pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Fallacy of AI Functionality
Authors: Inioluwa Deborah Raji, I. Elizabeth Kumar, Aaron Horowitz, Andrew D. Selbst
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00

Deployed AI systems often do not work. They can be constructed haphazardly, deployed indiscriminately, and promoted deceptively. However, despite this reality, scholars, the press, and policymakers pay too little attention to functionality. This leads to technical and policy solutions focused on "ethical" or value-aligned deployments, often skipping over the prior question of whether a given system functions, or provides any benefits at all. To describe the harms of various types of functionality failures, we analyze a set of case studies to create a taxonomy of known AI functionality issues. We then point to policy and organizational responses that are often overlooked and become more readily available once functionality is drawn into focus. We argue that functionality is a meaningful AI policy challenge, operating as a necessary first step towards protecting affected communities from algorithmic harm.
Using Machine Learning Algorithms to Predict the State of Financial Inclusion in Africa
Authors: Qusai F. Ismail, Eslam S. Al-Sobh, Sarah S. Al-Omari, Tuqa M. Bani Yaseen, Malak A. Abdullah
Date: 2022-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: International Conference on Information and Communication Systems 2022 5
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The financial economy in Africa faces significant challenges that affect development and livelihood. One of these challenges is holding a bank account in Africa, indicating the person’s stable economic status. There is a need to solve bank problems in Africa and find solutions to the banking problems. Studies on this topic consider the enormous number of people who do not have a bank account compared to those who have and how this contributes to the decline of Africa’s economy. Therefore, in this research, we have implemented effective mech- anisms using machine learning techniques to predict who owns a bank account and who is not in African banks. We used different machine learning algorithms, such as SVM, Naive Bays, Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, Bagging, AdaBoosting, Voting Ensemble, KNN, Stack, and XGBoosting Classifiers. We have experimented with these techniques on a public dataset obtained from African banks (publically available on Zindi) to predict whether a person has a bank account or not. We used the Holdout cross-validation method to split the training dataset randomly to train and validation. The results show that the XGBoost model has a superior accuracy score of 89.23%. This paper provides a comprehensive comparison for all mentioned models, which we used to perform our study.
Diversified Adversarial Attacks based on Conjugate Gradient Method
Authors: Keiichiro Yamamura, Haruki Sato, Nariaki Tateiwa, Nozomi Hata, Toru Mitsutake, Issa Oe, Hiroki Ishikura, Katsuki Fujisawa
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Deep learning models are vulnerable to adversarial examples, and adversarial attacks used to generate such examples have attracted considerable research interest. Although existing methods based on the steepest descent have achieved high attack success rates, ill-conditioned problems occasionally reduce their performance. To address this limitation, we utilize the conjugate gradient (CG) method, which is effective for this type of problem, and propose a novel attack algorithm inspired by the CG method, named the Auto Conjugate Gradient (ACG) attack. The results of large-scale evaluation experiments conducted on the latest robust models show that, for most models, ACG was able to find more adversarial examples with fewer iterations than the existing SOTA algorithm Auto-PGD (APGD). We investigated the difference in search performance between ACG and APGD in terms of diversification and intensification, and define a measure called Diversity Index (DI) to quantify the degree of diversity. From the analysis of the diversity using this index, we show that the more diverse search of the proposed method remarkably improves its attack success rate.
MSANet: Multi-Similarity and Attention Guidance for Boosting Few-Shot Segmentation
Authors: Ehtesham Iqbal, Sirojbek Safarov, Seongdeok Bang
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Meta-Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Few-shot segmentation aims to segment unseen-class objects given only a handful of densely labeled samples. Prototype learning, where the support feature yields a singleor several prototypes by averaging global and local object information, has been widely used in FSS. However, utilizing only prototype vectors may be insufficient to represent the features for all training data. To extract abundant features and make more precise predictions, we propose a Multi-Similarity and Attention Network (MSANet) including two novel modules, a multi-similarity module and an attention module. The multi-similarity module exploits multiple feature-maps of support images and query images to estimate accurate semantic relationships. The attention module instructs the network to concentrate on class-relevant information. The network is tested on standard FSS datasets, PASCAL-5i 1-shot, PASCAL-5i 5-shot, COCO-20i 1-shot, and COCO-20i 5-shot. The MSANet with the backbone of ResNet-101 achieves the state-of-the-art performance for all 4-benchmark datasets with mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 69.13%, 73.99%, 51.09%, 56.80%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/AIVResearch/MSANet
ORFD: A Dataset and Benchmark for Off-Road Freespace Detection
Authors: Chen Min, Weizhong Jiang, Dawei Zhao, Jiaolong Xu, Liang Xiao, Yiming Nie, Bin Dai
Date: 2022-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Semantic Segmentation, Trajectory Planning

