pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A biologically interfaced evolvable organic pattern classifier
Authors: Jennifer Gerasimov, Deyu Tu, Vivek Hitaishi, Padinhare Cholakkal Harikesh, Chi-Yuan Yang, Tobias Abrahamsson, Meysam Rad, Mary J. Donahue, Malin Silverå Ejneby, Magnus Berggren, Robert Forchheimer, Simone Fabiano
Date: 2022-11-29 00:00:00

Future brain-computer interfaces will require local and highly individualized signal processing of fully integrated electronic circuits within the nervous system and other living tissue. New devices will need to be developed that can receive data from a sensor array, process data into meaningful information, and translate that information into a format that living systems can interpret. Here, we report the first example of interfacing a hardware-based pattern classifier with a biological nerve. The classifier implements the Widrow-Hoff learning algorithm on an array of evolvable organic electrochemical transistors (EOECTs). The EOECTs' channel conductance is modulated in situ by electropolymerizing the semiconductor material within the channel, allowing for low voltage operation, high reproducibility, and an improvement in state retention of two orders of magnitude over state-of-the-art OECT devices. The organic classifier is interfaced with a biological nerve using an organic electrochemical spiking neuron to translate the classifier's output to a simulated action potential. The latter is then used to stimulate muscle contraction selectively based on the input pattern, thus paving the way for the development of closed-loop therapeutic systems.
Simulation and assimilation of the digital human brain
Authors: Wenlian Lu, Xin Du, Jiexiang Wang, Longbin Zeng, Leijun Ye, Shitong Xiang, Qibao Zheng, Jie Zhang, Ningsheng Xu, Jianfeng Feng
Date: 2022-11-29 00:00:00

Here, we present the Digital Brain (DB), a platform for simulating spiking neuronal networks at the large neuron scale of the human brain based on personalized magnetic-resonance-imaging data and biological constraints. The DB aims to reproduce both the resting state and certain aspects of the action of the human brain. An architecture with up to 86 billion neurons and 14,012 GPUs, including a two-level routing scheme between GPUs to accelerate spike transmission up to 47.8 trillion neuronal synapses, was implemented as part of the simulations. We show that the DB can reproduce blood-oxygen-level-dependent signals of the resting-state of the human brain with a high correlation coefficient, as well as interact with its perceptual input, as demonstrated in a visual task. These results indicate the feasibility of implementing a digital representation of the human brain, which can open the door to a broad range of potential applications.
Business-cycles and Cash-on-Market: Pre-money Startup Valuation in the Macroeconomic Environment
Authors: Max Berre, Benjamin Le Pendeven
Date: 2022-11-29 00:00:00

How do business-cycles impact startup-valuations? While several studies explore VC startupecosystems and pre-money valuations, relatively-few delve deeper into the role of macro-level economic factors in influencing those startup deals valuations. Using a dataset of 1,089 venturecapital investments in European Union and European Economic Area markets, this article examines macroeconomic, cyclical and macro-sectoral influences on VC startups pre-money VC valuations. Our findings show that business-cycles impact startup-valuation both directly and indirectly. Beyond DCF factors, startup-valuations are impacted via by business-cycles directly, and via local venture-capital market-size. By using a Structural Equation Model approach, our findings contribute to entrepreneurship and financial-intermediary literature by exploring indirect and endogenous relationship possibilities finding that most determinants are transmission-channels rather than independent drivers. Our findings effectively tie-together startup-valuations, intermediary markets, and macroeconomic determinants.
Mechanism of information transmission from a spot rate market to crypto-asset markets
Authors: Takeshi Yoshihara, Taisei Kaizoji
Date: 2022-11-29 00:00:00

We applied the SVAR-LiNGAM to illustrate the causal relationships between the spot exchange rate, and three crypto-asset exchange rates, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. It was notable that the causal order, the EUR_USD spot rate->Bitcoin->Ethereum->Ripple, was obtained by this approach. All the instantaneous effects were strongly positive. Moreover, it was notable that Bitcoin can influence the EUR_USD spot rate positively with a one-day time lag.
Exploring adaptation of VideoMAE for Audio-Visual Diarization & Social @ Ego4d Looking at me Challenge
Authors: Yinan He, Guo Chen
Date: 2022-11-17 00:00:00

In this report, we present the transferring pretrained video mask autoencoders(VideoMAE) to egocentric tasks for Ego4d Looking at me Challenge. VideoMAE is the data-efficient pretraining model for self-supervised video pre-training and can easily transfer to downstream tasks. We show that the representation transferred from VideoMAE has good Spatio-temporal modeling and the ability to capture small actions. We only need to use egocentric data to train 10 epochs based on VideoMAE which pretrained by the ordinary videos acquired from a third person's view, and we can get better results than the baseline on Ego4d Looking at me Challenge.
On "Deep Learning" Misconduct
Authors: Juyang Weng
Date: 2022-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

