Italy

The research in reinforcement learning has achieved great success in strategic game playing. These successes are thanks to the incorporation of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to the agent trained under the self-play (SP) environment. By self-play, agents are provided with an incrementally more difficult curriculum which in turn facilitates learning. 
However, recent research suggests that agents trained via self-play may easily lead to getting stuck in local equilibria.
In this paper, we consider a population of agents each independently learns to play an alternating Markov game (AMG).
We propose a new training framework ---group practice--- for a population of decentralized RL agents.
By group practice (GP), agents are assigned into multiple learning groups during training, for every episode of games, an agent is randomly paired up and practices with another agent in the learning group.
The convergence result to the optimal value function and the Nash equilibrium are proved under the GP framework. Experimental study is conducted by applying GP to $Q$-learning algorithm and the deep $Q$-learning with Monte-Carlo tree search on the game of Connect Four and the game of Hex. 
We verify that GP is the more efficient training scheme than SP given the same amount of training.
We also show that the learning effectiveness can even be improved when applying local grouping to agents.

ICPR 2020

Self-Play or Group Practice: Learning to PlayAlternating Markov Game in Multi-Agent System

reinforcement learning; multi-agent system; group practice

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. 


poster


Most deep learning-based image inpainting approaches adopt autoencoder or its variants to ﬁll missing regions in images. Encoders are usually utilized to learn powerful representational spaces, which are important for dealing with sophisticated learning tasks. Speciﬁcally, in image inpainting tasks, masks with any shapes can appear anywhere in images (i.e., free-form masks) which form complex patterns. It is difﬁcult for encoders to capture such powerful representations under this complex situation. To tackle this problem, we propose a self-supervised Siamese inference network to improve the robustness and generalization. It can encode contextual semantics from full-resolution images and obtain more discriminative
representations. we further propose a multi-scale decoder with a novel dual attention fusion module (DAF), which can combine both the restored and known regions in a smooth way. This multi-scale architecture is beneﬁcial for decoding discriminative representations learned by encoders into images layer by layer. In this way, unknown regions will be ﬁlled naturally from outside to inside.

Free-Form Image Inpainting via Contrastive Attention Network

Today's legal restrictions that protect the privacy of biometric data are hampering fingerprint recognition researches. For instance, all high-resolution fingerprint databases ceased to be publicly available. To address this problem, we present a novel hybrid approach to synthesize realistic, high-resolution fingerprints. First, we improved Anguli, a handcrafted fingerprint generator, to obtain dynamic ridge maps with sweat pores and scratches. Then, we trained a CycleGAN to transform these maps into realistic fingerprints. Unlike other CNN-based works, we can generate several images for the same identity. We used our approach to create a synthetic database with 7400 images in an attempt to propel further studies in this field without raising legal issues. We included sweat pore annotations in 740 images to encourage research developments in pore detection. In our experiments, we employed two fingerprint matching approaches to confirm that real and synthetic databases have similar performance. We conducted a human perception analysis where sixty volunteers could hardly differ between real and synthesized fingerprints. Given that we also favorably compare our results with the most advanced works in the literature, our experimentation suggests that our approach is the new state-of-the-art.

Level Three Synthetic Fingerprint Generation


Face age transformation aims to generate a face
image in the past or future and has been receiving increasing
attention for its significance recently. This paper proposes a localglobal interactive framework for long-span face age transformation. We divide a face image into five local parts and design
a local generative network for each of them to learn the local
changes of a face image. Meanwhile a global generative network
is utilized to learn the global changes. We introduce an interactive
network and an age classification network, which are respectively
used to integrate the local and global features and maintain the
corresponding age features in different age groups. Given a face
image at a certain age, our network can produce a realistic image
of face aging or rejuvenation. We test and evaluate the model on
complex datasets. Extensive qualitative comparison experiments
prove the effectiveness and potential of our proposed method.

Local-Global Interactive Network For Face Age Transformation


Due to the advancement of non-invasive medical imaging modalities like Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA), an increasing number of Intracranial Aneurysm (IA) cases are being reported in recent years. The IAs are typically treated by so-called endovascular coiling, where blood flow in the IA is prevented by embolization with a platinum coil. Accurate quantification of the IA Remnant (IAR), i.e. the volume with blood flow present post treatment is the utmost important factor in choosing the right treatment planning. This is typically done by manually segmenting the aneurysm remnant from the MRA volume. Since manual segmentation of volumetric images is a labour-intensive and error-prone process, development of an automatic volumetric segmentation method is required. Segmentation of small structures such as IA, that may largely vary in size, shape, and location is considered extremely difficult. Similar intensity distribution of IAs and surrounding blood vessels makes it more challenging and susceptible to false positive. In this paper we propose a novel 3D CNN architecture called Dual-Attention Atrous Net (DAtt-ANet), which can efficiently segment IAR volumes from MRA images by reconciling features at different scales using the proposed Parallel Atrous Unit (PAU) along with the use of self-attention mechanism for extracting fine-grained features and intra-class correlation. The proposed DAtt-ANet model is trained and evaluated on a clinical MRA image dataset of IAR consisting of 46 subjects. We compared the proposed DAtt-ANet with five state-of-the-art CNN models based on their segmentation performance. The proposed DAtt-ANet outperformed all other methods and was able to achieve a five-fold cross-validation DICE score of 0.73 ± 0.06.

