pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Survey of Algorithms for Black-Box Safety Validation of Cyber-Physical Systems
Authors: Anthony Corso, Robert J. Moss, Mark Koren, Ritchie Lee, Mykel J. Kochenderfer
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Collision Avoidance, Problem Decomposition, Survey

Autonomous cyber-physical systems (CPS) can improve safety and efficiency for safety-critical applications, but require rigorous testing before deployment. The complexity of these systems often precludes the use of formal verification and real-world testing can be too dangerous during development. Therefore, simulation-based techniques have been developed that treat the system under test as a black box operating in a simulated environment. Safety validation tasks include finding disturbances in the environment that cause the system to fail (falsification), finding the most-likely failure, and estimating the probability that the system fails. Motivated by the prevalence of safety-critical artificial intelligence, this work provides a survey of state-of-the-art safety validation techniques for CPS with a focus on applied algorithms and their modifications for the safety validation problem. We present and discuss algorithms in the domains of optimization, path planning, reinforcement learning, and importance sampling. Problem decomposition techniques are presented to help scale algorithms to large state spaces, which are common for CPS. A brief overview of safety-critical applications is given, including autonomous vehicles and aircraft collision avoidance systems. Finally, we present a survey of existing academic and commercially available safety validation tools.
Mathematical foundations of stable RKHSs
Authors: Mauro Bisiacco, Gianluigi Pillonetto
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHSs) are key spaces for machine learning that are becoming popular also for linear system identification. In particular, the so-called stable RKHSs can be used to model absolutely summable impulse responses. In combination e.g. with regularized least squares they can then be used to reconstruct dynamic systems from input-output data. In this paper we provide new structural properties of stable RKHSs. The relation between stable kernels and other fundamental classes, like those containing absolutely summable or finite-trace kernels, is elucidated. These insights are then brought into the feature space context. First, it is proved that any stable kernel admits feature maps induced by a basis of orthogonal eigenvectors in l2. The exact connection with classical system identification approaches that exploit such kind of functions to model impulse responses is also provided. Then, the necessary and sufficient stability condition for RKHSs designed by formulating kernel eigenvectors and eigenvalues is obtained. Overall, our new results provide novel mathematical foundations of stable RKHSs with impact on stability tests, impulse responses modeling and computational efficiency of regularized schemes for linear system identification.
Outlier-Robust Clustering of Non-Spherical Mixtures
Authors: Ainesh Bakshi, Pravesh Kothari
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

We give the first outlier-robust efficient algorithm for clustering a mixture of $k$ statistically separated d-dimensional Gaussians (k-GMMs). Concretely, our algorithm takes input an $\epsilon$-corrupted sample from a $k$-GMM and whp in $d^{\text{poly}(k/\eta)}$ time, outputs an approximate clustering that misclassifies at most $k^{O(k)}(\epsilon+\eta)$ fraction of the points whenever every pair of mixture components are separated by $1-\exp(-\text{poly}(k/\eta)^k)$ in total variation (TV) distance. Such a result was not previously known even for $k=2$. TV separation is the statistically weakest possible notion of separation and captures important special cases such as mixed linear regression and subspace clustering. Our main conceptual contribution is to distill simple analytic properties - (certifiable) hypercontractivity and bounded variance of degree 2 polynomials and anti-concentration of linear projections - that are necessary and sufficient for mixture models to be (efficiently) clusterable. As a consequence, our results extend to clustering mixtures of arbitrary affine transforms of the uniform distribution on the $d$-dimensional unit sphere. Even the information-theoretic clusterability of separated distributions satisfying these two analytic assumptions was not known prior to our work and is likely to be of independent interest. Our algorithms build on the recent sequence of works relying on certifiable anti-concentration first introduced in the works of Karmarkar, Klivans, and Kothari and Raghavendra, and Yau in 2019. Our techniques expand the sum-of-squares toolkit to show robust certifiability of TV-separated Gaussian clusters in data. This involves giving a low-degree sum-of-squares proof of statements that relate parameter (i.e. mean and covariances) distance to total variation distance by relying only on hypercontractivity and anti-concentration.
Generating Memorable Images Based on Human Visual Memory Schemas
Authors: Cameron Kyle-Davidson, Adrian G. Bors, Karla K. Evans
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00

This research study proposes using Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) that incorporate a two-dimensional measure of human memorability to generate memorable or non-memorable images of scenes. The memorability of the generated images is evaluated by modelling Visual Memory Schemas (VMS), which correspond to mental representations that human observers use to encode an image into memory. The VMS model is based upon the results of memory experiments conducted on human observers, and provides a 2D map of memorability. We impose a memorability constraint upon the latent space of a GAN by employing a VMS map prediction model as an auxiliary loss. We assess the difference in memorability between images generated to be memorable or non-memorable through an independent computational measure of memorability, and additionally assess the effect of memorability on the realness of the generated images.
Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Detection and Cross-Document Coreference Resolution of Militarized Interstate Disputes
Authors: Benjamin J. Radford
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Cross Document Coreference Resolution, Event Coreference Resolution

