pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Large Scale Real-World Multi-Person Tracking
Authors: Bing Shuai, Alessandro Bergamo, Uta Buechler, Andrew Berneshawi, Alyssa Boden, Joseph Tighe
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2022 7
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking

This paper presents a new large scale multi-person tracking dataset -- \texttt{PersonPath22}, which is over an order of magnitude larger than currently available high quality multi-object tracking datasets such as MOT17, HiEve, and MOT20 datasets. The lack of large scale training and test data for this task has limited the community's ability to understand the performance of their tracking systems on a wide range of scenarios and conditions such as variations in person density, actions being performed, weather, and time of day. \texttt{PersonPath22} dataset was specifically sourced to provide a wide variety of these conditions and our annotations include rich meta-data such that the performance of a tracker can be evaluated along these different dimensions. The lack of training data has also limited the ability to perform end-to-end training of tracking systems. As such, the highest performing tracking systems all rely on strong detectors trained on external image datasets. We hope that the release of this dataset will enable new lines of research that take advantage of large scale video based training data.
FactorMatte: Redefining Video Matting for Re-Composition Tasks
Authors: Zeqi Gu, Wenqi Xian, Noah Snavely, Abe Davis
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Image Matting, Video Matting

We propose "factor matting", an alternative formulation of the video matting problem in terms of counterfactual video synthesis that is better suited for re-composition tasks. The goal of factor matting is to separate the contents of video into independent components, each visualizing a counterfactual version of the scene where contents of other components have been removed. We show that factor matting maps well to a more general Bayesian framing of the matting problem that accounts for complex conditional interactions between layers. Based on this observation, we present a method for solving the factor matting problem that produces useful decompositions even for video with complex cross-layer interactions like splashes, shadows, and reflections. Our method is trained per-video and requires neither pre-training on external large datasets, nor knowledge about the 3D structure of the scene. We conduct extensive experiments, and show that our method not only can disentangle scenes with complex interactions, but also outperforms top methods on existing tasks such as classical video matting and background subtraction. In addition, we demonstrate the benefits of our approach on a range of downstream tasks. Please refer to our project webpage for more details: https://factormatte.github.io
Improving Semi-supervised Deep Learning by using Automatic Thresholding to Deal with Out of Distribution Data for COVID-19 Detection using Chest X-ray Images
Authors: Isaac Benavides-Mata, Saul Calderon-Ramirez
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) leverages both labeled and unlabeled data for training models when the labeled data is limited and the unlabeled data is vast. Frequently, the unlabeled data is more widely available than the labeled data, hence this data is used to improve the level of generalization of a model when the labeled data is scarce. However, in real-world settings unlabeled data might depict a different distribution than the labeled dataset distribution. This is known as distribution mismatch. Such problem generally occurs when the source of unlabeled data is different from the labeled data. For instance, in the medical imaging domain, when training a COVID-19 detector using chest X-ray images, different unlabeled datasets sampled from different hospitals might be used. In this work, we propose an automatic thresholding method to filter out-of-distribution data in the unlabeled dataset. We use the Mahalanobis distance between the labeled and unlabeled datasets using the feature space built by a pre-trained Image-net Feature Extractor (FE) to score each unlabeled observation. We test two simple automatic thresholding methods in the context of training a COVID-19 detector using chest X-ray images. The tested methods provide an automatic manner to define what unlabeled data to preserve when training a semi-supervised deep learning architecture.
Shapes2Toon: Generating Cartoon Characters from Simple Geometric Shapes
Authors: Simanta Deb Turja, Mohammad Imrul Jubair, Md. Shafiur Rahman, Md. Hasib Al Zadid, Mohtasim Hossain Shovon, Md. Faraz Kabir Khan
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Generative Adversarial Network, Image-to-Image Translation

Cartoons are an important part of our entertainment culture. Though drawing a cartoon is not for everyone, creating it using an arrangement of basic geometric primitives that approximates that character is a fairly frequent technique in art. The key motivation behind this technique is that human bodies - as well as cartoon figures - can be split down into various basic geometric primitives. Numerous tutorials are available that demonstrate how to draw figures using an appropriate arrangement of fundamental shapes, thus assisting us in creating cartoon characters. This technique is very beneficial for children in terms of teaching them how to draw cartoons. In this paper, we develop a tool - shape2toon - that aims to automate this approach by utilizing a generative adversarial network which combines geometric primitives (i.e. circles) and generate a cartoon figure (i.e. Mickey Mouse) depending on the given approximation. For this purpose, we created a dataset of geometrically represented cartoon characters. We apply an image-to-image translation technique on our dataset and report the results in this paper. The experimental results show that our system can generate cartoon characters from input layout of geometric shapes. In addition, we demonstrate a web-based tool as a practical implication of our work.
Book Cover Synthesis from the Summary
Authors: Emdadul Haque, Md. Faraz Kabir Khan, Mohammad Imrul Jubair, Jarin Anjum, Abrar Zahir Niloy
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

