pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Scalable Data Point Valuation in Decentralized Learning
Authors: Konstantin D. Pandl, Chun-Yin Huang, Ivan Beschastnikh, Xiaoxiao Li, Scott Thiebes, Ali Sunyaev
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Valuation, Federated Learning

Existing research on data valuation in federated and swarm learning focuses on valuing client contributions and works best when data across clients is independent and identically distributed (IID). In practice, data is rarely distributed IID. We develop an approach called DDVal for decentralized data valuation, capable of valuing individual data points in federated and swarm learning. DDVal is based on sharing deep features and approximating Shapley values through a k-nearest neighbor approximation method. This allows for novel applications, for example, to simultaneously reward institutions and individuals for providing data to a decentralized machine learning task. The valuation of data points through DDVal allows to also draw hierarchical conclusions on the contribution of institutions, and we empirically show that the accuracy of DDVal in estimating institutional contributions is higher than existing Shapley value approximation methods for federated learning. Specifically, it reaches a cosine similarity in approximating Shapley values of 99.969 % in both, IID and non-IID data distributions across institutions, compared with 99.301 % and 97.250 % for the best state of the art methods. DDVal scales with the number of data points instead of the number of clients, and has a loglinear complexity. This scales more favorably than existing approaches with an exponential complexity. We show that DDVal is especially efficient in data distribution scenarios with many clients that have few data points - for example, more than 16 clients with 8,000 data points each. By integrating DDVal into a decentralized system, we show that it is not only suitable for centralized federated learning, but also decentralized swarm learning, which aligns well with the research on emerging internet technologies such as web3 to reward users for providing data to algorithms.
Can ChatGPT Pass An Introductory Level Functional Language Programming Course?
Authors: Chuqin Geng, Yihan Zhang, Brigitte Pientka, Xujie Si
Date: 2023-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Summarization

The recent introduction of ChatGPT has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia due to its impressive capabilities in solving a diverse range of tasks, including language translation, text summarization, and computer programming. Its capability for writing, modifying, and even correcting code together with its ease of use and access is already dramatically impacting computer science education. This paper aims to explore how well ChatGPT can perform in an introductory-level functional language programming course. In our systematic evaluation, we treated ChatGPT as one of our students and demonstrated that it can achieve a grade B- and its rank in the class is 155 out of 314 students overall. Our comprehensive evaluation provides valuable insights into ChatGPT's impact from both student and instructor perspectives. Additionally, we identify several potential benefits that ChatGPT can offer to both groups. Overall, we believe that this study significantly clarifies and advances our understanding of ChatGPT's capabilities and potential impact on computer science education.
Wavelet Coherence Of Total Solar Irradiance and Atlantic Climate
Authors: Vasil Kolev, Yavor Chapanov
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

The oscillations of climatic parameters of North Atlantic Ocean play important role in various events in North America and Europe. Several climatic indices are associated with these oscillations. The long term Atlantic temperature anomalies are described by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation also known as Atlantic Multidecadal Variability (AMV), is the variability of the sea surface temperature (SST) of the North Atlantic Ocean at the timescale of several decades. The AMO is correlated to air temperatures and rainfall over much of the Northern Hemisphere, in particular in the summer climate in North America and Europe. The long-term variations of surface temperature are driven mainly by the cycles of solar activity, represented by the variations of the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI). The frequency and amplitude dependences between the TSI and AMO are analyzed by wavelet coherence of millennial time series since 800 AD till now. The results of wavelet coherence are compared with the detected common solar and climate cycles in narrow frequency bands by the method of Partial Fourier Approximation. The long-term coherence between TSI and AMO can help to understand better the recent climate change and can improve the long term forecast.
Visual Chain of Thought: Bridging Logical Gaps with Multimodal Infillings
Authors: Daniel Rose, Vaishnavi Himakunthala, Andy Ouyang, Ryan He, Alex Mei, Yujie Lu, Michael Saxon, Chinmay Sonar, Diba Mirza, William Yang Wang
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Question Answering, Visual Storytelling

