A Computational Approach to Measure Empathy and Theory-of-Mind from Written Texts

Theory-of-mind (ToM), a human ability to infer the intentions and thoughts of others, is an essential part of empathetic experiences. We provide here the framework for using NLP models to measure ToM expressed in written texts. For this purpose, we introduce ToM-Diary, a crowdsourced 18,238 diaries with 74,014 Korean sentences annotated with different ToM levels. Each diary was annotated with ToM levels by trained psychology students and reviewed by selected psychology experts. The annotators first divided the diaries based on whether they mentioned other people: self-focused and other-focused. Examples of self-focused sentences are "I am feeling good". The other-focused sentences were further classified into different levels. These levels differ by whether the writer 1) mentions the presence of others without inferring their mental state(e.g., I saw a man walking down the street), 2) fails to take the perspective of others (e.g., I don't understand why they refuse to wear masks), or 3) successfully takes the perspective of others (It must have been hard for them to continue working). We tested whether state-of-the-art transformer-based models (e.g., BERT) could predict underlying ToM levels in sentences. We found that BERT more successfully detected self-focused sentences than other-focused ones. Sentences that successfully take the perspective of others (the highest ToM level) were the most difficult to predict. Our study suggests a promising direction for large-scale and computational approaches for identifying the ability of authors to empathize and take the perspective of others. The dataset is at [URL](https://github.com/humanfactorspsych/covid19-tom-empathy-diary)

TrajGAIL: Generating Urban Vehicle Trajectories using Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning

Recently, an abundant amount of urban vehicle trajectory data has been collected in road networks. Many studies have used machine learning algorithms to analyze patterns in vehicle trajectories to predict location sequences of individual travelers. Unlike the previous studies that used a discriminative modeling approach, this research suggests a generative modeling approach to learn the underlying distributions of urban vehicle trajectory data. A generative model for urban vehicle trajectories can better generalize from training data by learning the underlying distribution of the training data and, thus, produce synthetic vehicle trajectories similar to real vehicle trajectories with limited observations. Synthetic trajectories can provide solutions to data sparsity or data privacy issues in using location data. This research proposesTrajGAIL, a generative adversarial imitation learning framework for the urban vehicle trajectory generation. In TrajGAIL, learning location sequences in observed trajectories is formulated as an imitation learning problem in a partially observable Markov decision process. The model is trained by the generative adversarial framework, which uses the reward function from the adversarial discriminator. The model is tested with both simulation and real-world datasets, and the results show that the proposed model obtained significant performance gains compared to existing models in sequence modeling.

Associative Partial Domain Adaptation

Partial Adaptation (PDA) addresses a practical scenario in which the target domain contains only a subset of classes in the source domain. While PDA should take into account both class-level and sample-level to mitigate negative transfer, current approaches mostly rely on only one of them. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to fully exploit multi-level associations that can arise in PDA. Our Associative Partial Domain Adaptation (APDA) utilizes intra-domain association to actively select out non-trivial anomaly samples in each source-private class that sample-level weighting cannot handle. Additionally, our method considers inter-domain association to encourage positive transfer by mapping between nearby target samples and source samples with high label-commonness. For this, we exploit feature propagation in a proposed label space consisting of source ground-truth labels and target probabilistic labels. We further propose a geometric guidance loss based on the label commonness of each source class to encourage positive transfer. Our APDA consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across public datasets.

Sample-based Regularization: A Transfer Learning Strategy Toward Better Generalization

Training a deep neural network with a small amount of data is a challenging problem as it is vulnerable to overfitting. However, one of the practical difficulties that we often face is to collect many samples. Transfer learning is a cost-effective solution to this problem. By using the source model trained with a large-scale dataset, the target model can alleviate the overfitting originated from the lack of training data. Resorting to the ability of generalization of the source model, several methods proposed to use the source knowledge during the whole training procedure. However, this is likely to restrict the potential of the target model and some transferred knowledge from the source can interfere with the training procedure. For improving the generalization performance of the target model with a few training samples, we proposed a regularization method called sample-based regularization (SBR), which does not rely on the source's knowledge during training. With SBR, we suggested a new training framework for transfer learning. Experimental results showed that our framework outperformed existing methods in various configurations.

