pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Continual Learning with Deep Learning Methods in an Application-Oriented Context
Authors: Benedikt Pfülb
Date: 2022-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Continual Learning

Abstract knowledge is deeply grounded in many computer-based applications. An important research area of Artificial Intelligence (AI) deals with the automatic derivation of knowledge from data. Machine learning offers the according algorithms. One area of research focuses on the development of biologically inspired learning algorithms. The respective machine learning methods are based on neurological concepts so that they can systematically derive knowledge from data and store it. One type of machine learning algorithms that can be categorized as "deep learning" model is referred to as Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). DNNs consist of multiple artificial neurons arranged in layers that are trained by using the backpropagation algorithm. These deep learning methods exhibit amazing capabilities for inferring and storing complex knowledge from high-dimensional data. However, DNNs are affected by a problem that prevents new knowledge from being added to an existing base. The ability to continuously accumulate knowledge is an important factor that contributed to evolution and is therefore a prerequisite for the development of strong AIs. The so-called "catastrophic forgetting" (CF) effect causes DNNs to immediately loose already derived knowledge after a few training iterations on a new data distribution. Only an energetically expensive retraining with the joint data distribution of past and new data enables the abstraction of the entire new set of knowledge. In order to counteract the effect, various techniques have been and are still being developed with the goal to mitigate or even solve the CF problem. These published CF avoidance studies usually imply the effectiveness of their approaches for various continual learning tasks. This dissertation is set in the context of continual machine learning with deep learning methods. The first part deals with the development of an ...
Forecasting COVID-19 spreading trough an ensemble of classical and machine learning models: Spain's case study
Authors: Ignacio Heredia Cacha, Judith Sainz-Pardo Díaz, María Castrillo Melguizo, Álvaro López García
Date: 2022-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In this work we evaluate the applicability of an ensemble of population models and machine learning models to predict the near future evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a particular use case in Spain. We rely solely in open and public datasets, fusing incidence, vaccination, human mobility and weather data to feed our machine learning models (Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, k-Nearest Neighbours and Kernel Ridge Regression). We use the incidence data to adjust classic population models (Gompertz, Logistic, Richards, Bertalanffy) in order to be able to better capture the trend of the data. We then ensemble these two families of models in order to obtain a more robust and accurate prediction. Furthermore, we have observed an improvement in the predictions obtained with machine learning models as we add new features (vaccines, mobility, climatic conditions), analyzing the importance of each of them using Shapley Additive Explanation values. As in any other modelling work, data and predictions quality have several limitations and therefore they must be seen from a critical standpoint, as we discuss in the text. Our work concludes that the ensemble use of these models improves the individual predictions (using only machine learning models or only population models) and can be applied, with caution, in cases when compartmental models cannot be utilized due to the lack of relevant data.
FD-GATDR: A Federated-Decentralized-Learning Graph Attention Network for Doctor Recommendation Using EHR
Authors: Luning Bi, Yunlong Wang, Fan Zhang, Zhuqing Liu, Yong Cai, Emily Zhao
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Recommendation Systems

In the past decade, with the development of big data technology, an increasing amount of patient information has been stored as electronic health records (EHRs). Leveraging these data, various doctor recommendation systems have been proposed. Typically, such studies process the EHR data in a flat-structured manner, where each encounter was treated as an unordered set of features. Nevertheless, the heterogeneous structured information such as service sequence stored in claims shall not be ignored. This paper presents a doctor recommendation system with time embedding to reconstruct the potential connections between patients and doctors using heterogeneous graph attention network. Besides, to address the privacy issue of patient data sharing crossing hospitals, a federated decentralized learning method based on a minimization optimization model is also proposed. The graph-based recommendation system has been validated on a EHR dataset. Compared to baseline models, the proposed method improves the AUC by up to 6.2%. And our proposed federated-based algorithm not only yields the fictitious fusion center's performance but also enjoys a convergence rate of O(1/T).
Physics Informed Symbolic Networks
Authors: Ritam Majumdar, Vishal Jadhav, Anirudh Deodhar, Shirish Karande, Lovekesh Vig, Venkataramana Runkana
Date: 2022-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

