bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Multi-Task Learning for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading and Lesion Segmentation
Authors: Foo Alex , Hsu Wynne , Lee Mong Li , Lim Gilbert , Wong Tien Yin
Published: June 2020

Although deep learning for Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) screening has shown great success in achieving clinically acceptable accuracy for referable versus non-referable DR, there remains a need to provide more fine-grained grading of the DR severity level as well as automated segmentation of lesions (if any) in the retina images. We observe that the DR severity level of an image is dependent on the presence of different types of lesions and their prevalence. In this work, we adopt a multi-task learning approach to perform the DR grading and lesion segmentation tasks. In light of the lack of lesion segmentation mask ground-truths, we further propose a semi-supervised learning process to obtain the segmentation masks for the various datasets. Experiments results on publicly available datasets and a real world dataset obtained from population screening demonstrate the effectiveness of the multi-task solution over state-of-the-art networks.
Implicit Skills Extraction Using Document Embedding and Its Use in Job Recommendation
Authors: Gugnani Akshay , Misra Hemant
Published: June 2020

This paper presents a job recommender system to match resumes to job descriptions (JD), both of which are non-standard and unstructured/semi-structured in form. First, the paper proposes a combination of natural language processing (NLP) techniques for the task of skill extraction. The performance of the combined techniques on an industrial scale dataset yielded a precision and recall of 0.78 and 0.88 respectively. The paper then introduces the concept of extracting implicit skills – the skills which are not explicitly mentioned in a JD but may be implicit in the context of geography, industry or role. To mine and infer implicit skills for a JD, we find the other JDs similar to this JD. This similarity match is done in the semantic space. A Doc2Vec model is trained on 1.1 Million JDs covering several domains crawled from the web, and all the JDs are projected onto this semantic space. The skills absent in the JD but present in similar JDs are obtained, and the obtained skills are weighted using several techniques to obtain the set of final implicit skills. Finally, several similarity measures are explored to match the skills extracted from a candidate's resume to explicit and implicit skills of JDs. Empirical results for matching resumes and JDs demonstrate that the proposed approach gives a mean reciprocal rank of 0.88, an improvement of 29.4% when compared to the performance of a baseline method that uses only explicit skills.
EMSContExt: EMS Protocol-Driven Concept Extraction for Cognitive Assistance in Emergency Response
Authors: Preum Sarah Masud , Shu Sile , Alemzadeh Homa , Stankovic John A.
Published: June 2020

This paper presents a technique for automated curation of a domain-specific knowledge base or lexicon for resource-constrained domains, such as Emergency Medical Services (EMS) and its application to real-time concept extraction and cognitive assistance in emergency response. The EMS responders often verbalize critical information describing the situations at an incident scene, including patients' physical condition and medical history. Automated extraction of EMS protocol-specific concepts from responders' speech data can facilitate cognitive support through the selection and execution of the proper EMS protocols for patient treatment. Although this task is similar to the traditional NLP task of concept extraction, the underlying application domain poses major challenges, including low training resources availability (e.g., no existing EMS ontology, lexicon, or annotated EMS corpus) and domain mismatch. Hence, we develop EMSContExt, a weakly-supervised concept extraction approach for EMS concepts. It utilizes different knowledge bases and a semantic concept model based on a corpus of over 9400 EMS narratives for lexicon expansion. The expanded EMS lexicon is then used to automatically extract critical EMS protocol-specific concepts from real-time EMS speech narratives. Our experimental results show that EMSContExt achieves 0.85 recall and 0.82 F1-score for EMS concept extraction and significantly outperforms MetaMap, a state-of-the-art medical concept extraction tool. We also demonstrate the application of EMSContExt to EMS protocol selection and execution and real-time recommendation of protocol-specific interventions to the EMS responders. Here, EMSContExt outperforms MetaMap with a 6% increase and six times speedup in weighted recall and execution time, respectively.
Kanji Workbook: A Writing-Based Intelligent Tutoring System for Learning Proper Japanese Kanji Writing Technique with Instructor-Emulated Assessment
Authors: Taele Paul , Koh Jung In , Hammond Tracy
Published: June 2020

Kanji script writing is a skill that is often introduced to novice Japanese foreign language students for achieving Japanese writing mastery, but often poses difficulties to students with primarily English fluency due to their its vast differences with written English. Instructors often introduce various pedagogical methods—such as visual structure and written techniques—to assist students in kanji study, but may lack availability providing direct feedback on students' writing outside of class. Current educational applications are also limited due to lacking richer instructor-emulated feedback. We introduce Kanji Workbook, a writing-based intelligent tutoring system for students to receive intelligent assessment that emulates human instructor feedback. Our interface not only leverages students' computing devices for allowing them to learn, practice, and review the writing of prompted characters from their course's kanji script lessons, but also provides a diverse set of writing assessment metrics—derived from instructor interviews and classroom observation insights—through intelligent scoring and visual animations. We deployed our interface onto novice- and intermediate-level university courses over an entire academic year, and observed that interface users on average achieved higher course grades than their peers and also reacted positively to our interface's various features.
AI Trust in Business Processes: The Need for Process-Aware Explanations
Authors: Jan Steve T.K. , Ishakian Vatche , Muthusamy Vinod
Published: June 2020