Restore from Restored: Video Restoration with Pseudo Clean Video

In this paper, we propose a self-supervised video denoising method called "restore-from-restored" that fine-tunes a baseline network by using a pseudo clean video at the test phase. The pseudo clean video can be obtained by applying an input noisy video to the pre-trained baseline network. By adopting a fully convolutional network (FCN) as the baseline, we can restore videos without accurate optical flow and registration due to its translation-invariant property unlike many conventional video restoration methods. Moreover, the proposed method can take advantage of the existence of many similar patches across consecutive frames (i.e., patch-recurrence), which can boost performance of the baseline network by a large margin. We analyze the restoration performance of the FCN fine-tuned with the proposed self-supervision-based training algorithm, and demonstrate that FCN can utilize recurring patches without the need for registration among adjacent frames. The proposed method can be applied to any FCN-based denoising models. In our experiments, we apply the proposed method to the state-of-the-art denoisers, and our results indicate a considerable improvementin task performance.

Restore from Restored: Single Image Denoising with Pseudo Clean Image

Under certain statistical assumptions of noise (e.g., zero-mean noise), recent self-supervised approaches for denoising have been introduced to learn network parameters without ground-truth clean images, and these methods can restore an image by exploiting information available from the given input (i.e., internal statistics) at test time. However, self-supervised methods are not yet properly combined with conventional supervised denoising methods which train the denoising networks with a large number of external training images. Thus, we propose a new denoising approach that can greatly outperform the state-of-the-art supervised denoising methods by adapting (fine-tuning) their network parameters to the given specific input through self-supervision without changing the fully original network architectures. We demonstrate that the proposed method can be easily employed with state-of-the-art denoising networks without additional parameters, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on numerous denoising benchmark datasets.

Fast Adaptation to Super-Resolution Networks via Meta-Learning

Conventional supervised super-resolution (SR) approaches are trained with massive external SR datasets but fail to exploit desirable properties of the given test image. On the other hand, self-supervised SR approaches utilize the internal information within a test image but suffer from computational complexity in run-time. In this work, we observe the opportunity for further improvement of the performance of SISR without changing the architecture of conventional SR networks by practically exploiting additional information given from the input image. In the training stage, we train the network via meta-learning; thus, the network can quickly adapt to any input image at test time. Then, in the test stage, parameters of this meta-learned network are rapidly fine-tuned with only a few iterations by only using the given low-resolution image. The adaptation at the test time takes full advantage of patch-recurrence property observed in natural images. Our method effectively handles unknown SR kernels and can be applied to any existing model. We demonstrate that the proposed model-agnostic approach consistently improves the performance of conventional SR networks on various benchmark SR datasets.

Self-Supervised Fast Adaptation for Denoising via Meta-Learning

Under certain statistical assumptions of noise, recent self-supervised approaches for denoising have been introduced to learn network parameters without true clean images, and these methods can restore an image by exploiting information available from the given input (i.e., internal statistics) at test time. However, self-supervised methods are not yet combined with conventional supervised denoising methods which train the denoising networks with a large number of external training samples. Thus, we propose a new denoising approach that can greatly outperform the state-of-the-art supervised denoising methods by adapting their network parameters to the given input through selfsupervision without changing the networks architectures. Moreover, we propose a meta-learning algorithm to enable quick adaptation of parameters to the specific input at test time. We demonstrate that the proposed method can be easily employed with state-of-the-art denoising networks without additional parameters, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on numerous benchmark datasets.

Key Instance Selection for Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation

This paper proposes key instance selection based on video saliency covering objectness and dynamics for unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS). Our method takes frames sequentially and extracts object proposals with corresponding masks for each frame. We link objects according to their similarity until the M-th frame and then assign them unique IDs (i.e., instances). Similarity measure takes into account multiple properties such as ReID descriptor, expected trajectory, and semantic co-segmentation result. After M-th frame, we select K IDs based on video saliency and frequency of appearance; then only these key IDs are tracked through the remaining frames. Thanks to these technical contributions, our results are ranked third on the leaderboard of UVOS DAVIS challenge.

Discriminative Few-Shot Learning Based on Directional Statistics

Metric-based few-shot learning methods try to overcome the difficulty due to the lack of training examples by learning embedding to make comparison easy. We propose a novel algorithm to generate class representatives for few-shot classification tasks. As a probabilistic model for learned features of inputs, we consider a mixture of von Mises-Fisher distributions which is known to be more expressive than Gaussian in a high dimensional space. Then, from a discriminative classifier perspective, we get a better class representative considering inter-class correlation which has not been addressed by conventional few-shot learning algorithms. We apply our method to \emph{mini}ImageNet and \emph{tiered}ImageNet datasets, and show that the proposed approach outperforms other comparable methods in few-shot classification tasks.