pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Hide Your Model: A Parameter Transmission-free Federated Recommender System
Authors: Wei Yuan, Chaoqun Yang, Liang Qu, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, JianXin Li, Hongzhi Yin
Date: 2023-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Recommendation Systems

With the growing concerns regarding user data privacy, Federated Recommender System (FedRec) has garnered significant attention recently due to its privacy-preserving capabilities. Existing FedRecs generally adhere to a learning protocol in which a central server shares a global recommendation model with clients, and participants achieve collaborative learning by frequently communicating the model's public parameters. Nevertheless, this learning framework has two drawbacks that limit its practical usability: (1) It necessitates a global-sharing recommendation model; however, in real-world scenarios, information related to the recommender model, including its algorithm and parameters, constitutes the platforms' intellectual property. Hence, service providers are unlikely to release such information actively. (2) The communication costs of model parameter transmission are expensive since the model parameters are usually high-dimensional matrices. With the model size increasing, the communication burden will be the bottleneck for such traditional FedRecs. Given the above limitations, this paper introduces a novel parameter transmission-free federated recommendation framework that balances the protection between users' data privacy and platforms' model privacy, namely PTF-FedRec. Specifically, participants in PTF-FedRec collaboratively exchange knowledge by sharing their predictions within a privacy-preserving mechanism. Through this way, the central server can learn a recommender model without disclosing its model parameters or accessing clients' raw data, preserving both the server's model privacy and users' data privacy. Besides, since clients and the central server only need to communicate prediction scores which are just a few real numbers, the overhead is significantly reduced compared to traditional FedRecs. The code is available at\url{https://github.com/hi-weiyuan/PTF-FedRec}.
Anomaly detection in cross-country money transfer temporal networks
Authors: Salvatore Vilella, Arthur Thomas Edward Capozzi Lupi, Marco Fornasiero, Dario Moncalvo, Valeria Ricci, Silvia Ronchiadin, Giancarlo Ruffo
Date: 2023-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

This paper explores anomaly detection through temporal network analysis. Unlike many conventional methods, relying on rule-based algorithms or general machine learning approaches, our methodology leverages the evolving structure and relationships within temporal networks, that can be used to model financial transactions. Focusing on minimal changes in stable ecosystems, such as those found in large international financial institutions, our approach utilizes network centrality measures to gain insights into individual nodes. By monitoring the temporal evolution of centrality-based node rankings, our method effectively identifies abrupt shifts in the roles of specific nodes, prompting further investigation by domain experts. To demonstrate its efficacy, our methodology is applied in the Anti-Financial Crime (AFC) domain, analyzing a substantial financial dataset comprising over 80 million cross-country wire transfers. The goal is to pinpoint outliers potentially involved in malicious activities, aligning with financial regulations. This approach serves as an initial stride towards automating AFC and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) processes, providing AFC officers with a comprehensive top-down view to enhance their efforts. It overcomes many limitations of current prevalent paradigms, offering a holistic interpretation of the financial data landscape and addressing potential blindness to phenomena that cannot be effectively estimated through single-node or narrowly focused transactional approaches.
DiffBindFR: An SE(3) Equivariant Network for Flexible Protein-Ligand Docking
Authors: Jintao Zhu, Zhonghui Gu, Jianfeng Pei, Luhua Lai
Date: 2023-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design, Molecular Docking, Pose Prediction

