Italy

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are powerful but computationally demanding and memory intensive, thus impeding their practical applications on resource-constrained hardware. Filter pruning is an efficient approach for deep CNN compression and acceleration, which aims to eliminate some ﬁlters with tolerable performance degradation. In the literature, the majority of approaches prune networks by defining the redundant filters or training the networks with a sparsity prior loss function. These approaches mainly use FLOPs as their speed metric. However, the inference latency of pruned networks cannot be directly controlled on the hardware platform, which is an important dimension of practicality. To address this issue, we propose a novel Hardware-aware Filter Pruning method (HFP) which can produce pruned networks that satisfy the actual latency budget on the hardwares of interest. In addition, we propose an iterative pruning framework called Opti-Trim to decrease the accuracy degradation of pruning process and accelerate the pruning procedure whilst meeting the hardware budget. More specifically, HFP first builds up a lookup table for fast estimating the latency of target network about filter configuration layer by layer. Then, HFP leverages information gain (IG) to globally evaluate the filters contribution to network output distribution. HFP utilizes the Opti-Trim framework to globally prune filters with the minimum IG one by one until the latency budget is satisfied. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed method on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet.

ICPR 2020

HFP: Hardware-Aware Filter Pruning for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Acceleration

filter pruning

convolutional neural network

model compression

ECAI2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI, including:




**An extensive programme of workshops, tutorials, and invited speakers**

**The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference (PAIS)**

**The Frontiers in AI track sessions**

**The Lab To Market event**

**The Women in AI time**

**The EU Challenges forum**

… and many more!

ECAI 2020

ECAI 2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI.

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. 



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.

Generating Private Data Surrogates for Vision Tasks

Deep architectures represent the state-of-the-art for perceiving depth from stereo images. Although these methods are highly accurate, it is crucial to effectively detect any outlier through confidence measures since a wrong perception of even small portions of the sensed scene might lead to catastrophic consequences, for instance, in autonomous driving. Purposely, state-of-the-art confidence estimation methods rely on deep-networks as well. 
In this paper, arguing that these tasks are two sides of the same coin, we propose a novel paradigm for their joint training. Specifically, inspired by the successful deployment of GANs in other fields, we design two deep architectures: a generator for disparity estimation and a discriminator for distinguishing correct assignments from outliers. The two networks are jointly trained in a new peculiar weakly adversarial manner pushing the former to fix the errors detected by the discriminator while keeping the correct prediction unchanged. Experimental results on standard stereo datasets prove that such joint training paradigm is beneficial. Moreover, an additional outcome of our proposal is the ability to detect outliers with better accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art.

Leveraging a weakly adversarial paradigm for joint learning of disparity and confidence estimation


Joint-event-extraction, which extracts structural information (i.e., entities or triggers of events) from unstructured real-world corpora, has attracted more and more research attention in natural language processing. \revised{Most existing works do not fully address the sparse co-occurrence relationships between entities and triggers, which loses this important information and thus deteriorates the extraction performance.} To mitigate this issue, we first define the joint-event-extraction as a sequence-to-sequence labeling task with a tag set composed of tags of triggers and entities. Then, to incorporate the missing information in the aforementioned co-occurrence relationships, we propose a \underline{C}ross-\underline{S}upervised \underline{M}echanism (CSM) to alternately supervise the extraction of either triggers or entities based on the type distribution of each other. Moreover, since the connected entities and triggers naturally form a heterogeneous information network (HIN), we leverage the latent pattern along meta-paths for a given corpus to further improve the performance of our proposed method. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets as well as compare our method with state-of-the-art methods. Empirical results and analysis show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both entity and trigger extraction.

Cross-Supervised Joint-Event-Extraction with Heterogeneous Information Networks

Human body part segmentation refers to the task of predicting the semantic segmentation mask for each body part. Fully supervised body part segmentation methods achieve good performances but require an enormous amount of effort to annotate part masks for training. In contrast to high annotation costs needed for a limited number of part mask annotations, a large number of weak labels such as poses and full body masks already exist and contain relevant information. Motivated by the possibility of using existing weak labels, we propose the first weakly supervised body part segmentation framework. The core idea is first converting the sparse weak labels such as keypoints to the initial estimate of body part masks, and then iteratively refine the part mask predictions. We name the initial part masks estimated from poses the "part priors." With sufficient extra weak labels, our weakly supervised framework achieves a comparable performance (62.0% mIoU) to the fully supervised method (63.6% mIoU) on the Pascal-Person-Part dataset. Furthermore, in the extended semi-supervised setting, the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-art methods. Moreover, we extend our proposed framework to other keypoint-supervised part segmentation tasks such as face parsing.

