Italy

Learning how to adapt to complex and dynamic environments is one of the most important factors that contribute to our intelligence. Endowing artificial agents with this ability is not a simple task, particularly in competitive scenarios. In this paper, we present a broad study on how popular reinforcement learning algorithms can be adapted and implemented to learn and to play a real-world implementation of a competitive multiplayer card game. We propose specific training and validation routines for the learning agents, in order to evaluate how the agents learn to be competitive and explain how they adapt to each others&#39; playing style. Finally, we pinpoint how the behavior of each agent derives from their learning style and create a baseline for future research on this scenario.

ICPR 2020

Learning from Learners: Adapting Reinforcement Learning Agents to be Competitive in a Card Game

deep q-learning

competitive strategies

reinforcement learning

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. 


Learning how to adapt to complex and dynamic environments is one of the most important factors that contribute to our intelligence. Endowing artificial agents with this ability is not a simple task, particularly in competitive scenarios. In this paper, we present a broad study on how popular reinforcement learning algorithms can be adapted and implemented to learn and to play a real-world implementation of a competitive multiplayer card game. We propose specific training and validation routines for the learning agents, in order to evaluate how the agents learn to be competitive and explain how they adapt to each others' playing style. Finally, we pinpoint how the behavior of each agent derives from their learning style and create a baseline for future research on this scenario.

poster

Deep neural networks (DNNs) with many layers of feature representations yield state-of-the-art results on several difficult learning tasks. However, optimizing very deep DNNs without shortcut connections known as PlainNets, is a notoriously hard problem. Considering the growing interest in this area, this paper investigates holistically two scenarios that plague the training of very deep PlainNets: (1) the relatively popular challenge of ‘vanishing and exploding units’ activations’, and (2) the less investigated ‘singularity’ problem, which is studied in details in this paper. In contrast to earlier works that study only the saturation and explosion of units’ activations in isolation, this paper harmonizes the inconspicuous coexistence of the aforementioned problems for very deep PlainNets. Particularly, we argue that the aforementioned problems would have to be tackled simultaneously for the successful training of very deep PlainNets. Finally, different techniques that can be employed for tackling the optimization problem are discussed, and a specific combination of simple techniques that allows the successful training of PlainNets having up to 100 layers is demonstrated.

Revisiting the Training of Very Deep Neural Networks without Skip Connections


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.

Top-rank Counter Metric for Person Re-identification

Regression via classification (RvC) is a common method used for regression problems in deep learning, where the target variable belongs to a set of continuous values. By discretizing the target into a set of non-overlapping classes, it has been shown that training a classifier can improve neural network accuracy compared to using a standard regression approach. However, it is not clear how the set of discrete classes should be chosen and how it affects the overall solution. In this work, we propose that using several discrete data representations simultaneously can improve neural network learning compared to a single representation. Our approach is end-to-end differentiable and can be added as a simple extension to conventional learning methods, such as deep neural networks. We test our method on three challenging tasks and show that our method reduces the prediction error compared to a baseline RvC approach while maintaining a similar model complexity.

Deep Ordinal Regression with Label Diversity

recent years, progress in the Visual Question Answering (VQA)field has largely been driven by public challenges and large datasets. One of the most widely-used of these is the VQA 2.0 dataset, consisting of polar (yes/no) and non-polar questions. Looking at the question distribution over all answers, we find that the answers yes and no account for 38% of the questions (19% per class), while the remaining 62% are spread over the remaining 3127 answers (0.02%per class). While several sources of biases have been investigated in the field, the effects of such an over-representation of polar questions remain unclear. In this paper, we measure the potential confounding factors when polar and non-polar samples are used jointly to train a baseline VQA classifier, and compare it to an upper bound where the over-representation of polar questions is excluded from the training. Further, we perform cross-over experiments to analyze how well the feature spaces of polar and non-polar samples align. Contrary to expectations, we find no evidence of counterproductive effects in the joint training of unbalanced classes. In fact, by exploring the intermediate feature space of visual-text embeddings, we find that the feature space of polar questions already encodes sufficient structure to answer many non-polar questions. Our results indicate that the polar (P) and the non-polar (NP) feature spaces are strongly aligned, hence the expression P (approx.) NP.

P (approx.) NP, at least in Visual Question Answering

We present an approach to perform 3D pose estimation of multiple people from a few calibrated camera views. Our architecture, leveraging the recently proposed unprojection layer, aggregates feature-maps from a 2D pose estimator backbone into a comprehensive representation of the 3D scene. Such intermediate representation is then elaborated by a fully-convolutional volumetric network and a decoding stage to extract 3D skeletons with sub-voxel accuracy. Our method achieves state of the art MPJPE on the CMU Panoptic dataset using a few unseen views and obtains competitive results even with a single input view. We also assess the transfer learning capabilities of the model by testing it against the publicly available Shelf dataset obtaining good performance metrics. The proposed method is inherently efficient: as a pure bottom-up approach, it is computationally independent of the number of people in the scene. Furthermore, even though the computational burden of the 2D part scales linearly with the number of input views, the overall architecture is able to exploit a very lightweight 2D backbone which is orders of magnitude faster than the volumetric counterpart, resulting in fast inference time. The system can run at 6 FPS, processing up to 10 camera views on a single 1080Ti GPU.