Business processes underpin a large number of enterprise operations including processing loan applications, managing invoices, and insurance claims. The business process management (BPM) industry is expected to grow at approximately 16 Billion dollar by 2023. There is a large opportunity for infusing AI to reduce cost or provide better customer experience with a $15.7 trillion “potential contribution to the global economy by 2030”. To this end, the BPM literature is rich in machine learning solutions including unsupervised learning to gain insights on clusters of process traces, classification models to predict the outcomes, duration, or paths of partial process traces, extracting business process from documents, and models to recommend how to optimize a business process or navigate decision points. More recently, deep learning models including those from the NLP domain have been applied to process predictions.Unfortunately, very little of these innovations have been applied and adopted by enterprise companies. We assert that a large reason for the lack of adoption of AI models in BPM is that business users are risk-averse and do not implicitly trust AI models. There has, unfortunately, been little attention paid to explaining model predictions to business users with process context. We challenge the BPM community to build on the AI interpretability literature, and the AI Trust community to understand what it means to take advantage of business process artifacts in order to provide business level explanations.
Zhorai: Designing a Conversational Agent for Children to Explore Machine Learning Concepts
Authors: Lin Phoebe , Van Brummelen Jessica , Lukin Galit , Williams Randi , Breazeal Cynthia
Published: June 2020

Understanding how machines learn is critical for children to develop useful mental models for exploring artificial intelligence (AI) and smart devices that they now frequently interact with. Although children are very familiar with having conversations with conversational agents like Siri and Alexa, children often have limited knowledge about AI and machine learning. We leverage their existing familiarity and present Zhorai, a conversational platform and curriculum designed to help young children understand how machines learn. Children ages eight to eleven train an agent through conversation and understand how the knowledge is represented using visualizations. This paper describes how we designed the curriculum and evaluated its effectiveness with 14 children in small groups. We found that the conversational aspect of the platform increased engagement during learning and the novel visualizations helped make machine knowledge understandable. As a result, we make recommendations for future iterations of Zhorai and approaches for teaching AI to children.
Multiple Data Augmentation Strategies for Improving Performance on Automatic Short Answer Scoring
Authors: Lun Jiaqi , Zhu Jia , Tang Yong , Yang Min
Published: June 2020

Automatic short answer scoring (ASAS) is a research subject of intelligent education, which is a hot field of natural language understanding. Many experiments have confirmed that the ASAS system is not good enough, because its performance is limited by the training data. Focusing on the problem, we propose MDA-ASAS, multiple data augmentation strategies for improving performance on automatic short answer scoring. MDA-ASAS is designed to learn language representation enhanced by data augmentation strategies, which includes back-translation, correct answer as reference answer, and swap content. We argue that external knowledge has a profound impact on the ASAS process. Meanwhile, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model has been shown to be effective for improving many natural language processing tasks, which acquires more semantic, grammatical and other features in large amounts of unsupervised data, and actually adds external knowledge. Combining with the latest BERT model, our experimental results on the ASAS dataset show that MDA-ASAS brings a significant gain over state-of-art. We also perform extensive ablation studies and suggest parameters for practical use.
Teaching Game AI as an Undergraduate Course in Computational Media
Authors: Smith Adam M. , Shapiro Daniel
Published: June 2020

We need to teach AI to students in and outside of traditional computer science degree programs, including those designer-engineer hybrid students who will design and implement games or engage in technical games research later. The need to rethink AI curriculum is pressing in a design education context because AI powers many emerging practical techniques such as drama management, procedural content generation, player modeling, and machine playtesting. In this paper, we describe a 5-year experimental effort to teach a Game AI course structured around a broad and expanding set of roles AI can play in game design (e.g., Adversary and Actor, as well as Design Assistant and Storyteller). This course sets up computer science and computer game design students to transform practices in the game industry as well as create new forms of media that were previously unreachable. Our students gained mastery over the relevant techniques and further demonstrated (via novel prototype systems) many new roles for AI along the way.
Using AI Techniques in a Serious Game for Socio-Moral Reasoning Development
Authors: Tato Ange , Nkambou Roger , Dufresne Aude
Published: June 2020

We present a serious game designed to help players/learners develop socio-moral reasoning (SMR) maturity. It is based on an existing computerized task that was converted into a game to improve the motivation of learners. The learner model is computed using a hybrid deep learning architecture, and adaptation rules are provided by both human experts and machine learning techniques. We conducted some experiments with two versions of the game (the initial version and the adaptive version with AI-Based learner modeling). The results show that the adaptive version provides significant better results in terms of learning gain.
Using Cloud Tools for Literate Programming to Redesign an AI Course for Non-Traditional College Students
Authors: Hwang Maria , Williamson Calvin
Published: June 2020

