OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Benchmarking Regression Methods: A comparison with CGAN
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, impressive progress has been made in the design of implicit probabilistic models via Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) and its extension, the Conditional GAN (CGAN). Excellent solutions have been demonstrated mostly in image processing applications which involve large, continuous output spaces. There is almost no application of these powerful tools to problems having small dimensional output spaces. Regression problems involving the inductive learning of a map, $y=f(x,z)$, $z$ denoting noise, $f:\mathbb{R}^n\times \mathbb{R}^k \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^m$, with $m$ small (e.g., $m=1$ or just a few) is one good case in point. The standard approach to solve regression problems is to probabilistically model the output $y$ as the sum of a mean function $m(x)$ and a noise term $z$; it is also usual to take the noise to be a Gaussian. These are done for convenience sake so that the likelihood of observed data is expressible in closed form. In the real world, on the other hand, stochasticity of the output is usually caused by missing or noisy input variables. Such a real world situation is best represented using an implicit model in which an extra noise vector, $z$ is included with $x$ as input. CGAN is naturally suited to design such implicit models. This paper makes the first step in this direction and compares the existing regression methods with CGAN. We notice however, that the existing methods like mixture density networks (MDN) and XGBoost do quite well compared to CGAN in terms of likelihood and mean absolute error, respectively. Both these methods are comparatively easier to train than CGANs. CGANs need more innovation to have a comparable modeling and ease-of-training with respect to the existing regression solvers. In summary, for modeling uncertainty MDNs are better while XGBoost is better for the cases where accurate prediction is more important.
Sequential no-Substitution k-Median-Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We study the sample-based k-median clustering objective under a sequential setting without substitutions. In this setting, an i.i.d. sequence of examples is observed. An example can be selected as a center only immediately after it is observed, and it cannot be substituted later. The goal is to select a set of centers with a good k-median cost on the distribution which generated the sequence. We provide an efficient algorithm for this setting, and show that its multiplicative approximation factor is twice the approximation factor of an efficient offline algorithm. In addition, we show that if efficiency requirements are removed, there is an algorithm that can obtain the same approximation factor as the best offline algorithm. We demonstrate in experiments the performance of the efficient algorithm on real data sets. Our code is available at https://github.com/tomhess/No_Substitution_K_Median.
Interpretable PID Parameter Tuning for Control Engineering using General Dynamic Neural Networks: An Extensive Comparison
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Modern automation systems rely on closed loop control, wherein a controller interacts with a controlled process, based on observations. These systems are increasingly complex, yet most controllers are linear Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controllers. PID controllers perform well on linear and near-linear systems but their simplicity is at odds with the robustness required to reliably control complex processes. Modern machine learning offers a way to extend PID controllers beyond their linear capabilities by using neural networks. However, such an extension comes at the cost of losing stability guarantees and controller interpretability. In this paper, we examine the utility of extending PID controllers with recurrent neural networks-namely, General Dynamic Neural Networks (GDNN); we show that GDNN (neural) PID controllers perform well on a range of control systems and highlight how they can be a scalable and interpretable option for control systems. To do so, we provide an extensive study using four benchmark systems that represent the most common control engineering benchmarks. All control benchmarks are evaluated with and without noise as well as with and without disturbances. The neural PID controller performs better than standard PID control in 15 of 16 tasks and better than model-based control in 13 of 16 tasks. As a second contribution, we address the lack of interpretability that prevents neural networks from being used in real-world control processes. We use bounded-input bounded-output stability analysis to evaluate the parameters suggested by the neural network, thus making them understandable. This combination of rigorous evaluation paired with better interpretability is an important step towards the acceptance of neural-network-based control approaches. It is furthermore an important step towards interpretable and safely applied artificial intelligence.
Audio Caption in a Car Setting with a Sentence-Level Loss
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2020
Year: 2020

Captioning has attracted much attention in image and video understanding while a small amount of work examines audio captioning. This paper contributes a Mandarin-annotated dataset for audio captioning within a car scene. A sentence-level loss is proposed to be used in tandem with a GRU encoder-decoder model to generate captions with higher semantic similarity to human annotations. We evaluate the model on the newly-proposed Car dataset, a previously published Mandarin Hospital dataset and the Joint dataset, indicating its generalization capability across different scenes. An improvement in all metrics can be observed, including classical natural language generation (NLG) metrics, sentence richness and human evaluation ratings. However, though detailed audio captions can now be automatically generated, human annotations still outperform model captions on many aspects.
