pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Semi-supervised segmentation of tooth from 3D Scanned Dental Arches
Authors: Ammar Alsheghri, Farnoosh Ghadiri, Ying Zhang, Olivier Lessard, Julia Keren, Farida Cheriet, Francois Guibault
Date: 2022-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Teeth segmentation is an important topic in dental restorations that is essential for crown generation, diagnosis, and treatment planning. In the dental field, the variability of input data is high and there are no publicly available 3D dental arch datasets. Although there has been improvement in the field provided by recent deep learning architectures on 3D data, there still exists some problems such as properly identifying missing teeth in an arch. We propose to use spectral clustering as a self-supervisory signal to joint-train neural networks for segmentation of 3D arches. Our approach is motivated by the observation that K-means clustering provides cues to capture margin lines related to human perception. The main idea is to automatically generate training data by decomposing unlabeled 3D arches into segments relying solely on geometric information. The network is then trained using a joint loss that combines a supervised loss of annotated input and a self-supervised loss of non-labeled input. Our collected data has a variety of arches including arches with missing teeth. Our experimental results show improvement over the fully supervised state-of-the-art MeshSegNet when using semi-supervised learning. Finally, we contribute code and a dataset.
Quality Not Quantity: On the Interaction between Dataset Design and Robustness of CLIP
Authors: Thao Nguyen, Gabriel Ilharco, Mitchell Wortsman, Sewoong Oh, Ludwig Schmidt
Date: 2022-08-10 00:00:00

Web-crawled datasets have enabled remarkable generalization capabilities in recent image-text models such as CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image pre-training) or Flamingo, but little is known about the dataset creation processes. In this work, we introduce a testbed of six publicly available data sources - YFCC, LAION, Conceptual Captions, WIT, RedCaps, Shutterstock - to investigate how pre-training distributions induce robustness in CLIP. We find that the performance of the pre-training data varies substantially across distribution shifts, with no single data source dominating. Moreover, we systematically study the interactions between these data sources and find that combining multiple sources does not necessarily yield better models, but rather dilutes the robustness of the best individual data source. We complement our empirical findings with theoretical insights from a simple setting, where combining the training data also results in diluted robustness. In addition, our theoretical model provides a candidate explanation for the success of the CLIP-based data filtering technique recently employed in the LAION dataset. Overall our results demonstrate that simply gathering a large amount of data from the web is not the most effective way to build a pre-training dataset for robust generalization, necessitating further study into dataset design. Code is available at https://github.com/mlfoundations/clip_quality_not_quantity.
KiPA22 Report: U-Net with Contour Regularization for Renal Structures Segmentation
Authors: Kangqing Ye, Peng Liu, Xiaoyang Zou, Qin Zhou, Guoyan Zheng
Date: 2022-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Three-dimensional (3D) integrated renal structures (IRS) segmentation is important in clinical practice. With the advancement of deep learning techniques, many powerful frameworks focusing on medical image segmentation are proposed. In this challenge, we utilized the nnU-Net framework, which is the state-of-the-art method for medical image segmentation. To reduce the outlier prediction for the tumor label, we combine contour regularization (CR) loss of the tumor label with Dice loss and cross-entropy loss to improve this phenomenon.
High-Frequency Space Diffusion Models for Accelerated MRI
Authors: Chentao Cao, Zhuo-Xu Cui, Yue Wang, Shaonan Liu, Taijin Chen, Hairong Zheng, Dong Liang, Yanjie Zhu
Date: 2022-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, MRI Reconstruction, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Diffusion models with continuous stochastic differential equations (SDEs) have shown superior performances in image generation. It can serve as a deep generative prior to solving the inverse problem in magnetic resonance (MR) reconstruction. However, low-frequency regions of $k$-space data are typically fully sampled in fast MR imaging, while existing diffusion models are performed throughout the entire image or $k$-space, inevitably introducing uncertainty in the reconstruction of low-frequency regions. Additionally, existing diffusion models often demand substantial iterations to converge, resulting in time-consuming reconstructions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel SDE tailored specifically for MR reconstruction with the diffusion process in high-frequency space (referred to as HFS-SDE). This approach ensures determinism in the fully sampled low-frequency regions and accelerates the sampling procedure of reverse diffusion. Experiments conducted on the publicly available fastMRI dataset demonstrate that the proposed HFS-SDE method outperforms traditional parallel imaging methods, supervised deep learning, and existing diffusion models in terms of reconstruction accuracy and stability. The fast convergence properties are also confirmed through theoretical and experimental validation. Our code and weights are available at https://github.com/Aboriginer/HFS-SDE.
Semantic Self-adaptation: Enhancing Generalization with a Single Sample
Authors: Sherwin Bahmani, Oliver Hahn, Eduard Zamfir, Nikita Araslanov, Daniel Cremers, Stefan Roth
Date: 2022-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization, One-shot Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The lack of out-of-domain generalization is a critical weakness of deep networks for semantic segmentation. Previous studies relied on the assumption of a static model, i. e., once the training process is complete, model parameters remain fixed at test time. In this work, we challenge this premise with a self-adaptive approach for semantic segmentation that adjusts the inference process to each input sample. Self-adaptation operates on two levels. First, it fine-tunes the parameters of convolutional layers to the input image using consistency regularization. Second, in Batch Normalization layers, self-adaptation interpolates between the training and the reference distribution derived from a single test sample. Despite both techniques being well known in the literature, their combination sets new state-of-the-art accuracy on synthetic-to-real generalization benchmarks. Our empirical study suggests that self-adaptation may complement the established practice of model regularization at training time for improving deep network generalization to out-of-domain data. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/visinf/self-adaptive.
Neural Mesh-Based Graphics
Authors: Shubhendu Jena, Franck Multon, Adnane Boukhayma
Date: 2022-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Rendering, Novel View Synthesis