As more open source educational software applications become available, higher educational institutions have the opportunity to utilize these cost efficient tools to deliver the instruction traditionally taught off line with heavy associated costs. Here we introduce a machine learning course that uses a simple, cloud computing approach to creating course materials. We see this type of serverless, cloud-based, literate programming to be the future of computer science education in non-traditional higher educational institutions in particular serving students who will need the basic literacy for computing and computation but will not pursue the traditional computer scientist path.
Collective Information
Authors: Endriss Ulle
Published: June 2020

Many challenging problems of scientific, technological, and societal significance require us to aggregate information supplied by multiple agents into a single piece of information of the same type—the collective information representing the stance of the group as a whole. Examples include expressive forms of voting and democratic decision making (where citizens supply information regarding their preferences), peer evaluation (where participants supply information in the form of assessments of their peers), and crowdsourcing (where volunteers supply information by annotating data). In this position paper, I outline the challenge of modelling, handling, and analysing all of these diverse instances of collective information using a common methodology. Addressing this challenge will facilitate a transfer of knowledge between different application domains, thereby enabling progress in all of them.
Assessing Ethical Thinking about AI
Authors: Goldsmith Judy , Burton Emanuelle , Dueber David M. , Goldstein Beth , Sampson Shannon , Toland Michael D.
Published: June 2020

As is evidenced by the associated AI, Ethics and Society conference, we now take as given the need for ethics education in the AI and general CS curricula. The anticipated surge in AI ethics education will force the field to reckon with delineating and then evaluating learner outcomes to determine what is working and improve what is not. We argue for a more descriptive than normative focus of this ethics education, and propose the development of assessments that can measure descriptive ethical thinking about AI. Such an assessment tool for measuring ethical reasoning capacity in CS contexts must be designed to produce reliable scores for which there is established validity evidence concerning their interpretation and use.
Learning on the Job: Online Lifelong and Continual Learning
Authors: Liu Bing
Published: June 2020

One of the hallmarks of the human intelligence is the ability to learn continuously, accumulate the knowledge learned in the past and use the knowledge to help learn more and learn better. It is hard to imagine a truly intelligent system without this capability. This type of learning differs significantly than the classic machine learning (ML) paradigm of isolated single-task learning. Although there is already research on learning a sequence of tasks incrementally under the names of lifelong learning or continual learning, they still follow the traditional two-phase separate training and testing paradigm in learning each task. The tasks are also given by the user. This paper adds on-the-job learning to the mix to emphasize the need to learn during application (thus online) after the model has been deployed, which traditional ML cannot do. It aims to leverage the learned knowledge to discover new tasks, interact with humans and the environment, make inferences, and incrementally learn the new tasks on the fly during applications in a self-supervised and interactive manner. This is analogous to human on-the-job learning after formal training. We use chatbots and self-driving cars as examples to discuss the need, some initial work, and key challenges and opportunities in building this capability.
Let's Learn Their Language? A Case for Planning with Automata-Network Languages from Model Checking
Authors: Hoffmann Jorg , Hermanns Holger , Klauck Michaela , Steinmetz Marcel , Karpas Erez , Magazzeni Daniele
Published: June 2020

It is widely known that AI planning and model checking are closely related. Compilations have been devised between various pairs of language fragments. What has barely been voiced yet, though, is the idea to let go of one's own modeling language, and use one from the other area instead. We advocate that idea here – to use automata-network languages from model checking instead of PDDL – motivated by modeling difficulties relating to planning agents surrounded by exogenous agents in complex environments. One could, of course, address this by designing additional extended planning languages. But one can also leverage decades of work on modeling in the formal methods community, creating potential for deep synergy and integration with their techniques as a side effect. We believe there's a case to be made for the latter, as one modeling alternative in planning among others.
MAPF Scenario: Software for Evaluating MAPF Plans on Real Robots
Authors: Barták Roman , Švancara Jiří , Krasičenko Ivan
Published: June 2020

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) deals with finding collision free paths for a set of agents (robots) moving on a graph. The interest in MAPF in the research community started to increase recently partly due to practical applications in areas such as warehousing and computer games. However, the academic community focuses mostly on solving the abstract version of the problem (moving of agents on the graph) with only a few results on real robots. The presented software MAPF Scenario provides a tool for specifying MAPF problems on grid maps, solving the problems using various abstractions (for example, assuming rotation actions or not), simulating execution of plans, and translating the abstract plans to control programs for small robots Ozobots. The tool is intended as a research platform for evaluating abstract MAPF plans on real robots and as an educational and demonstration tool bridging the areas of artificial intelligence and robotics.
Doc2Dial: A Framework for Dialogue Composition Grounded in Documents
Authors: Feng Song , Fadnis Kshitij , Liao Q. Vera , Lastras Luis A.
Published: June 2020

