Italy

Among the wide variety of image generative models, two models stand out: Variational Auto Encoders (VAE) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). GANs can produce realistic images, but they suffer from mode collapse and do not provide simple ways to get the latent representation of an image. On the other hand, VAEs do not have these problems, but they often generate images less realistic than GANs. In this article, we explain that this lack of realism is partially due to a common underestimation of the natural image manifold dimensionality. To solve this issue we introduce a new framework that combines VAE and GAN in a novel and complementary way to produce an auto-encoding model that keeps VAEs properties while generating images of GAN-quality. We evaluate our approach both qualitatively and quantitatively on five image datasets.

ICPR 2020

AVAE: Adversarial Variational Auto Encoder

generative model

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

The 37th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2021) is held fully online. We have an exciting program consisting of keynote talks by [Susan Murphy](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=A), [Eric Horvitz](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=B), [Lenka Zdeborová](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=C), [Judea Pearl](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=D) and [Ankur Moitra](https://www.auai.org/uai2021/program?block=E), a town hall meeting, peer-reviewed papers, and three workshops. The main conference is single-track and each paper is show-cased with a live component (either a live discussion and Q&A, or a live lightning talk). All papers are also featured in video presentations and in poster sessions in gather.town. The three parallel workshops on Friday allow for smaller meetings on current topics.

The walkthrough video below shows how you can navigate this site and use the different possibilities for interaction: UAIsland2021 on gather.town for posters and social interactions, the mementor platform for virtual mentoring sessions, and the chat and Q&A systems for discussions about talks and posters.

Have a great UAI 2021! 
<br>
<br>Cassio de Campos and Marloes Maathuis
<br>UAI 2021 Program Chairs
<br>uai2021programchairs@gmail.com

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A ticket is required to access this conference. Please use the provided link to register for the event.

https://auai.org/uai2021/registration

UAI 2021

The Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI) is one of the premier international conferences on research related to knowledge representation, learning, and reasoning in the presence of uncertainty. It is supported by the [Association for Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (AUAI).](https://www.auai.org/)

poster

ICPR 2020 is the premier international conference on Pattern Recognition, gathering leading researchers from around the world to present their latest achievements in Pattern Analysis and Recognition, applied Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The topic of the year is " Putting Artificial intelligence to work on Patterns". 
For the first time, ICPR has employed a two-round review process similar to journal submissions, with new papers allowed to be submitted in either the first or second round and papers submitted in the first round and not accepted allowed to be revised and re-submitted for second round review. 

In this edition of the **ICPR 2020** Conference, there are 1407 Oral/Poster presentations organized in five Tracks: 
- Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning for Pattern Analysis; 
- Biometrics, Human Analysis and Behavior Understanding; Computer Vision, Robotics and Intelligent Systems; 
- Document and Media Analysis; and 
- Image and Signal Processing. 

The **ICPR 2020** Main Conference program also includes 7 Keynotes from prominent world-renowned scientists, 8 Tutorials, 28 Demos, 8 Challenges, 2 Panels, as well as an Industry/Sponsor Exhibition. In addition, 41 Workshops on a range of important current and emerging research topics complete the ICPR 2020 program. 


Understanding human behaviors in crowded scenar- ios requires analyzing not only the position of the subjects in space, but also the scene context. Existing approaches mostly rely on the motion history of each pedestrian and model the interactions among people by considering the entire surrounding neighborhood. In our approach, we address the problem of motion prediction by applying coherent group clustering and a global attention mechanism on the LSTM-based Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The proposed model consists of an attentive group-aware GAN that observes the agents’ past motion and predicts future paths, using (i) a group pooling module to model neighborhood interaction, and (ii) an attention module to specifically focus on hidden states. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposal outperforms state-of-the- art models on common benchmark datasets, and is able to generate socially-acceptable trajectories.

