pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Audio-Visual Segmentation
Authors: Jinxing Zhou, Jianyuan Wang, Jiayi Zhang, Weixuan Sun, Jing Zhang, Stan Birchfield, Dan Guo, Lingpeng Kong, Meng Wang, Yiran Zhong
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

We propose to explore a new problem called audio-visual segmentation (AVS), in which the goal is to output a pixel-level map of the object(s) that produce sound at the time of the image frame. To facilitate this research, we construct the first audio-visual segmentation benchmark (AVSBench), providing pixel-wise annotations for the sounding objects in audible videos. Two settings are studied with this benchmark: 1) semi-supervised audio-visual segmentation with a single sound source and 2) fully-supervised audio-visual segmentation with multiple sound sources. To deal with the AVS problem, we propose a novel method that uses a temporal pixel-wise audio-visual interaction module to inject audio semantics as guidance for the visual segmentation process. We also design a regularization loss to encourage the audio-visual mapping during training. Quantitative and qualitative experiments on the AVSBench compare our approach to several existing methods from related tasks, demonstrating that the proposed method is promising for building a bridge between the audio and pixel-wise visual semantics. Code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/AVSBench.
Intra-Modal Constraint Loss For Image-Text Retrieval
Authors: Jianan Chen, Lu Zhang, Qiong Wang, Cong Bai, Kidiyo Kpalma
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Image-text Retrieval, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

Cross-modal retrieval has drawn much attention in both computer vision and natural language processing domains. With the development of convolutional and recurrent neural networks, the bottleneck of retrieval across image-text modalities is no longer the extraction of image and text features but an efficient loss function learning in embedding space. Many loss functions try to closer pairwise features from heterogeneous modalities. This paper proposes a method for learning joint embedding of images and texts using an intra-modal constraint loss function to reduce the violation of negative pairs from the same homogeneous modality. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art bi-directional image-text retrieval methods on Flickr30K and Microsoft COCO datasets. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/CanonChen/IMC.
LaT: Latent Translation with Cycle-Consistency for Video-Text Retrieval
Authors: Jinbin Bai, Chunhui Liu, Feiyue Ni, Haofan Wang, Mengying Hu, Xiaofeng Guo, Lele Cheng
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Retrieval, Text Retrieval, Translation, Video Retrieval, Video-Text Retrieval, Zero-Shot Video Retrieval

Video-text retrieval is a class of cross-modal representation learning problems, where the goal is to select the video which corresponds to the text query between a given text query and a pool of candidate videos. The contrastive paradigm of vision-language pretraining has shown promising success with large-scale datasets and unified transformer architecture, and demonstrated the power of a joint latent space. Despite this, the intrinsic divergence between the visual domain and textual domain is still far from being eliminated, and projecting different modalities into a joint latent space might result in the distorting of the information inside the single modality. To overcome the above issue, we present a novel mechanism for learning the translation relationship from a source modality space $\mathcal{S}$ to a target modality space $\mathcal{T}$ without the need for a joint latent space, which bridges the gap between visual and textual domains. Furthermore, to keep cycle consistency between translations, we adopt a cycle loss involving both forward translations from $\mathcal{S}$ to the predicted target space $\mathcal{T'}$, and backward translations from $\mathcal{T'}$ back to $\mathcal{S}$. Extensive experiments conducted on MSR-VTT, MSVD, and DiDeMo datasets demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our LaT approach compared with vanilla state-of-the-art methods.
Learned Video Compression via Heterogeneous Deformable Compensation Network
Authors: Huairui Wang, Zhenzhong Chen, Chang Wen Chen
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Compensation, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Compression

Learned video compression has recently emerged as an essential research topic in developing advanced video compression technologies, where motion compensation is considered one of the most challenging issues. In this paper, we propose a learned video compression framework via heterogeneous deformable compensation strategy (HDCVC) to tackle the problems of unstable compression performance caused by single-size deformable kernels in downsampled feature domain. More specifically, instead of utilizing optical flow warping or single-size-kernel deformable alignment, the proposed algorithm extracts features from the two adjacent frames to estimate content-adaptive heterogeneous deformable (HetDeform) kernel offsets. Then we transform the reference features with the HetDeform convolution to accomplish motion compensation. Moreover, we design a Spatial-Neighborhood-Conditioned Divisive Normalization (SNCDN) to achieve more effective data Gaussianization combined with the Generalized Divisive Normalization. Furthermore, we propose a multi-frame enhanced reconstruction module for exploiting context and temporal information for final quality enhancement. Experimental results indicate that HDCVC achieves superior performance than the recent state-of-the-art learned video compression approaches.
Towards Proper Contrastive Self-supervised Learning Strategies For Music Audio Representation
Authors: Jeong Choi, Seongwon Jang, Hyunsouk Cho, Sehee Chung
Date: 2022-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Information Retrieval, Music Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Self-Supervised Learning