We introduce Doc2Dial, an end-to-end framework for generating conversational data grounded in given documents. It takes the documents as input and generates the pipelined tasks for obtaining the annotations specifically for producing the simulated dialog flows. Then, the dialog flows are used to guide the collection of the utterances via the integrated crowdsourcing tool. The outcomes include the human-human dialogue data grounded in the given documents, as well as various types of automatically or human labeled annotations that help ensure the quality of the dialog data with the flexibility to (re)composite dialogues. We expect such data can facilitate building automated dialogue agents for goal-oriented tasks. We demonstrate Doc2Dial system with the various domain documents for customer care.
DAMN: Defeasible Reasoning Tool for Multi-Agent Reasoning
Authors: Hecham Abdelraouf , Croitoru Madalina , Bisquert Pierre
Published: June 2020

This demonstration paper introduces DAMN: a defeasible reasoning platform available on the web. It is geared towards decision making where each agent has its own knowledge base that can be combined with other agents to detect and visualize conflicts and potentially solve them using a semantics. It allows the use of different defeasible reasoning semantics (ambiguity blocking/propagating with or without team defeat) and integrates agent collaboration and visualization features.
‘Watch the Flu’: A Tweet Monitoring Tool for Epidemic Intelligence of Influenza in Australia
Authors: Jin Brian , Joshi Aditya , Sparks Ross , Wan Stephen , Paris Cécile , MacIntyre C Raina
Published: June 2020

‘Watch The Flu’ is a tool that monitors tweets posted in Australia for symptoms of influenza. The tool is a unique combination of two areas of artificial intelligence: natural language processing and time series monitoring, in order to assist public health surveillance. Using a real-time data pipeline, it deploys a web-based dashboard for visual analysis, and sends out emails to a set of users when an outbreak is detected. We expect that the tool will assist public health experts with their decision-making for disease outbreaks, by providing them insights from social media.
Deep Poetry: A Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System
Authors: Liu Yusen , Liu Dayiheng , Lv Jiancheng
Published: June 2020

In this work, we demonstrate a Chinese classical poetry generation system called Deep Poetry. Existing systems for Chinese classical poetry generation are mostly template-based and very few of them can accept multi-modal input. Unlike previous systems, Deep Poetry uses neural networks that are trained on over 200 thousand poems and 3 million ancient Chinese prose. Our system can accept plain text, images or artistic conceptions as inputs to generate Chinese classical poetry. More importantly, users are allowed to participate in the process of writing poetry by our system. For the user's convenience, we deploy the system at the WeChat applet platform, users can use the system on the mobile device whenever and wherever possible.
Automatic Car Damage Assessment System: Reading and Understanding Videos as Professional Insurance Inspectors
Authors: Zhang Wei , Cheng Yuan , Guo Xin , Guo Qingpei , Wang Jian , Wang Qing , Jiang Chen , Wang Meng , Xu Furong , Chu Wei
Published: June 2020

We demonstrate a car damage assessment system in car insurance field based on artificial intelligence techniques, which can exempt insurance inspectors from checking cars on site and help people without professional knowledge to evaluate car damages when accidents happen. Unlike existing approaches, we utilize videos instead of photos to interact with users to make the whole procedure as simple as possible. We adopt object and video detection and segmentation techniques in computer vision, and take advantage of multiple frames extracted from videos to achieve high damage recognition accuracy. The system uploads video streams captured by mobile devices, recognizes car damage on the cloud asynchronously and then returns damaged components and repair costs to users. The system evaluates car damages and returns results automatically and effectively in seconds, which reduces laboratory costs and decreases insurance claim time significantly.
Algorithm-in-the-Loop Decision Making
Authors: Green Ben , Chen Yiling
Published: June 2020

We introduce a new framework for conceiving of and studying algorithms that are deployed to aid human decision making: “algorithm-in-the-loop” systems. The algorithm-in-the-loop framework centers human decision making, providing a more precise lens for studying the social impacts of algorithmic decision making aids. We report on two experiments that evaluate algorithm-in-the-loop decision making and find significant limits to these systems.
Reasoning about Political Bias in Content Moderation
Authors: Jiang Shan , Robertson Ronald E. , Wilson Christo
Published: June 2020

Content moderation, the AI-human hybrid process of removing (toxic) content from social media to promote community health, has attracted increasing attention from lawmakers due to allegations of political bias. Hitherto, this allegation has been made based on anecdotes rather than logical reasoning and empirical evidence, which motivates us to audit its validity. In this paper, we first introduce two formal criteria to measure bias (i.e., independence and separation) and their contextual meanings in content moderation, and then use YouTube as a lens to investigate if the political leaning of a video plays a role in the moderation decision for its associated comments. Our results show that when justifiable target variables (e.g., hate speech and extremeness) are controlled with propensity scoring, the likelihood of comment moderation is equal across left- and right-leaning videos.
Designing Evaluation Rules That Are Robust to Strategic Behavior
Authors: Kleinberg Jon , Raghavan Manish
Published: June 2020