Molecular docking, a key technique in structure-based drug design, plays pivotal roles in protein-ligand interaction modeling, hit identification and optimization, in which accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding mode is essential. Conventional docking approaches perform well in redocking tasks with known protein binding pocket conformation in the complex state. However, in real-world docking scenario without knowing the protein binding conformation for a new ligand, accurately modeling the binding complex structure remains challenging as flexible docking is computationally expensive and inaccurate. Typical deep learning-based docking methods do not explicitly consider protein side chain conformations and fail to ensure the physical plausibility and detailed atomic interactions. In this study, we present DiffBindFR, a full-atom diffusion-based flexible docking model that operates over the product space of ligand overall movements and flexibility and pocket side chain torsion changes. We show that DiffBindFR has higher accuracy in producing native-like binding structures with physically plausible and detailed interactions than available docking methods. Furthermore, in the Apo and AlphaFold2 modeled structures, DiffBindFR demonstrates superior advantages in accurate ligand binding pose and protein binding conformation prediction, making it suitable for Apo and AlphaFold2 structure-based drug design. DiffBindFR provides a powerful flexible docking tool for modeling accurate protein-ligand binding structures.
InHARD - Industrial Human Action Recognition Dataset in the Context of Industrial Collaborative Robotics
Authors: Mejdi Dallel, Vincent Havard, David Baudry, Xavier Savatier
Date: 2020-09-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE International Conference on Human-Machine Systems (ICHMS) 2020 9
Tasks: Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Nowadays, humans and robots are working more closely together. This increases business productivity and product quality, leading to efficiency and growth. However, human and robot collaboration is rather static; robots move to a specific position then humans perform their tasks while being assisted by the robots. In order to get a dynamic collaboration, robots need to understand the human's intention and learn to recognize the performed actions complementing therefore his capabilities and relieving him of arduous tasks. Consequently, there is a need for a human action recognition dataset for Machine Learning algorithms. Currently available depth-based and RGB+D+S based human action recognition datasets have a number of limitations, counting the lack of training samples along with distinct class labels, camera views, diversity of subjects and more importantly the absence of actual industrial human actions in an industrial environment. Actual action recognition datasets include simple daily, mutual, or health-related actions. Therefore, in this paper we introduce an RGB+ S dataset named “Industrial Human Action Recognition Dataset” (InHARD) from a real-world setting for industrial human action recognition with over 2 million frames, collected from 16 distinct subjects. This dataset contains 13 different industrial action classes and over 4800 action samples. The introduction of this dataset should allow us the study and development of various learning techniques for the task of human actions analysis inside industrial environments involving human robot collaborations.
SECOND: Sparsely Embedded Convolutional Detection
Authors: Yan Yan, Yuxing Mao, Bo Li
Date: 2018-10-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: Sensors 2018 10
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, object-detection, Object Detection

LiDAR-based or RGB-D-based object detection is used in numerous applications, ranging from autonomous driving to robot vision. Voxel-based 3D convolutional networks have been used for some time to enhance the retention of information when processing point cloud LiDAR data. However, problems remain, including a slow inference speed and low orientation estimation performance. We therefore investigate an improved sparse convolution method for such networks, which significantly increases the speed of both training and inference. We also introduce a new form of angle loss regression to improve the orientation estimation performance and a new data augmentation approach that can enhance the convergence speed and performance. The proposed network produces state-of-the-art results on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmarks while maintaining a fast inference speed.
MonoUNI: A Unified Vehicle and Infrastructure-side Monocular 3D Object Detection Network with Sufficient Depth Clues
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: Neural Information Processing Systems 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Monocular 3D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Monocular 3D detection of vehicle and infrastructure sides are two important topics in autonomous driving. Due to diverse sensor installations and focal lengths, researchers are faced with the challenge of constructing algorithms for the two topics based on different prior knowledge. In this paper, by taking into account the diversity of pitch angles and focal lengths, we propose a unified optimization target named normalized depth, which realizes the unification of 3D detection problems for the two sides. Furthermore, to enhance the accuracy of monocular 3D detection, 3D normalized cube depth of obstacle is developed to promote the learning of depth information. We posit that the richness of depth clues is a pivotal factor impacting the detection performance on both the vehicle and infrastructure sides. A richer set of depth clues facilitates the model to learn better spatial knowledge, and the 3D normalized cube depth offers sufficient depth clues. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Without introducing any extra information, our method, named MonoUNI, achieves state-of-the-art performance on five widely used monocular 3D detection benchmarks, including Rope3D and DAIR-V2X-I for the infrastructure side, KITTI and Waymo for the vehicle side, and nuScenes for the cross-dataset evaluation.
RangePerception: Taming LiDAR Range View for Efficient and Accurate 3D Object Detection
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