The common research goal of self-supervised learning is to extract a general representation which an arbitrary downstream task would benefit from. In this work, we investigate music audio representation learned from different contrastive self-supervised learning schemes and empirically evaluate the embedded vectors on various music information retrieval (MIR) tasks where different levels of the music perception are concerned. We analyze the results to discuss the proper direction of contrastive learning strategies for different MIR tasks. We show that these representations convey a comprehensive information about the auditory characteristics of music in general, although each of the self-supervision strategies has its own effectiveness in certain aspect of information.
Dual-Path Cross-Modal Attention for better Audio-Visual Speech Extraction
Authors: Zhongweiyang Xu, Xulin Fan, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
Date: 2022-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Extraction, Speech Separation

Audio-visual target speech extraction, which aims to extract a certain speaker's speech from the noisy mixture by looking at lip movements, has made significant progress combining time-domain speech separation models and visual feature extractors (CNN). One problem of fusing audio and video information is that they have different time resolutions. Most current research upsamples the visual features along the time dimension so that audio and video features are able to align in time. However, we believe that lip movement should mostly contain long-term, or phone-level information. Based on this assumption, we propose a new way to fuse audio-visual features. We observe that for DPRNN \cite{dprnn}, the interchunk dimension's time resolution could be very close to the time resolution of video frames. Like \cite{sepformer}, the LSTM in DPRNN is replaced by intra-chunk and inter-chunk self-attention, but in the proposed algorithm, inter-chunk attention incorporates the visual features as an additional feature stream. This prevents the upsampling of visual cues, resulting in more efficient audio-visual fusion. The result shows we achieve superior results compared with other time-domain based audio-visual fusion models.
Learning to Separate Voices by Spatial Regions
Authors: Zhongweiyang Xu, Romit Roy Choudhury
Date: 2022-07-09 00:00:00

We consider the problem of audio voice separation for binaural applications, such as earphones and hearing aids. While today's neural networks perform remarkably well (separating $4+$ sources with 2 microphones) they assume a known or fixed maximum number of sources, K. Moreover, today's models are trained in a supervised manner, using training data synthesized from generic sources, environments, and human head shapes. This paper intends to relax both these constraints at the expense of a slight alteration in the problem definition. We observe that, when a received mixture contains too many sources, it is still helpful to separate them by region, i.e., isolating signal mixtures from each conical sector around the user's head. This requires learning the fine-grained spatial properties of each region, including the signal distortions imposed by a person's head. We propose a two-stage self-supervised framework in which overheard voices from earphones are pre-processed to extract relatively clean personalized signals, which are then used to train a region-wise separation model. Results show promising performance, underscoring the importance of personalization over a generic supervised approach. (audio samples available at our project website: https://uiuc-earable-computing.github.io/binaural/. We believe this result could help real-world applications in selective hearing, noise cancellation, and audio augmented reality.
Learning Structured Representations of Visual Scenes
Authors: Meng-Jiun Chiou
Date: 2022-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Representation Learning, Scene Graph Generation, Unbiased Scene Graph Generation, Visual Relationship Detection

As the intermediate-level representations bridging the two levels, structured representations of visual scenes, such as visual relationships between pairwise objects, have been shown to not only benefit compositional models in learning to reason along with the structures but provide higher interpretability for model decisions. Nevertheless, these representations receive much less attention than traditional recognition tasks, leaving numerous open challenges unsolved. In the thesis, we study how machines can describe the content of the individual image or video with visual relationships as the structured representations. Specifically, we explore how structured representations of visual scenes can be effectively constructed and learned in both the static-image and video settings, with improvements resulting from external knowledge incorporation, bias-reducing mechanism, and enhanced representation models. At the end of this thesis, we also discuss some open challenges and limitations to shed light on future directions of structured representation learning for visual scenes.
Neural and spectral operator surrogates: unified construction and expression rate bounds
Authors: Lukas Herrmann, Christoph Schwab, Jakob Zech
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00

