Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Attention network forecasts time-to-failure in laboratory shear experiments

Rocks under stress deform by creep mechanisms that include formation and slip on small-scale internal cracks. Intragranular cracks and slip along grain contacts release energy as elastic waves termed acoustic emissions (AE). AEs are thought to contain predictive information that can be used for fault failure forecasting. Here we present a method using unsupervised classification and an attention network to forecast labquakes using AE waveform features. Our data were generated in a laboratory setting using a biaxial shearing device with granular fault gouge intended to mimic the conditions of tectonic faults. Here we analyzed the temporal evolution of AEs generated throughout several hundred laboratory earthquake cycles. We used a Conscience Self-Organizing Map (CSOM) to perform topologically ordered vector quantization based on waveform properties. The resulting map was used to interactively cluster AEs. We examined the clusters over time to identify those with predictive ability. Finally, we used a variety of LSTM and attention-based networks to test the predictive power of the AE clusters. By tracking cumulative waveform features over the seismic cycle, the network is able to forecast the time-to-failure (TTF) of lab earthquakes. Our results show that analyzing the data to isolate predictive signals and using a more sophisticated network architecture are key to robustly forecasting labquakes. In the future, this method could be applied on tectonic faults monitor earthquakes and augment current early warning systems.
Formal Verification of Debates in Argumentation Theory

Humans engage in informal debates on a daily basis. By expressing their opinions and ideas in an argumentative fashion, they are able to gain a deeper understanding of a given problem and in some cases, find the best possible course of actions towards resolving it. In this paper, we develop a methodology to verify debates formalised as abstract argumentation frameworks. We first present a translation from debates to transition systems. Such transition systems can model debates and represent their evolution over time using a finite set of states. We then formalise relevant debate properties using temporal and strategy logics. These formalisations, along with a debate transition system, allow us to verify whether a given debate satisfies certain properties. The verification process can be automated using model checkers. Therefore, we also measure their performance when verifying debates, and use the results to discuss the feasibility of model checking debates.
Coloring graph neural networks for node disambiguation

In this paper, we show that a simple coloring scheme can improve, both theoretically and empirically, the expressive power of Message Passing Neural Networks(MPNNs). More specifically, we introduce a graph neural network called Colored Local Iterative Procedure (CLIP) that uses colors to disambiguate identical node attributes, and show that this representation is a universal approximator of continuous functions on graphs with node attributes. Our method relies on separability , a key topological characteristic that allows to extend well-chosen neural networks into universal representations. Finally, we show experimentally that CLIP is capable of capturing structural characteristics that traditional MPNNs fail to distinguish,while being state-of-the-art on benchmark graph classification datasets.
Discriminative Autoencoder for Feature Extraction: Application to Character Recognition

Conventionally, autoencoders are unsupervised representation learning tools. In this work, we propose a novel discriminative autoencoder. Use of supervised discriminative learning ensures that the learned representation is robust to variations commonly encountered in image datasets. Using the basic discriminating autoencoder as a unit, we build a stacked architecture aimed at extracting relevant representation from the training data. The efficiency of our feature extraction algorithm ensures a high classification accuracy with even simple classification schemes like KNN (K-nearest neighbor). We demonstrate the superiority of our model for representation learning by conducting experiments on standard datasets for character/image recognition and subsequent comparison with existing supervised deep architectures like class sparse stacked autoencoder and discriminative deep belief network.
Distance Distributions of Cyclic Orbit Codes

The distance distribution of a code is the vector whose $i^\text{th}$ entry is the number of pairs of codewords with distance $i$. We investigate the structure of the distance distribution for cyclic orbit codes, which are subspace codes generated by the action of $\mathbb{F}_{q^n}^*$ on an $\mathbb{F}_q$-subspace $U$ of $\mathbb{F}_{q^n}$. We show that for optimal full-length orbit codes the distance distribution depends only on $q,\,n$, and the dimension of $U$. For full-length orbit codes with lower minimum distance, we provide partial results towards a characterization of the distance distribution, especially in the case that any two codewords intersect in a space of dimension at most 2. Finally, we briefly address the distance distribution of a union of optimal full-length orbit codes.
Non-intrusive Load Monitoring via Multi-label Sparse Representation based Classification

This work follows the approach of multi-label classification for non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM). We modify the popular sparse representation based classification (SRC) approach (developed for single label classification) to solve multi-label classification problems. Results on benchmark REDD and Pecan Street dataset shows significant improvement over state-of-the-art techniques with small volume of training data.
Is Feature Diversity Necessary in Neural Network Initialization?

