MagFace: A Universal Representation for Face Recognition and Quality Assessment

The performance of face recognition system degrades when the variability of the acquired faces increases. Prior work alleviates this issue by either monitoring the face quality in pre-processing or predicting the data uncertainty along with the face feature. This paper proposes MagFace, a category of losses that learn a universal feature embedding whose magnitude can measure the quality of the given face. Under the new loss, it can be proven that the magnitude of the feature embedding monotonically increases if the subject is more likely to be recognized. In addition, MagFace introduces an adaptive mechanism to learn a wellstructured within-class feature distributions by pulling easy samples to class centers while pushing hard samples away. This prevents models from overfitting on noisy low-quality samples and improves face recognition in the wild. Extensive experiments conducted on face recognition, quality assessments as well as clustering demonstrate its superiority over state-of-the-arts. The code is available at https://github.com/IrvingMeng/MagFace.

Predicting Driver Fatigue in Automated Driving with Explainability

Research indicates that monotonous automated driving increases the incidence of fatigued driving. Although many prediction models based on advanced machine learning techniques were proposed to monitor driver fatigue, especially in manual driving, little is known about how these black-box machine learning models work. In this paper, we proposed a combination of eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) to predict driver fatigue with explanations due to their efficiency and accuracy. First, in order to obtain the ground truth of driver fatigue, PERCLOS (percentage of eyelid closure over the pupil over time) between 0 and 100 was used as the response variable. Second, we built a driver fatigue regression model using both physiological and behavioral measures with XGBoost and it outperformed other selected machine learning models with 3.847 root-mean-squared error (RMSE), 1.768 mean absolute error (MAE) and 0.996 adjusted $R^2$. Third, we employed SHAP to identify the most important predictor variables and uncovered the black-box XGBoost model by showing the main effects of most important predictor variables globally and explaining individual predictions locally. Such an explainable driver fatigue prediction model offered insights into how to intervene in automated driving when necessary, such as during the takeover transition period from automated driving to manual driving.

Combat COVID-19 Infodemic Using Explainable Natural Language Processing Models

Misinformation of COVID-19 is prevalent on social media as the pandemic unfolds, and the associated risks are extremely high. Thus, it is critical to detect and combat such misinformation. Recently, deep learning models using natural language processing techniques, such as BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), have achieved great successes in detecting misinformation. In this paper, we proposed an explainable natural language processing model based on DistilBERT and SHAP (Shapley Additive exPlanations) to combat misinformation about COVID-19 due to their efficiency and effectiveness. First, we collected a dataset of 984 claims about COVID-19 with fact checking. By augmenting the data using back-translation, we doubled the sample size of the dataset and the DistilBERT model was able to obtain good performance (accuracy: 0.972; areas under the curve: 0.993) in detecting misinformation about COVID-19. Our model was also tested on a larger dataset for AAAI2021 - COVID-19 Fake News Detection Shared Task and obtained good performance (accuracy: 0.938; areas under the curve: 0.985). The performance on both datasets was better than traditional machine learning models. Second, in order to boost public trust in model prediction, we employed SHAP to improve model explainability, which was further evaluated using a between-subjects experiment with three conditions, i.e., text (T), text+SHAP explanation (TSE), and text+SHAP explanation+source and evidence (TSESE). The participants were significantly more likely to trust and share information related to COVID-19 in the TSE and TSESE conditions than in the T condition. Our results provided good implications in detecting misinformation about COVID-19 and improving public trust.

Searching for Alignment in Face Recognition

A standard pipeline of current face recognition frameworks consists of four individual steps: locating a face with a rough bounding box and several fiducial landmarks, aligning the face image using a pre-defined template, extracting representations and comparing. Among them, face detection, landmark detection and representation learning have long been studied and a lot of works have been proposed. As an essential step with a significant impact on recognition performance, the alignment step has attracted little attention. In this paper, we first explore and highlight the effects of different alignment templates on face recognition. Then, for the first time, we try to search for the optimal template automatically. We construct a well-defined searching space by decomposing the template searching into the crop size and vertical shift, and propose an efficient method Face Alignment Policy Search (FAPS). Besides, a well-designed benchmark is proposed to evaluate the searched policy. Experiments on our proposed benchmark validate the effectiveness of our method to improve face recognition performance.

