simplicity, robustness to hyperparameters, and strong overall performance on offline RL tasks. However, simply conditioning a probabilistic model on a desired return and taking the predicted action can fail dramatically in stochastic environments since trajectories that result in a return may have only achieved that return due to luck. In this work, we describe the limitations of RvS approaches in stochastic environments and propose a solution. Rather than simply conditioning on the return of a single trajectory as is standard practice, our proposed method, ESPER, learns to cluster trajectories and conditions on average cluster returns, which are independent from environment stochasticity. Doing so allows ESPER to achieve strong alignment between target return and expected performance in real environments. We demonstrate this in several challenging stochastic offline-RL tasks including the challenging puzzle game 2048, and Connect Four playing against a stochastic opponent. In all tested domains, ESPER achieves significantly better alignment between the target return and achieved return than simply conditioning on returns. ESPER also achieves higher maximum performance than even the value-based baselines.
Knowledge Graph - Deep Learning: A Case Study in Question Answering in Aviation Safety Domain
Authors: Ankush Agarwal, Raj Gite, Shreya Laddha, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Satyanarayan Kar, Asif Ekbal, Prabhjit Thind, Rajesh Zele, Ravi Shankar
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2022 6
Tasks: Natural Language Queries, Passage Retrieval, Question Answering, Retrieval, Sentence

In the commercial aviation domain, there are a large number of documents, like, accident reports (NTSB, ASRS) and regulatory directives (ADs). There is a need for a system to access these diverse repositories efficiently in order to service needs in the aviation industry, like maintenance, compliance, and safety. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Graph (KG) guided Deep Learning (DL) based Question Answering (QA) system for aviation safety. We construct a Knowledge Graph from Aircraft Accident reports and contribute this resource to the community of researchers. The efficacy of this resource is tested and proved by the aforesaid QA system. Natural Language Queries constructed from the documents mentioned above are converted into SPARQL (the interface language of the RDF graph database) queries and answered. On the DL side, we have two different QA models: (i) BERT QA which is a pipeline of Passage Retrieval (Sentence-BERT based) and Question Answering (BERT based), and (ii) the recently released GPT-3. We evaluate our system on a set of queries created from the accident reports. Our combined QA system achieves 9.3% increase in accuracy over GPT-3 and 40.3% increase over BERT QA. Thus, we infer that KG-DL performs better than either singly.
Two-Dimensional Quantum Material Identification via Self-Attention and Soft-labeling in Deep Learning
Authors: Xuan Bac Nguyen, Apoorva Bisht, Ben Thompson, Hugh Churchill, Khoa Luu, Samee U. Khan
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: 2k, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In quantum machine field, detecting two-dimensional (2D) materials in Silicon chips is one of the most critical problems. Instance segmentation can be considered as a potential approach to solve this problem. However, similar to other deep learning methods, the instance segmentation requires a large scale training dataset and high quality annotation in order to achieve a considerable performance. In practice, preparing the training dataset is a challenge since annotators have to deal with a large image, e.g 2K resolution, and extremely dense objects in this problem. In this work, we present a novel method to tackle the problem of missing annotation in instance segmentation in 2D quantum material identification. We propose a new mechanism for automatically detecting false negative objects and an attention based loss strategy to reduce the negative impact of these objects contributing to the overall loss function. We experiment on the 2D material detection datasets, and the experiments show our method outperforms previous works.
Hide and Seek: on the Stealthiness of Attacks against Deep Learning Systems
Authors: Zeyan Liu, Fengjun Li, Jingqiang Lin, Zhu Li, Bo Luo
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

With the growing popularity of artificial intelligence and machine learning, a wide spectrum of attacks against deep learning models have been proposed in the literature. Both the evasion attacks and the poisoning attacks attempt to utilize adversarially altered samples to fool the victim model to misclassify the adversarial sample. While such attacks claim to be or are expected to be stealthy, i.e., imperceptible to human eyes, such claims are rarely evaluated. In this paper, we present the first large-scale study on the stealthiness of adversarial samples used in the attacks against deep learning. We have implemented 20 representative adversarial ML attacks on six popular benchmarking datasets. We evaluate the stealthiness of the attack samples using two complementary approaches: (1) a numerical study that adopts 24 metrics for image similarity or quality assessment; and (2) a user study of 3 sets of questionnaires that has collected 20,000+ annotations from 1,000+ responses. Our results show that the majority of the existing attacks introduce nonnegligible perturbations that are not stealthy to human eyes. We further analyze the factors that contribute to attack stealthiness. We further examine the correlation between the numerical analysis and the user studies, and demonstrate that some image quality metrics may provide useful guidance in attack designs, while there is still a significant gap between assessed image quality and visual stealthiness of attacks.
A Competitive Method for Dog Nose-print Re-identification
Authors: Fei Shen, Zhe Wang, Zijun Wang, Xiaode Fu, Jiayi Chen, Xiaoyu Du, Jinhui Tang
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Triplet