Machine learning is often used to produce decision-making rules that classify or evaluate individuals. When these individuals have incentives to be classified a certain way, they may behave strategically to influence their outcomes. We develop a model for how strategic agents can invest effort to change the outcomes they receive, and we give a tight characterization of when such agents can be incentivized to invest specified forms of effort into improving their outcomes as opposed to “gaming” the classifier. We show that whenever any “reasonable” mechanism can do so, a simple linear mechanism suffices. This work is based on “How Do Classifiers Induce Agents To Invest Effort Strategically?” published in Economics and Computation 2019 (Kleinberg and Raghavan 2019).
Understanding Generalization in Neural Networks for Robustness against Adversarial Vulnerabilities
Authors: Chaudhury Subhajit
Published: June 2020

Neural networks have contributed to tremendous progress in the domains of computer vision, speech processing, and other real-world applications. However, recent studies have shown that these state-of-the-art models can be easily compromised by adding small imperceptible perturbations. My thesis summary frames the problem of adversarial robustness as an equivalent problem of learning suitable features that leads to good generalization in neural networks. This is motivated from learning in humans which is not trivially fooled by such perturbations due to robust feature learning which shows good out-of-sample generalization.
Quantum Probabilistic Models Using Feynman Diagram Rules for Better Understanding the Information Diffusion Dynamics in Online Social Networks
Authors: Mutlu Ece C.
Published: June 2020

This doctoral consortium presents an overview of my anticipated PhD dissertation which focuses on employing quantum Bayesian networks for social learning. The project, mainly, aims to expand the use of current quantum probabilistic models in human decision-making from two agents to multi-agent systems. First, I cultivate the classical Bayesian networks which are used to understand information diffusion through human interaction on online social networks (OSNs) by taking into account the relevance of multitude of social, psychological, behavioral and cognitive factors influencing the process of information transmission. Since quantum like models require quantum probability amplitudes, the complexity will be exponentially increased with increasing uncertainty in the complex system. Therefore, the research will be followed by a study on optimization of heuristics. Here, I suggest to use an belief entropy based heuristic approach. This research is an interdisciplinary research which is related with the branches of complex systems, quantum physics, network science, information theory, cognitive science and mathematics. Therefore, findings can contribute significantly to the areas related mainly with social learning behavior of people, and also to the aforementioned branches of complex systems. In addition, understanding the interactions in complex systems might be more viable via the findings of this research since probabilistic approaches are not only used for predictive purposes but also for explanatory aims.
Hybrid Approaches to Fine-Grained Emotion Detection in Social Media Data
Authors: Schoene Annika Marie
Published: June 2020

This paper states the challenges in fine-grained target-dependent Sentiment Analysis for social media data using recurrent neural networks. First, the problem statement is outlined and an overview of related work in the area is given. Then a summary of progress and results achieved to date and a research plan and future directions of this work are given.
Explainability in Autonomous Pedagogical Agents
Authors: Tulli Silvia
Published: June 2020

The research presented herein addresses the topic of explainability in autonomous pedagogical agents. We will be investigating possible ways to explain the decision-making process of such pedagogical agents (which can be embodied as robots) with a focus on the effect of these explanations in concrete learning scenarios for children. The hypothesis is that the agents' explanations about their decision making will support mutual modeling and a better understanding of the learning tasks and how learners perceive them. The objective is to develop a computational model that will allow agents to express internal states and actions and adapt to the human expectations of cooperative behavior accordingly. In addition, we would like to provide a comprehensive taxonomy of both the desiderata and methods in the explainable AI research applied to children's learning scenarios.
Efficient Predictive Uncertainty Estimators for Deep Probabilistic Models
Authors: Villanueva Llerena Julissa , Maua Denis Deratani
Published: June 2020

Deep Probabilistic Models (DPM) based on arithmetic circuits representation, such as Sum-Product Networks (SPN) and Probabilistic Sentential Decision Diagrams (PSDD), have shown competitive performance in several machine learning tasks with interesting properties (Poon and Domingos 2011; Kisa et al. 2014). Due to the high number of parameters and scarce data, DPMs can produce unreliable and overconfident inference. This research aims at increasing the robustness of predictive inference with DPMs by obtaining new estimators of the predictive uncertainty. This problem is not new and the literature on deep models contains many solutions. However the probabilistic nature of DPMs offer new possibilities to achieve accurate estimates at low computational costs, but also new challenges, as the range of different types of predictions is much larger than with traditional deep models. To cope with such issues, we plan on investigating two different approaches. The first approach is to perform a global sensitivity analysis on the parameters, measuring the variability of the output to perturbations of the model weights. The second approach is to capture the variability of the prediction with respect to changes in the model architecture. Our approaches shall be evaluated on challenging tasks such as image completion, multilabel classification.
Learning to Model Opponent Learning (Student Abstract)
Authors: Davies Ian , Tian Zheng , Wang Jun
Published: June 2020