Light3DPose: Real-time Multi-Person 3D Pose Estimation from Multiple Views

We present a groundtruthing approach which is applicable to large video datasets collected for studying people’s behavior, and which are recorded at a low frame per
second (fps) rate. Groundtruthing a large dataset manually is a time consuming task and is prone to errors. The proposed approach is semi-automated (using a combination of deepnet and traditional image analysis) to minimize human labeler’s
interaction with the video frames. The framework employs mask-rcnn as a people counter followed by human assisted semi-automated tests to correct the wrong labels. Subsequently, a bounding box extraction algorithm is used which is fully
automated for frames with a single person and semi-automated for frames with two or more people. We also propose a methodology for anomaly detection i.e., collapse on table or floor. Behavior recognition is performed by using a fine-tuned alexnet convolutional neural network. The people detection and behavior analysis components of the framework are primarily designed to help reduce human labor in ground-truthing so that minimal human involvement is required. They are not meant to be employed as fully automated state-of-the-art systems. The proposed approach is validated on a new dataset presented in this paper, containing human activity in an indoor office environment and recorded at 1 fps as well as an indoor video
sequence recorded at 15 fps. Experimental results show a significant reduction in human labor involved in the process of ground-truthing i.e., the number of potential clicks for office dataset was reduced by 99.2% and for the additional test video by 99.7%.

Ground-truthing Large Human Behavior Monitoring Datasets

This paper addresses the problem of recognizing human-human interaction from skeletal sequences. Existing methods are mainly designed to classify single human action. Many of them simply stack the movement features of two characters to deal with human interaction, while neglecting the abundant relationships between characters. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stream recurrent neural network by adopting the geometric features from both single actions and interactions to describe the spatial correlations with different discriminative abilities. The first stream is constructed under pairwise joint distance (PJD) in a fully-connected mesh to categorize the interactions with explicit distance patterns. To better distinguish similar interactions, in the second stream, we combine PJD with the spatial features from individual joint positions using graph convolutions to detect the implicit correlations among joints, where the joint connections in the graph are adaptive for
flexible correlations. After spatial modeling, each stream is fed to a bi-directional LSTM to encode two-way temporal properties. To take advantage of the diverse discriminative power of the two streams, we come up with a late fusion algorithm to combine their output predictions concerning information entropy. Experimental
results show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3D and comparable performance on 2D interaction datasets. Moreover, the late fusion results demonstrate the effectiveness of improving the recognition accuracy compared with single streams.

A Two-Stream Recurrent Network for Skeleton-based Human Interaction Recognition

Given a set of 3D to 2D putative matches, labeling the correspondences as inliers or outliers plays a critical role in a wide range of computer vision applications including the Perspective-n-Point (PnP) and object recognition. In this paper, we study a more generalized problem which allows the matches to belong to multiple objects with distinct poses. We propose a deep architecture to simultaneously label the correspondences as inliers or outliers and classify the inliers into multiple objects. Specifically, we discretize the 3D rotation space into twenty convex cones based on the facets of a regular icosahedron. For each facet, a facet classifier is trained to predict the probability of a correspondence being an inlier for a pose whose rotation normal vector points towards this facet. An efficient RANSAC-based post-processing algorithm is also proposed to further process the prediction results and detect the objects. Experiments demonstrate that our method is very efficient compared to existing methods and is capable of simultaneously labeling and classifying the inliers of multiple objects with high precision.

Learning To Find Good Correspondences Of Multiple Objects

The Rectified Nearest Feature Line Segment (RNFLS) classifier is an improved version of the Nearest Feature Line (NFL) classification rule. RNFLS corrects two drawbacks of NFL, namely the interpolation and extrapolation inaccuracies, by applying two consecutive processes ---segmentation and rectification--- to the initial set of feature lines. The main drawbacks of this technique, occurring in both training and test phases, are the high computational cost of the rectification procedure and the exponential explosion of the number of lines. We propose a cheaper version of RNFLS, based on a characterization of the points that should form good lines. The characterization relies on a recent neighborhood-based principle that categorizes objects into four types: safe, borderline, rare and outliers, depending on the position of each point with respect to the other classes. The proposed approach represents a variant of RNFLS in the sense that it only considers lines between safe points. This allows a drastic reduction in the computational burden imposed by RNFLS. We carried out an empirical and thorough analysis based on different public data sets, showing that our proposed approach, in general, is not significantly different from RNFLS, but cheaper since the consideration of likely irrelevant feature line segments is avoided.

A cheaper Rectified-Nearest-Feature-Line-Segment classifier based on safe points

Although deep neural networks (NNs) have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in many visual recognition tasks, the growing computational complexity and energy consumption of networks remains an issue, especially for applications on platforms with limited resources and requiring real-time processing. Filter pruning techniques have recently shown promising results for the compression and acceleration of convolutional NNs (CNNs). 
However, these techniques involve numerous steps and complex optimisations because some only prune after training CNNs, while others prune from scratch during training, by integrating sparsity constraints or by modifying the loss function. 
In this paper, we introduce a new Progressive Gradient Pruning (PGP) technique for iterative filter pruning during training. In contrast to previous progressive pruning techniques, 
it relies on a novel filter selection criterion that measures the change in filter weights, uses a new hard and soft pruning strategy, and effectively adapts momentum tensors during the backward propagation pass. Experimental results obtained after training various CNNs on benchmark datasets for image classification, object detection and domain adaptation indicate that our PGP technique can achieve a better trade-off between classification accuracy and network (time and memory) complexity than PSFP and other state-of-the-art filter pruning techniques. Code is available on GitHub link: https://github.com/Anon6627/Pruning-PGP.

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Learning from Learners: Adapting Reinforcement Learning Agents to be Competitive in a Card Game

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