This is a theoretical paper, as a companion paper of the plenary talk for the same conference ISAIC 2022. In contrast to the author's plenary talk in the same conference, conscious learning (Weng, 2022b; Weng, 2022c) which develops a single network for a life (many tasks), "Deep Learning" trains multiple networks for each task. Although "Deep Learning" may use different learning modes, including supervised, reinforcement and adversarial modes, almost all "Deep Learning" projects apparently suffer from the same misconduct, called "data deletion" and "test on training data". This paper establishes a theorem that a simple method called Pure-Guess Nearest Neighbor (PGNN) reaches any required errors on validation data set and test data set, including zero-error requirements, through the same misconduct, as long as the test data set is in the possession of the authors and both the amount of storage space and the time of training are finite but unbounded. The misconduct violates well-known protocols called transparency and cross-validation. The nature of the misconduct is fatal, because in the absence of any disjoint test, "Deep Learning" is clearly not generalizable.
DBA: Efficient Transformer with Dynamic Bilinear Low-Rank Attention
Authors: Bosheng Qin, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
Date: 2022-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

Many studies have been conducted to improve the efficiency of Transformer from quadric to linear. Among them, the low-rank-based methods aim to learn the projection matrices to compress the sequence length. However, the projection matrices are fixed once they have been learned, which compress sequence length with dedicated coefficients for tokens in the same position. Adopting such input-invariant projections ignores the fact that the most informative part of a sequence varies from sequence to sequence, thus failing to preserve the most useful information that lies in varied positions. In addition, previous efficient Transformers only focus on the influence of sequence length while neglecting the effect of hidden state dimension. To address the aforementioned problems, we present an efficient yet effective attention mechanism, namely the Dynamic Bilinear Low-Rank Attention (DBA), which compresses the sequence length by input-sensitive dynamic projection matrices and achieves linear time and space complexity by jointly optimizing the sequence length and hidden state dimension while maintaining state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, we first theoretically demonstrate that the sequence length can be compressed non-destructively from a novel perspective of information theory, with compression matrices dynamically determined by the input sequence. Furthermore, we show that the hidden state dimension can be approximated by extending the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, optimizing the attention in bilinear form. Theoretical analysis shows that DBA is proficient in capturing high-order relations in cross-attention problems. Experiments over tasks with diverse sequence length conditions show that DBA achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with various strong baselines while maintaining less memory consumption with higher speed.
QuadFormer: Quadruple Transformer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Power Line Segmentation of Aerial Images
Authors: Pratyaksh Prabhav Rao, Feng Qiao, Weide Zhang, Yiliang Xu, Yong Deng, Guangbin Wu, Qiang Zhang
Date: 2022-11-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Pseudo Label, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Accurate segmentation of power lines in aerial images is essential to ensure the flight safety of aerial vehicles. Acquiring high-quality ground truth annotations for training a deep learning model is a laborious process. Therefore, developing algorithms that can leverage knowledge from labelled synthetic data to unlabelled real images is highly demanded. This process is studied in Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Recent approaches to self-training have achieved remarkable performance in UDA for semantic segmentation, which trains a model with pseudo labels on the target domain. However, the pseudo labels are noisy due to a discrepancy in the two data distributions. We identify that context dependency is important for bridging this domain gap. Motivated by this, we propose QuadFormer, a novel framework designed for domain adaptive semantic segmentation. The hierarchical quadruple transformer combines cross-attention and self-attention mechanisms to adapt transferable context. Based on cross-attentive and self-attentive feature representations, we introduce a pseudo label correction scheme to online denoise the pseudo labels and reduce the domain gap. Additionally, we present two datasets - ARPLSyn and ARPLReal to further advance research in unsupervised domain adaptive powerline segmentation. Finally, experimental results indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for the domain adaptive power line segmentation on ARPLSyn$\rightarrow$TTTPLA and ARPLSyn$\rightarrow$ARPLReal.
Carbon Emission Prediction on the World Bank Dataset for Canada
Authors: Aman Desai, Shyamal Gandhi, Sachin Gupta, Manan Shah, Samir Patel
Date: 2022-11-26 00:00:00