Neural Markov Logic Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce neural Markov logic networks (NMLNs), a statistical relational learning system that borrows ideas from Markov logic. Like Markov logic networks (MLNs), NMLNs are an exponential-family model for modelling distributions over possible worlds, but unlike MLNs, they do not rely on explicitly specified first-order logic rules. Instead, NMLNs learn an implicit representation of such rules as a neural network that acts as a potential function on fragments of the relational structure. Similarly to many neural symbolic methods, NMLNs can exploit embeddings of constants but, unlike them, NMLNs work well also in their absence. This is extremely important for predicting in settings other than the transductive one. We showcase the potential of NMLNs on knowledge-base completion, triple classification and on generation of molecular (graph) data.
Effective writing style imitation via combinatorial paraphrasing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Stylometry can be used to profile or deanonymize authors against their will based on writing style. Style transfer provides a defence. Current techniques typically use either encoder-decoder architectures or rule-based algorithms. Crucially, style transfer must reliably retain original semantic content to be actually deployable. We conduct a multifaceted evaluation of three state-of-the-art encoder-decoder style transfer techniques, and show that all fail at semantic retainment. In particular, they do not produce appropriate paraphrases, but only retain original content in the trivial case of exactly reproducing the text. To mitigate this problem we propose ParChoice: a technique based on the combinatorial application of multiple paraphrasing algorithms. ParChoice strongly outperforms the encoder-decoder baselines in semantic retainment. Additionally, compared to baselines that achieve non-negligible semantic retainment, ParChoice has superior style transfer performance. We also apply ParChoice to multi-author style imitation (not considered by prior work), where we achieve up to 75% imitation success among five authors. Furthermore, when compared to two state-of-the-art rule-based style transfer techniques, ParChoice has markedly better semantic retainment. Combining ParChoice with the best performing rule-based baseline (Mutant-X) also reaches the highest style transfer success on the Brennan-Greenstadt and Extended-Brennan-Greenstadt corpora, with much less impact on original meaning than when using the rule-based baseline techniques alone. Finally, we highlight a critical problem that afflicts all current style transfer techniques: the adversary can use the same technique for thwarting style transfer via adversarial training. We show that adding randomness to style transfer helps to mitigate the effectiveness of adversarial training.
Learning robust control for LQR systems with multiplicative noise via policy gradient
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The linear quadratic regulator (LQR) problem has reemerged as an important theoretical benchmark for reinforcement learning-based control of complex dynamical systems with continuous state and action spaces. In contrast with nearly all recent work in this area, we consider multiplicative noise models, which are increasingly relevant because they explicitly incorporate inherent uncertainty and variation in the system dynamics and thereby improve robustness properties of the controller. Robustness is a critical and poorly understood issue in reinforcement learning; existing methods which do not account for uncertainty can converge to fragile policies or fail to converge at all. Additionally, intentional injection of multiplicative noise into learning algorithms can enhance robustness of policies, as observed in ad hoc work on domain randomization. Although policy gradient algorithms require optimization of a non-convex cost function, we show that the multiplicative noise LQR cost has a special property called gradient domination, which is exploited to prove global convergence of policy gradient algorithms to the globally optimum control policy with polynomial dependence on problem parameters. Results are provided both in the model-known and model-unknown settings where samples of system trajectories are used to estimate policy gradients.
End to end learning and optimization on graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Real-world applications often combine learning and optimization problems on graphs. For instance, our objective may be to cluster the graph in order to detect meaningful communities (or solve other common graph optimization problems such as facility location, maxcut, and so on). However, graphs or related attributes are often only partially observed, introducing learning problems such as link prediction which must be solved prior to optimization. Standard approaches treat learning and optimization entirely separately, while recent machine learning work aims to predict the optimal solution directly from the inputs. Here, we propose an alternative decision-focused learning approach that integrates a differentiable proxy for common graph optimization problems as a layer in learned systems. The main idea is to learn a representation that maps the original optimization problem onto a simpler proxy problem that can be efficiently differentiated through. Experimental results show that our ClusterNet system outperforms both pure end-to-end approaches (that directly predict the optimal solution) and standard approaches that entirely separate learning and optimization. Code for our system is available at https://github.com/bwilder0/clusternet.