Recent advances in large language models elicit reasoning in a chain-of-thought that allows models to decompose problems in a human-like fashion. Though this paradigm improves multi-step reasoning ability in language models, it is limited by being unimodal and applied mainly to question-answering tasks. We claim that incorporating visual augmentation into reasoning is essential, especially for complex, imaginative tasks. Consequently, we introduce VCoT, a novel method that leverages chain-of-thought prompting with vision-language grounding to recursively bridge the logical gaps within sequential data. Our method uses visual guidance to generate synthetic multimodal infillings that add consistent and novel information to reduce the logical gaps for downstream tasks that can benefit from temporal reasoning, as well as provide interpretability into models' multi-step reasoning. We apply VCoT to the Visual Storytelling and WikiHow summarization datasets and demonstrate through human evaluation that VCoT offers novel and consistent synthetic data augmentation beating chain-of-thought baselines, which can be used to enhance downstream performance.
AG3D: Learning to Generate 3D Avatars from 2D Image Collections
Authors: Zijian Dong, Xu Chen, Jinlong Yang, Michael J. Black, Otmar Hilliges, Andreas Geiger
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1

While progress in 2D generative models of human appearance has been rapid, many applications require 3D avatars that can be animated and rendered. Unfortunately, most existing methods for learning generative models of 3D humans with diverse shape and appearance require 3D training data, which is limited and expensive to acquire. The key to progress is hence to learn generative models of 3D avatars from abundant unstructured 2D image collections. However, learning realistic and complete 3D appearance and geometry in this under-constrained setting remains challenging, especially in the presence of loose clothing such as dresses. In this paper, we propose a new adversarial generative model of realistic 3D people from 2D images. Our method captures shape and deformation of the body and loose clothing by adopting a holistic 3D generator and integrating an efficient and flexible articulation module. To improve realism, we train our model using multiple discriminators while also integrating geometric cues in the form of predicted 2D normal maps. We experimentally find that our method outperforms previous 3D- and articulation-aware methods in terms of geometry and appearance. We validate the effectiveness of our model and the importance of each component via systematic ablation studies.
Dynamic Sparse Training with Structured Sparsity
Authors: Mike Lasby, Anna Golubeva, Utku Evci, Mihai Nica, Yani Ioannou
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU

Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) methods achieve state-of-the-art results in sparse neural network training, matching the generalization of dense models while enabling sparse training and inference. Although the resulting models are highly sparse and theoretically less computationally expensive, achieving speedups with unstructured sparsity on real-world hardware is challenging. In this work, we propose a sparse-to-sparse DST method, Structured RigL (SRigL), to learn a variant of fine-grained structured N:M sparsity by imposing a constant fan-in constraint. Using our empirical analysis of existing DST methods at high sparsity, we additionally employ a neuron ablation method which enables SRigL to achieve state-of-the-art sparse-to-sparse structured DST performance on a variety of Neural Network (NN) architectures. Using a 90% sparse linear layer, we demonstrate a real-world acceleration of 3.4x/2.5x on CPU for online inference and 1.7x/13.0x on GPU for inference with a batch size of 256 when compared to equivalent dense/unstructured (CSR) sparse layers, respectively.
Making the Most of What You Have: Adapting Pre-trained Visual Language Models in the Low-data Regime
Authors: Chuhan Zhang, Antoine Miech, Jiajun Shen, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Pauline Luc
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Large-scale visual language models are widely used as pre-trained models and then adapted for various downstream tasks. While humans are known to efficiently learn new tasks from a few examples, deep learning models struggle with adaptation from few examples. In this work, we look into task adaptation in the low-data regime, and provide a thorough study of the existing adaptation methods for generative Visual Language Models. And we show important benefits of self-labelling, i.e. using the model's own predictions to self-improve when having access to a larger number of unlabelled images of the same distribution. Our study demonstrates significant gains using our proposed task adaptation pipeline across a wide range of visual language tasks such as visual classification (ImageNet), visual captioning (COCO), detailed visual captioning (Localised Narratives) and visual question answering (VQAv2).
Iranian License Plate Recognition Using a Reliable Deep Learning Approach
Authors: Soheila Hatami, Majid Sadedel, Farideh Jamali
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, License Plate Recognition

The issue of Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been one of the most challenging issues in recent years. Weather conditions, camera angle of view, lighting conditions, different characters written on license plates, and many other factors are among the challenges for the issue of ALPR. Given the advances that have been made in recent years in the field of deep neural networks, some types of neural networks and models based on them can be used to perform the task of Iranian license plate recognition. In the proposed method presented in this paper, the license plate recognition is done in two steps. The first step is to detect the rectangles of the license plates from the input image. In the second step, these license plates are cropped from the image and their characters are recognized. For the first step, 3065 images including license plates and for the second step, 3364 images including characters of license plates have been prepared and considered as the desired datasets. In the first step, license plates are detected using the YOLOv4-tiny model, which is based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). In the next step, the characters of these license plates are recognized using Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN), and Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC). In the second step, there is no need to segment and label the characters separately, only one string of numbers and letters is enough for the labels.
Multi-dimensional Signal Recovery using Low-rank Deconvolution
Authors: David Reixach
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00