Weakly Supervised Body Part Segmentation with Pose based Part Priors

Inspired by the human ability to infer emotions from body language, we propose an automated framework for body language based emotion recognition starting from regular RGB videos. In collaboration with psychologists, we further extend the framework for psychiatric symptom prediction. Because a specific application domain of the proposed framework may only supply a limited amount of data, the framework is designed to work on a small training set and possess a good transferability. The proposed system in the first stage generates sequences of body language predictions based on human poses estimated from input videos. In the second stage, the predicted sequences are fed into a temporal network for emotion interpretation and psychiatric symptom prediction. We first validate the accuracy and transferability of the proposed body language recognition method on several public action recognition datasets. We then evaluate the framework on a proposed URMC dataset, which consists of conversations between a standardized patient and a behavioral health professional, along with expert annotations of body language, emotions, and potential psychiatric symptoms. The proposed framework outperforms other methods on the URMC dataset.

Pose-based Body Language Recognition for Emotion and Psychiatric Symptom Interpretation

Flexible and Adaptive Unsupervised Graph Embedding

3D palmprint-based biometric recognition has drawn growing research attention due to its several merits over 2D counterpart such as robust structural measurement of a palm surface and high anti-counterfeiting capability. However, most existing 3D palmprint descriptors are hand-crafted that usually extract stationary features from 3D palmprint images. In this paper, we propose a feature learning method to jointly learn compact curvature feature descriptor for 3D palmprint recognition. We first form multiple curvature data vectors to completely sample the intrinsic curvature information of 3D palmprint images. Then, we jointly learn a feature projection function that project curvature data vectors into binary feature codes, which have the maximum inter-class variances and minimum intra-class distance so that they are discriminative. Moreover, we learn the collaborative binary representation of the multiple curvature feature codes by minimizing the information loss between the final representation and the multiple curvature features, so that the proposed method is more compact in feature representation and efficient in matching. Experimental results on the baseline 3D palmprint database demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in terms of recognition performance in comparison with state-of-the-art 3D palmprint descriptors.

Joint Learning Multiple Curvature Descriptor for 3D Palmprint Recognition

Crowd counting aims to estimate the number of people in images. Although promising progresses have been made with the prevalence of deep Convolutional Neural Networks, there still remains a challenging task due to cluttered backgrounds and varying scales of people within an image. In this paper, we propose a learnable spatial attention module which can get the spatial relations to diminish the negative impact of backgrounds. Besides, a dense hybrid dilated convolution module is also brought up to preserve information derived from varied scales. With these two modules, our network can deal with the problem caused by scale variance and background interference. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we compare it with state-of-the-art algorithms on three representative crowd counting benchmarks (ShanghaiTech, UCF-QNRF, UCF_CC_50). Experimental results show that our proposed network can achieve significant improvements on all the three datasets.

Spatial-related and Scale-aware Network for Crowd Counting

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are deep neural networks that allow us to sample from an arbitrary probability distribution without explicitly estimating the distribution. There is a generator that takes a latent vector as input and transforms it into a valid sample from the distribution. There is also a discriminator that is trained to discriminate such fake samples from true samples of the distribution; at the same time, the generator is trained to generate fakes that the discriminator cannot tell apart from the true samples. Instead of learning a global generator, a recent approach involves training multiple generators each responsible from one part of the distribution. In this work, we review such approaches and propose the hierarchical mixture of generators, inspired from the hierarchical mixture of experts model, that learns a tree structure implementing a hierarchical clustering with soft splits in the decision nodes and local generators in the leaves. Since the generators are combined softly, the whole model is continuous and can be trained using gradient-based optimization, just like the original GAN model. Our experiments on five image data sets, namely, MNIST, FashionMNIST, UTZap50K, Oxford Flowers, and CelebA, show that our proposed model generates samples of high quality and diversity in terms of popular GAN evaluation metrics. The learned hierarchical structure also leads to knowledge extraction.

Hierarchical Mixtures of Generators for Adversarial Learning


Online streaming services have been growing at a fast pace. To provide the best user experience, it is needed to detect low quality images from videos so that we can repair or improve them before showing to customers. For example, for movie and TV-show streaming services, it is important to check if an original (master) video produced from a studio has low quality images that contain artifacts such as up-scaling or interlacing; for live streaming services, it is important to detect if a streamed video have hits due to encoding such as H.264 or MPEG-2. The impairment detection is usually measured by the non-reference (NR) metrics because it is often difficult and sometimes impossible to get the original (master) videos. On the other hand, today researches in the image quality area, such as super-resolution, are mainly focused on the full reference (FR) metrics like PSNR or VMAF. In this paper, we present an algorithm that is able to reliably compute five types of spatial NR metrics that are commonly used in the online streaming industries. The algorithm consists of two components: a pre-processing step that spatially de-correlates pixel intensity values and a novel deep neural network (DNN) that is able to quantify the NR metrics at the image region level. We show that our algorithm achieves better performance than state-of-art algorithms in this area.

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HFP: Hardware-Aware Filter Pruning for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Acceleration

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Generating Private Data Surrogates for Vision Tasks

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