cGANs with Conditional Convolution Layer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) have been widely researched to generate class conditional images using a single generator. However, in the conventional cGANs techniques, it is still challenging for the generator to learn condition-specific features, since a standard convolutional layer with the same weights is used regardless of the condition. In this paper, we propose a novel convolution layer, called the conditional convolution layer, which directly generates different feature maps by employing the weights which are adjusted depending on the conditions. More specifically, in each conditional convolution layer, the weights are conditioned in a simple but effective way through filter-wise scaling and channel-wise shifting operations. In contrast to the conventional methods, the proposed method with a single generator can effectively handle condition-specific characteristics. The experimental results on CIFAR, LSUN and ImageNet datasets show that the generator with the proposed conditional convolution layer achieves a higher quality of conditional image generation than that with the standard convolution layer.
On Radically Expanding the Landscape of Potential Applications for Automated Proof Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we examine the potential of computer-assisted proof methods to be applied much more broadly than commonly recognized. More specifically, we contend that there are vast opportunities to derive useful mathematical results and properties that are extremely narrow in scope, and of practical relevance only to highly-specialized engineering applications, that are presently overlooked because they have characteristics atypical of those that are conventionally pursued in the areas of pure and applied mathematics. As a concrete example, we demonstrate use of automated methods for certifying polynomial nonnegativity as a part of a dimension-pinning strategy to prove that the inverse of the relative gain array (RGA) of a d-dimensional positive-definite matrix is doubly-stochastic for $d\leq 4$.
Depth-Aware Arbitrary Style Transfer Using Instance Normalization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Style transfer is the process of rendering one image with some content in the style of another image, representing the style. Recent studies of Liu et al. (2017) show that traditional style transfer methods of Gatys et al. (2016) and Johnson et al. (2016) fail to reproduce the depth of the content image, which is critical for human perception. They suggest to preserve the depth map by additional regularizer in the optimized loss function, forcing preservation of the depth map. However these traditional methods are either computationally inefficient or require training a separate neural network for each style. AdaIN method of Huang et al. (2017) allows efficient transferring of arbitrary style without training a separate model but is not able to reproduce the depth map of the content image. We propose an extension to this method, allowing depth map preservation by applying variable stylization strength. Qualitative analysis and results of user evaluation study indicate that the proposed method provides better stylizations, compared to the original AdaIN style transfer method.
Baby steps towards few-shot learning with multiple semantics
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Learning from one or few visual examples is one of the key capabilities of humans since early infancy, but is still a significant challenge for modern AI systems. While considerable progress has been achieved in few-shot learning from a few image examples, much less attention has been given to the verbal descriptions that are usually provided to infants when they are presented with a new object. In this paper, we focus on the role of additional semantics that can significantly facilitate few-shot visual learning. Building upon recent advances in few-shot learning with additional semantic information, we demonstrate that further improvements are possible by combining multiple and richer semantics (category labels, attributes, and natural language descriptions). Using these ideas, we offer the community new results on the popular miniImageNet and CUB few-shot benchmarks, comparing favorably to the previous state-of-the-art results for both visual only and visual plus semantics-based approaches. We also performed an ablation study investigating the components and design choices of our approach.
A Hierarchical Decoder with Three-level Hierarchical Attention to Generate Abstractive Summaries of Interleaved Texts
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Interleaved texts, where posts belonging to different threads occur in one sequence, are a common occurrence, e.g., online chat conversations. To quickly obtain an overview of such texts, existing systems first disentangle the posts by threads and then extract summaries from those threads. The major issues with such systems are error propagation and non-fluent summary. To address those, we propose an end-to-end trainable hierarchical encoder-decoder system. We also introduce a novel hierarchical attention mechanism which combines three levels of information from an interleaved text, i.e, posts, phrases and words, and implicitly disentangles the threads. We evaluated the proposed system on multiple interleaved text datasets, and it out-performs a SOTA two-step system by 20-40%.
Diameter-based Interactive Structure Discovery
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce interactive structure discovery, a generic framework that encompasses many interactive learning settings, including active learning, top-k item identification, interactive drug discovery, and others. We adapt a recently developed active learning algorithm of Tosh and Dasgupta (2017) for interactive structure discovery, and show that the new algorithm can be made noise-tolerant and enjoys favorable query complexity bounds.