Segmentation of Intracranial Aneurysm Remnant in MRA using Dual-Attention Atrous Net


This paper introduces neural architecture search (NAS) for the automatic discovery of small models for keyword spotting (KWS) in limited resource environments. We employ a differentiable NAS approach to optimize the structure of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to maximize the classification accuracy while minimizing the number of operations per inference. Using NAS only, we were able to obtain a highly efficient model with 95.4% accuracy on the Google speech commands dataset with 494.8 kB of memory usage and 19.6 million operations. Additionally, weight quantization is used to reduce the memory consumption even further. We show that weight quantization to low bit-widths (e.g. 1 bit) can be used without substantial loss in accuracy. By increasing the number of input features from 10 MFCC to 20 MFCC we were able to increase the accuracy to 96.3% at 340.1 kB of memory usage and 27.1 million operations.

Resource-efficient DNNs for Keyword Spotting using Neural Architecture Search and Quantization


Manipulating images of complex scenes to reconstruct, insert and/or remove specific object instances is a challenging task.
Complex scenes contain multiple semantics and objects, which are frequently cluttered or ambiguous, thus hampering the performance of inpainting models.
Conventional techniques often rely on structural information such as object contours in multi-stage approaches that generate unreliable results and boundaries.
In this work, we propose a novel deep learning model to alter a complex urban scene by removing a user-specified portion of the image and coherently inserting a new object (e.g. car or pedestrian) in that scene.
Inspired by recent works on image inpainting, our proposed method leverages the semantic segmentation to model the content and structure of the image, and learn the best shape and location of the object to insert.
To generate reliable results, we design a new decoder block that combines the semantic segmentation and generation task to guide better the generation of new objects and scenes, which have to be semantically consistent with the image.

Our experiments, conducted on two large-scale datasets of urban scenes (Cityscapes and Indian Driving), show that our proposed approach successfully address the problem of semantically-guided inpainting of complex urban scene.

Semantic-Guided Inpainting Network for Complex Urban Scenes Manipulation

A plethora of research in the literature shows how human eye fixation pattern varies depending on different factors, including genetics, age, social functioning, cognitive functioning, and so on. Analysis of these variations in visual attention has already elicited two potential research avenues: 1) determining the physiological or psychological state of the subject and 2) predicting the tasks associated with the act of viewing from the recorded eye-fixation data. To this end, this paper proposes a visual saliency based novel feature extraction method for automatic and quantitative classification of eye-tracking data, which is applicable to both of the research directions. Instead of directly extracting features from the fixation data, this method
employs several well-known computational models of visual attention to predict eye fixation locations as saliency maps. Comparing the saliency amplitudes, similarity and dissimilarity of saliency maps with the corresponding eye fixations maps gives an extra dimension of information which is effectively utilized to generate discriminative features to classify the eye-tracking data. Extensive experimentation using Saliency4ASD, Age Prediction, and Visual Perceptual Task dataset show that
our saliency-based feature can achieve superior performance, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art methods by a considerable margin. Moreover, unlike the existing application-specific solutions, our method demonstrates performance improvement across three distinct problems from the real-life domain: Autism Spectrum Disorder screening, toddler age prediction, and human visual perceptual task classification, providing a general paradigm that utilizes the extra-information
inherent in saliency maps for a more accurate classification

Classifying Eye-Tracking Data Using Saliency Maps

Time series clustering is a challenging task due to the specificities of this type of data. Temporal correlation and invariance to transformations such as shifting, warping or noise prevent the use of standard data mining methods. Time series clustering has been mostly studied under the angle of finding efficient algorithms and distance metrics adapted to the specific nature of time series data. Much less attention has been devoted to the general problem of model selection. Clustering stability has emerged as a universal and model-agnostic principle for clustering model selection. This principle can be stated as follows: an algorithm should find a structure in the data that is resilient to perturbation by sampling or noise. We propose to apply stability analysis to time series by leveraging prior knowledge on the nature and invariances of the data. These invariances determine the perturbation process used to assess stability. Based on a recently introduced criterion combining between-cluster and within-cluster stability, we propose an invariance-guided method for model selection, applicable to a wide range of clustering algorithms. Experiments conducted on artificial and benchmark data sets demonstrate the ability of our criterion to discover structure and select the correct number of clusters, whenever data invariances are known beforehand.

An Invariance-guided Stability Criterion for Time Series Clustering Validation

Acquiring information about the road lane structure
is a crucial step for autonomous navigation. To this end, several
approaches tackle this task from different perspectives such as
lane marking detection or semantic lane segmentation. However,
to the best of our knowledge, there is yet no purely vision
based end-to-end solution to answer the precise question: How
to estimate the relative number or "ID" of the current driven
lane within a multi-lane road or a highway?
In this work, we propose a real-time, vision-only (i.e. monocular
camera) solution to the problem based on a dual left-right
convention. We interpret this task as a classification problem
by limiting the maximum number of lane candidates to eight.
Our approach is designed to meet low-complexity specifications
and limited runtime requirements. It harnesses the temporal
dimension inherent to the input sequences to improve upon high complexity
state-of-the-art models. We achieve more than 95%
accuracy on a challenging test set with extreme conditions and
different routes.


Real-time End-to-End Lane ID Estimation Using
Recurrent Networks



In this paper, a new 2D transform named Discrete Mirror Transform (DMT) is presented.
The DMT is computed by decomposing a signal into its even and odd parts around an optimal location in a given direction so that the signal energy is maximally split between the two components.
After minimizing the information required to regenerate the original signal by removing redundant structures,
the process is iterated leading the signal energy to distribute into a continuously smaller set of coefficients.
The DMT can be displayed as a binary tree, where each node represents the 
single (even or odd) signal derived from the decomposition in the previous level.
An optimized version of the DMT (ODMT) is also introduced, by exploiting the possibility to choose different directions at which performing the decomposition.
Experimental simulations have been carried out in order to test the sparsity
properties of the DMT and ODMT when applied on images: referring to both transforms, the results show a superior performance with respect to the popular Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) in terms of non-linear approximation.

Self-Play or Group Practice: Learning to PlayAlternating Markov Game in Multi-Agent System

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