LiDAR-based 3D detection methods currently use bird's-eye view (BEV) or range view (RV) as their primary basis. The former relies on voxelization and 3D convolutions, resulting in inefficient training and inference processes. Conversely, RV-based methods demonstrate higher efficiency due to their compactness and compatibility with 2D convolutions, but their performance still trails behind that of BEV-based methods. To eliminate this performance gap while preserving the efficiency of RV-based methods, this study presents an efficient and accurate RV-based 3D object detection framework termed RangePerception. Through meticulous analysis, this study identifies two critical challenges impeding the performance of existing RV-based methods: 1) there exists a natural domain gap between the 3D world coordinate used in output and 2D range image coordinate used in input, generating difficulty in information extraction from range images; 2) native range images suffer from vision corruption issue, affecting the detection accuracy of the objects located on the margins of the range images. To address the key challenges above, we propose two novel algorithms named Range Aware Kernel (RAK) and Vision Restoration Module (VRM), which facilitate information flow from range image representation and world-coordinate 3D detection results. With the help of RAK and VRM, our RangePerception achieves 3.25/4.18 higher averaged L1/L2 AP compared to previous state-of-the-art RV-based method RangeDet, on Waymo Open Dataset. For the first time as an RV-based 3D detection method, RangePerception achieves slightly superior averaged AP compared with the well-known BEV-based method CenterPoint and the inference speed of RangePerception is 1.3 times as fast as CenterPoint.
Greatness in Simplicity: Unified Self-Cycle Consistency for Parser-Free Virtual Try-On
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Image-based virtual try-on tasks remain challenging, primarily due to inherent complexities associated with non-rigid garment deformation modeling and strong feature entanglement of clothing within human body. Recent groundbreaking formulations, such as in-painting, cycle consistency, and knowledge distillation, have facilitated self-supervised generation of try-on images. However, these paradigms necessitate the disentanglement of garment features within human body features through auxiliary tasks, such as leveraging 'teacher knowledge' and dual generators. The potential presence of irresponsible prior knowledge in the auxiliary task can serve as a significant bottleneck for the main generator (e.g., 'student model') in the downstream task. Moreover, existing garment deformation methods lack the ability to perceive the correlation between the garment and the human body in the real world, leading to unrealistic alignment effects. To tackle these limitations, we present a new parser-free virtual try-on network based on unified self-cycle consistency (USC-PFN), which enables robust translation between different garments using just a single generator, faithfully replicating non-rigid geometric deformation of garments in real-life scenarios. Specifically, we first propose a self-cycle consistency architecture with a circular mode. It utilizes real unpaired garment-person images exclusively as input for training, effectively eliminating the impact of irresponsible prior knowledge at the model input end. Additionally, we formulate a Markov Random Field to simulate a more natural and realistic garment deformation. Furthermore, USC-PFN can leverage a general generator for self-supervised cycle training. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on a popular virtual try-on benchmark.
EICIL: Joint Excitatory Inhibitory Cycle Iteration Learning for Deep Spiking Neural Networks
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have undergone continuous development and extensive study for decades, leading to increased biological plausibility and optimal energy efficiency. However, traditional training methods for deep SNNs have some limitations, as they rely on strategies such as pre-training and fine-tuning, indirect coding and reconstruction, and approximate gradients. These strategies lack a complete training model and require gradient approximation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel learning method named Joint Excitatory Inhibitory Cycle Iteration learning for Deep Spiking Neural Networks (EICIL) that integrates both excitatory and inhibitory behaviors inspired by the signal transmission of biological neurons.By organically embedding these two behavior patterns into one framework, the proposed EICIL significantly improves the bio-mimicry and adaptability of spiking neuron models, as well as expands the representation space of spiking neurons. Extensive experiments based on EICIL and traditional learning methods demonstrate that EICIL outperforms traditional methods on various datasets, such as CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, revealing the crucial role of the learning approach that integrates both behaviors during training.
BCDiff: Bidirectional Consistent Diffusion for Instantaneous Trajectory Prediction
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