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) considers settings in which a set of coexisting agents interact with one another and their environment. The adaptation and learning of other agents induces non-stationarity in the environment dynamics. This poses a great challenge for value function-based algorithms whose convergence usually relies on the assumption of a stationary environment. Policy search algorithms also struggle in multi-agent settings as the partial observability resulting from an opponent's actions not being known introduces high variance to policy training. Modelling an agent's opponent(s) is often pursued as a means of resolving the issues arising from the coexistence of learning opponents. An opponent model provides an agent with some ability to reason about other agents to aid its own decision making. Most prior works learn an opponent model by assuming the opponent is employing a stationary policy or switching between a set of stationary policies. Such an approach can reduce the variance of training signals for policy search algorithms. However, in the multi-agent setting, agents have an incentive to continually adapt and learn. This means that the assumptions concerning opponent stationarity are unrealistic. In this work, we develop a novel approach to modelling an opponent's learning dynamics which we term Learning to Model Opponent Learning (LeMOL). We show our structured opponent model is more accurate and stable than naive behaviour cloning baselines. We further show that opponent modelling can improve the performance of algorithmic agents in multi-agent settings.
Search Tree Pruning for Progressive Neural Architecture Search (Student Abstract)
Authors: Flynn Deanna , Furlong P. Michael , Coltin Brian
Published: June 2020

Our neural architecture search algorithm progressively searches a tree of neural network architectures. Child nodes are created by inserting new layers determined by a transition graph into a parent network up to a maximum depth and pruned when performance is worse than its parent. This increases efficiency but makes the algorithm greedy. Simpler networks are successfully found before more complex ones that can achieve benchmark performance similar to other top-performing networks.
Predicting Opioid Overdose Crude Rates with Text-Based Twitter Features (Student Abstract)
Authors: Gandhi Nupoor , Morales Alex , Chan Sally Man-Pui , Albarracin Dolores , Zhai ChengXiang
Published: June 2020

Drug use reporting is often a bottleneck for modern public health surveillance; social media data provides a real-time signal which allows for tracking and monitoring opioid overdoses. In this work we focus on text-based feature construction for the prediction task of opioid overdose rates at the county level. More specifically, using a Twitter dataset with over 3.4 billion tweets, we explore semantic features, such as topic features, to show that social media could be a good indicator for forecasting opioid overdose crude rates in public health monitoring systems. Specifically, combining topic and TF-IDF features in conjunction with demographic features can predict opioid overdose rates at the county level.
An Automatic Shoplifting Detection from Surveillance Videos (Student Abstract)
Authors: Gim U-Ju , Lee Jae-Jun , Kim Jeong-Hun , Park Young-Ho , Nasridinov Aziz
Published: June 2020

The use of closed circuit television (CCTV) surveillance devices is increasing every year to prevent abnormal behaviors, including shoplifting. However, damage from shoplifting is also increasing every year. Thus, there is a need for intelligent CCTV surveillance systems that ensure the integrity of shops, despite workforce shortages. In this study, we propose an automatic detection system of shoplifting behaviors from surveillance videos. Instead of extracting features from the whole frame, we use the Region of Interest (ROI) optical-flow fusion network to highlight the necessary features more accurately.
ESAS: Towards Practical and Explainable Short Answer Scoring (Student Abstract)
Authors: Goenka Palak , Piplani Mehak , Sawhney Ramit , Mathur Puneet , Shah Rajiv Ratn
Published: June 2020

Motivated by the mandate to design and deploy a practical, real-world educational tool for grading, we extensively explore linguistic patterns for Short Answer Scoring (SAS) as well as authorship feedback. We approach the SAS task via a multipronged approach that employs linguistic context features for capturing domain-specific knowledge while emphasizing on domain agnostic grading and detailed feedback via an ensemble of explainable statistical models. Our methodology quantitatively supersedes multiple automatic short answer scoring systems.
Modeling Involuntary Dynamic Behaviors to Support Intelligent Tutoring (Student Abstract)
Authors: Goswami Mononito , Chen Lujie , Gao Chufan , Dubrawski Artur
Published: June 2020

