OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Tax Knowledge Graph for a Smarter and More Personalized TurboTax
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

Most knowledge graph use cases are data-centric, focusing on representing data entities and their semantic relationships. There are no published success stories to represent large-scale complicated business logic with knowledge graph technologies. In this paper, we will share our innovative and practical approach to representing complicated U.S. and Canadian income tax compliance logic (calculations and rules) via a large-scale knowledge graph. We will cover how the Tax Knowledge Graph is constructed and automated, how it is used to calculate tax refunds, reasoned to find missing info, and navigated to explain the calculated results. The Tax Knowledge Graph has helped transform Intuit's flagship TurboTax product into a smart and personalized experience, accelerating and automating the tax preparation process while instilling confidence for millions of customers.
Towards the Quantification of Safety Risks in Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Safety concerns on the deep neural networks (DNNs) have been raised when they are applied to critical sectors. In this paper, we define safety risks by requesting the alignment of the network's decision with human perception. To enable a general methodology for quantifying safety risks, we define a generic safety property and instantiate it to express various safety risks. For the quantification of risks, we take the maximum radius of safe norm balls, in which no safety risk exists. The computation of the maximum safe radius is reduced to the computation of their respective Lipschitz metrics - the quantities to be computed. In addition to the known adversarial example, reachability example, and invariant example, in this paper we identify a new class of risk - uncertainty example - on which humans can tell easily but the network is unsure. We develop an algorithm, inspired by derivative-free optimization techniques and accelerated by tensor-based parallelization on GPUs, to support efficient computation of the metrics. We perform evaluations on several benchmark neural networks, including ACSC-Xu, MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet networks. The experiments show that, our method can achieve competitive performance on safety quantification in terms of the tightness and the efficiency of computation. Importantly, as a generic approach, our method can work with a broad class of safety risks and without restrictions on the structure of neural networks.
Multi-channel MRI Embedding: An EffectiveStrategy for Enhancement of Human Brain WholeTumor Segmentation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

One of the most important tasks in medical image processing is the brain's whole tumor segmentation. It assists in quicker clinical assessment and early detection of brain tumors, which is crucial for lifesaving treatment procedures of patients. Because, brain tumors often can be malignant or benign, if they are detected at an early stage. A brain tumor is a collection or a mass of abnormal cells in the brain. The human skull encloses the brain very rigidly and any growth inside this restricted place can cause severe health issues. The detection of brain tumors requires careful and intricate analysis for surgical planning and treatment. Most physicians employ Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to diagnose such tumors. A manual diagnosis of the tumors using MRI is known to be time-consuming; approximately, it takes up to eighteen hours per sample. Thus, the automatic segmentation of tumors has become an optimal solution for this problem. Studies have shown that this technique provides better accuracy and it is faster than manual analysis resulting in patients receiving the treatment at the right time. Our research introduces an efficient strategy called Multi-channel MRI embedding to improve the result of deep learning-based tumor segmentation. The experimental analysis on the Brats-2019 dataset wrt the U-Net encoder-decoder (EnDec) model shows significant improvement. The embedding strategy surmounts the state-of-the-art approaches with an improvement of 2% without any timing overheads.
MERAM: Non-Volatile Cache Memory Based on Magneto-Electric FETs
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2020
Year: 2020

Magneto-Electric FET (MEFET) is a recently developed post-CMOS FET, which offers intriguing characteristics for high speed and low-power design in both logic and memory applications. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a non-volatile 2T-1MEFET memory bit-cell with separate read and write paths. We show that with proper co-design at the device, cell and array levels, such a design is a promising candidate for fast non-volatile cache memory, termed as MERAM. To further evaluate its performance in memory system, we, for the first time, build a device-to-architecture cross-layer evaluation framework based on an experimentally-calibrated MEFET device model to quantitatively analyze and benchmark the proposed MERAM design with other memory technologies, including both volatile memory (i.e. SRAM, eDRAM) and other popular non-volatile emerging memory (i.e. ReRAM, STT-MRAM, and SOT-MRAM). The experiment results show that MERAM has a high state distinguishability with almost 36x magnitude difference in sense current. Results for the PARSEC benchmark suite indicate that as an L2 cache alternative, MERAM reduces Energy Area Latency (EAT) product on average by ~98\% and ~70\% compared with typical 6T SRAM and 2T SOT-MRAM platforms, respectively.
Complexity Measures for Neural Networks with General Activation Functions Using Path-based Norms
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