Freespace detection is an essential component of autonomous driving technology and plays an important role in trajectory planning. In the last decade, deep learning-based free space detection methods have been proved feasible. However, these efforts were focused on urban road environments and few deep learning-based methods were specifically designed for off-road free space detection due to the lack of off-road benchmarks. In this paper, we present the ORFD dataset, which, to our knowledge, is the first off-road free space detection dataset. The dataset was collected in different scenes (woodland, farmland, grassland, and countryside), different weather conditions (sunny, rainy, foggy, and snowy), and different light conditions (bright light, daylight, twilight, darkness), which totally contains 12,198 LiDAR point cloud and RGB image pairs with the traversable area, non-traversable area and unreachable area annotated in detail. We propose a novel network named OFF-Net, which unifies Transformer architecture to aggregate local and global information, to meet the requirement of large receptive fields for free space detection tasks. We also propose the cross-attention to dynamically fuse LiDAR and RGB image information for accurate off-road free space detection. Dataset and code are publicly available athttps://github.com/chaytonmin/OFF-Net.
REVECA -- Rich Encoder-decoder framework for Video Event CAptioner
Authors: Jaehyuk Heo, YongGi Jeong, Sunwoo Kim, Jaehee Kim, Pilsung Kang
Date: 2022-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Semantic Segmentation, Video Understanding

We describe an approach used in the Generic Boundary Event Captioning challenge at the Long-Form Video Understanding Workshop held at CVPR 2022. We designed a Rich Encoder-decoder framework for Video Event CAptioner (REVECA) that utilizes spatial and temporal information from the video to generate a caption for the corresponding the event boundary. REVECA uses frame position embedding to incorporate information before and after the event boundary. Furthermore, it employs features extracted using the temporal segment network and temporal-based pairwise difference method to learn temporal information. A semantic segmentation mask for the attentional pooling process is adopted to learn the subject of an event. Finally, LoRA is applied to fine-tune the image encoder to enhance the learning efficiency. REVECA yielded an average score of 50.97 on the Kinetics-GEBC test data, which is an improvement of 10.17 over the baseline method. Our code is available in https://github.com/TooTouch/REVECA.
Reconstruct from BEV: A 3D Lane Detection Approach based on Geometry Structure Prior
Authors: Chenguang Li, Jia Shi, Ya Wang, Guangliang Cheng
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Lane Detection, Data Augmentation, Lane Detection

In this paper, we propose an advanced approach in targeting the problem of monocular 3D lane detection by leveraging geometry structure underneath the process of 2D to 3D lane reconstruction. Inspired by previous methods, we first analyze the geometry heuristic between the 3D lane and its 2D representation on the ground and propose to impose explicit supervision based on the structure prior, which makes it achievable to build inter-lane and intra-lane relationships to facilitate the reconstruction of 3D lanes from local to global. Second, to reduce the structure loss in 2D lane representation, we directly extract BEV lane information from front view images, which tremendously eases the confusion of distant lane features in previous methods. Furthermore, we propose a novel task-specific data augmentation method by synthesizing new training data for both segmentation and reconstruction tasks in our pipeline, to counter the imbalanced data distribution of camera pose and ground slope to improve generalization on unseen data. Our work marks the first attempt to employ the geometry prior information into DNN-based 3D lane detection and makes it achievable for detecting lanes in an extra-long distance, doubling the original detection range. The proposed method can be smoothly adopted by other frameworks without extra costs. Experimental results show that our work outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 3.8% F-Score on Apollo 3D synthetic dataset at real-time speed of 82 FPS without introducing extra parameters.
Semi-supervised Change Detection of Small Water Bodies Using RGB and Multispectral Images in Peruvian Rainforests
Authors: Kangning Cui, Seda Camalan, Ruoning Li, Victor P. Pauca, Sarra Alqahtani, Robert J. Plemmons, Miles Silman, Evan N. Dethier, David Lutz, Raymond H. Chan
Date: 2022-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Semi-supervised Change Detection