Vision-based pattern identification (such as face, fingerprint, iris etc.) has been successfully applied in human biometrics for a long history. However, dog nose-print authentication is a challenging problem since the lack of a large amount of labeled data. For that, this paper presents our proposed methods for dog nose-print authentication (Re-ID) task in CVPR 2022 pet biometric challenge. First, considering the problem that each class only with few samples in the training set, we propose an automatic offline data augmentation strategy. Then, for the difference in sample styles between the training and test datasets, we employ joint cross-entropy, triplet and pair-wise circle losses function for network optimization. Finally, with multiple models ensembled adopted, our methods achieve 86.67\% AUC on the test set. Codes are available at https://github.com/muzishen/Pet-ReID-IMAG.
Uzbek Sentiment Analysis based on local Restaurant Reviews
Authors: Sanatbek Matlatipov, Hulkar Rahimboeva, Jaloliddin Rajabov, Elmurod Kuriyozov
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Extracting useful information for sentiment analysis and classification problems from a big amount of user-generated feedback, such as restaurant reviews, is a crucial task of natural language processing, which is not only for customer satisfaction where it can give personalized services, but can also influence the further development of a company. In this paper, we present a work done on collecting restaurant reviews data as a sentiment analysis dataset for the Uzbek language, a member of the Turkic family which is heavily affected by the low-resource constraint, and provide some further analysis of the novel dataset by evaluation using different techniques, from logistic regression based models, to support vector machines, and even deep learning models, such as recurrent neural networks, as well as convolutional neural networks. The paper includes detailed information on how the data was collected, how it was pre-processed for better quality optimization, as well as experimental setups for the evaluation process. The overall evaluation results indicate that by performing pre-processing steps, such as stemming for agglutinative languages, the system yields better results, eventually achieving 91% accuracy result in the best performing model
Enhanced Teaching-Learning-based Optimization for 3D Path Planning of Multicopter UAVs
Authors: Van Truong Hoang, Manh Duong Phung
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00

This paper introduces a new path planning algorithm for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) based on the teaching-learning-based optimization (TLBO) technique. We first define an objective function that incorporates requirements on the path length and constraints on the movement and safe operation of UAVs to convert the path planning into an optimization problem. The optimization algorithm named Multi-subject TLBO is then proposed to minimize the formulated objective function. The algorithm is developed based on TLBO but enhanced with new operations including mutation, elite selection and multi-subject training to improve the solution quality and speed up the convergence rate. Comparison with state-of-the-art algorithms and experiments with real UAVs have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. The results confirm its validity and effectiveness in generating optimal, collision-free and flyable paths for UAVs in complex operating environments.
VQ-AR: Vector Quantized Autoregressive Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Kashif Rasul, Young-Jin Park, Max Nihlén Ramström, Kyung-Min Kim
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Inductive Bias, Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting, Zero-shot Generalization

Time series models aim for accurate predictions of the future given the past, where the forecasts are used for important downstream tasks like business decision making. In practice, deep learning based time series models come in many forms, but at a high level learn some continuous representation of the past and use it to output point or probabilistic forecasts. In this paper, we introduce a novel autoregressive architecture, VQ-AR, which instead learns a \emph{discrete} set of representations that are used to predict the future. Extensive empirical comparison with other competitive deep learning models shows that surprisingly such a discrete set of representations gives state-of-the-art or equivalent results on a wide variety of time series datasets. We also highlight the shortcomings of this approach, explore its zero-shot generalization capabilities, and present an ablation study on the number of representations. The full source code of the method will be available at the time of publication with the hope that researchers can further investigate this important but overlooked inductive bias for the time series domain.
Simplex Neural Population Learning: Any-Mixture Bayes-Optimality in Symmetric Zero-sum Games
Authors: SiQi Liu, Marc Lanctot, Luke Marris, Nicolas Heess
Date: 2022-05-31 00:00:00

Learning to play optimally against any mixture over a diverse set of strategies is of important practical interests in competitive games. In this paper, we propose simplex-NeuPL that satisfies two desiderata simultaneously: i) learning a population of strategically diverse basis policies, represented by a single conditional network; ii) using the same network, learn best-responses to any mixture over the simplex of basis policies. We show that the resulting conditional policies incorporate prior information about their opponents effectively, enabling near optimal returns against arbitrary mixture policies in a game with tractable best-responses. We verify that such policies behave Bayes-optimally under uncertainty and offer insights in using this flexibility at test time. Finally, we offer evidence that learning best-responses to any mixture policies is an effective auxiliary task for strategic exploration, which, by itself, can lead to more performant populations.