A simple approach is proposed to obtain complexity controls for neural networks with general activation functions. The approach is motivated by approximating the general activation functions with one-dimensional ReLU networks, which reduces the problem to the complexity controls of ReLU networks. Specifically, we consider two-layer networks and deep residual networks, for which path-based norms are derived to control complexities. We also provide preliminary analyses of the function spaces induced by these norms and a priori estimates of the corresponding regularized estimators.
A Deep Framework for Cross-Domain and Cross-System Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) and Cross-System Recommendations (CSR) are two of the promising solutions to address the long-standing data sparsity problem in recommender systems. They leverage the relatively richer information, e.g., ratings, from the source domain or system to improve the recommendation accuracy in the target domain or system. Therefore, finding an accurate mapping of the latent factors across domains or systems is crucial to enhancing recommendation accuracy. However, this is a very challenging task because of the complex relationships between the latent factors of the source and target domains or systems. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Deep framework for both Cross-Domain and Cross-System Recommendations, called DCDCSR, based on Matrix Factorization (MF) models and a fully connected Deep Neural Network (DNN). Specifically, DCDCSR first employs the MF models to generate user and item latent factors and then employs the DNN to map the latent factors across domains or systems. More importantly, we take into account the rating sparsity degrees of individual users and items in different domains or systems and use them to guide the DNN training process for utilizing the rating data more effectively. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that DCDCSR framework outperforms the state-of-the-art CDR and CSR approaches in terms of recommendation accuracy.
Cascade Network for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

It is a classical compute vision problem to obtain real scene depth maps by using a monocular camera, which has been widely concerned in recent years. However, training this model usually requires a large number of artificially labeled samples. To solve this problem, some researchers use a self-supervised learning model to overcome this problem and reduce the dependence on manually labeled data. Nevertheless, the accuracy and reliability of these methods have not reached the expected standard. In this paper, we propose a new self-supervised learning method based on cascade networks. Compared with the previous self-supervised methods, our method has improved accuracy and reliability, and we have proved this by experiments. We show a cascaded neural network that divides the target scene into parts of different sight distances and trains them separately to generate a better depth map. Our approach is divided into the following four steps. In the first step, we use the self-supervised model to estimate the depth of the scene roughly. In the second step, the depth of the scene generated in the first step is used as a label to divide the scene into different depth parts. The third step is to use models with different parameters to generate depth maps of different depth parts in the target scene, and the fourth step is to fuse the depth map. Through the ablation study, we demonstrated the effectiveness of each component individually and showed high-quality, state-of-the-art results in the KITTI benchmark.
SAPAG: A Self-Adaptive Privacy Attack From Gradients
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Distributed learning such as federated learning or collaborative learning enables model training on decentralized data from users and only collects local gradients, where data is processed close to its sources for data privacy. The nature of not centralizing the training data addresses the privacy issue of privacy-sensitive data. Recent studies show that a third party can reconstruct the true training data in the distributed machine learning system through the publicly-shared gradients. However, existing reconstruction attack frameworks lack generalizability on different Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures and different weight distribution initialization, and can only succeed in the early training phase. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a more general privacy attack from gradient, SAPAG, which uses a Gaussian kernel based of gradient difference as a distance measure. Our experiments demonstrate that SAPAG can construct the training data on different DNNs with different weight initializations and on DNNs in any training phases.
Unsupervised learning for vascular heterogeneity assessment of glioblastoma based on magnetic resonance imaging: The Hemodynamic Tissue Signature
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

