Much of the recent literature on bandit learning focuses on algorithms that aim to converge on an optimal action. One shortcoming is that this orientation does not account for time sensitivity, which can play a crucial role when learning an optimal action requires much more information than near-optimal ones. Indeed, popular approaches such as upper-confidence-bound methods and Thompson sampling can fare poorly in such situations. We consider instead learning a satisficing action, which is near-optimal while requiring less information, and propose satisficing Thompson sampling, an algorithm that serves this purpose. We establish a general bound on expected discounted regret and study the application of satisficing Thompson sampling to linear and infinite-armed bandits, demonstrating arbitrarily large benefits over Thompson sampling. We also discuss the relation between the notion of satisficing and the theory of rate distortion, which offers guidance on the selection of satisficing actions.
Task-oriented semantic parsing models typically have high resource requirements: to support new ontologies (i.e., intents and slots), practitioners crowdsource thousands of samples for supervised fine-tuning. Partly, this is due to the structure of de facto copy-generate parsers; these models treat ontology labels as discrete entities, relying on parallel data to extrinsically derive their meaning. In our work, we instead exploit what we intrinsically know about ontology labels; for example, the fact that SL:TIME_ZONE has the categorical type "slot" and language-based span "time zone". Using this motivation, we build our approach with offline and online stages. During preprocessing, for each ontology label, we extract its intrinsic properties into a component, and insert each component into an inventory as a cache of sorts. During training, we fine-tune a seq2seq, pre-trained transformer to map utterances and inventories to frames, parse trees comprised of utterance and ontology tokens. Our formulation encourages the model to consider ontology labels as a union of its intrinsic properties, therefore substantially bootstrapping learning in low-resource settings. Experiments show our model is highly sample efficient: using a low-resource benchmark derived from TOPv2, our inventory parser outperforms a copy-generate parser by +15 EM absolute (44% relative) when fine-tuning on 10 samples from an unseen domain.
Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims at improving the perception or interpretability of an image captured in an environment with poor illumination. Recent advances in this area are dominated by deep learning-based solutions, where many learning strategies, network structures, loss functions, training data, etc. have been employed. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey to cover various aspects ranging from algorithm taxonomy to unsolved open issues. To examine the generalization of existing methods, we propose a large-scale low-light image and video dataset, in which the images and videos are taken by different mobile phones' cameras under diverse illumination conditions. Besides, for the first time, we provide a unified online platform that covers many popular LLIE methods, of which the results can be produced through a user-friendly web interface. In addition to qualitative and quantitative evaluation of existing methods on publicly available and our proposed datasets, we also validate their performance in face detection in the dark. This survey together with the proposed dataset and online platform could serve as a reference source for future study and promote the development of this research field. The proposed platform and the collected methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics are publicly available and will be regularly updated at https://github.com/Li-Chongyi/Lighting-the-Darkness-in-the-Deep-Learning-Era-Open. We will release our low-light image and video dataset.
Pavement condition evaluation is essential to time the preventative or rehabilitative actions and control distress propagation. Failing to conduct timely evaluations can lead to severe structural and financial loss of the infrastructure and complete reconstructions. Automated computer-aided surveying measures can provide a database of road damage patterns and their locations. This database can be utilized for timely road repairs to gain the minimum cost of maintenance and the asphalt's maximum durability. This paper introduces a deep learning-based surveying scheme to analyze the image-based distress data in real-time. A database consisting of a diverse population of crack distress types such as longitudinal, transverse, and alligator cracks, photographed using mobile-device is used. Then, a family of efficient and scalable models that are tuned for pavement crack detection is trained, and various augmentation policies are explored. Proposed models, resulted in F1-scores, ranging from 52% to 56%, and average inference time from 178-10 images per second. Finally, the performance of the object detectors are examined, and error analysis is reported against various images. The source code is available at https://github.com/mahdi65/roadDamageDetection2020.
Automated tongue image segmentation in tongue images is a challenging task for two reasons: 1) there are many pathological details on the tongue surface, which affect the extraction of the boundary; 2) the shapes of the tongues captured from various persons (with different diseases) are quite different. To deal with the challenge, a novel end-to-end Boundary Guidance Hierarchical Network (BGHNet) with a new hybrid loss is proposed in this paper. In the new approach, firstly Context Feature Encoder Module (CFEM) is built upon the bottomup pathway to confront with the shrinkage of the receptive field. Secondly, a novel hierarchical recurrent feature fusion module (HRFFM) is adopt to progressively and hierarchically refine object maps to recover image details by integrating local context information. Finally, the proposed hybrid loss in a four hierarchy-pixel, patch, map and boundary guides the network to effectively segment the tongue regions and accurate tongue boundaries. BGHNet is applied to a set of tongue images. The experimental results suggest that the proposed approach can achieve the latest tongue segmentation performance. And in the meantime, the lightweight network contains only 15.45M parameters and performs only 11.22GFLOPS.