We revisit NPBG, the popular approach to novel view synthesis that introduced the ubiquitous point feature neural rendering paradigm. We are interested in particular in data-efficient learning with fast view synthesis. We achieve this through a view-dependent mesh-based denser point descriptor rasterization, in addition to a foreground/background scene rendering split, and an improved loss. By training solely on a single scene, we outperform NPBG, which has been trained on ScanNet and then scene finetuned. We also perform competitively with respect to the state-of-the-art method SVS, which has been trained on the full dataset (DTU and Tanks and Temples) and then scene finetuned, in spite of their deeper neural renderer.
Aesthetic Visual Question Answering of Photographs
Authors: Xin Jin, Wu Zhou, Xinghui Zhou, Shuai Cui, Le Zhang, Jianwen Lv, Shu Zhao
Date: 2022-08-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Aesthetic assessment of images can be categorized into two main forms: numerical assessment and language assessment. Aesthetics caption of photographs is the only task of aesthetic language assessment that has been addressed. In this paper, we propose a new task of aesthetic language assessment: aesthetic visual question and answering (AVQA) of images. If we give a question of images aesthetics, model can predict the answer. We use images from \textit{www.flickr.com}. The objective QA pairs are generated by the proposed aesthetic attributes analysis algorithms. Moreover, we introduce subjective QA pairs that are converted from aesthetic numerical labels and sentiment analysis from large-scale pre-train models. We build the first aesthetic visual question answering dataset, AesVQA, that contains 72,168 high-quality images and 324,756 pairs of aesthetic questions. Two methods for adjusting the data distribution have been proposed and proved to improve the accuracy of existing models. This is the first work that both addresses the task of aesthetic VQA and introduces subjectiveness into VQA tasks. The experimental results reveal that our methods outperform other VQA models on this new task.
Partition Pooling for Convolutional Graph Network Applications in Particle Physics
Authors: M. Bachlechner, T. Birkenfeld, P. Soldin, A. Stahl, C. Wiebusch
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Convolutional graph networks are used in particle physics for effective event reconstructions and classifications. However, their performances can be limited by the considerable amount of sensors used in modern particle detectors if applied to sensor-level data. We present a pooling scheme that uses partitioning to create pooling kernels on graphs, similar to pooling on images. Partition pooling can be used to adopt successful image recognition architectures for graph neural network applications in particle physics. The reduced computational resources allow for deeper networks and more extensive hyperparameter optimizations. To show its applicability, we construct a convolutional graph network with partition pooling that reconstructs simulated interaction vertices for an idealized neutrino detector. The pooling network yields improved performance and is less susceptible to overfitting than a similar network without pooling. The lower resource requirements allow the construction of a deeper network with further improved performance.
Interactive Code Generation via Test-Driven User-Intent Formalization
Authors: Shuvendu K. Lahiri, Sarah Fakhoury, Aaditya Naik, Georgios Sakkas, Saikat Chakraborty, Madanlal Musuvathi, Piali Choudhury, Curtis von Veh, Jeevana Priya Inala, Chenglong Wang, Jianfeng Gao
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval, mbpp