The cover is the face of a book and is a point of attraction for the readers. Designing book covers is an essential task in the publishing industry. One of the main challenges in creating a book cover is representing the theme of the book's content in a single image. In this research, we explore ways to produce a book cover using artificial intelligence based on the fact that there exists a relationship between the summary of the book and its cover. Our key motivation is the application of text-to-image synthesis methods to generate images from given text or captions. We explore several existing text-to-image conversion techniques for this purpose and propose an approach to exploit these frameworks for producing book covers from provided summaries. We construct a dataset of English books that contains a large number of samples of summaries of existing books and their cover images. In this paper, we describe our approach to collecting, organizing, and pre-processing the dataset to use it for training models. We apply different text-to-image synthesis techniques to generate book covers from the summary and exhibit the results in this paper.
Streaming Audio-Visual Speech Recognition with Alignment Regularization
Authors: Pingchuan Ma, Niko Moritz, Stavros Petridis, Christian Fuegen, Maja Pantic
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decision Making, Decoder, Lip Reading, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Visual Speech Recognition

In this work, we propose a streaming AV-ASR system based on a hybrid connectionist temporal classification (CTC)/attention neural network architecture. The audio and the visual encoder neural networks are both based on the conformer architecture, which is made streamable using chunk-wise self-attention (CSA) and causal convolution. Streaming recognition with a decoder neural network is realized by using the triggered attention technique, which performs time-synchronous decoding with joint CTC/attention scoring. Additionally, we propose a novel alignment regularization technique that promotes synchronization of the audio and visual encoder, which in turn results in better word error rates (WERs) at all SNR levels for streaming and offline AV-ASR models. The proposed AV-ASR model achieves WERs of 2.0% and 2.6% on the Lip Reading Sentences 3 (LRS3) dataset in an offline and online setup, respectively, which both present state-of-the-art results when no external training data are used.
Efficient Information Sharing in ICT Supply Chain Social Network via Table Structure Recognition
Authors: Bin Xiao, Yakup Akkaya, Murat Simsek, Burak Kantarci, Ala Abu Alkheir
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, object-detection, Object Detection

The global Information and Communications Technology (ICT) supply chain is a complex network consisting of all types of participants. It is often formulated as a Social Network to discuss the supply chain network's relations, properties, and development in supply chain management. Information sharing plays a crucial role in improving the efficiency of the supply chain, and datasheets are the most common data format to describe e-component commodities in the ICT supply chain because of human readability. However, with the surging number of electronic documents, it has been far beyond the capacity of human readers, and it is also challenging to process tabular data automatically because of the complex table structures and heterogeneous layouts. Table Structure Recognition (TSR) aims to represent tables with complex structures in a machine-interpretable format so that the tabular data can be processed automatically. In this paper, we formulate TSR as an object detection problem and propose to generate an intuitive representation of a complex table structure to enable structuring of the tabular data related to the commodities. To cope with border-less and small layouts, we propose a cost-sensitive loss function by considering the detection difficulty of each class. Besides, we propose a novel anchor generation method using the character of tables that columns in a table should share an identical height, and rows in a table should share the same width. We implement our proposed method based on Faster-RCNN and achieve 94.79% on mean Average Precision (AP), and consistently improve more than 1.5% AP for different benchmark models.
Graph-Based Multi-Camera Soccer Player Tracker
Authors: Jacek Komorowski, Grzegorz Kurzejamski
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00

The paper presents a multi-camera tracking method intended for tracking soccer players in long shot video recordings from multiple calibrated cameras installed around the playing field. The large distance to the camera makes it difficult to visually distinguish individual players, which adversely affects the performance of traditional solutions relying on the appearance of tracked objects. Our method focuses on individual player dynamics and interactions between neighborhood players to improve tracking performance. To overcome the difficulty of reliably merging detections from multiple cameras in the presence of calibration errors, we propose the novel tracking approach, where the tracker operates directly on raw detection heat maps from multiple cameras. Our model is trained on a large synthetic dataset generated using Google Research Football Environment and fine-tuned using real-world data to reduce costs involved with ground truth preparation.
Abstract Images Have Different Levels of Retrievability Per Reverse Image Search Engine
Authors: Shawn M. Jones, Diane Oyen
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval

Much computer vision research has focused on natural images, but technical documents typically consist of abstract images, such as charts, drawings, diagrams, and schematics. How well do general web search engines discover abstract images? Recent advancements in computer vision and machine learning have led to the rise of reverse image search engines. Where conventional search engines accept a text query and return a set of document results, including images, a reverse image search accepts an image as a query and returns a set of images as results. This paper evaluates how well common reverse image search engines discover abstract images. We conducted an experiment leveraging images from Wikimedia Commons, a website known to be well indexed by Baidu, Bing, Google, and Yandex. We measure how difficult an image is to find again (retrievability), what percentage of images returned are relevant (precision), and the average number of results a visitor must review before finding the submitted image (mean reciprocal rank). When trying to discover the same image again among similar images, Yandex performs best. When searching for pages containing a specific image, Google and Yandex outperform the others when discovering photographs with precision scores ranging from 0.8191 to 0.8297, respectively. In both of these cases, Google and Yandex perform better with natural images than with abstract ones achieving a difference in retrievability as high as 54\% between images in these categories. These results affect anyone applying common web search engines to search for technical documents that use abstract images.
Translated Skip Connections -- Expanding the Receptive Fields of Fully Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Joshua Bruton, Hairong Wang
Date: 2022-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Self-Driving Cars, Semantic Segmentation

The effective receptive field of a fully convolutional neural network is an important consideration when designing an architecture, as it defines the portion of the input visible to each convolutional kernel. We propose a neural network module, extending traditional skip connections, called the translated skip connection. Translated skip connections geometrically increase the receptive field of an architecture with negligible impact on both the size of the parameter space and computational complexity. By embedding translated skip connections into a benchmark architecture, we demonstrate that our module matches or outperforms four other approaches to expanding the effective receptive fields of fully convolutional neural networks. We confirm this result across five contemporary image segmentation datasets from disparate domains, including the detection of COVID-19 infection, segmentation of aerial imagery, common object segmentation, and segmentation for self-driving cars.
Reservoir Computing via Quantum Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, Daniel Fry, Amol Deshmukh, Vladimir Rastunkov, Charlee Stefanski
Date: 2022-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Prediction

Recent developments in quantum computing and machine learning have propelled the interdisciplinary study of quantum machine learning. Sequential modeling is an important task with high scientific and commercial value. Existing VQC or QNN-based methods require significant computational resources to perform the gradient-based optimization of a larger number of quantum circuit parameters. The major drawback is that such quantum gradient calculation requires a large amount of circuit evaluation, posing challenges in current near-term quantum hardware and simulation software. In this work, we approach sequential modeling by applying a reservoir computing (RC) framework to quantum recurrent neural networks (QRNN-RC) that are based on classical RNN, LSTM and GRU. The main idea to this RC approach is that the QRNN with randomly initialized weights is treated as a dynamical system and only the final classical linear layer is trained. Our numerical simulations show that the QRNN-RC can reach results comparable to fully trained QRNN models for several function approximation and time series prediction tasks. Since the QRNN training complexity is significantly reduced, the proposed model trains notably faster. In this work we also compare to corresponding classical RNN-based RC implementations and show that the quantum version learns faster by requiring fewer training epochs in most cases. Our results demonstrate a new possibility to utilize quantum neural network for sequential modeling with greater quantum hardware efficiency, an important design consideration for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers.
Improving the Predictive Performances of $k$ Nearest Neighbors Learning by Efficient Variable Selection
Authors: Eddie Pei, Ernest Fokoue
Date: 2022-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Variable Selection