The objective of pedestrian trajectory prediction is to estimate the future paths of pedestrians by leveraging historical observations, which plays a vital role in ensuring the safety of self-driving vehicles and navigation robots. Previous works usually rely on a sufficient amount of observation time to accurately predict future trajectories. However, there are many real-world situations where the model lacks sufficient time to observe, such as when pedestrians abruptly emerge from blind spots, resulting in inaccurate predictions and even safety risks. Therefore, it is necessary to perform trajectory prediction based on instantaneous observations, which has rarely been studied before. In this paper, we propose a Bi-directional Consistent Diffusion framework tailored for instantaneous trajectory prediction, named BCDiff. At its heart, we develop two coupled diffusion models by designing a mutual guidance mechanism which can bidirectionally and consistently generate unobserved historical trajectories and future trajectories step-by-step,  to utilize the complementary information between them. Specifically, at each step, the predicted unobserved historical trajectories and limited observed trajectories guide one diffusion model to generate future trajectories, while the predicted future trajectories and observed trajectories guide the other diffusion model to predict unobserved historical trajectories. Given the presence of relatively high noise in the generated trajectories during the initial steps, we introduce a gating mechanism to learn the weights between the predicted trajectories and the limited observed trajectories for automatically balancing their contributions. By means of this iterative and mutually guided generation process, both the future and unobserved historical trajectories undergo continuous refinement, ultimately leading to accurate predictions. Essentially, BCDiff is an encoder-free framework that can be compatible with existing trajectory prediction models in principle. Experiments show that our proposed BCDiff significantly improves the accuracy of instantaneous trajectory prediction on the ETH/UCY and Stanford Drone datasets, compared to related approaches.
TexQ: Zero-shot Network Quantization with Texture Feature Distribution Calibration
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Quantization is an effective way to compress neural networks. By reducing the bit width of the parameters, the processing efficiency of neural network models at edge devices can be notably improved. Most conventional quantization methods utilize real datasets to optimize quantization parameters and fine-tune. Due to the inevitable privacy and security issues of real samples, the existing real-data-driven methods are no longer applicable. Thus, a natural method is to introduce synthetic samples for zero-shot quantization (ZSQ). However, the conventional synthetic samples fail to retain the detailed texture feature distributions, which severely limits the knowledge transfer and performance of the quantized model. In this paper, a novel ZSQ method, TexQ is proposed to address this issue. We first synthesize a calibration image and extract its calibration center for each class with a texture feature energy distribution calibration method. Then, the calibration centers are used to guide the generator to synthesize samples. Finally, we introduce the mixup knowledge distillation module to diversify synthetic samples for fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on CIFAR10/100 and ImageNet show that TexQ is observed to perform state-of-the-art in ultra-low bit width quantization. For example, when ResNet-18 is quantized to 3-bit, TexQ achieves a 12.18% top-1 accuracy increase on ImageNet compared to state-of-the-art methods. Code at https://github.com/dangsingrue/TexQ.Submission Number: 3309
Active Negative Loss Functions for Learning with Noisy Labels
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Robust loss functions are essential for training deep neural networks in the presence of noisy labels. Some robust loss functions use Mean Absolute Error (MAE) as its necessary component. For example, the recently proposed Active Passive Loss (APL) uses MAE as its passive loss function. However, MAE treats every sample equally, slows down the convergence and can make training difficult. In this work, we propose a new class of theoretically robust passive loss functions different from MAE, namely *Normalized Negative Loss Functions* (NNLFs), which focus more on memorized clean samples. By replacing the MAE in APL with our proposed NNLFs, we improve APL and propose a new framework called *Active Negative Loss* (ANL). Experimental results on benchmark and real-world datasets demonstrate that the new set of loss functions created by our ANL framework can outperform state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at
https://github.com/Virusdoll/Active-Negative-Loss.
Preconditioning Matters: Fast Global Convergence of Non-convex Matrix Factorization via Scaled Gradient Descent
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Low-rank matrix factorization (LRMF) is a canonical problem in non-convex optimization, the objective function to be minimized is non-convex and even non-smooth, which makes the global convergence guarantee of gradient-based algorithm quite challenging. Recent work made a breakthrough on proving that standard gradient descent converges to the $\varepsilon$-global minima after $O( \frac{d \kappa^2}{\tau^2} {\rm ln} \frac{d \sigma_d}{\tau} + \frac{d \kappa^2}{\tau^2} {\rm ln} \frac{\sigma_d}{\varepsilon})$ iterations from small initialization with a very small learning rate (both are related to the small constant $\tau$). While the dependence of the convergence on the \textit{condition number} $\kappa$ and \textit{small learning rate} makes it not practical especially for ill-conditioned LRMF problem.

In this paper, we show that precondition helps in accelerating the convergence and prove that the scaled gradient descent (ScaledGD) and its variant, alternating scaled gradient descent (AltScaledGD) converge to an $\varepsilon$-global minima after $O( {\rm ln} \frac{d}{\delta} + {\rm ln} \frac{d}{\varepsilon})$ iterations from general random initialization. Meanwhile, for small initialization as in gradient descent, both ScaledGD and AltScaledGD converge to $\varepsilon$-global minima after only $O({\rm ln} \frac{d}{\varepsilon})$ iterations. Furthermore, we prove that as a proximity to the alternating minimization, AltScaledGD converges faster than ScaledGD, its global convergence does not rely on small learning rate and small initialization, which certificates the advantages of AltScaledGD in LRMF.
Boosting Verification of Deep Reinforcement Learning via Piece-Wise Linear Decision Neural Networks
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Formally verifying deep reinforcement learning (DRL) systems suffers from both inaccurate verification results and limited scalability. The major obstacle lies in the large overestimation introduced inherently during training and then transforming the inexplicable decision-making models, i.e., deep neural networks (DNNs), into easy-to-verify models. In this paper, we propose an inverse transform-then-train approach, which first encodes a DNN into an equivalent set of efficiently and tightly verifiable linear control policies and then optimizes them via reinforcement learning.  We accompany our inverse approach with a novel neural network model called piece-wise linear decision neural networks (PLDNNs), which are compatible with most existing DRL training algorithms with comparable performance against conventional DNNs. Our extensive experiments show that, compared to DNN-based  DRL systems, PLDNN-based systems can be more efficiently and tightly verified with up to $438$ times speedup and a significant reduction in overestimation.  In particular, even a complex $12$-dimensional DRL system is efficiently verified with up to 7 times deeper computation steps.