Standard practice in training neural networks involves initializing the weights in an independent fashion. The results of recent work suggest that feature "diversity" at initialization plays an important role in training the network. However, other initialization schemes with reduced feature diversity have also been shown to be viable. In this work, we conduct a series of experiments aimed at elucidating the importance of feature diversity at initialization. We show that a complete lack of diversity is harmful to training, but its effects can be counteracted by a relatively small addition of noise - even the noise in standard non-deterministic GPU computations is sufficient. Furthermore, we construct a deep convolutional network with identical features at initialization and almost all of the weights initialized at 0 that can be trained to reach accuracy matching its standard-initialized counterpart.
Two Birds with One Stone: Investigating Invertible Neural Networks for Inverse Problems in Morphology

Most problems in natural language processing can be approximated as inverse problems such as analysis and generation at variety of levels from morphological (e.g., cat+Plural <-> cats) to semantic (e.g., (call + 1 2) <-> "Calculate one plus two."). Although the tasks in both directions are closely related, general approach in the field has been to design separate models specific for each task. However, having one shared model for both tasks, would help the researchers exploit the common knowledge among these problems with reduced time and memory requirements. We investigate a specific class of neural networks, called Invertible Neural Networks (INNs) (Ardizzone et al. 2019) that enable simultaneous optimization in both directions, hence allow addressing of inverse problems via a single model. In this study, we investigate INNs on morphological problems casted as inverse problems. We apply INNs to various morphological tasks with varying ambiguity and show that they provide competitive performance in both directions. We show that they are able to recover the morphological input parameters, i.e., predicting the lemma (e.g., cat) or the morphological tags (e.g., Plural) when run in the reverse direction, without any significant performance drop in the forward direction, i.e., predicting the surface form (e.g., cats).
Quality of syntactic implication of RL-based sentence summarization

Work on summarization has explored both reinforcement learning (RL) optimization using ROUGE as a reward and syntax-aware models, such as models those input is enriched with part-of-speech (POS)-tags and dependency information. However, it is not clear what is the respective impact of these approaches beyond the standard ROUGE evaluation metric. Especially, RL-based for summarization is becoming more and more popular. In this paper, we provide a detailed comparison of these two approaches and of their combination along several dimensions that relate to the perceived quality of the generated summaries: number of repeated words, distribution of part-of-speech tags, impact of sentence length, relevance and grammaticality. Using the standard Gigaword sentence summarization task, we compare an RL self-critical sequence training (SCST) method with syntax-aware models that leverage POS tags and Dependency information. We show that on all qualitative evaluations, the combined model gives the best results, but also that only training with RL and without any syntactic information already gives nearly as good results as syntax-aware models with less parameters and faster training convergence.
Impulse Denoising From Hyper-Spectral Images: A Blind Compressed Sensing Approach

In this work we propose a technique to remove sparse impulse noise from hyperspectral images. Our algorithm accounts for the spatial redundancy and spectral correlation of such images. The proposed method is based on the recently introduced Blind Compressed Sensing (BCS) framework, i.e. it empirically learns the spatial and spectral sparsifying dictionaries while denoising the images. The BCS framework differs from existing CS techniques - which assume the sparsifying dictionaries to be data independent, and from prior dictionary learning studies which learn the dictionary in an offline training phase. Our proposed formulation have shown over 5 dB improvement in PSNR over other techniques.
Zero-shot generalization using cascaded system-representations

Deep reinforcement learning has been applied to solve a variety of control problems in isolation. However, the learned latent representations cannot be optimally reused for other analogous tasks and/or control systems without additional training or tuning. In this regard, we propose a novel framework that can be used to learn a single control policy for a whole class of analogous control systems. The framework is abbreviated as CASNET and it leverages the similarities in the designs of analogous control-systems to learn general-purpose abstract system-representations. The framework uses a cascade of recurrent neural networks-based encoders to create these representations which are then fed to a conventional policy network as input. A similar cascade of decoders decodes the output of the policy network to generate system-specific output. We illustrate the effectiveness of this framework on arguably the most significant use-case of DRL: Robotics. In this paper, we use CASNET to learn generalizable control policies for two separate classes of robots: planer-manipulators and crawling robots, using 15+ and 55+ morphologically analogous simulated robots respectively. These robot models encompass the most common design variations used in the real world. Our empirical results using state of the art on and off policy learning algorithms show that on average, CASNET agent achieves zero shot optimal performance (performance equivalent to expert agents trained for individual robot models) on unseen robot models. These results illustrate that the performance of the learned policy is bound the learning algorithm rather than the framework itself. The proposed framework serves a major step towards universal controllers.
HyperCon: Image-To-Video Model Transfer for Video-To-Video Translation Tasks