We introduce Physics Informed Symbolic Networks (PISN) which utilize physics-informed loss to obtain a symbolic solution for a system of Partial Differential Equations (PDE). Given a context-free grammar to describe the language of symbolic expressions, we propose to use weighted sum as continuous approximation for selection of a production rule. We use this approximation to define multilayer symbolic networks. We consider Kovasznay flow (Navier-Stokes) and two-dimensional viscous Burger's equations to illustrate that PISN are able to provide a performance comparable to PINNs across various start-of-the-art advances: multiple outputs and governing equations, domain-decomposition, hypernetworks. Furthermore, we propose Physics-informed Neurosymbolic Networks (PINSN) which employ a multilayer perceptron (MLP) operator to model the residue of symbolic networks. PINSNs are observed to give 2-3 orders of performance gain over standard PINN.
Developing an NLP-based Recommender System for the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Synthetic Biology
Authors: Damien Dablain, Lilian Huang, Brandon Sepulvado
Date: 2022-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Synthetic biology is an emerging field that involves the engineering and re-design of organisms for purposes such as food security, health, and environmental protection. As such, it poses numerous ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) for researchers and policy makers. Various efforts to ensure socially responsible synthetic biology are underway. Policy making is one regulatory avenue, and other initiatives have sought to embed social scientists and ethicists on synthetic biology projects. However, given the nascency of synthetic biology, the number of heterogeneous domains it spans, and the open nature of many ethical questions, it has proven challenging to establish widespread concrete policies, and including social scientists and ethicists on synthetic biology teams has met with mixed success. This text proposes a different approach, asking instead is it possible to develop a well-performing recommender model based upon natural language processing (NLP) to connect synthetic biologists with information on the ELSI of their specific research? This recommender was developed as part of a larger project building a Synthetic Biology Knowledge System (SBKS) to accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. Our approach aims to distill for synthetic biologists relevant ethical and social scientific information and embed it into synthetic biology research workflows.
Deep Transformer Model with Pre-Layer Normalization for COVID-19 Growth Prediction
Authors: Rizki Ramadhan Fitra, Novanto Yudistira, Wayan Firdaus Mahmudy
Date: 2022-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Coronavirus disease or COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The first confirmed case caused by this virus was found at the end of December 2019 in Wuhan City, China. This case then spread throughout the world, including Indonesia. Therefore, the COVID-19 case was designated as a global pandemic by WHO. The growth of COVID-19 cases, especially in Indonesia, can be predicted using several approaches, such as the Deep Neural Network (DNN). One of the DNN models that can be used is Deep Transformer which can predict time series. The model is trained with several test scenarios to get the best model. The evaluation is finding the best hyperparameters. Then, further evaluation was carried out using the best hyperparameters setting of the number of prediction days, the optimizer, the number of features, and comparison with the former models of the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). All evaluations used metric of the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Based on the results of the evaluations, Deep Transformer produces the best results when using the Pre-Layer Normalization and predicting one day ahead with a MAPE value of 18.83. Furthermore, the model trained with the Adamax optimizer obtains the best performance among other tested optimizers. The performance of the Deep Transformer also exceeds other test models, which are LSTM and RNN.
Towards Highly Expressive Machine Learning Models of Non-Melanoma Skin Cancer
Authors: Simon M. Thomas, James G. Lefevre, Glenn Baxter, Nicholas A. Hamilton
Date: 2022-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Pathologists have a rich vocabulary with which they can describe all the nuances of cellular morphology. In their world, there is a natural pairing of images and words. Recent advances demonstrate that machine learning models can now be trained to learn high-quality image features and represent them as discrete units of information. This enables natural language, which is also discrete, to be jointly modelled alongside the imaging, resulting in a description of the contents of the imaging. Here we present experiments in applying discrete modelling techniques to the problem domain of non-melanoma skin cancer, specifically, histological images of Intraepidermal Carcinoma (IEC). Implementing a VQ-GAN model to reconstruct high-resolution (256x256) images of IEC images, we trained a sequence-to-sequence transformer to generate natural language descriptions using pathologist terminology. Combined with the idea of interactive concept vectors available by using continuous generative methods, we demonstrate an additional angle of interpretability. The result is a promising means of working towards highly expressive machine learning systems which are not only useful as predictive/classification tools, but also means to further our scientific understanding of disease.
Improving Wikipedia Verifiability with AI
Authors: Fabio Petroni, Samuel Broscheit, Aleksandra Piktus, Patrick Lewis, Gautier Izacard, Lucas Hosseini, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Maria Lomeli, Timo Schick, Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré, Armand Joulin, Edouard Grave, Sebastian Riedel
Date: 2022-07-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Citation Recommendation, Fact Checking