Strong and Simple Baselines for Multimodal Utterance Embeddings
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Human language is a rich multimodal signal consisting of spoken words, facial expressions, body gestures, and vocal intonations. Learning representations for these spoken utterances is a complex research problem due to the presence of multiple heterogeneous sources of information. Recent advances in multimodal learning have followed the general trend of building more complex models that utilize various attention, memory and recurrent components. In this paper, we propose two simple but strong baselines to learn embeddings of multimodal utterances. The first baseline assumes a conditional factorization of the utterance into unimodal factors. Each unimodal factor is modeled using the simple form of a likelihood function obtained via a linear transformation of the embedding. We show that the optimal embedding can be derived in closed form by taking a weighted average of the unimodal features. In order to capture richer representations, our second baseline extends the first by factorizing into unimodal, bimodal, and trimodal factors, while retaining simplicity and efficiency during learning and inference. From a set of experiments across two tasks, we show strong performance on both supervised and semi-supervised multimodal prediction, as well as significant (10 times) speedups over neural models during inference. Overall, we believe that our strong baseline models offer new benchmarking options for future research in multimodal learning.
Gradient-Based Neural DAG Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a novel score-based approach to learning a directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data. We adapt a recently proposed continuous constrained optimization formulation to allow for nonlinear relationships between variables using neural networks. This extension allows to model complex interactions while avoiding the combinatorial nature of the problem. In addition to comparing our method to existing continuous optimization methods, we provide missing empirical comparisons to nonlinear greedy search methods. On both synthetic and real-world data sets, this new method outperforms current continuous methods on most tasks, while being competitive with existing greedy search methods on important metrics for causal inference.
Multi-scale self-guided attention for medical image segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Even though convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are driving progress in medical image segmentation, standard models still have some drawbacks. First, the use of multi-scale approaches, i.e., encoder-decoder architectures, leads to a redundant use of information, where similar low-level features are extracted multiple times at multiple scales. Second, long-range feature dependencies are not efficiently modeled, resulting in non-optimal discriminative feature representations associated with each semantic class. In this paper we attempt to overcome these limitations with the proposed architecture, by capturing richer contextual dependencies based on the use of guided self-attention mechanisms. This approach is able to integrate local features with their corresponding global dependencies, as well as highlight interdependent channel maps in an adaptive manner. Further, the additional loss between different modules guides the attention mechanisms to neglect irrelevant information and focus on more discriminant regions of the image by emphasizing relevant feature associations. We evaluate the proposed model in the context of semantic segmentation on three different datasets: abdominal organs, cardiovascular structures and brain tumors. A series of ablation experiments support the importance of these attention modules in the proposed architecture. In addition, compared to other state-of-the-art segmentation networks our model yields better segmentation performance, increasing the accuracy of the predictions while reducing the standard deviation. This demonstrates the efficiency of our approach to generate precise and reliable automatic segmentations of medical images. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/sinAshish/Multi-Scale-Attention
Risky Action Recognition in Lane Change Video Clips using Deep Spatiotemporal Networks with Segmentation Mask Transfer
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Advanced driver assistance and automated driving systems rely on risk estimation modules to predict and avoid dangerous situations. Current methods use expensive sensor setups and complex processing pipeline, limiting their availability and robustness. To address these issues, we introduce a novel deep learning based action recognition framework for classifying dangerous lane change behavior in short video clips captured by a monocular camera. We designed a deep spatiotemporal classification network that uses pre-trained state-of-the-art instance segmentation network Mask R-CNN as its spatial feature extractor for this task. The Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) and shallower final classification layers of the proposed method were trained on a semi-naturalistic lane change dataset with annotated risk labels. A comprehensive comparison of state-of-the-art feature extractors was carried out to find the best network layout and training strategy. The best result, with a 0.937 AUC score, was obtained with the proposed network. Our code and trained models are available open-source.
Understanding Generalization through Visualizations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The power of neural networks lies in their ability to generalize to unseen data, yet the underlying reasons for this phenomenon remain elusive. Numerous rigorous attempts have been made to explain generalization, but available bounds are still quite loose, and analysis does not always lead to true understanding. The goal of this work is to make generalization more intuitive. Using visualization methods, we discuss the mystery of generalization, the geometry of loss landscapes, and how the curse (or, rather, the blessing) of dimensionality causes optimizers to settle into minima that generalize well.