pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Case for Dataset Specific Profiling
Authors: Seth Ockerman, John Wu, Christopher Stewart
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Model Selection

Data-driven science is an emerging paradigm where scientific discoveries depend on the execution of computational AI models against rich, discipline-specific datasets. With modern machine learning frameworks, anyone can develop and execute computational models that reveal concepts hidden in the data that could enable scientific applications. For important and widely used datasets, computing the performance of every computational model that can run against a dataset is cost prohibitive in terms of cloud resources. Benchmarking approaches used in practice use representative datasets to infer performance without actually executing models. While practicable, these approaches limit extensive dataset profiling to a few datasets and introduce bias that favors models suited for representative datasets. As a result, each dataset's unique characteristics are left unexplored and subpar models are selected based on inference from generalized datasets. This necessitates a new paradigm that introduces dataset profiling into the model selection process. To demonstrate the need for dataset-specific profiling, we answer two questions:(1) Can scientific datasets significantly permute the rank order of computational models compared to widely used representative datasets? (2) If so, could lightweight model execution improve benchmarking accuracy? Taken together, the answers to these questions lay the foundation for a new dataset-aware benchmarking paradigm.
Choose, not Hoard: Information-to-Model Matching for Artificial Intelligence in O-RAN
Authors: Jorge Martín-Pérez, Nuria Molner, Francesco Malandrino, Carlos Jesús Bernardos, Antonio de la Oliva, David Gomez-Barquero
Date: 2022-08-01 00:00:00

Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) is an emerging paradigm, whereby virtualized network infrastructure elements from different vendors communicate via open, standardized interfaces. A key element therein is the RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based controller. Traditionally, all data available in the network has been used to train a single AI model to be used at the RIC. This paper introduces, discusses, and evaluates the creation of multiple AI model instances at different RICs, leveraging information from some (or all) locations for their training. This brings about a flexible relationship between gNBs, the AI models used to control them, and the data such models are trained with. Experiments with real-world traces show how using multiple AI model instances that choose training data from specific locations improve the performance of traditional approaches following the hoarding strategy.
Sampling, Communication, and Prediction Co-Design for Synchronizing the Real-World Device and Digital Model in Metaverse
Authors: Zhen Meng, Changyang She, Guodong Zhao, Daniele De Martini
Date: 2022-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Mixed Reality, Prediction

The metaverse has the potential to revolutionize the next generation of the Internet by supporting highly interactive services with the help of Mixed Reality (MR) technologies; still, to provide a satisfactory experience for users, the synchronization between the physical world and its digital models is crucial. This work proposes a sampling, communication and prediction co-design framework to minimize the communication load subject to a constraint on tracking the Mean Squared Error (MSE) between a real-world device and its digital model in the metaverse. To optimize the sampling rate and the prediction horizon, we exploit expert knowledge and develop a constrained Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) algorithm, named Knowledge-assisted Constrained Twin-Delayed Deep Deterministic (KC-TD3) policy gradient algorithm. We validate our framework on a prototype composed of a real-world robotic arm and its digital model. Compared with existing approaches: (1) When the tracking error constraint is stringent (MSE=0.002 degrees), our policy degenerates into the policy in the sampling-communication co-design framework. (2) When the tracking error constraint is mild (MSE=0.007 degrees), our policy degenerates into the policy in the prediction-communication co-design framework. (3) Our framework achieves a better trade-off between the average MSE and the average communication load compared with a communication system without sampling and prediction. For example, the average communication load can be reduced up to 87% when the track error constraint is 0.002 degrees. (4) Our policy outperforms the benchmark with the static sampling rate and prediction horizon optimized by exhaustive search, in terms of the tail probability of the tracking error. Furthermore, with the assistance of expert knowledge, the proposed algorithm KC-TD3 achieves better convergence time, stability, and final policy performance.
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Long-Term Network Resource Allocation through Auction: a V2X Application
Authors: Jing Tan, Ramin Khalili, Holger Karl, Artur Hecker
Date: 2022-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Fairness, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

We formulate offloading of computational tasks from a dynamic group of mobile agents (e.g., cars) as decentralized decision making among autonomous agents. We design an interaction mechanism that incentivizes such agents to align private and system goals by balancing between competition and cooperation. In the static case, the mechanism provably has Nash equilibria with optimal resource allocation. In a dynamic environment, this mechanism's requirement of complete information is impossible to achieve. For such environments, we propose a novel multi-agent online learning algorithm that learns with partial, delayed and noisy state information, thus greatly reducing information need. Our algorithm is also capable of learning from long-term and sparse reward signals with varying delay. Empirical results from the simulation of a V2X application confirm that through learning, agents with the learning algorithm significantly improve both system and individual performance, reducing up to 30% of offloading failure rate, communication overhead and load variation, increasing computation resource utilization and fairness. Results also confirm the algorithm's good convergence and generalization property in different environments.
3D Vision with Transformers: A Survey
Authors: Jean Lahoud, Jiale Cao, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Hisham Cholakkal, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Salman Khan, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Survey