Video-to-video translation is more difficult than image-to-image translation due to the temporal consistency problem that, if unaddressed, leads to distracting flickering effects. Although video models designed from scratch produce temporally consistent results, training them to match the vast visual knowledge captured by image models requires an intractable number of videos. To combine the benefits of image and video models, we propose an image-to-video model transfer method called Hyperconsistency (HyperCon) that transforms any well-trained image model into a temporally consistent video model without fine-tuning. HyperCon works by translating a temporally interpolated video frame-wise and then aggregating over temporally localized windows on the interpolated video. It handles both masked and unmasked inputs, enabling support for even more video-to-video translation tasks than prior image-to-video model transfer techniques. We demonstrate HyperCon on video style transfer and inpainting, where it performs favorably compared to prior state-of-the-art methods without training on a single stylized or incomplete video. Our project website is available at https://ryanszeto.com/projects/hypercon .
On the Algebraic Combinatorics of Injections and its Applications to Injection Codes

We consider the algebraic combinatorics of the set of injections from a $k$-element set to an $n$-element set. In particular, we give a new combinatorial formula for the spherical functions of the Gelfand pair $(S_k \times S_n, \text{diag}(S_k) \times S_{n-k})$. We use this combinatorial formula to give new Delsarte linear programming bounds on the size of codes over injections.
PLIERS: A Process that Integrates User-Centered Methods into Programming Language Design

Programming language design requires making many usability-related design decisions. However, existing HCI methods can be impractical to apply to programming languages: they have high iteration costs, programmers require significant learning time, and user performance has high variance. To address these problems, we adapted both formative and summative HCI methods to make them more suitable for programming language design. We integrated these methods into a new process, PLIERS, for designing programming languages in a user-centered way. We evaluated PLIERS by using it to design two new programming languages. Glacier extends Java to enable programmers to express immutability properties effectively and easily. Obsidian is a language for blockchains that includes verification of critical safety properties. Summative usability studies showed that programmers were able to program effectively in both languages after short training periods.
Transformed Subspace Clustering

Subspace clustering assumes that the data is sepa-rable into separate subspaces. Such a simple as-sumption, does not always hold. We assume that, even if the raw data is not separable into subspac-es, one can learn a representation (transform coef-ficients) such that the learnt representation is sep-arable into subspaces. To achieve the intended goal, we embed subspace clustering techniques (locally linear manifold clustering, sparse sub-space clustering and low rank representation) into transform learning. The entire formulation is jointly learnt; giving rise to a new class of meth-ods called transformed subspace clustering (TSC). In order to account for non-linearity, ker-nelized extensions of TSC are also proposed. To test the performance of the proposed techniques, benchmarking is performed on image clustering and document clustering datasets. Comparison with state-of-the-art clustering techniques shows that our formulation improves upon them.
Learning Disentangled Representations via Mutual Information Estimation

In this paper, we investigate the problem of learning disentangled representations. Given a pair of images sharing some attributes, we aim to create a low-dimensional representation which is split into two parts: a shared representation that captures the common information between the images and an exclusive representation that contains the specific information of each image. To address this issue, we propose a model based on mutual information estimation without relying on image reconstruction or image generation. Mutual information maximization is performed to capture the attributes of data in the shared and exclusive representations while we minimize the mutual information between the shared and exclusive representation to enforce representation disentanglement. We show that these representations are useful to perform downstream tasks such as image classification and image retrieval based on the shared or exclusive component. Moreover, classification results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art model based on VAE/GAN approaches in representation disentanglement.
ILS-SUMM: Iterated Local Search for Unsupervised Video Summarization

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in building video summarization tools, where the goal is to automatically create a short summary of an input video that properly represents the original content. We consider shot-based video summarization where the summary consists of a subset of the video shots which can be of various lengths. A straightforward approach to maximize the representativeness of a subset of shots is by minimizing the total distance between shots and their nearest selected shots. We formulate the task of video summarization as an optimization problem with a knapsack-like constraint on the total summary duration. Previous studies have proposed greedy algorithms to solve this problem approximately, but no experiments were presented to measure the ability of these methods to obtain solutions with low total distance. Indeed, our experiments on video summarization datasets show that the success of current methods in obtaining results with low total distance still has much room for improvement. In this paper, we develop ILS-SUMM, a novel video summarization algorithm to solve the subset selection problem under the knapsack constraint. Our algorithm is based on the well-known metaheuristic optimization framework -- Iterated Local Search (ILS), known for its ability to avoid weak local minima and obtain a good near-global minimum. Extensive experiments show that our method finds solutions with significantly better total distance than previous methods. Moreover, to indicate the high scalability of ILS-SUMM, we introduce a new dataset consisting of videos of various lengths.
Human-to-AI Coach: Improving Human Inputs to AI Systems