Artisanal and Small-scale Gold Mining (ASGM) is an important source of income for many households, but it can have large social and environmental effects, especially in rainforests of developing countries. The Sentinel-2 satellites collect multispectral images that can be used for the purpose of detecting changes in water extent and quality which indicates the locations of mining sites. This work focuses on the recognition of ASGM activities in Peruvian Amazon rainforests. We tested several semi-supervised classifiers based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs) to detect the changes of water bodies from 2019 to 2021 in the Madre de Dios region, which is one of the global hotspots of ASGM activities. Experiments show that SVM-based models can achieve reasonable performance for both RGB (using Cohen's $\kappa$ 0.49) and 6-channel images (using Cohen's $\kappa$ 0.71) with very limited annotations. The efficacy of incorporating Lab color space for change detection is analyzed as well.
EnvPool: A Highly Parallel Reinforcement Learning Environment Execution Engine
Authors: Jiayi Weng, Min Lin, Shengyi Huang, Bo Liu, Denys Makoviichuk, Viktor Makoviychuk, Zichen Liu, Yufan Song, Ting Luo, Yukun Jiang, Zhongwen Xu, Shuicheng Yan
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

There has been significant progress in developing reinforcement learning (RL) training systems. Past works such as IMPALA, Apex, Seed RL, Sample Factory, and others, aim to improve the system's overall throughput. In this paper, we aim to address a common bottleneck in the RL training system, i.e., parallel environment execution, which is often the slowest part of the whole system but receives little attention. With a curated design for paralleling RL environments, we have improved the RL environment simulation speed across different hardware setups, ranging from a laptop and a modest workstation, to a high-end machine such as NVIDIA DGX-A100. On a high-end machine, EnvPool achieves one million frames per second for the environment execution on Atari environments and three million frames per second on MuJoCo environments. When running EnvPool on a laptop, the speed is 2.8x that of the Python subprocess. Moreover, great compatibility with existing RL training libraries has been demonstrated in the open-sourced community, including CleanRL, rl_games, DeepMind Acme, etc. Finally, EnvPool allows researchers to iterate their ideas at a much faster pace and has great potential to become the de facto RL environment execution engine. Example runs show that it only takes five minutes to train agents to play Atari Pong and MuJoCo Ant on a laptop. EnvPool is open-sourced at https://github.com/sail-sg/envpool.
Uncertainty Quantification for Competency Assessment of Autonomous Agents
Authors: Aastha Acharya, Rebecca Russell, Nisar R. Ahmed
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