This paper computationally demonstrates a sharp improvement in predictive performance for $k$ nearest neighbors thanks to an efficient forward selection of the predictor variables. We show both simulated and real-world data that this novel repeatedly approaches outperformance regression models under stepwise selection
Modeling Temporal Data as Continuous Functions with Stochastic Process Diffusion
Authors: Marin Biloš, Kashif Rasul, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Stephan Günnemann
Date: 2022-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Imputation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Temporal data such as time series can be viewed as discretized measurements of the underlying function. To build a generative model for such data we have to model the stochastic process that governs it. We propose a solution by defining the denoising diffusion model in the function space which also allows us to naturally handle irregularly-sampled observations. The forward process gradually adds noise to functions, preserving their continuity, while the learned reverse process removes the noise and returns functions as new samples. To this end, we define suitable noise sources and introduce novel denoising and score-matching models. We show how our method can be used for multivariate probabilistic forecasting and imputation, and how our model can be interpreted as a neural process.
CCATMos: Convolutional Context-aware Transformer Network for Non-intrusive Speech Quality Assessment
Authors: Yuchen Liu, Li-Chia Yang, Alex Pawlicki, Marko Stamenovic
Date: 2022-11-04 00:00:00

Speech quality assessment has been a critical component in many voice communication related applications such as telephony and online conferencing. Traditional intrusive speech quality assessment requires the clean reference of the degraded utterance to provide an accurate quality measurement. This requirement limits the usability of these methods in real-world scenarios. On the other hand, non-intrusive subjective measurement is the ``golden standard" in evaluating speech quality as human listeners can intrinsically evaluate the quality of any degraded speech with ease. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end model structure called Convolutional Context-Aware Transformer (CCAT) network to predict the mean opinion score (MOS) of human raters. We evaluate our model on three MOS-annotated datasets spanning multiple languages and distortion types and submit our results to the ConferencingSpeech 2022 Challenge. Our experiments show that CCAT provides promising MOS predictions compared to current state-of-art non-intrusive speech assessment models with average Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) increasing from 0.530 to 0.697 and average RMSE decreasing from 0.768 to 0.570 compared to the baseline model on the challenge evaluation test set.
The 'Problem' of Human Label Variation: On Ground Truth in Data, Modeling and Evaluation
Authors: Barbara Plank
Date: 2022-11-04 00:00:00

Human variation in labeling is often considered noise. Annotation projects for machine learning (ML) aim at minimizing human label variation, with the assumption to maximize data quality and in turn optimize and maximize machine learning metrics. However, this conventional practice assumes that there exists a ground truth, and neglects that there exists genuine human variation in labeling due to disagreement, subjectivity in annotation or multiple plausible answers. In this position paper, we argue that this big open problem of human label variation persists and critically needs more attention to move our field forward. This is because human label variation impacts all stages of the ML pipeline: data, modeling and evaluation. However, few works consider all of these dimensions jointly; and existing research is fragmented. We reconcile different previously proposed notions of human label variation, provide a repository of publicly-available datasets with un-aggregated labels, depict approaches proposed so far, identify gaps and suggest ways forward. As datasets are becoming increasingly available, we hope that this synthesized view on the 'problem' will lead to an open discussion on possible strategies to devise fundamentally new directions.
scikit-fda: A Python Package for Functional Data Analysis
Authors: Carlos Ramos-Carreño, José Luis Torrecilla, Miguel Carbajo-Berrocal, Pablo Marcos, Alberto Suárez
Date: 2022-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection

The library scikit-fda is a Python package for Functional Data Analysis (FDA). It provides a comprehensive set of tools for representation, preprocessing, and exploratory analysis of functional data. The library is built upon and integrated in Python's scientific ecosystem. In particular, it conforms to the scikit-learn application programming interface so as to take advantage of the functionality for machine learning provided by this package: pipelines, model selection, and hyperparameter tuning, among others. The scikit-fda package has been released as free and open-source software under a 3-Clause BSD license and is open to contributions from the FDA community. The library's extensive documentation includes step-by-step tutorials and detailed examples of use.
A Comparison of SVM against Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) for Text Classification Tasks
Authors: Yasmen Wahba, Nazim Madhavji, John Steinbacher
Date: 2022-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, text-classification, Text Classification

The emergence of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has shown great success in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks including text classification. Due to the minimal to no feature engineering required when using these models, PLMs are becoming the de facto choice for any NLP task. However, for domain-specific corpora (e.g., financial, legal, and industrial), fine-tuning a pre-trained model for a specific task has shown to provide a performance improvement. In this paper, we compare the performance of four different PLMs on three public domain-free datasets and a real-world dataset containing domain-specific words, against a simple SVM linear classifier with TFIDF vectorized text. The experimental results on the four datasets show that using PLMs, even fine-tuned, do not provide significant gain over the linear SVM classifier. Hence, we recommend that for text classification tasks, traditional SVM along with careful feature engineering can pro-vide a cheaper and superior performance than PLMs.