Humans increasingly interact with Artificial intelligence(AI) systems. AI systems are optimized for objectives such as minimum computation or minimum error rate in recognizing and interpreting inputs from humans. In contrast, inputs created by humans are often treated as a given. We investigate how inputs of humans can be altered to reduce misinterpretation by the AI system and to improve efficiency of input generation for the human while altered inputs should remain as similar as possible to the original inputs. These objectives result in trade-offs that are analyzed for a deep learning system classifying handwritten digits. To create examples that serve as demonstrations for humans to improve, we develop a model based on a conditional convolutional autoencoder (CCAE). Our quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows that in many occasions the generated proposals lead to lower error rates, require less effort to create and differ only modestly from the original samples.
M-IHS: An Accelerated Randomized Preconditioning Method Avoiding Costly Matrix Decompositions

Momentum Iterative Hessian Sketch (M-IHS) techniques, a group of solvers for large scale regularized linear Least Squares (LS) problems, are proposed and analyzed in detail. Proposed M-IHS techniques are obtained by incorporating the Heavy Ball Acceleration into the Iterative Hessian Sketch algorithm and they provide significant improvements over the randomized preconditioning techniques. By using approximate solvers along with the iterations, the proposed techniques are capable of avoiding all matrix decompositions and inversions, which is one of the main advantages over the alternative solvers such as the Blendenpik and the LSRN. Similar to the Chebyshev semi-iterations, the M-IHS variants do not use any inner products and eliminate the corresponding synchronization steps in hierarchical or distributed memory systems, yet the M-IHS converges faster than the Chebyshev Semi-iteration based solvers. Lower bounds on the required sketch size for various randomized distributions are established through the error analyses. Unlike the previously proposed approaches to produce a solution approximation, the proposed M-IHS techniques can use sketch sizes that are proportional to the statistical dimension which is always smaller than the rank of the coefficient matrix. The relative computational saving gets more significant as the regularization parameter or the singular value decay rate of the coefficient matrix increase.
PidginUNMT: Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation from West African Pidgin to English

Over 800 languages are spoken across West Africa. Despite the obvious diversity among people who speak these languages, one language significantly unifies them all - West African Pidgin English. There are at least 80 million speakers of West African Pidgin English. However, there is no known natural language processing (NLP) work on this language. In this work, we perform the first NLP work on the most popular variant of the language, providing three major contributions. First, the provision of a Pidgin corpus of over 56000 sentences, which is the largest we know of. Secondly, the training of the first ever cross-lingual embedding between Pidgin and English. This aligned embedding will be helpful in the performance of various downstream tasks between English and Pidgin. Thirdly, the training of an Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation model between Pidgin and English which achieves BLEU scores of 7.93 from Pidgin to English, and 5.18 from English to Pidgin. In all, this work greatly reduces the barrier of entry for future NLP works on West African Pidgin English.
Exploring the Ideal Depth of Neural Network when Predicting Question Deletion on Community Question Answering

In recent years, Community Question Answering (CQA) has emerged as a popular platform for knowledge curation and archival. An interesting aspect of question answering is that it combines aspects from natural language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning. In this paper, we have explored how the depth of the neural network influences the accuracy of prediction of deleted questions in question-answering forums. We have used different shallow and deep models for prediction and analyzed the relationships between number of hidden layers, accuracy, and computational time. The results suggest that while deep networks perform better than shallow networks in modeling complex non-linear functions, increasing the depth may not always produce desired results. We observe that the performance of the deep neural network suffers significantly due to vanishing gradients when large number of hidden layers are present. Constantly increasing the depth of the model increases accuracy initially, after which the accuracy plateaus, and finally drops. Adding each layer is also expensive in terms of the time required to train the model. This research is situated in the domain of neural information retrieval and contributes towards building a theory on how deep neural networks can be efficiently and accurately used for predicting question deletion. We predict deleted questions with more than 90\% accuracy using two to ten hidden layers, with less accurate results for shallower and deeper architectures.