For safe and reliable deployment in the real world, autonomous agents must elicit appropriate levels of trust from human users. One method to build trust is to have agents assess and communicate their own competencies for performing given tasks. Competency depends on the uncertainties affecting the agent, making accurate uncertainty quantification vital for competency assessment. In this work, we show how ensembles of deep generative models can be used to quantify the agent's aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties when forecasting task outcomes as part of competency assessment.
FedHiSyn: A Hierarchical Synchronous Federated Learning Framework for Resource and Data Heterogeneity
Authors: Guanghao Li, Yue Hu, Miao Zhang, Ji Liu, Quanjun Yin, Yong Peng, Dejing Dou
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) enables training a global model without sharing the decentralized raw data stored on multiple devices to protect data privacy. Due to the diverse capacity of the devices, FL frameworks struggle to tackle the problems of straggler effects and outdated models. In addition, the data heterogeneity incurs severe accuracy degradation of the global model in the FL training process. To address aforementioned issues, we propose a hierarchical synchronous FL framework, i.e., FedHiSyn. FedHiSyn first clusters all available devices into a small number of categories based on their computing capacity. After a certain interval of local training, the models trained in different categories are simultaneously uploaded to a central server. Within a single category, the devices communicate the local updated model weights to each other based on a ring topology. As the efficiency of training in the ring topology prefers devices with homogeneous resources, the classification based on the computing capacity mitigates the impact of straggler effects. Besides, the combination of the synchronous update of multiple categories and the device communication within a single category help address the data heterogeneity issue while achieving high accuracy. We evaluate the proposed framework based on MNIST, EMNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 datasets and diverse heterogeneous settings of devices. Experimental results show that FedHiSyn outperforms six baseline methods, e.g., FedAvg, SCAFFOLD, and FedAT, in terms of training accuracy and efficiency.
Multi-UAV Planning for Cooperative Wildfire Coverage and Tracking with Quality-of-Service Guarantees
Authors: Esmaeil Seraj, Andrew Silva, Matthew Gombolay
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00

In recent years, teams of robot and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been commissioned by researchers to enable accurate, online wildfire coverage and tracking. While the majority of prior work focuses on the coordination and control of such multi-robot systems, to date, these UAV teams have not been given the ability to reason about a fire's track (i.e., location and propagation dynamics) to provide performance guarantee over a time horizon. Motivated by the problem of aerial wildfire monitoring, we propose a predictive framework which enables cooperation in multi-UAV teams towards collaborative field coverage and fire tracking with probabilistic performance guarantee. Our approach enables UAVs to infer the latent fire propagation dynamics for time-extended coordination in safety-critical conditions. We derive a set of novel, analytical temporal, and tracking-error bounds to enable the UAV-team to distribute their limited resources and cover the entire fire area according to the case-specific estimated states and provide a probabilistic performance guarantee. Our results are not limited to the aerial wildfire monitoring case-study and are generally applicable to problems, such as search-and-rescue, target tracking and border patrol. We evaluate our approach in simulation and provide demonstrations of the proposed framework on a physical multi-robot testbed to account for real robot dynamics and restrictions. Our quantitative evaluations validate the performance of our method accumulating 7.5x and 9.0x smaller tracking-error than state-of-the-art model-based and reinforcement learning benchmarks, respectively.
Rethinking Symbolic Regression Datasets and Benchmarks for Scientific Discovery
Authors: Yoshitomo Matsubara, Naoya Chiba, Ryo Igarashi, Yoshitaka Ushiku
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, scientific discovery, Symbolic Regression, tabular-regression

This paper revisits datasets and evaluation criteria for Symbolic Regression (SR), specifically focused on its potential for scientific discovery. Focused on a set of formulas used in the existing datasets based on Feynman Lectures on Physics, we recreate 120 datasets to discuss the performance of symbolic regression for scientific discovery (SRSD). For each of the 120 SRSD datasets, we carefully review the properties of the formula and its variables to design reasonably realistic sampling ranges of values so that our new SRSD datasets can be used for evaluating the potential of SRSD such as whether or not an SR method can (re)discover physical laws from such datasets. We also create another 120 datasets that contain dummy variables to examine whether SR methods can choose necessary variables only. Besides, we propose to use normalized edit distances (NED) between a predicted equation and the true equation trees for addressing a critical issue that existing SR metrics are either binary or errors between the target values and an SR model's predicted values for a given input. We conduct benchmark experiments on our new SRSD datasets using various representative SR methods. The experimental results show that we provide a more realistic performance evaluation, and our user study shows that the NED correlates with human judges significantly more than an existing SR metric. We publish repositories of our code and 240 SRSD datasets.
HealNet -- Self-Supervised Acute Wound Heal-Stage Classification
Authors: Héctor Carrión, Mohammad Jafari, Hsin-Ya Yang, Roslyn Rivkah Isseroff, Marco Rolandi, Marcella Gomez, Narges Norouzi
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Self-Supervised Learning