Problem solving is one of the most important 21st century skills. However, effectively coaching young students in problem solving is challenging because teachers must continuously monitor their cognitive and affective states and make real-time pedagogical interventions to maximize students' learning outcomes. It is an even more challenging task in social environments with limited human coaching resources. To lessen the cognitive load on a teacher and enable affect-sensitive intelligent tutoring, many researchers have investigated automated cognitive and affective detection methods. However, most of the studies use culturally-sensitive indices of affect that are prone to social editing such as facial expressions, and only few studies have explored involuntary dynamic behavioral signals such as gross body movements. In addition, most current methods rely on expensive labelled data from trained annotators for supervised learning. In this paper, we explore a semi-supervised learning framework that can learn low-dimensional representations of involuntary dynamic behavioral signals (mainly gross-body movements) from a modest number of short time series segments. Experiments on a real-world dataset reveal a significant utility of these representations in discriminating cognitive disequilibrium and flow and demonstrate their potential in transferring learned models to previously unseen subjects.
Re-Thinking LiDAR-Stereo Fusion Frameworks (Student Abstract)
Authors: Jin Qilin , Duggirala Parasara Sridhar
Published: June 2020

In this paper, we present a 2-step framework for high-precision dense depth perception from stereo RGB images and sparse LiDAR input. In the first step, we train a deep neural network to predict dense depth map from the left image and sparse LiDAR data, in a novel self-supervised manner. Then in the second step, we compute a disparity map from the predicted depths, and refining the disparity map by making sure that for every pixel in the left, its match in the right image, according to the final disparity, is the local optimum.
New Off-Board Solution for Predicting Vehicles' Intentions in the Highway On-Ramp Using Probabilistic Classifiers (Student Abstract)
Authors: Kherroubi Zine El Abidine , Aknine Samir , Bacha Rebiha
Published: June 2020

This paper proposes a new approach for predicting drivers' intentions in a Highway on-ramp merge situation using a central road side unit (RSU) with probabilistic classifiers.
Task Scoping for Efficient Planning in Open Worlds (Student Abstract)
Authors: Kumar Nishanth , Fishman Michael , Danas Natasha , Tellex Stefanie , Littman Michael , Konidaris George
Published: June 2020

We propose an abstraction method for open-world environments expressed as Factored Markov Decision Processes (FMDPs) with very large state and action spaces. Our method prunes state and action variables that are irrelevant to the optimal value function on the state subspace the agent would visit when following any optimal policy from the initial state. This method thus enables tractable fast planning within large open-world FMDPs.
Submodel Decomposition for Solving Limited Memory Influence Diagrams (Student Abstract)
Authors: Lee Junkyu
Published: June 2020

This paper presents a systematic way of decomposing a limited memory influence diagram (LIMID) to a tree of single-stage decision problems, or submodels and solving it by message passing. The relevance in LIMIDs is formalized by the notion of the partial evaluation of the maximum expected utility, and the graph separation criteria for identifying submodels follow. The submodel decomposition provides a graphical model approach for updating the beliefs and propagating the conditional expected utilities for solving LIMIDs with the worst-case complexity bounded by the maximum treewidth of the individual submodels.
Constrained Self-Supervised Clustering for Discovering New Intents (Student Abstract)
Authors: Lin Ting-En , Xu Hua , Zhang Hanlei
Published: June 2020

Discovering new user intents is an emerging task in the dialogue system. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised clustering method that can naturally incorporate pairwise constraints as prior knowledge to guide the clustering process and does not require intensive feature engineering. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method can yield significant improvements over strong baselines.
How to Predict Seawater Temperature for Sustainable Marine Aquaculture (Student Abstract)
Authors: Okuno Masahito , Otsuka Takanobu
Published: June 2020

The increasing global demand for marine products has turned attention to marine aquaculture. In marine aquaculture, appropriate environment control is important for a stable supply. The influence of seawater temperature on this environment is significant and accurate prediction is therefore required. In this paper, we propose and describe the implementation of a seawater prediction method using data acquired from real aquaculture areas and neural networks. Our evaluation experiment showed that hourly next-day prediction has an average error of about 0.2 to 0.4 ◦C and daily prediction of up to one week has an average error of about 0.2 to 0.5 ◦C. This is enough to meet actual worker need, which is within 1 ◦C error, thus confirming that our seawater prediction method is suitable for actual sites.
Predicting Students' Attention Level with Interpretable Facial and Head Dynamic Features in an Online Tutoring System (Student Abstract)
Authors: Peng Shimeng , Chen Lujie , Gao Chufan , Tong Richard Jiarui
Published: June 2020

Engaged learners are effective learners. Even though it is widely recognized that engagement plays a vital role in learning effectiveness, engagement remains to be an elusive psychological construct that is yet to find a consensus definition and reliable measurement. In this study, we attempted to discover the plausible operational definitions of engagement within an online learning context. We achieved this goal by first deriving a set of interpretable features on dynamics of eyes, head and mouth movement from facial landmarks extractions of video recording when students interacting with an online tutoring system. We then assessed their predicative value for engagement which was approximated by synchronized measurements from commercial EEG brainwave headset worn by students. Our preliminary results show that those features reduce root mean-squared error by 29% compared with default predictor and we found that the random forest model performs better than a linear regressor.
On the Hierarchical Information in a Single Contextualised Word Representation (Student Abstract)
Authors: Slack Dean L. , Hardey Mariann , Al Moubayed Noura
Published: June 2020