The success of the transformer architecture in natural language processing has recently triggered attention in the computer vision field. The transformer has been used as a replacement for the widely used convolution operators, due to its ability to learn long-range dependencies. This replacement was proven to be successful in numerous tasks, in which several state-of-the-art methods rely on transformers for better learning. In computer vision, the 3D field has also witnessed an increase in employing the transformer for 3D convolution neural networks and multi-layer perceptron networks. Although a number of surveys have focused on transformers in vision in general, 3D vision requires special attention due to the difference in data representation and processing when compared to 2D vision. In this work, we present a systematic and thorough review of more than 100 transformers methods for different 3D vision tasks, including classification, segmentation, detection, completion, pose estimation, and others. We discuss transformer design in 3D vision, which allows it to process data with various 3D representations. For each application, we highlight key properties and contributions of proposed transformer-based methods. To assess the competitiveness of these methods, we compare their performance to common non-transformer methods on 12 3D benchmarks. We conclude the survey by discussing different open directions and challenges for transformers in 3D vision. In addition to the presented papers, we aim to frequently update the latest relevant papers along with their corresponding implementations at: https://github.com/lahoud/3d-vision-transformers.
PlaneFormers: From Sparse View Planes to 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Samir Agarwala, Linyi Jin, Chris Rockwell, David F. Fouhey
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Surface Reconstruction

We present an approach for the planar surface reconstruction of a scene from images with limited overlap. This reconstruction task is challenging since it requires jointly reasoning about single image 3D reconstruction, correspondence between images, and the relative camera pose between images. Past work has proposed optimization-based approaches. We introduce a simpler approach, the PlaneFormer, that uses a transformer applied to 3D-aware plane tokens to perform 3D reasoning. Our experiments show that our approach is substantially more effective than prior work, and that several 3D-specific design decisions are crucial for its success.
Boosting neural video codecs by exploiting hierarchical redundancy
Authors: Reza Pourreza, Hoang Le, Amir Said, Guillaume Sautiere, Auke Wiggers
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Compression

In video compression, coding efficiency is improved by reusing pixels from previously decoded frames via motion and residual compensation. We define two levels of hierarchical redundancy in video frames: 1) first-order: redundancy in pixel space, i.e., similarities in pixel values across neighboring frames, which is effectively captured using motion and residual compensation, 2) second-order: redundancy in motion and residual maps due to smooth motion in natural videos. While most of the existing neural video coding literature addresses first-order redundancy, we tackle the problem of capturing second-order redundancy in neural video codecs via predictors. We introduce generic motion and residual predictors that learn to extrapolate from previously decoded data. These predictors are lightweight, and can be employed with most neural video codecs in order to improve their rate-distortion performance. Moreover, while RGB is the dominant colorspace in neural video coding literature, we introduce general modifications for neural video codecs to embrace the YUV420 colorspace and report YUV420 results. Our experiments show that using our predictors with a well-known neural video codec leads to 38% and 34% bitrate savings in RGB and YUV420 colorspaces measured on the UVG dataset.
LWGNet: Learned Wirtinger Gradients for Fourier Ptychographic Phase Retrieval
Authors: Atreyee Saha, Salman S Khan, Sagar Sehrawat, Sanjana S Prabhu, Shanti Bhattacharya, Kaushik Mitra
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Rolling Shutter Correction

Fourier Ptychographic Microscopy (FPM) is an imaging procedure that overcomes the traditional limit on Space-Bandwidth Product (SBP) of conventional microscopes through computational means. It utilizes multiple images captured using a low numerical aperture (NA) objective and enables high-resolution phase imaging through frequency domain stitching. Existing FPM reconstruction methods can be broadly categorized into two approaches: iterative optimization based methods, which are based on the physics of the forward imaging model, and data-driven methods which commonly employ a feed-forward deep learning framework. We propose a hybrid model-driven residual network that combines the knowledge of the forward imaging system with a deep data-driven network. Our proposed architecture, LWGNet, unrolls traditional Wirtinger flow optimization algorithm into a novel neural network design that enhances the gradient images through complex convolutional blocks. Unlike other conventional unrolling techniques, LWGNet uses fewer stages while performing at par or even better than existing traditional and deep learning techniques, particularly, for low-cost and low dynamic range CMOS sensors. This improvement in performance for low-bit depth and low-cost sensors has the potential to bring down the cost of FPM imaging setup significantly. Finally, we show consistently improved performance on our collected real data.
Self-Supervised Contrastive Representation Learning for 3D Mesh Segmentation
Authors: Ayaan Haque, Hankyu Moon, Heng Hao, Sima Didari, Jae Oh Woo, Patrick Bangert
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning

3D deep learning is a growing field of interest due to the vast amount of information stored in 3D formats. Triangular meshes are an efficient representation for irregular, non-uniform 3D objects. However, meshes are often challenging to annotate due to their high geometrical complexity. Specifically, creating segmentation masks for meshes is tedious and time-consuming. Therefore, it is desirable to train segmentation networks with limited-labeled data. Self-supervised learning (SSL), a form of unsupervised representation learning, is a growing alternative to fully-supervised learning which can decrease the burden of supervision for training. We propose SSL-MeshCNN, a self-supervised contrastive learning method for pre-training CNNs for mesh segmentation. We take inspiration from traditional contrastive learning frameworks to design a novel contrastive learning algorithm specifically for meshes. Our preliminary experiments show promising results in reducing the heavy labeled data requirement needed for mesh segmentation by at least 33%.
Visual-Inertial Multi-Instance Dynamic SLAM with Object-level Relocalisation
Authors: Yifei Ren, Binbin Xu, Christopher L. Choi, Stefan Leutenegger
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Object, Object Tracking

In this paper, we present a tightly-coupled visual-inertial object-level multi-instance dynamic SLAM system. Even in extremely dynamic scenes, it can robustly optimise for the camera pose, velocity, IMU biases and build a dense 3D reconstruction object-level map of the environment. Our system can robustly track and reconstruct the geometries of arbitrary objects, their semantics and motion by incrementally fusing associated colour, depth, semantic, and foreground object probabilities into each object model thanks to its robust sensor and object tracking. In addition, when an object is lost or moved outside the camera field of view, our system can reliably recover its pose upon re-observation. We demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of our method by quantitatively and qualitatively testing it in real-world data sequences.
Label-Free Synthetic Pretraining of Object Detectors
Authors: Hei Law, Jia Deng
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

We propose a new approach, Synthetic Optimized Layout with Instance Detection (SOLID), to pretrain object detectors with synthetic images. Our "SOLID" approach consists of two main components: (1) generating synthetic images using a collection of unlabelled 3D models with optimized scene arrangement; (2) pretraining an object detector on "instance detection" task - given a query image depicting an object, detecting all instances of the exact same object in a target image. Our approach does not need any semantic labels for pretraining and allows the use of arbitrary, diverse 3D models. Experiments on COCO show that with optimized data generation and a proper pretraining task, synthetic data can be highly effective data for pretraining object detectors. In particular, pretraining on rendered images achieves performance competitive with pretraining on real images while using significantly less computing resources. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/SOLID.
Distinctive Image Captioning via CLIP Guided Group Optimization
Authors: Youyuan Zhang, Jiuniu Wang, Hao Wu, Wenjia Xu
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning

Image captioning models are usually trained according to human annotated ground-truth captions, which could generate accurate but generic captions. In this paper, we focus on generating distinctive captions that can distinguish the target image from other similar images. To evaluate the distinctiveness of captions, we introduce a series of metrics that use large-scale vision-language pre-training model CLIP to quantify the distinctiveness. To further improve the distinctiveness of captioning models, we propose a simple and effective training strategy that trains the model by comparing target image with similar image group and optimizing the group embedding gap. Extensive experiments are conducted on various baseline models to demonstrate the wide applicability of our strategy and the consistency of metric results with human evaluation. By comparing the performance of our best model with existing state-of-the-art models, we claim that our model achieves new state-of-the-art towards distinctiveness objective.
Snowpack Estimation in Key Mountainous Water Basins from Openly-Available, Multimodal Data Sources
Authors: Malachy Moran, Kayla Woputz, Derrick Hee, Manuela Girotto, Paolo D'Odorico, Ritwik Gupta, Daniel Feldman, Puya Vahabi, Alberto Todeschini, Colorado J Reed
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00

Accurately estimating the snowpack in key mountainous basins is critical for water resource managers to make decisions that impact local and global economies, wildlife, and public policy. Currently, this estimation requires multiple LiDAR-equipped plane flights or in situ measurements, both of which are expensive, sparse, and biased towards accessible regions. In this paper, we demonstrate that fusing spatial and temporal information from multiple, openly-available satellite and weather data sources enables estimation of snowpack in key mountainous regions. Our multisource model outperforms single-source estimation by 5.0 inches RMSE, as well as outperforms sparse in situ measurements by 1.2 inches RMSE.
SKDCGN: Source-free Knowledge Distillation of Counterfactual Generative Networks using cGANs
Authors: Sameer Ambekar, Matteo Tafuro, Ankit Ankit, Diego van der Mast, Mark Alence, Christos Athanasiadis
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