AG-GAN: An Attentive Group-Aware GAN for pedestrian trajectory prediction

Feature-based transfer is one of the most effective methodologies for transfer learning. Existing studies usually assume that the learned new feature representation is truly \emph{domain-invariant}, and thus directly train a transfer model $\mathcal{M}$ on source domain. In this paper, we consider a more realistic scenario where the new feature representation is suboptimal and small divergence still exists across domains. We propose a new learning strategy with a transfer model called Randomized Transferable Machine (RTM). More specifically, we work on source data with the new feature representation learned from existing feature-based transfer methods. The key idea is to enlarge source training data populations by randomly corrupting source data using some noises, and then train a transfer model $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$ that performs well on all the corrupted source data populations. In principle, the more corruptions are made, the higher the probability of the target data can be covered by the constructed source populations, and thus better transfer performance can be achieved by $\widetilde{\mathcal{M}}$.
An ideal case is with infinite corruptions, which however is infeasible in reality. We develop a marginalized solution with linear regression model and dropout noise. With a marginalization trick, we can train an RTM that is equivalently to training using infinite source noisy populations without truly conducting any corruption. More importantly, such an RTM has a closed-form solution, which enables very fast and efficient training. Extensive experiments on various real-world transfer tasks show that RTM is a promising transfer model.

Randomized Transferable Machine


In this talk, we present different variants of the self-attention based network for emotion prediction from movies, which is called AttendAffectNet. We take both audio and video into account and incorporate the relation among multiple modalities by applying self-attention mechanism in a novel manner into the extracted features for emotion prediction. We compare it to the typically temporal integration of the self-attention based model, which in our case, allows to capture the relation of temporal representations of the movie while considering the sequential dependencies of emotion responses. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architectures on the extended COGNIMUSE dataset and the MediaEval 2016 Emotional Impact of Movies Task, which consist of movies with emotion annotations. Our results show that applying the self-attention mechanism on the different audio-visual features, rather than in the time domain, is more effective for emotion prediction. Our approach is also proven to outperform some state-of-the-art models for emotion prediction.


AttendAffectNet: Self-Attention based Networks for Predicting Affective Responses from Movies

In this study, we propose the Ductal Instance-Oriented Pipeline (DIOP) that contains a duct-level instance segmentation model, a tissue-level semantic segmentation model, and three-levels of features for diagnostic classification. Based on recent advancements in instance segmentation and the Mask R-CNN model, our duct-level segmenter tries to identify each ductal individual inside a microscopic image; then, it extracts tissue-level information from the identified ductal instances. Leveraging three levels of information obtained from these ductal instances and also the histopathology image, the proposed DIOP outperforms previous approaches (both feature-based and CNN-based) in all diagnostic tasks; for the four-way classification task, the DIOP achieves comparable performance to general pathologists in this unique dataset. The proposed DIOP only takes a few seconds to run in the inference time, which could be used interactively on most modern computers. More clinical explorations are needed to study the robustness and generalizability of this system in the future.

Classifying Breast Histopathology Images with a Ductal Instance-Oriented Pipeline

Existing key-binding biometric cryptosystems, such as the Fuzzy Vault Scheme (FVS) and Fuzzy Commitment Scheme (FCS), employ Error Correcting Codes (ECC) to handle intra-user variations in biometric data. As a result, a trade-off exists between the key length and matching accuracy. Moreover, these systems are vulnerable to privacy leakage, i.e., it is trivial to recover the original biometric template given the secure sketch and its associated cryptographic key. In this work, we propose a novel key-binding biometric cryptosystem framework, referred to as Cancelable Biometrics Vault (CBV), to address the above two limitations. The CBV framework is inspired by the cryptographic principle of chaffing and winnowing. It utilizes the concept of cancelable biometrics (CB) to generate secure biometric templates, which in turn are used to encode bits in a cryptographic key. While the CBV framework is generic and does not rely on a specific biometric representation, it does assume the availability of a suitable (satisfying the requirements of accuracy
preservation, non-invertibility, and non-linkability) CB scheme for the given representation. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed CBV framework, we implement this approach using an extended BioEncoding scheme, which is a CB scheme appropriate for bit strings such as iris-codes. Unlike the baseline BioEncoding scheme, the extended version proposed in this work fulfills all the three requirements of a CB construct. Experiments show that the decoding accuracy of the proposed CBV framework is comparable to the recognition accuracy of the underlying CB construct, namely, the extended BioEncoding scheme, regardless
of the cryptographic key size.