Contextual word embeddings produced by neural language models, such as BERT or ELMo, have seen widespread application and performance gains across many Natural Language Processing tasks, suggesting rich linguistic features encoded in their representations. This work aims to investigate to what extent any linguistic hierarchical information is encoded into a single contextual embedding. Using labelled constituency trees, we train simple linear classifiers on top of single contextualised word representations for ancestor sentiment analysis tasks at multiple constituency levels of a sentence. To assess the presence of hierarchical information throughout the networks, the linear classifiers are trained using representations produced by each intermediate layer of BERT and ELMo variants. We show that with no fine-tuning, a single contextualised representation encodes enough syntactic and semantic sentence-level information to significantly outperform a non-contextual baseline for classifying 5-class sentiment of its ancestor constituents at multiple levels of the constituency tree. Additionally, we show that both LSTM and transformer architectures trained on similarly sized datasets achieve similar levels of performance on these tasks. Future work looks to expand the analysis to a wider range of NLP tasks and contextualisers.
Leakage-Robust Classifier via Mask-Enhanced Training (Student Abstract)
Authors: Stachura Damian , Galias Christopher , Żołna Konrad
Published: June 2020

We synthetically add data leakage to well-known image datasets, which results in predictions of convolutional neural networks trained naively on these spoiled datasets becoming wildly inaccurate. We propose a method, dubbed Mask-Enhanced Training, that automatically identifies the possible leakage and makes the classifier robust. The method enables the model to focus on all features needed to solve the task, making its predictions on the original validation set accurate, even if the whole training dataset is spoiled with the leakage.
Sampling Random Chordal Graphs by MCMC (Student Abstract)
Authors: Sun Wenbo , Bezáková Ivona
Published: June 2020

Chordal graphs are a widely studied graph class, with applications in several areas of computer science, including structural learning of Bayesian networks. Many problems that are hard on general graphs become solvable on chordal graphs. The random generation of instances of chordal graphs for testing these algorithms is often required. Nevertheless, there are only few known algorithms that generate random chordal graphs, and, as far as we know, none of them generate chordal graphs uniformly at random (where each chordal graph appears with equal probability). In this paper we propose a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to sample connected chordal graphs uniformly at random. Additionally, we propose a Markov chain that generates connected chordal graphs with a bounded treewidth uniformly at random. Bounding the treewidth parameter (which bounds the largest clique) has direct implications on the running time of various algorithms on chordal graphs. For each of the proposed Markov chains we prove that they are ergodic and therefore converge to the uniform distribution. Finally, as initial evidence that the Markov chains have the potential to mix rapidly, we prove that the chain on graphs with bounded treewidth mixes rapidly for trees (chordal graphs with treewidth bound of one).
Semantics- and Syntax-Related Subvectors in the Skip-Gram Embeddings (Student Abstract)
Authors: Tezekbayev Maxat , Assylbekov Zhenisbek , Takhanov Rustem
Published: June 2020

We show that the skip-gram embedding of any word can be decomposed into two subvectors which roughly correspond to semantic and syntactic roles of the word.
Robust Multi-View Representation Learning (Student Abstract)
Authors: Venkatesan Sibi , Miller James K. , Dubrawski Artur
Published: June 2020

Multi-view data has become ubiquitous, especially with multi-sensor systems like self-driving cars or medical patient-side monitors. We propose two methods to approach robust multi-view representation learning with the aim of leveraging local relationships between views.The first is an extension of Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) where we consider multiple one-vs-rest CCA problems, one for each view. We use a group-sparsity penalty to encourage finding local relationships. The second method is a straightforward extension of a multi-view AutoEncoder with view-level drop-out.We demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods in simple synthetic experiments. We also describe heuristics and extensions to improve and/or expand on these methods.
Topic Enhanced Controllable CVAE for Dialogue Generation (Student Abstract)
Authors: Wang Yiru , Si Pengda , Lei Zeyang , Yang Yujiu
Published: June 2020

Neural generation models have shown great potential in conversation generation recently. However, these methods tend to generate uninformative or irrelevant responses. In this paper, we present a novel topic-enhanced controllable CVAE (TEC-CVAE) model to address this issue. On the one hand, the model learns the context-interactive topic knowledge through a novel multi-hop hybrid attention in the encoder. On the other hand, we design a topic-aware controllable decoder to constrain the expression of the stochastic latent variable in the CVAE to reduce irrelevant responses. Experimental results on two public datasets show that the two mechanisms synchronize to improve both relevance and diversity, and the proposed model outperforms other competitive methods.