The continuous rise in CO2 emission into the environment is one of the most crucial issues facing the whole world. Many countries are making crucial decisions to control their carbon footprints to escape some of their catastrophic outcomes. There has been a lot of research going on to project the amount of carbon emissions in the future, which can help us to develop innovative techniques to deal with it in advance. Machine learning is one of the most advanced and efficient techniques for predicting the amount of carbon emissions from current data. This paper provides the methods for predicting carbon emissions (CO2 emissions) for the next few years. The predictions are based on data from the past 50 years. The dataset, which is used for making the prediction, is collected from World Bank datasets. This dataset contains CO2 emissions (metric tons per capita) of all the countries from 1960 to 2018. Our method consists of using machine learning techniques to take the idea of what carbon emission measures will look like in the next ten years and project them onto the dataset taken from the World Bank's data repository. The purpose of this research is to compare how different machine learning models (Decision Tree, Linear Regression, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine) perform on a similar dataset and measure the difference between their predictions.
NeAF: Learning Neural Angle Fields for Point Normal Estimation
Authors: Shujuan Li, Junsheng Zhou, Baorui Ma, Yu-Shen Liu, Zhizhong Han
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Surface Normals Estimation

Normal estimation for unstructured point clouds is an important task in 3D computer vision. Current methods achieve encouraging results by mapping local patches to normal vectors or learning local surface fitting using neural networks. However, these methods are not generalized well to unseen scenarios and are sensitive to parameter settings. To resolve these issues, we propose an implicit function to learn an angle field around the normal of each point in the spherical coordinate system, which is dubbed as Neural Angle Fields (NeAF). Instead of directly predicting the normal of an input point, we predict the angle offset between the ground truth normal and a randomly sampled query normal. This strategy pushes the network to observe more diverse samples, which leads to higher prediction accuracy in a more robust manner. To predict normals from the learned angle fields at inference time, we randomly sample query vectors in a unit spherical space and take the vectors with minimal angle values as the predicted normals. To further leverage the prior learned by NeAF, we propose to refine the predicted normal vectors by minimizing the angle offsets. The experimental results with synthetic data and real scans show significant improvements over the state-of-the-art under widely used benchmarks.
ShaDocNet: Learning Spatial-Aware Tokens in Transformer for Document Shadow Removal
Authors: Xuhang Chen, Xiaodong Cun, Chi-Man Pun, Shuqiang Wang
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Shadow Removal, Image Shadow Removal, Shadow Detection, Shadow Removal

Shadow removal improves the visual quality and legibility of digital copies of documents. However, document shadow removal remains an unresolved subject. Traditional techniques rely on heuristics that vary from situation to situation. Given the quality and quantity of current public datasets, the majority of neural network models are ill-equipped for this task. In this paper, we propose a Transformer-based model for document shadow removal that utilizes shadow context encoding and decoding in both shadow and shadow-free regions. Additionally, shadow detection and pixel-level enhancement are included in the whole coarse-to-fine process. On the basis of comprehensive benchmark evaluations, it is competitive with state-of-the-art methods.
Linking Sketch Patches by Learning Synonymous Proximity for Graphic Sketch Representation
Authors: Sicong Zang, Shikui Tu, Lei Xu
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Graphic sketch representations are effective for representing sketches. Existing methods take the patches cropped from sketches as the graph nodes, and construct the edges based on sketch's drawing order or Euclidean distances on the canvas. However, the drawing order of a sketch may not be unique, while the patches from semantically related parts of a sketch may be far away from each other on the canvas. In this paper, we propose an order-invariant, semantics-aware method for graphic sketch representations. The cropped sketch patches are linked according to their global semantics or local geometric shapes, namely the synonymous proximity, by computing the cosine similarity between the captured patch embeddings. Such constructed edges are learnable to adapt to the variation of sketch drawings, which enable the message passing among synonymous patches. Aggregating the messages from synonymous patches by graph convolutional networks plays a role of denoising, which is beneficial to produce robust patch embeddings and accurate sketch representations. Furthermore, we enforce a clustering constraint over the embeddings jointly with the network learning. The synonymous patches are self-organized as compact clusters, and their embeddings are guided to move towards their assigned cluster centroids. It raises the accuracy of the computed synonymous proximity. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the performance on both controllable sketch synthesis and sketch healing.
AIO-P: Expanding Neural Performance Predictors Beyond Image Classification
Authors: Keith G. Mills, Di Niu, Mohammad Salameh, Weichen Qiu, Fred X. Han, Puyuan Liu, Jialin Zhang, Wei Lu, Shangling Jui
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Human Pose Estimation, Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, Neural Architecture Search, Object Detection, Panoptic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Evaluating neural network performance is critical to deep neural network design but a costly procedure. Neural predictors provide an efficient solution by treating architectures as samples and learning to estimate their performance on a given task. However, existing predictors are task-dependent, predominantly estimating neural network performance on image classification benchmarks. They are also search-space dependent; each predictor is designed to make predictions for a specific architecture search space with predefined topologies and set of operations. In this paper, we propose a novel All-in-One Predictor (AIO-P), which aims to pretrain neural predictors on architecture examples from multiple, separate computer vision (CV) task domains and multiple architecture spaces, and then transfer to unseen downstream CV tasks or neural architectures. We describe our proposed techniques for general graph representation, efficient predictor pretraining and knowledge infusion techniques, as well as methods to transfer to downstream tasks/spaces. Extensive experimental results show that AIO-P can achieve Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Spearman's Rank Correlation (SRCC) below 1% and above 0.5, respectively, on a breadth of target downstream CV tasks with or without fine-tuning, outperforming a number of baselines. Moreover, AIO-P can directly transfer to new architectures not seen during training, accurately rank them and serve as an effective performance estimator when paired with an algorithm designed to preserve performance while reducing FLOPs.
GENNAPE: Towards Generalized Neural Architecture Performance Estimators
Authors: Keith G. Mills, Fred X. Han, Jialin Zhang, Fabian Chudak, Ali Safari Mamaghani, Mohammad Salameh, Wei Lu, Shangling Jui, Di Niu
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Classification, Neural Architecture Search