Approximation rates are analyzed for deep surrogates of maps between infinite-dimensional function spaces, arising e.g. as data-to-solution maps of linear and nonlinear partial differential equations. Specifically, we study approximation rates for Deep Neural Operator and Generalized Polynomial Chaos (gpc) Operator surrogates for nonlinear, holomorphic maps between infinite-dimensional, separable Hilbert spaces. Operator in- and outputs from function spaces are assumed to be parametrized by stable, affine representation systems. Admissible representation systems comprise orthonormal bases, Riesz bases or suitable tight frames of the spaces under consideration. Algebraic expression rate bounds are established for both, deep neural and spectral operator surrogates acting in scales of separable Hilbert spaces containing domain and range of the map to be expressed, with finite Sobolev or Besov regularity. We illustrate the abstract concepts by expression rate bounds for the coefficient-to-solution map for a linear elliptic PDE on the torus.
Randomized Kaczmarz Method for Single Particle X-ray Image Phase Retrieval
Authors: Y. Xian, H. Liu, X. Tai, Y. Wang
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

In this paper, we investigate phase retrieval algorithm for the single particle X-ray imaging data. We present a variance-reduced randomized Kaczmarz (VR-RK) algorithm for phase retrieval. The VR-RK algorithm is inspired by the randomized Kaczmarz method and the Stochastic Variance Reduce Gradient Descent (SVRG) algorithm. Numerical experiments show that the VR-RK algorithm has a faster convergence rate than randomized Kaczmarz algorithm and the iterative projection phase retrieval methods, such as the hybrid input output (HIO) and the relaxed averaged alternating reflections (RAAR) methods. The VR-RK algorithm can recover the phases with higher accuracy, and is robust at the presence of noise. Experimental results on the scattering data from individual particles show that the VR-RK algorithm can recover phases and improve the single particle image identification.
Deep neural network based adaptive learning for switched systems
Authors: Junjie He, Zhihang Xu, Qifeng Liao
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00

In this paper, we present a deep neural network based adaptive learning (DNN-AL) approach for switched systems. Currently, deep neural network based methods are actively developed for learning governing equations in unknown dynamic systems, but their efficiency can degenerate for switching systems, where structural changes exist at discrete time instants. In this new DNN-AL strategy, observed datasets are adaptively decomposed into subsets, such that no structural changes within each subset. During the adaptive procedures, DNNs are hierarchically constructed, and unknown switching time instants are gradually identified. Especially, network parameters at previous iteration steps are reused to initialize networks for the later iteration steps, which gives efficient training procedures for the DNNs. For the DNNs obtained through our DNN-AL, bounds of the prediction error are established. Numerical studies are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of DNN-AL.
Batch-efficient EigenDecomposition for Small and Medium Matrices
Authors: Yue Song, Nicu Sebe, Wei Wang
Date: 2022-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

EigenDecomposition (ED) is at the heart of many computer vision algorithms and applications. One crucial bottleneck limiting its usage is the expensive computation cost, particularly for a mini-batch of matrices in the deep neural networks. In this paper, we propose a QR-based ED method dedicated to the application scenarios of computer vision. Our proposed method performs the ED entirely by batched matrix/vector multiplication, which processes all the matrices simultaneously and thus fully utilizes the power of GPUs. Our technique is based on the explicit QR iterations by Givens rotation with double Wilkinson shifts. With several acceleration techniques, the time complexity of QR iterations is reduced from $O{(}n^5{)}$ to $O{(}n^3{)}$. The numerical test shows that for small and medium batched matrices (\emph{e.g.,} $dim{<}32$) our method can be much faster than the Pytorch SVD function. Experimental results on visual recognition and image generation demonstrate that our methods also achieve competitive performances.
Forward Error Correction applied to JPEG-XS codestreams
Authors: Antoine Legrand, Benoît Macq, Christophe De Vleeschouwer
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