This paper presents fast procedures for thermal infrared remote sensing in dark, GPS-denied environments, such as those found in industrial plants such as in High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) converter stations. These procedures are based on the combination of the depth estimation obtained from either a 1-Dimensional LIDAR laser or a 2-Dimensional Hokuyo laser or a 3D MultiSense SLB laser sensor and the visible and thermal cameras from a FLIR Duo R dual-sensor thermal camera. The combination of these sensors/cameras is suitable to be mounted on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and/or robots in order to provide reliable information about the potential malfunctions, which can be found within the hazardous environment. For example, the capabilities of the developed software and hardware system corresponding to the combination of the 1-D LIDAR sensor and the FLIR Duo R dual-sensor thermal camera is assessed from the point of the accuracy of results and the required computational times: the obtained computational times are under 10 ms, with a maximum localization error of 8 mm and an average standard deviation for the measured temperatures of 1.11 degree Celsius, which results are obtained for a number of test cases. The paper is structured as follows: the description of the system used for identification and localization of hotspots in industrial plants is presented in section II. In section III, the method for faults identification and localization in plants by using a 1-Dimensional LIDAR laser sensor and thermal images is described together with results. In section IV the real time thermal image processing is presented. Fusion of the 2-Dimensional depth laser Hokuyo and the thermal images is described in section V. In section VI the combination of the 3D MultiSense SLB laser and thermal images is described. In section VII a discussion and several conclusions are drawn.
We propose a simple yet effective framework for instance and panoptic segmentation, termed CondInst (conditional convolutions for instance and panoptic segmentation). In the literature, top-performing instance segmentation methods typically follow the paradigm of Mask R-CNN and rely on ROI operations (typically ROIAlign) to attend to each instance. In contrast, we propose to attend to the instances with dynamic conditional convolutions. Instead of using instance-wise ROIs as inputs to the instance mask head of fixed weights, we design dynamic instance-aware mask heads, conditioned on the instances to be predicted. CondInst enjoys three advantages: 1.) Instance and panoptic segmentation are unified into a fully convolutional network, eliminating the need for ROI cropping and feature alignment. 2.) The elimination of the ROI cropping also significantly improves the output instance mask resolution. 3.) Due to the much improved capacity of dynamically-generated conditional convolutions, the mask head can be very compact (e.g., 3 conv. layers, each having only 8 channels), leading to significantly faster inference time per instance and making the overall inference time almost constant, irrelevant to the number of instances. We demonstrate a simpler method that can achieve improved accuracy and inference speed on both instance and panoptic segmentation tasks. On the COCO dataset, we outperform a few state-of-the-art methods. We hope that CondInst can be a strong baseline for instance and panoptic segmentation. Code is available at: https://git.io/AdelaiDet
In this work, we introduce a control variate approximation technique for low error approximate Deep Neural Network (DNN) accelerators. The control variate technique is used in Monte Carlo methods to achieve variance reduction. Our approach significantly decreases the induced error due to approximate multiplications in DNN inference, without requiring time-exhaustive retraining compared to state-of-the-art. Leveraging our control variate method, we use highly approximated multipliers to generate power-optimized DNN accelerators. Our experimental evaluation on six DNNs, for Cifar-10 and Cifar-100 datasets, demonstrates that, compared to the accurate design, our control variate approximation achieves same performance and 24% power reduction for a merely 0.16% accuracy loss.
Over the last decade, the use of Deep Learning in many applications produced results that are comparable to and in some cases surpassing human expert performance. The application domains include diagnosing diseases, finance, agriculture, search engines, robot vision, and many others. In this paper, we are proposing an architecture that utilizes image/video captioning methods and Natural Language Processing systems to generate a title and a concise abstract for a video. Such a system can potentially be utilized in many application domains, including, the cinema industry, video search engines, security surveillance, video databases/warehouses, data centers, and others. The proposed system functions and operates as followed: it reads a video; representative image frames are identified and selected; the image frames are captioned; NLP is applied to all generated captions together with text summarization; and finally, a title and an abstract are generated for the video. All functions are performed automatically. Preliminary results are provided in this paper using publicly available datasets. This paper is not concerned about the efficiency of the system at the execution time. We hope to be able to address execution efficiency issues in our subsequent publications.
Being able to segment unseen classes not observed during training is an important technical challenge in deep learning, because of its potential to reduce the expensive annotation required for semantic segmentation. Prior zero-label semantic segmentation works approach this task by learning visual-semantic embeddings or generative models. However, they are prone to overfitting on the seen classes because there is no training signal for them. In this paper, we study the challenging generalized zero-label semantic segmentation task where the model has to segment both seen and unseen classes at test time. We assume that pixels of unseen classes could be present in the training images but without being annotated. Our idea is to capture the latent information on unseen classes by supervising the model with self-produced pseudo-labels for unlabeled pixels. We propose a consistency regularizer to filter out noisy pseudo-labels by taking the intersections of the pseudo-labels generated from different augmentations of the same image. Our framework generates pseudo-labels and then retrain the model with human-annotated and pseudo-labelled data. This procedure is repeated for several iterations. As a result, our approach achieves the new state-of-the-art on PascalVOC12 and COCO-stuff datasets in the challenging generalized zero-label semantic segmentation setting, surpassing other existing methods addressing this task with more complex strategies.