This thesis focuses on the research and development of the Hemodynamic Tissue Signature (HTS) method: an unsupervised machine learning approach to describe the vascular heterogeneity of glioblastomas by means of perfusion MRI analysis. The HTS builds on the concept of habitats. An habitat is defined as a sub-region of the lesion with a particular MRI profile describing a specific physiological behavior. The HTS method delineates four habitats within the glioblastoma: the High Angiogenic Tumor (HAT) habitat, as the most perfused region of the enhancing tumor; the Low Angiogenic Tumor (LAT) habitat, as the region of the enhancing tumor with a lower angiogenic profile; the potentially Infiltrated Peripheral Edema (IPE) habitat, as the non-enhancing region adjacent to the tumor with elevated perfusion indexes; and the Vasogenic Peripheral Edema (VPE) habitat, as the remaining edema of the lesion with the lowest perfusion profile. The results of this thesis have been published in ten scientific contributions, including top-ranked journals and conferences in the areas of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Probability, Radiology & Nuclear Medicine, Machine Learning and Data Mining and Biomedical Engineering. An industrial patent registered in Spain (ES201431289A), Europe (EP3190542A1) and EEUU (US20170287133A1) was also issued, summarizing the efforts of the thesis to generate tangible assets besides the academic revenue obtained from research publications. Finally, the methods, technologies and original ideas conceived in this thesis led to the foundation of ONCOANALYTICS CDX, a company framed into the business model of companion diagnostics for pharmaceutical compounds, thought as a vehicle to facilitate the industrialization of the ONCOhabitats technology.
Demystifying Deep Learning in Predictive Spatio-Temporal Analytics: An Information-Theoretic Framework
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep learning has achieved incredible success over the past years, especially in various challenging predictive spatio-temporal analytics (PSTA) tasks, such as disease prediction, climate forecast, and traffic prediction, where intrinsic dependency relationships among data exist and generally manifest at multiple spatio-temporal scales. However, given a specific PSTA task and the corresponding dataset, how to appropriately determine the desired configuration of a deep learning model, theoretically analyze the model's learning behavior, and quantitatively characterize the model's learning capacity remains a mystery. In order to demystify the power of deep learning for PSTA, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive framework for deep learning model design and information-theoretic analysis. First, we develop and demonstrate a novel interactively- and integratively-connected deep recurrent neural network (I$^2$DRNN) model. I$^2$DRNN consists of three modules: an Input module that integrates data from heterogeneous sources; a Hidden module that captures the information at different scales while allowing the information to flow interactively between layers; and an Output module that models the integrative effects of information from various hidden layers to generate the output predictions. Second, to theoretically prove that our designed model can learn multi-scale spatio-temporal dependency in PSTA tasks, we provide an information-theoretic analysis to examine the information-based learning capacity (i-CAP) of the proposed model. Third, to validate the I$^2$DRNN model and confirm its i-CAP, we systematically conduct a series of experiments involving both synthetic datasets and real-world PSTA tasks. The experimental results show that the I$^2$DRNN model outperforms both classical and state-of-the-art models, and is able to capture meaningful multi-scale spatio-temporal dependency.
Double-Wing Mixture of Experts for Streaming Recommendations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2020
Year: 2020

Streaming Recommender Systems (SRSs) commonly train recommendation models on newly received data only to address user preference drift, i.e., the changing user preferences towards items. However, this practice overlooks the long-term user preferences embedded in historical data. More importantly, the common heterogeneity in data stream greatly reduces the accuracy of streaming recommendations. The reason is that different preferences (or characteristics) of different types of users (or items) cannot be well learned by a unified model. To address these two issues, we propose a Variational and Reservoir-enhanced Sampling based Double-Wing Mixture of Experts framework, called VRS-DWMoE, to improve the accuracy of streaming recommendations. In VRS-DWMoE, we first devise variational and reservoir-enhanced sampling to wisely complement new data with historical data, and thus address the user preference drift issue while capturing long-term user preferences. After that, we propose a Double-Wing Mixture of Experts (DWMoE) model to first effectively learn heterogeneous user preferences and item characteristics, and then make recommendations based on them. Specifically, DWMoE contains two Mixture of Experts (MoE, an effective ensemble learning model) to learn user preferences and item characteristics, respectively. Moreover, the multiple experts in each MoE learn the preferences (or characteristics) of different types of users (or items) where each expert specializes in one underlying type. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VRS-DWMoE consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art SRSs.
Continuous dictionaries meet low-rank tensor approximations
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this short paper we bridge two seemingly unrelated sparse approximation topics: continuous sparse coding and low-rank approximations. We show that for a specific choice of continuous dictionary, linear systems with nuclear-norm regularization have the same solutions as a BLasso problem. Although this fact was already partially understood in the matrix case, we further show that for tensor data, using BLasso solvers for the low-rank approximation problem leads to a new branch of optimization methods yet vastly unexplored. In particular, the proposed Frank-Wolfe algorithm is showcased on an automatic tensor rank selection problem.
On Generating Plausible Counterfactual and Semi-Factual Explanations for Deep Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