JPEG-XS offers low complexity image compression for applications with constrained but reasonable bit-rate, and low latency. Our paper explores the deployment of JPEG-XS on lossy packet networks. To preserve low latency, Forward Error Correction (FEC) is envisioned as the protection mechanism of interest. Despite the JPEG-XS codestream is not scalable in essence, we observe that the loss of a codestream fraction impacts the decoded image quality differently, depending on whether this codestream fraction corresponds to codestream headers, to coefficients significance information, or to low/high frequency data, respectively. Hence, we propose a rate-distortion optimal unequal error protection scheme that adapts the redundancy level of Reed-Solomon codes according to the rate of channel losses and the type of information protected by the code. Our experiments demonstrate that, at 5% loss rates, it reduces the Mean Squared Error by up to 92% and 65%, compared to a transmission without and with optimal but equal protection, respectively.
SparseTIR: Composable Abstractions for Sparse Compilation in Deep Learning
Authors: Zihao Ye, Ruihang Lai, Junru Shao, Tianqi Chen, Luis Ceze
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Sparse tensors are rapidly becoming critical components of modern deep learning workloads. However, developing high-performance sparse operators can be difficult and tedious, and existing vendor libraries cannot satisfy the escalating demands from new operators. Sparse tensor compilers simplify the development of operators, but efficient sparse compilation for deep learning remains challenging because a single sparse format cannot maximize hardware efficiency, and single-shot compilers cannot keep up with latest hardware and system advances. In this paper, we observe that the key to addressing both these challenges is to leverage composable formats and composable transformations. We propose SparseTIR, a sparse tensor compilation abstraction that offers composable formats and composable transformations for deep learning workloads. SparseTIR constructs a search space over these composable components for performance tuning. With these improvements, SparseTIR obtains consistent performance speedups vs vendor libraries on GPUs for single operators: 1.20-2.34x for GNN operators, 1.05-2.98x for sparse attention operators, and 0.56-7.45x for sparse convolution operators. SparseTIR also accelerates end-to-end GNNs by 1.08-1.52x for GraphSAGE training, and 4.20-40.18x for RGCN inference.
TensorIR: An Abstraction for Automatic Tensorized Program Optimization
Authors: Siyuan Feng, Bohan Hou, Hongyi Jin, Wuwei Lin, Junru Shao, Ruihang Lai, Zihao Ye, Lianmin Zheng, Cody Hao Yu, Yong Yu, Tianqi Chen
Date: 2022-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning

Deploying deep learning models on various devices has become an important topic. The wave of hardware specialization brings a diverse set of acceleration primitives for multi-dimensional tensor computations. These new acceleration primitives, along with the emerging machine learning models, bring tremendous engineering challenges. In this paper, we present TensorIR, a compiler abstraction for optimizing programs with these tensor computation primitives. TensorIR generalizes the loop nest representation used in existing machine learning compilers to bring tensor computation as the first-class citizen. Finally, we build an end-to-end framework on top of our abstraction to automatically optimize deep learning models for given tensor computation primitives. Experimental results show that TensorIR compilation automatically uses the tensor computation primitives for given hardware backends and delivers performance that is competitive to state-of-art hand-optimized systems across platforms.
Subclasses of Class Function used to Implement Transformations of Statistical Models
Authors: Lloyd Allison
Date: 2022-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

A library of software for inductive inference guided by the Minimum Message Length (MML) principle was created previously. It contains various (object-oriented-) classes and subclasses of statistical Model and can be used to infer Models from given data sets in machine learning problems. Here transformations of statistical Models are considered and implemented within the library so as to have desirable properties from the object-oriented programming and mathematical points of view. The subclasses of class Function needed to do such transformations are defined.
Learning Continuous Grasping Function with a Dexterous Hand from Human Demonstrations
Authors: Jianglong Ye, Jiashun Wang, Binghao Huang, Yuzhe Qin, Xiaolong Wang
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, motion retargeting

We propose to learn to generate grasping motion for manipulation with a dexterous hand using implicit functions. With continuous time inputs, the model can generate a continuous and smooth grasping plan. We name the proposed model Continuous Grasping Function (CGF). CGF is learned via generative modeling with a Conditional Variational Autoencoder using 3D human demonstrations. We will first convert the large-scale human-object interaction trajectories to robot demonstrations via motion retargeting, and then use these demonstrations to train CGF. During inference, we perform sampling with CGF to generate different grasping plans in the simulator and select the successful ones to transfer to the real robot. By training on diverse human data, our CGF allows generalization to manipulate multiple objects. Compared to previous planning algorithms, CGF is more efficient and achieves significant improvement on success rate when transferred to grasping with the real Allegro Hand. Our project page is available at https://jianglongye.com/cgf .
Learning Temporally Extended Skills in Continuous Domains as Symbolic Actions for Planning
Authors: Jan Achterhold, Markus Krimmel, Joerg Stueckler
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Problems which require both long-horizon planning and continuous control capabilities pose significant challenges to existing reinforcement learning agents. In this paper we introduce a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning agent which links temporally extended skills for continuous control with a forward model in a symbolic discrete abstraction of the environment's state for planning. We term our agent SEADS for Symbolic Effect-Aware Diverse Skills. We formulate an objective and corresponding algorithm which leads to unsupervised learning of a diverse set of skills through intrinsic motivation given a known state abstraction. The skills are jointly learned with the symbolic forward model which captures the effect of skill execution in the state abstraction. After training, we can leverage the skills as symbolic actions using the forward model for long-horizon planning and subsequently execute the plan using the learned continuous-action control skills. The proposed algorithm learns skills and forward models that can be used to solve complex tasks which require both continuous control and long-horizon planning capabilities with high success rate. It compares favorably with other flat and hierarchical reinforcement learning baseline agents and is successfully demonstrated with a real robot.