With the usage of appropriate inductive biases, Counterfactual Generative Networks (CGNs) can generate novel images from random combinations of shape, texture, and background manifolds. These images can be utilized to train an invariant classifier, avoiding the wide spread problem of deep architectures learning spurious correlations rather than meaningful ones. As a consequence, out-of-domain robustness is improved. However, the CGN architecture comprises multiple over parameterized networks, namely BigGAN and U2-Net. Training these networks requires appropriate background knowledge and extensive computation. Since one does not always have access to the precise training details, nor do they always possess the necessary knowledge of counterfactuals, our work addresses the following question: Can we use the knowledge embedded in pre-trained CGNs to train a lower-capacity model, assuming black-box access (i.e., only access to the pretrained CGN model) to the components of the architecture? In this direction, we propose a novel work named SKDCGN that attempts knowledge transfer using Knowledge Distillation (KD). In our proposed architecture, each independent mechanism (shape, texture, background) is represented by a student 'TinyGAN' that learns from the pretrained teacher 'BigGAN'. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method using state-of-the-art datasets such as ImageNet, and MNIST by using KD and appropriate loss functions. Moreover, as an additional contribution, our paper conducts a thorough study on the composition mechanism of the CGNs, to gain a better understanding of how each mechanism influences the classification accuracy of an invariant classifier. Code available at: https://github.com/ambekarsameer96/SKDCGN
Boosting Video-Text Retrieval with Explicit High-Level Semantics
Authors: Haoran Wang, Di Xu, Dongliang He, Fu Li, Zhong Ji, Jungong Han, Errui Ding
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Text Retrieval, Video Captioning, Video-Text Retrieval, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Video-text retrieval (VTR) is an attractive yet challenging task for multi-modal understanding, which aims to search for relevant video (text) given a query (video). Existing methods typically employ completely heterogeneous visual-textual information to align video and text, whilst lacking the awareness of homogeneous high-level semantic information residing in both modalities. To fill this gap, in this work, we propose a novel visual-linguistic aligning model named HiSE for VTR, which improves the cross-modal representation by incorporating explicit high-level semantics. First, we explore the hierarchical property of explicit high-level semantics, and further decompose it into two levels, i.e. discrete semantics and holistic semantics. Specifically, for visual branch, we exploit an off-the-shelf semantic entity predictor to generate discrete high-level semantics. In parallel, a trained video captioning model is employed to output holistic high-level semantics. As for the textual modality, we parse the text into three parts including occurrence, action and entity. In particular, the occurrence corresponds to the holistic high-level semantics, meanwhile both action and entity represent the discrete ones. Then, different graph reasoning techniques are utilized to promote the interaction between holistic and discrete high-level semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, with the aid of explicit high-level semantics, our method achieves the superior performance over state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark datasets, including MSR-VTT, MSVD and DiDeMo.
Vision-Based Activity Recognition in Children with Autism-Related Behaviors
Authors: Pengbo Wei, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Harshala Gammulle, Simon Denman, Mohammad Ali Armin
Date: 2022-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition

Advances in machine learning and contactless sensors have enabled the understanding complex human behaviors in a healthcare setting. In particular, several deep learning systems have been introduced to enable comprehensive analysis of neuro-developmental conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This condition affects children from their early developmental stages onwards, and diagnosis relies entirely on observing the child's behavior and detecting behavioral cues. However, the diagnosis process is time-consuming as it requires long-term behavior observation, and the scarce availability of specialists. We demonstrate the effect of a region-based computer vision system to help clinicians and parents analyze a child's behavior. For this purpose, we adopt and enhance a dataset for analyzing autism-related actions using videos of children captured in uncontrolled environments (e.g. videos collected with consumer-grade cameras, in varied environments). The data is pre-processed by detecting the target child in the video to reduce the impact of background noise. Motivated by the effectiveness of temporal convolutional models, we propose both light-weight and conventional models capable of extracting action features from video frames and classifying autism-related behaviors by analyzing the relationships between frames in a video. Through extensive evaluations on the feature extraction and learning strategies, we demonstrate that the best performance is achieved with an Inflated 3D Convnet and Multi-Stage Temporal Convolutional Networks, achieving a 0.83 Weighted F1-score for classification of the three autism-related actions, outperforming existing methods. We also propose a light-weight solution by employing the ESNet backbone within the same system, achieving competitive results of 0.71 Weighted F1-score, and enabling potential deployment on embedded systems.