Identifying, tracking, and predicting wound heal-stage progression is a fundamental task towards proper diagnosis, effective treatment, facilitating healing, and reducing pain. Traditionally, a medical expert might observe a wound to determine the current healing state and recommend treatment. However, sourcing experts who can produce such a diagnosis solely from visual indicators can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. In addition, lesions may take several weeks to undergo the healing process, demanding resources to monitor and diagnose continually. Automating this task can be challenging; datasets that follow wound progression from onset to maturation are small, rare, and often collected without computer vision in mind. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a self-supervised learning scheme composed of (a) learning embeddings of wound's temporal dynamics, (b) clustering for automatic stage discovery, and (c) fine-tuned classification. The proposed self-supervised and flexible learning framework is biologically inspired and trained on a small dataset with zero human labeling. The HealNet framework achieved high pre-text and downstream classification accuracy; when evaluated on held-out test data, HealNet achieved 97.7% pre-text accuracy and 90.62% heal-stage classification accuracy.
EpiGRAF: Rethinking training of 3D GANs
Authors: Ivan Skorokhodov, Sergey Tulyakov, Yiqun Wang, Peter Wonka
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D-Aware Image Synthesis

A very recent trend in generative modeling is building 3D-aware generators from 2D image collections. To induce the 3D bias, such models typically rely on volumetric rendering, which is expensive to employ at high resolutions. During the past months, there appeared more than 10 works that address this scaling issue by training a separate 2D decoder to upsample a low-resolution image (or a feature tensor) produced from a pure 3D generator. But this solution comes at a cost: not only does it break multi-view consistency (i.e. shape and texture change when the camera moves), but it also learns the geometry in a low fidelity. In this work, we show that it is possible to obtain a high-resolution 3D generator with SotA image quality by following a completely different route of simply training the model patch-wise. We revisit and improve this optimization scheme in two ways. First, we design a location- and scale-aware discriminator to work on patches of different proportions and spatial positions. Second, we modify the patch sampling strategy based on an annealed beta distribution to stabilize training and accelerate the convergence. The resulted model, named EpiGRAF, is an efficient, high-resolution, pure 3D generator, and we test it on four datasets (two introduced in this work) at $256^2$ and $512^2$ resolutions. It obtains state-of-the-art image quality, high-fidelity geometry and trains ${\approx} 2.5 \times$ faster than the upsampler-based counterparts. Project website: https://universome.github.io/epigraf.
Neural Transformers for Intraductal Papillary Mucosal Neoplasms (IPMN) Classification in MRI images
Authors: Federica Proietto Salanitri, Giovanni Bellitto, Simone Palazzo, Ismail Irmakci, Michael B. Wallace, Candice W. Bolan, Megan Engels, Sanne Hoogenboom, Marco Aldinucci, Ulas Bagci, Daniela Giordano, Concetto Spampinato
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00

Early detection of precancerous cysts or neoplasms, i.e., Intraductal Papillary Mucosal Neoplasms (IPMN), in pancreas is a challenging and complex task, and it may lead to a more favourable outcome. Once detected, grading IPMNs accurately is also necessary, since low-risk IPMNs can be under surveillance program, while high-risk IPMNs have to be surgically resected before they turn into cancer. Current standards (Fukuoka and others) for IPMN classification show significant intra- and inter-operator variability, beside being error-prone, making a proper diagnosis unreliable. The established progress in artificial intelligence, through the deep learning paradigm, may provide a key tool for an effective support to medical decision for pancreatic cancer. In this work, we follow this trend, by proposing a novel AI-based IPMN classifier that leverages the recent success of transformer networks in generalizing across a wide variety of tasks, including vision ones. We specifically show that our transformer-based model exploits pre-training better than standard convolutional neural networks, thus supporting the sought architectural universalism of transformers in vision, including the medical image domain and it allows for a better interpretation of the obtained results.