Cancelable Biometrics Vault: A Secure Key-Binding Biometric Cryptosystem based on
Chaffing and Winnowing

The softmax and binary classifier are commonly preferred for image classification applications. However, as softmax is specifically designed for categorical classification, it assumes each image has just one class label. This limits its applicability for problems where the number of labels does not equal one, most notably zero- and multi-label problems. In these challenging settings, binary classifiers are, in theory, better suited. However, as they ignore the correlation between classes, they are not as accurate and scalable in practice. In this paper, we start from the observation that the only difference between binary and softmax classifiers is their normalization function. Specifically, while the binary classifier self-normalizes its score, the softmax classifier combines the scores from all classes before normalisation. On the basis of this observation we introduce a normalization function that is learnable, constant, and shared between classes and data points. By doing so, we arrive at a new type of binary classifier that we coin quasibinary classifier. We show in a variety of image classification settings, and on several datasets, that quasibinary classifiers are considerably better in classification settings where regular binary and softmax classifiers suffer, including zero-label and multi-label classification. What is more, we show that quasibinary classifiers yield well-calibrated probabilities allowing for direct and reliable comparisons, not only between classes but also between data points.


Quasibinary Classifier for Images with Zero and Multiple Labels

Wearable cameras are becoming more and more popular in several applications, increasing the interest of the research community in developing approaches for recognizing actions from the first-person point of view. An open challenge in egocentric action recognition is that videos lack detailed information about the main actor's pose and thus tend to record only parts of the movement when focusing on manipulation tasks. Thus, the amount of information about the action itself is limited, making crucial the understanding of the manipulated objects and their context. Many previous works addressed this issue with two-stream architectures, where one stream is dedicated to modeling the appearance of objects involved in the action, and another to extracting motion features from optical flow. In this paper, we argue that learning features jointly from these two information channels is beneficial to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between the two better. To this end, we propose a single stream architecture able to do so, thanks to the addition of a self-supervised block that uses a pretext motion prediction task to intertwine motion and appearance knowledge. Experiments on several publicly available databases show the power of our approach.

Self-Supervised Joint Encoding of Motion and Appearance for First Person Action Recognition


This paper studies the problem of Person Re-Identification (ReID)
for large-scale applications. Recent research efforts have been devoted
to building complicated part models, which introduce considerably
high computational cost and memory consumption, inhibiting its practicability
in large-scale applications. This paper aims to develop a novel learning
strategy to find efficient feature embeddings while maintaining the
balance of accuracy and model complexity. More specifically, we find
by enhancing the classical triplet loss together with cross-entropy
loss, our method can explore the hard examples and build a discriminant
feature embedding yet compact enough for large-scale applications.
Our method is carried out progressively using Bayesian optimization,
and we call it the Progressive Learning Algorithm (PLA). Extensive
experiments on three large-scale datasets show that our PLA is comparable
or better than the state-of-the-arts. Especially, on the challenging
Market-1501 dataset, we achieve Rank-1=94.7%/mAP=89.4% while saving
at least 30\% parameters than strong part models.

Probabilistic Word Embeddings in Kinematic Space


In this paper, an end-to-end neural embedding system based on triplet loss and residual learning has been proposed for speech emotion recognition. The proposed system learns the embeddings from the emotional information of the speech utterances. The learned embeddings are used to recognize the emotions portrayed by given speech samples of various lengths. The proposed system implements Residual Neural Network architecture. It is trained using softmax pre-training and triplet loss function. The weights between the fully connected and embedding layers of the trained network are used to calculate the embedding values. The embedding representations of various emotions are mapped onto a hyperplane, and the angles among them are computed using the cosine similarity. These angles are utilized to classify a new speech sample into its appropriate emotion class. The proposed system has demonstrated 91.67% and 64.44% accuracy while recognizing emotions for RAVDESS and IEMOCAP dataset, respectively.

End-to-end Triplet Loss based Emotion Embedding System for Speech Emotion Recognition


Lung segmentation on CT images is a crucial step for a computer-aided diagnosis system of lung diseases. The existing deep learning based lung segmentation methods are less efficient to segment lungs on clinical CT images, especially that the segmentation on lung boundaries is not accurate enough due to complex pulmonary opacities in practical clinics. In this paper, we propose a boundary-guided network (BG-Net) to address this problem. It contains two auxiliary branches that seperately segment lungs and extract the lung boundaries, and an aggregation branch that efficiently exploits lung boundary cues to guide the network for more accurate lung segmentation on clinical CT images. We evaluate the proposed method on a private dataset collected from the Osaka university hospital and four public datasets including StructSeg, HUG, VESSEL12, and a Novel Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed method can segment lungs more accurately and outperform several other deep learning based methods.

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Next from ICPR 2020

AG-GAN: An Attentive Group-Aware GAN for pedestrian trajectory prediction

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