In this work we present Low-rank Deconvolution, a powerful framework for low-level feature-map learning for efficient signal representation with application to signal recovery. Its formulation in multi-linear algebra inherits properties from convolutional sparse coding and low-rank approximation methods as in this setting signals are decomposed in a set of filters convolved with a set of low-rank tensors. We show its advantages by learning compressed video representations and solving image in-painting problems.
DocLangID: Improving Few-Shot Training to Identify the Language of Historical Documents
Authors: Furkan Simsek, Brian Pfitzmann, Hendrik Raetz, Jona Otholt, Haojin Yang, Christoph Meinel
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Language Identification, Transfer Learning

Language identification describes the task of recognizing the language of written text in documents. This information is crucial because it can be used to support the analysis of a document's vocabulary and context. Supervised learning methods in recent years have advanced the task of language identification. However, these methods usually require large labeled datasets, which often need to be included for various domains of images, such as documents or scene images. In this work, we propose DocLangID, a transfer learning approach to identify the language of unlabeled historical documents. We achieve this by first leveraging labeled data from a different but related domain of historical documents. Secondly, we implement a distance-based few-shot learning approach to adapt a convolutional neural network to new languages of the unlabeled dataset. By introducing small amounts of manually labeled examples from the set of unlabeled images, our feature extractor develops a better adaptability towards new and different data distributions of historical documents. We show that such a model can be effectively fine-tuned for the unlabeled set of images by only reusing the same few-shot examples. We showcase our work across 10 languages that mostly use the Latin script. Our experiments on historical documents demonstrate that our combined approach improves the language identification performance, achieving 74% recognition accuracy on the four unseen languages of the unlabeled dataset.
Inverse Global Illumination using a Neural Radiometric Prior
Authors: Saeed Hadadan, Geng Lin, Jan Novák, Fabrice Rousselle, Matthias Zwicker
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Inverse Rendering

Inverse rendering methods that account for global illumination are becoming more popular, but current methods require evaluating and automatically differentiating millions of path integrals by tracing multiple light bounces, which remains expensive and prone to noise. Instead, this paper proposes a radiometric prior as a simple alternative to building complete path integrals in a traditional differentiable path tracer, while still correctly accounting for global illumination. Inspired by the Neural Radiosity technique, we use a neural network as a radiance function, and we introduce a prior consisting of the norm of the residual of the rendering equation in the inverse rendering loss. We train our radiance network and optimize scene parameters simultaneously using a loss consisting of both a photometric term between renderings and the multi-view input images, and our radiometric prior (the residual term). This residual term enforces a physical constraint on the optimization that ensures that the radiance field accounts for global illumination. We compare our method to a vanilla differentiable path tracer, and more advanced techniques such as Path Replay Backpropagation. Despite the simplicity of our approach, we can recover scene parameters with comparable and in some cases better quality, at considerably lower computation times.
CLUSTSEG: Clustering for Universal Segmentation
Authors: James Liang, Tianfei Zhou, Dongfang Liu, Wenguan Wang
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Superpixels, Universal Segmentation

We present CLUSTSEG, a general, transformer-based framework that tackles different image segmentation tasks (i.e., superpixel, semantic, instance, and panoptic) through a unified neural clustering scheme. Regarding queries as cluster centers, CLUSTSEG is innovative in two aspects:1) cluster centers are initialized in heterogeneous ways so as to pointedly address task-specific demands (e.g., instance- or category-level distinctiveness), yet without modifying the architecture; and 2) pixel-cluster assignment, formalized in a cross-attention fashion, is alternated with cluster center update, yet without learning additional parameters. These innovations closely link CLUSTSEG to EM clustering and make it a transparent and powerful framework that yields superior results across the above segmentation tasks.
Semi-Supervised Segmentation of Functional Tissue Units at the Cellular Level
Authors: Volodymyr Sydorskyi, Igor Krashenyi, Denis Sakva, Oleksandr Zarichkovyi
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We present a new method for functional tissue unit segmentation at the cellular level, which utilizes the latest deep learning semantic segmentation approaches together with domain adaptation and semi-supervised learning techniques. This approach allows for minimizing the domain gap, class imbalance, and captures settings influence between HPA and HubMAP datasets. The presented approach achieves comparable with state-of-the-art-result in functional tissue unit segmentation at the cellular level. The source code is available at https://github.com/VSydorskyy/hubmap_2022_htt_solution
ProgDTD: Progressive Learned Image Compression with Double-Tail-Drop Training
Authors: Ali Hojjat, Janek Haberer, Olaf Landsiedel
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, MS-SSIM, SSIM