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in automating significant aspects of coding by producing natural code from informal natural language (NL) intent. However, when interacting with LLMs, users have no guarantees that the code suggestions produced correctly satisfy the intent they provided. In fact, it is hard to define a notion of correctness since natural language can be ambiguous and lacks a formal semantics. In this paper, we propose the workflow of {\it interactive test-driven code generation}, which leverages lightweight user feedback to (a) formalize the user intent using generated tests that can be useful for debugging, and (b) produce an improved set of code suggestions by pruning and ranking candidate code suggestions. We describe a language-agnostic abstract algorithm and a concrete implementation TiCoder. We perform an automated evaluation of TiCoder on the \emph{MBPP} and \emph{HumanEval} code generation benchmarks. Our results are promising with using the OpenAI Codex LLM: our best algorithm improves the \passk{1} code generation accuracy (in absolute percentages) between $22.49\%$ to $37.71\%$ for MBPP and between $24.79\%$ to $53.98\%$ for HumanEval using between 1 to 5 simulated user queries.
Valid Inference After Causal Discovery
Authors: Paula Gradu, Tijana Zrnic, Yixin Wang, Michael I. Jordan
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Causal Inference, valid

Causal discovery and causal effect estimation are two fundamental tasks in causal inference. While many methods have been developed for each task individually, statistical challenges arise when applying these methods jointly: estimating causal effects after running causal discovery algorithms on the same data leads to "double dipping," invalidating the coverage guarantees of classical confidence intervals. To this end, we develop tools for valid post-causal-discovery inference. Across empirical studies, we show that a naive combination of causal discovery and subsequent inference algorithms leads to highly inflated miscoverage rates; on the other hand, applying our method provides reliable coverage while achieving more accurate causal discovery than data splitting.
Near-Optimal Algorithms for Making the Gradient Small in Stochastic Minimax Optimization
Authors: Lesi Chen, Luo Luo
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

We study the problem of finding a near-stationary point for smooth minimax optimization. The recent proposed extra anchored gradient (EAG) methods achieve the optimal convergence rate for the convex-concave minimax problem in deterministic setting. However, the direct extension of EAG to stochastic optimization is not efficient.In this paper, we design a novel stochastic algorithm called Recursive Anchored IteratioN (RAIN). We show that the RAIN achieves near-optimal stochastic first-order oracle (SFO) complexity for stochastic minimax optimization in both convex-concave and strongly-convex-strongly-concave cases. In addition, we extend the idea of RAIN to solve structured nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problem and it also achieves near-optimal SFO complexity.
Regularizing Deep Neural Networks with Stochastic Estimators of Hessian Trace
Authors: Yucong Liu, Shixing Yu, Tong Lin
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

In this paper, we develop a novel regularization method for deep neural networks by penalizing the trace of Hessian. This regularizer is motivated by a recent guarantee bound of the generalization error. We explain its benefits in finding flat minima and avoiding Lyapunov stability in dynamical systems. We adopt the Hutchinson method as a classical unbiased estimator for the trace of a matrix and further accelerate its calculation using a dropout scheme. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing regularizers and data augmentation methods, such as Jacobian, Confidence Penalty, Label Smoothing, Cutout, and Mixup.
Uncertainty Quantification of Sparse Travel Demand Prediction with Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Dingyi Zhuang, Shenhao Wang, Haris N. Koutsopoulos, Jinhua Zhao
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Uncertainty Quantification

Origin-Destination (O-D) travel demand prediction is a fundamental challenge in transportation. Recently, spatial-temporal deep learning models demonstrate the tremendous potential to enhance prediction accuracy. However, few studies tackled the uncertainty and sparsity issues in fine-grained O-D matrices. This presents a serious problem, because a vast number of zeros deviate from the Gaussian assumption underlying the deterministic deep learning models. To address this issue, we design a Spatial-Temporal Zero-Inflated Negative Binomial Graph Neural Network (STZINB-GNN) to quantify the uncertainty of the sparse travel demand. It analyzes spatial and temporal correlations using diffusion and temporal convolution networks, which are then fused to parameterize the probabilistic distributions of travel demand. The STZINB-GNN is examined using two real-world datasets with various spatial and temporal resolutions. The results demonstrate the superiority of STZINB-GNN over benchmark models, especially under high spatial-temporal resolutions, because of its high accuracy, tight confidence intervals, and interpretable parameters. The sparsity parameter of the STZINB-GNN has physical interpretation for various transportation applications.
Super-Universal Regularized Newton Method
Authors: Nikita Doikov, Konstantin Mishchenko, Yurii Nesterov
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00