Predicting neural architecture performance is a challenging task and is crucial to neural architecture design and search. Existing approaches either rely on neural performance predictors which are limited to modeling architectures in a predefined design space involving specific sets of operators and connection rules, and cannot generalize to unseen architectures, or resort to zero-cost proxies which are not always accurate. In this paper, we propose GENNAPE, a Generalized Neural Architecture Performance Estimator, which is pretrained on open neural architecture benchmarks, and aims to generalize to completely unseen architectures through combined innovations in network representation, contrastive pretraining, and fuzzy clustering-based predictor ensemble. Specifically, GENNAPE represents a given neural network as a Computation Graph (CG) of atomic operations which can model an arbitrary architecture. It first learns a graph encoder via Contrastive Learning to encourage network separation by topological features, and then trains multiple predictor heads, which are soft-aggregated according to the fuzzy membership of a neural network. Experiments show that GENNAPE pretrained on NAS-Bench-101 can achieve superior transferability to 5 different public neural network benchmarks, including NAS-Bench-201, NAS-Bench-301, MobileNet and ResNet families under no or minimum fine-tuning. We further introduce 3 challenging newly labelled neural network benchmarks: HiAML, Inception and Two-Path, which can concentrate in narrow accuracy ranges. Extensive experiments show that GENNAPE can correctly discern high-performance architectures in these families. Finally, when paired with a search algorithm, GENNAPE can find architectures that improve accuracy while reducing FLOPs on three families.
Non-Deterministic Approximation Fixpoint Theory and Its Application in Disjunctive Logic Programming
Authors: Jesse Heyninck, Ofer Arieli, Bart Bogaerts
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00

Approximation fixpoint theory (AFT) is an abstract and general algebraic framework for studying the semantics of nonmonotonic logics. It provides a unifying study of the semantics of different formalisms for nonmonotonic reasoning, such as logic programming, default logic and autoepistemic logic. In this paper, we extend AFT to dealing with non-deterministic constructs that allow to handle indefinite information, represented e.g. by disjunctive formulas. This is done by generalizing the main constructions and corresponding results of AFT to non-deterministic operators, whose ranges are sets of elements rather than single elements. The applicability and usefulness of this generalization is illustrated in the context of disjunctive logic programming.
SinGRAF: Learning a 3D Generative Radiance Field for a Single Scene
Authors: Minjung Son, Jeong Joon Park, Leonidas Guibas, Gordon Wetzstein
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Diversity

Generative models have shown great promise in synthesizing photorealistic 3D objects, but they require large amounts of training data. We introduce SinGRAF, a 3D-aware generative model that is trained with a few input images of a single scene. Once trained, SinGRAF generates different realizations of this 3D scene that preserve the appearance of the input while varying scene layout. For this purpose, we build on recent progress in 3D GAN architectures and introduce a novel progressive-scale patch discrimination approach during training. With several experiments, we demonstrate that the results produced by SinGRAF outperform the closest related works in both quality and diversity by a large margin.
CREPE: Open-Domain Question Answering with False Presuppositions
Authors: Xinyan Velocity Yu, Sewon Min, Luke Zettlemoyer, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Date: 2022-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering

Information seeking users often pose questions with false presuppositions, especially when asking about unfamiliar topics. Most existing question answering (QA) datasets, in contrast, assume all questions have well defined answers. We introduce CREPE, a QA dataset containing a natural distribution of presupposition failures from online information-seeking forums. We find that 25% of questions contain false presuppositions, and provide annotations for these presuppositions and their corrections. Through extensive baseline experiments, we show that adaptations of existing open-domain QA models can find presuppositions moderately well, but struggle when predicting whether a presupposition is factually correct. This is in large part due to difficulty in retrieving relevant evidence passages from a large text corpus. CREPE provides a benchmark to study question answering in the wild, and our analyses provide avenues for future work in better modeling and further studying the task.