Progressive compression allows images to start loading as low-resolution versions, becoming clearer as more data is received. This increases user experience when, for example, network connections are slow. Today, most approaches for image compression, both classical and learned ones, are designed to be non-progressive. This paper introduces ProgDTD, a training method that transforms learned, non-progressive image compression approaches into progressive ones. The design of ProgDTD is based on the observation that the information stored within the bottleneck of a compression model commonly varies in importance. To create a progressive compression model, ProgDTD modifies the training steps to enforce the model to store the data in the bottleneck sorted by priority. We achieve progressive compression by transmitting the data in order of its sorted index. ProgDTD is designed for CNN-based learned image compression models, does not need additional parameters, and has a customizable range of progressiveness. For evaluation, we apply ProgDTDto the hyperprior model, one of the most common structures in learned image compression. Our experimental results show that ProgDTD performs comparably to its non-progressive counterparts and other state-of-the-art progressive models in terms of MS-SSIM and accuracy.
GANonymization: A GAN-based Face Anonymization Framework for Preserving Emotional Expressions
Authors: Fabio Hellmann, Silvan Mertes, Mohamed Benouis, Alexander Hustinx, Tzung-Chien Hsieh, Cristina Conati, Peter Krawitz, Elisabeth André
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Anonymization, Generative Adversarial Network

In recent years, the increasing availability of personal data has raised concerns regarding privacy and security. One of the critical processes to address these concerns is data anonymization, which aims to protect individual privacy and prevent the release of sensitive information. This research focuses on the importance of face anonymization. Therefore, we introduce GANonymization, a novel face anonymization framework with facial expression-preserving abilities. Our approach is based on a high-level representation of a face, which is synthesized into an anonymized version based on a generative adversarial network (GAN). The effectiveness of the approach was assessed by evaluating its performance in removing identifiable facial attributes to increase the anonymity of the given individual face. Additionally, the performance of preserving facial expressions was evaluated on several affect recognition datasets and outperformed the state-of-the-art methods in most categories. Finally, our approach was analyzed for its ability to remove various facial traits, such as jewelry, hair color, and multiple others. Here, it demonstrated reliable performance in removing these attributes. Our results suggest that GANonymization is a promising approach for anonymizing faces while preserving facial expressions.
Bicubic++: Slim, Slimmer, Slimmest -- Designing an Industry-Grade Super-Resolution Network
Authors: Bahri Batuhan Bilecen, Mustafa Ayazoglu
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

We propose a real-time and lightweight single-image super-resolution (SR) network named Bicubic++. Despite using spatial dimensions of the input image across the whole network, Bicubic++ first learns quick reversible downgraded and lower resolution features of the image in order to decrease the number of computations. We also construct a training pipeline, where we apply an end-to-end global structured pruning of convolutional layers without using metrics like magnitude and gradient norms, and focus on optimizing the pruned network's PSNR on the validation set. Furthermore, we have experimentally shown that the bias terms take considerable amount of the runtime while increasing PSNR marginally, hence we have also applied bias removal to the convolutional layers. Our method adds ~1dB on Bicubic upscaling PSNR for all tested SR datasets and runs with ~1.17ms on RTX3090 and ~2.9ms on RTX3070, for 720p inputs and 4K outputs, both in FP16 precision. Bicubic++ won NTIRE 2023 RTSR Track 2 x3 SR competition and is the fastest among all competitive methods. Being almost as fast as the standard Bicubic upsampling method, we believe that Bicubic++ can set a new industry standard.
Automatic Parameterization for Aerodynamic Shape Optimization via Deep Geometric Learning
Authors: Zhen Wei, Pascal Fua, Michaël Bauerheim
Date: 2023-05-03 00:00:00

We propose two deep learning models that fully automate shape parameterization for aerodynamic shape optimization. Both models are optimized to parameterize via deep geometric learning to embed human prior knowledge into learned geometric patterns, eliminating the need for further handcrafting. The Latent Space Model (LSM) learns a low-dimensional latent representation of an object from a dataset of various geometries, while the Direct Mapping Model (DMM) builds parameterization on the fly using only one geometry of interest. We also devise a novel regularization loss that efficiently integrates volumetric mesh deformation into the parameterization model. The models directly manipulate the high-dimensional mesh data by moving vertices. LSM and DMM are fully differentiable, enabling gradient-based, end-to-end pipeline design and plug-and-play deployment of surrogate models or adjoint solvers. We perform shape optimization experiments on 2D airfoils and discuss the applicable scenarios for the two models.