There is a growing concern that the recent progress made in AI, especially regarding the predictive competence of deep learning models, will be undermined by a failure to properly explain their operation and outputs. In response to this disquiet counterfactual explanations have become massively popular in eXplainable AI (XAI) due to their proposed computational psychological, and legal benefits. In contrast however, semifactuals, which are a similar way humans commonly explain their reasoning, have surprisingly received no attention. Most counterfactual methods address tabular rather than image data, partly due to the nondiscrete nature of the latter making good counterfactuals difficult to define. Additionally generating plausible looking explanations which lie on the data manifold is another issue which hampers progress. This paper advances a novel method for generating plausible counterfactuals (and semifactuals) for black box CNN classifiers doing computer vision. The present method, called PlausIble Exceptionality-based Contrastive Explanations (PIECE), modifies all exceptional features in a test image to be normal from the perspective of the counterfactual class (hence concretely defining a counterfactual). Two controlled experiments compare this method to others in the literature, showing that PIECE not only generates the most plausible counterfactuals on several measures, but also the best semifactuals.
Completely Self-Supervised Crowd Counting via Distribution Matching
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Dense crowd counting is a challenging task that demands millions of head annotations for training models. Though existing self-supervised approaches could learn good representations, they require some labeled data to map these features to the end task of density estimation. We mitigate this issue with the proposed paradigm of complete self-supervision, which does not need even a single labeled image. The only input required to train, apart from a large set of unlabeled crowd images, is the approximate upper limit of the crowd count for the given dataset. Our method dwells on the idea that natural crowds follow a power law distribution, which could be leveraged to yield error signals for backpropagation. A density regressor is first pretrained with self-supervision and then the distribution of predictions is matched to the prior by optimizing Sinkhorn distance between the two. Experiments show that this results in effective learning of crowd features and delivers significant counting performance. Furthermore, we establish the superiority of our method in less data setting as well. The code and models for our approach is available at https://github.com/val-iisc/css-ccnn.
Carousel Personalization in Music Streaming Apps with Contextual Bandits
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Media services providers, such as music streaming platforms, frequently leverage swipeable carousels to recommend personalized content to their users. However, selecting the most relevant items (albums, artists, playlists...) to display in these carousels is a challenging task, as items are numerous and as users have different preferences. In this paper, we model carousel personalization as a contextual multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays, cascade-based updates and delayed batch feedback. We empirically show the effectiveness of our framework at capturing characteristics of real-world carousels by addressing a large-scale playlist recommendation task on a global music streaming mobile app. Along with this paper, we publicly release industrial data from our experiments, as well as an open-source environment to simulate comparable carousel personalization learning problems.
Collaborative Attention Mechanism for Multi-View Action Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Multi-view action recognition (MVAR) leverages complementary temporal information from different views to improve the learning performance. Obtaining informative view-specific representation plays an essential role in MVAR. Attention has been widely adopted as an effective strategy for discovering discriminative cues underlying temporal data. However, most existing MVAR methods only utilize attention to extract representation for each view individually, ignoring the potential to dig latent patterns based on mutual-support information in attention space. To this end, we propose a collaborative attention mechanism (CAM) for solving the MVAR problem in this paper. The proposed CAM detects the attention differences among multi-view, and adaptively integrates frame-level information to benefit each other. Specifically, we extend the long short-term memory (LSTM) to a Mutual-Aid RNN (MAR) to achieve the multi-view collaboration process. CAM takes advantages of view-specific attention pattern to guide another view and discover potential information which is hard to be explored by itself. It paves a novel way to leverage attention information and enhances the multi-view representation learning. Extensive experiments on four action datasets illustrate the proposed CAM achieves better results for each view and also boosts multi-view performance.
User Manual for the SU2 EQUiPS Module: Enabling Quantification of Uncertainty in Physics Simulations
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2020
Year: 2020

This document serves as the manual for using the EQUiPS (Enabling Quantification of Uncertainty in Physics Simulations) module in SU2. The EQUiPS module uses the Eigenspace Perturbation methodology to provide interval bounds on Quantities of Interest (QoIs) that capture epistemic uncertainties arising from assumptions made in RANS turbulence models. This has been implemented and tested in SU2 for a variety of benchmark turbulence cases as well as flows of aerodynamic interest.
Data Augmentation and Clustering for Vehicle Make/Model Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Vehicle shape information is very important in Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS). In this paper we present a way to exploit a training data set of vehicles released in different years and captured under different perspectives. Also the efficacy of clustering to enhance the make/model classification is presented. Both steps led to improved classification results and a greater robustness. Deeper convolutional neural network based on ResNet architecture has been designed for the training of the vehicle make/model classification. The unequal class distribution of training data produces an a priori probability. Its elimination, obtained by removing of the bias and through hard normalization of the centroids in the classification layer, improves the classification results. A developed application has been used to test the vehicle re-identification on video data manually based on make/model and color classification. This work was partially funded under the grant.