We analyze the performance of a variant of Newton method with quadratic regularization for solving composite convex minimization problems. At each step of our method, we choose regularization parameter proportional to a certain power of the gradient norm at the current point. We introduce a family of problem classes characterized by H\"older continuity of either the second or third derivative. Then we present the method with a simple adaptive search procedure allowing an automatic adjustment to the problem class with the best global complexity bounds, without knowing specific parameters of the problem. In particular, for the class of functions with Lipschitz continuous third derivative, we get the global $O(1/k^3)$ rate, which was previously attributed to third-order tensor methods. When the objective function is uniformly convex, we justify an automatic acceleration of our scheme, resulting in a faster global rate and local superlinear convergence. The switching between the different rates (sublinear, linear, and superlinear) is automatic. Again, for that, no a priori knowledge of parameters is needed.
Uncertainty Quantification for Traffic Forecasting: A Unified Approach
Authors: Weizhu Qian, Dalin Zhang, Yan Zhao, Kai Zheng, James J. Q. Yu
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting, Uncertainty Quantification, Variational Inference

Uncertainty is an essential consideration for time series forecasting tasks. In this work, we specifically focus on quantifying the uncertainty of traffic forecasting. To achieve this, we develop Deep Spatio-Temporal Uncertainty Quantification (DeepSTUQ), which can estimate both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. We first leverage a spatio-temporal model to model the complex spatio-temporal correlations of traffic data. Subsequently, two independent sub-neural networks maximizing the heterogeneous log-likelihood are developed to estimate aleatoric uncertainty. For estimating epistemic uncertainty, we combine the merits of variational inference and deep ensembling by integrating the Monte Carlo dropout and the Adaptive Weight Averaging re-training methods, respectively. Finally, we propose a post-processing calibration approach based on Temperature Scaling, which improves the model's generalization ability to estimate uncertainty. Extensive experiments are conducted on four public datasets, and the empirical results suggest that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both point prediction and uncertainty quantification.
GEM-2: Next Generation Molecular Property Prediction Network by Modeling Full-range Many-body Interactions
Authors: Lihang Liu, Donglong He, Xiaomin Fang, Shanzhuo Zhang, Fan Wang, Jingzhou He, Hua Wu
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational chemistry, Drug Discovery, Graph Regression, Molecular Property Prediction, Property Prediction

Molecular property prediction is a fundamental task in the drug and material industries. Physically, the properties of a molecule are determined by its own electronic structure, which is a quantum many-body system and can be exactly described by the Schr"odinger equation. Full-range many-body interactions between electrons have been proven effective in obtaining an accurate solution of the Schr"odinger equation by classical computational chemistry methods, although modeling such interactions consumes an expensive computational cost. Meanwhile, deep learning methods have also demonstrated their competence in molecular property prediction tasks. Inspired by the classical computational chemistry methods, we design a novel method, namely GEM-2, which comprehensively considers full-range many-body interactions in molecules. Multiple tracks are utilized to model the full-range interactions between the many-bodies with different orders, and a novel axial attention mechanism is designed to approximate the full-range interaction modeling with much lower computational cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the overwhelming superiority of GEM-2 over multiple baseline methods in quantum chemistry and drug discovery tasks. The ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of the full-range many-body interactions.
Predicting Tornadoes days ahead with Machine Learning
Authors: Davide Alessandro Coccomini, Giuliano Zara
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00

Developing methods to predict disastrous natural phenomena is more important than ever, and tornadoes are among the most dangerous ones in nature. Due to the unpredictability of the weather, counteracting them is not an easy task and today it is mainly carried out by expert meteorologists, who interpret meteorological models. In this paper we propose a system for the early detection of a tornado, validating its effectiveness in a real-world context and exploiting meteorological data collection systems that are already widespread throughout the world. Our system was able to predict tornadoes with a maximum probability of 84% up to five days before the event on a novel dataset of more than 5000 tornadic and non-tornadic events. The dataset and the code to reproduce our results are available at: https://tinyurl.com/3brsfwpk
Language Tokens: A Frustratingly Simple Approach Improves Zero-Shot Performance of Multilingual Translation
Authors: Muhammad ElNokrashy, Amr Hendy, Mohamed Maher, Mohamed Afify, Hany Hassan Awadalla
Date: 2022-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Translation

This paper proposes a simple yet effective method to improve direct (X-to-Y) translation for both cases: zero-shot and when direct data is available. We modify the input tokens at both the encoder and decoder to include signals for the source and target languages. We show a performance gain when training from scratch, or finetuning a pretrained model with the proposed setup. In the experiments, our method shows nearly 10.0 BLEU points gain on in-house datasets depending on the checkpoint selection criteria. In a WMT evaluation campaign, From-English performance improves by 4.17 and 2.87 BLEU points, in the zero-shot setting, and when direct data is available for training, respectively. While X-to-Y improves by 1.29 BLEU over the zero-shot baseline, and 0.44 over the many-to-many baseline. In the low-resource setting, we see a 1.5~1.7 point improvement when finetuning on X-to-Y domain data.