Modeling Dispositional and Initial learned Trust in Automated Vehicles with Predictability and Explainability

Technological advances in the automotive industry are bringing automated driving closer to road use. However, one of the most important factors affecting public acceptance of automated vehicles (AVs) is the public's trust in AVs. Many factors can influence people's trust, including perception of risks and benefits, feelings, and knowledge of AVs. This study aims to use these factors to predict people's dispositional and initial learned trust in AVs using a survey study conducted with 1175 participants. For each participant, 23 features were extracted from the survey questions to capture his or her knowledge, perception, experience, behavioral assessment, and feelings about AVs. These features were then used as input to train an eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model to predict trust in AVs. With the help of SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), we were able to interpret the trust predictions of XGBoost to further improve the explainability of the XGBoost model. Compared to traditional regression models and black-box machine learning models, our findings show that this approach was powerful in providing a high level of explainability and predictability of trust in AVs, simultaneously.

Visible Feature Guidance for Crowd Pedestrian Detection

Heavy occlusion and dense gathering in crowd scene make pedestrian detection become a challenging problem, because it's difficult to guess a precise full bounding box according to the invisible human part. To crack this nut, we propose a mechanism called Visible Feature Guidance (VFG) for both training and inference. During training, we adopt visible feature to regress the simultaneous outputs of visible bounding box and full bounding box. Then we perform NMS only on visible bounding boxes to achieve the best fitting full box in inference. This manner can alleviate the incapable influence brought by NMS in crowd scene and make full bounding box more precisely. Furthermore, in order to ease feature association in the post application process, such as pedestrian tracking, we apply Hungarian algorithm to associate parts for a human instance. Our proposed method can stably bring about 2~3% improvements in mAP and AP50 for both two-stage and one-stage detector. It's also more effective for MR-2 especially with the stricter IoU. Experiments on Crowdhuman, Cityperson, Caltech and KITTI datasets show that visible feature guidance can help detector achieve promisingly better performances. Moreover, parts association produces a strong benchmark on Crowdhuman for the vision community.

Matching Guided Distillation

Feature distillation is an effective way to improve the performance for a smaller student model, which has fewer parameters and lower computation cost compared to the larger teacher model. Unfortunately, there is a common obstacle - the gap in semantic feature structure between the intermediate features of teacher and student. The classic scheme prefers to transform intermediate features by adding the adaptation module, such as naive convolutional, attention-based or more complicated one. However, this introduces two problems: a) The adaptation module brings more parameters into training. b) The adaptation module with random initialization or special transformation isn't friendly for distilling a pre-trained student. In this paper, we present Matching Guided Distillation (MGD) as an efficient and parameter-free manner to solve these problems. The key idea of MGD is to pose matching the teacher channels with students' as an assignment problem. We compare three solutions of the assignment problem to reduce channels from teacher features with partial distillation loss. The overall training takes a coordinate-descent approach between two optimization objects - assignments update and parameters update. Since MGD only contains normalization or pooling operations with negligible computation cost, it is flexible to plug into network with other distillation methods.

Do not forget interaction: Predicting fatality of COVID-19 patients using logistic regression

Amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, whether COVID-19 patients with high risks can be recovered or not depends, to a large extent, on how early they will be treated appropriately before irreversible consequences are caused to the patients by the virus. In this research, we reported an explainable, intuitive, and accurate machine learning model based on logistic regression to predict the fatality rate of COVID-19 patients using only three important blood biomarkers, including lactic dehydrogenase, lymphocyte (%) and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, and their interactions. We found that when the fatality probability produced by the logistic regression model was over 0.8, the model had the optimal performance in that it was able to predict patient fatalities more than 11.30 days on average with maximally 34.91 days in advance, an accumulative f1-score of 93.76% and and an accumulative accuracy score of 93.92%. Such a model can be used to identify COVID-19 patients with high risks with three blood biomarkers and help the medical systems around the world plan critical medical resources amid this pandemic.