Verifiability is a core content policy of Wikipedia: claims that are likely to be challenged need to be backed by citations. There are millions of articles available online and thousands of new articles are released each month. For this reason, finding relevant sources is a difficult task: many claims do not have any references that support them. Furthermore, even existing citations might not support a given claim or become obsolete once the original source is updated or deleted. Hence, maintaining and improving the quality of Wikipedia references is an important challenge and there is a pressing need for better tools to assist humans in this effort. Here, we show that the process of improving references can be tackled with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). We develop a neural network based system, called Side, to identify Wikipedia citations that are unlikely to support their claims, and subsequently recommend better ones from the web. We train this model on existing Wikipedia references, therefore learning from the contributions and combined wisdom of thousands of Wikipedia editors. Using crowd-sourcing, we observe that for the top 10% most likely citations to be tagged as unverifiable by our system, humans prefer our system's suggested alternatives compared to the originally cited reference 70% of the time. To validate the applicability of our system, we built a demo to engage with the English-speaking Wikipedia community and find that Side's first citation recommendation collects over 60% more preferences than existing Wikipedia citations for the same top 10% most likely unverifiable claims according to Side. Our results indicate that an AI-based system could be used, in tandem with humans, to improve the verifiability of Wikipedia. More generally, we hope that our work can be used to assist fact checking efforts and increase the general trustworthiness of information online.
PyMAF-X: Towards Well-aligned Full-body Model Regression from Monocular Images
Authors: Hongwen Zhang, Yating Tian, Yuxiang Zhang, Mengcheng Li, Liang An, Zhenan Sun, Yebin Liu
Date: 2022-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D human pose and shape estimation, 3D Human Pose Estimation, Human Mesh Recovery, Markerless Motion Capture, regression

We present PyMAF-X, a regression-based approach to recovering parametric full-body models from monocular images. This task is very challenging since minor parametric deviation may lead to noticeable misalignment between the estimated mesh and the input image. Moreover, when integrating part-specific estimations into the full-body model, existing solutions tend to either degrade the alignment or produce unnatural wrist poses. To address these issues, we propose a Pyramidal Mesh Alignment Feedback (PyMAF) loop in our regression network for well-aligned human mesh recovery and extend it as PyMAF-X for the recovery of expressive full-body models. The core idea of PyMAF is to leverage a feature pyramid and rectify the predicted parameters explicitly based on the mesh-image alignment status. Specifically, given the currently predicted parameters, mesh-aligned evidence will be extracted from finer-resolution features accordingly and fed back for parameter rectification. To enhance the alignment perception, an auxiliary dense supervision is employed to provide mesh-image correspondence guidance while spatial alignment attention is introduced to enable the awareness of the global contexts for our network. When extending PyMAF for full-body mesh recovery, an adaptive integration strategy is proposed in PyMAF-X to produce natural wrist poses while maintaining the well-aligned performance of the part-specific estimations. The efficacy of our approach is validated on several benchmark datasets for body, hand, face, and full-body mesh recovery, where PyMAF and PyMAF-X effectively improve the mesh-image alignment and achieve new state-of-the-art results. The project page with code and video results can be found at https://www.liuyebin.com/pymaf-x.
River Surface Patch-wise Detector Using Mixture Augmentation for Scum-cover-index
Authors: Takato Yasuno, Junichiro Fujii, Masazumi Amakata
Date: 2022-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Augmentation, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Urban rivers provide a water environment that influences residential living. River surface monitoring has become crucial for making decisions about where to prioritize cleaning and when to automatically start the cleaning treatment. We focus on the organic mud, or "scum", that accumulates on the river's surface and contributes to the river's odor and has external economic effects on the landscape. Because of its feature of a sparsely distributed and unstable pattern of organic shape, automating the monitoring process has proved difficult. We propose a patch-wise classification pipeline to detect scum features on the river surface using mixture image augmentation to increase the diversity between the scum floating on the river and the entangled background on the river surface reflected by nearby structures like buildings, bridges, poles, and barriers. Furthermore, we propose a scum-index cover on rivers to help monitor worse grade online, collect floating scum, and decide on chemical treatment policies. Finally, we demonstrate the application of our method on a time series dataset with frames every ten minutes recording river scum events over several days. We discuss the significance of our pipeline and its experimental findings.
A General Framework for Partial to Full Image Registration
Authors: Carlos Francisco Moreno-Garcia, Francesc Serratosa
Date: 2022-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

Image registration is a research field in which images must be compared and aligned independently of the point of view or camera characteristics. In some applications (such as forensic biometrics, satellite photography or outdoor scene identification) classical image registration systems fail due to one of the images compared represents a tiny piece of the other image. For instance, in forensics palmprint recognition, it is usual to find only a small piece of the palmprint, but in the database, the whole palmprint has been enrolled. The main reason of the poor behaviour of classical image registration methods is the gap between the amounts of salient points of both images, which is related to the number of points to be considered as outliers. Usually, the difficulty of finding a good match increases when the image that represents the tiny part of the scene has been drastically rotated. Again, in the case of palmprint forensics, it is difficult to decide a priori the orientation of the found tiny palmprint image. We present a rotation invariant registration method that explicitly considers that the image to be matched is a small piece of a larger image. We have experimentally validated our method in two different scenarios; palmprint identification and outdoor image registration.
Joint Prediction of Monocular Depth and Structure using Planar and Parallax Geometry
Authors: Hao Xing, Yifan Cao, Maximilian Biber, Mingchuan Zhou, Darius Burschka
Date: 2022-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction

Supervised learning depth estimation methods can achieve good performance when trained on high-quality ground-truth, like LiDAR data. However, LiDAR can only generate sparse 3D maps which causes losing information. Obtaining high-quality ground-truth depth data per pixel is difficult to acquire. In order to overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach combining structure information from a promising Plane and Parallax geometry pipeline with depth information into a U-Net supervised learning network, which results in quantitative and qualitative improvement compared to existing popular learning-based methods. In particular, the model is evaluated on two large-scale and challenging datasets: KITTI Vision Benchmark and Cityscapes dataset and achieve the best performance in terms of relative error. Compared with pure depth supervision models, our model has impressive performance on depth prediction of thin objects and edges, and compared to structure prediction baseline, our model performs more robustly.
You Only Align Once: Bidirectional Interaction for Spatial-Temporal Video Super-Resolution
Authors: Mengshun Hu, Kui Jiang, Zhixiang Nie, Zheng Wang
Date: 2022-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution, Video Super-Resolution

Spatial-Temporal Video Super-Resolution (ST-VSR) technology generates high-quality videos with higher resolution and higher frame rates. Existing advanced methods accomplish ST-VSR tasks through the association of Spatial and Temporal video super-resolution (S-VSR and T-VSR). These methods require two alignments and fusions in S-VSR and T-VSR, which is obviously redundant and fails to sufficiently explore the information flow of consecutive spatial LR frames. Although bidirectional learning (future-to-past and past-to-future) was introduced to cover all input frames, the direct fusion of final predictions fails to sufficiently exploit intrinsic correlations of bidirectional motion learning and spatial information from all frames. We propose an effective yet efficient recurrent network with bidirectional interaction for ST-VSR, where only one alignment and fusion is needed. Specifically, it first performs backward inference from future to past, and then follows forward inference to super-resolve intermediate frames. The backward and forward inferences are assigned to learn structures and details to simplify the learning task with joint optimizations. Furthermore, a Hybrid Fusion Module (HFM) is designed to aggregate and distill information to refine spatial information and reconstruct high-quality video frames. Extensive experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in efficiency, and reduces calculation cost by about 22%.
6D Camera Relocalization in Visually Ambiguous Extreme Environments
Authors: Yang Zheng, Tolga Birdal, Fei Xia, Yanchao Yang, Yueqi Duan, Leonidas J. Guibas
Date: 2022-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Relocalization, Image Enhancement

We propose a novel method to reliably estimate the pose of a camera given a sequence of images acquired in extreme environments such as deep seas or extraterrestrial terrains. Data acquired under these challenging conditions are corrupted by textureless surfaces, image degradation, and presence of repetitive and highly ambiguous structures. When naively deployed, the state-of-the-art methods can fail in those scenarios as confirmed by our empirical analysis. In this paper, we attempt to make camera relocalization work in these extreme situations. To this end, we propose: (i) a hierarchical localization system, where we leverage temporal information and (ii) a novel environment-aware image enhancement method to boost the robustness and accuracy. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate superior performance in favor of our method under two extreme settings: localizing an autonomous underwater vehicle and localizing a planetary rover in a Mars-like desert. In addition, our method achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods on the indoor benchmark (7-Scenes dataset) using only 20% training data.
Symmetry-Aware Transformer-based Mirror Detection
Authors: Tianyu Huang, Bowen Dong, Jiaying Lin, Xiaohui Liu, Rynson W. H. Lau, WangMeng Zuo
Date: 2022-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Mirror Detection

Mirror detection aims to identify the mirror regions in the given input image. Existing works mainly focus on integrating the semantic features and structural features to mine specific relations between mirror and non-mirror regions, or introducing mirror properties like depth or chirality to help analyze the existence of mirrors. In this work, we observe that a real object typically forms a loose symmetry relationship with its corresponding reflection in the mirror, which is beneficial in distinguishing mirrors from real objects. Based on this observation, we propose a dual-path Symmetry-Aware Transformer-based mirror detection Network (SATNet), which includes two novel modules: Symmetry-Aware Attention Module (SAAM) and Contrast and Fusion Decoder Module (CFDM). Specifically, we first adopt a transformer backbone to model global information aggregation in images, extracting multi-scale features in two paths. We then feed the high-level dual-path features to SAAMs to capture the symmetry relations. Finally, we fuse the dual-path features and refine our prediction maps progressively with CFDMs to obtain the final mirror mask. Experimental results show that SATNet outperforms both RGB and RGB-D mirror detection methods on all available mirror detection datasets. Codes and trained models are available at: https://github.com/tyhuang0428/SATNet.