Previous efforts to automate the detection of social and political events in text have primarily focused on identifying events described within single sentences or documents. Within a corpus of documents, these automated systems are unable to link event references -- recognize singular events across multiple sentences or documents. A separate literature in computational linguistics on event coreference resolution attempts to link known events to one another within (and across) documents. I provide a data set for evaluating methods to identify certain political events in text and to link related texts to one another based on shared events. The data set, Headlines of War, is built on the Militarized Interstate Disputes data set and offers headlines classified by dispute status and headline pairs labeled with coreference indicators. Additionally, I introduce a model capable of accomplishing both tasks. The multi-task convolutional neural network is shown to be capable of recognizing events and event coreferences given the headlines' texts and publication dates.
Towards the Role of Theory of Mind in Explanation
Authors: Maayan Shvo, Toryn Q. Klassen, Sheila A. McIlraith
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Theory of Mind is commonly defined as the ability to attribute mental states (e.g., beliefs, goals) to oneself, and to others. A large body of previous work - from the social sciences to artificial intelligence - has observed that Theory of Mind capabilities are central to providing an explanation to another agent or when explaining that agent's behaviour. In this paper, we build and expand upon previous work by providing an account of explanation in terms of the beliefs of agents and the mechanism by which agents revise their beliefs given possible explanations. We further identify a set of desiderata for explanations that utilize Theory of Mind. These desiderata inform our belief-based account of explanation.
Exploring the Loss Landscape in Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Colin White, Sam Nolen, Yash Savani
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Denoising, Hyperparameter Optimization, Neural Architecture Search, Traveling Salesman Problem

Neural architecture search (NAS) has seen a steep rise in interest over the last few years. Many algorithms for NAS consist of searching through a space of architectures by iteratively choosing an architecture, evaluating its performance by training it, and using all prior evaluations to come up with the next choice. The evaluation step is noisy - the final accuracy varies based on the random initialization of the weights. Prior work has focused on devising new search algorithms to handle this noise, rather than quantifying or understanding the level of noise in architecture evaluations. In this work, we show that (1) the simplest hill-climbing algorithm is a powerful baseline for NAS, and (2), when the noise in popular NAS benchmark datasets is reduced to a minimum, hill-climbing to outperforms many popular state-of-the-art algorithms. We further back up this observation by showing that the number of local minima is substantially reduced as the noise decreases, and by giving a theoretical characterization of the performance of local search in NAS. Based on our findings, for NAS research we suggest (1) using local search as a baseline, and (2) denoising the training pipeline when possible.
Optimal Covid-19 Pool Testing with a priori Information
Authors: Marc Beunardeau, Éric Brier, Noémie Cartier, Aisling Connolly, Nathanaël Courant, Rémi Géraud-Stewart, David Naccache, Ofer Yifrach-Stav
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00

As humanity struggles to contain the global Covid-19 infection, prophylactic actions are grandly slowed down by the shortage of testing kits. Governments have taken several measures to work around this shortage: the FDA has become more liberal on the approval of Covid-19 tests in the US. In the UK emergency measures allowed to increase the daily number of locally produced test kits to 100,000. China has recently launched a massive test manufacturing program. However, all those efforts are very insufficient and many poor countries are still under threat. A popular method for reducing the number of tests consists in pooling samples, i.e. mixing patient samples and testing the mixed samples once. If all the samples are negative, pooling succeeds at a unitary cost. However, if a single sample is positive, failure does not indicate which patient is infected. This paper describes how to optimally detect infected patients in pools, i.e. using a minimal number of tests to precisely identify them, given the a priori probabilities that each of the patients is healthy. Those probabilities can be estimated using questionnaires, supervised machine learning or clinical examinations. The resulting algorithms, which can be interpreted as informed divide-and-conquer strategies, are non-intuitive and quite surprising. They are patent-free. Co-authors are listed in alphabetical order.
Attentive Semantic Exploring for Manipulated Face Detection
Authors: Zehao Chen, Hua Yang
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Face Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Face manipulation methods develop rapidly in recent years, whose potential risk to society accounts for the emerging of researches on detection methods. However, due to the diversity of manipulation methods and the high quality of fake images, detection methods suffer from a lack of generalization ability. To solve the problem, we find that segmenting images into semantic fragments could be effective, as discriminative defects and distortions are closely related to such fragments. Besides, to highlight discriminative regions in fragments and to measure contribution to the final prediction of each fragment is efficient for the improvement of generalization ability. Therefore, we propose a novel manipulated face detection method based on Multilevel Facial Semantic Segmentation and Cascade Attention Mechanism. To evaluate our method, we reconstruct two datasets: GGFI and FFMI, and also collect two open-source datasets. Experiments on four datasets verify the advantages of our approach against other state-of-the-arts, especially its generalization ability.
Multitask Models for Supervised Protests Detection in Texts
Authors: Benjamin J. Radford
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Extraction, Sentence

The CLEF 2019 ProtestNews Lab tasks participants to identify text relating to political protests within larger corpora of news data. Three tasks include article classification, sentence detection, and event extraction. I apply multitask neural networks capable of producing predictions for two and three of these tasks simultaneously. The multitask framework allows the model to learn relevant features from the training data of all three tasks. This paper demonstrates performance near or above the reported state-of-the-art for automated political event coding though noted differences in research design make direct comparisons difficult.
NTIRE 2020 Challenge on Video Quality Mapping: Methods and Results
Authors: Dario Fuoli, Zhiwu Huang, Martin Danelljan, Radu Timofte, Hua Wang, Longcun Jin, Dewei Su, Jing Liu, Jaehoon Lee, Michal Kudelski, Lukasz Bala, Dmitry Hrybov, Marcin Mozejko, Muchen Li, Si-Yao Li, Bo Pang, Cewu Lu, Chao Li, Dongliang He, Fu Li, Shilei Wen
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2020 challenge on video quality mapping (VQM), which addresses the issues of quality mapping from source video domain to target video domain. The challenge includes both a supervised track (track 1) and a weakly-supervised track (track 2) for two benchmark datasets. In particular, track 1 offers a new Internet video benchmark, requiring algorithms to learn the map from more compressed videos to less compressed videos in a supervised training manner. In track 2, algorithms are required to learn the quality mapping from one device to another when their quality varies substantially and weakly-aligned video pairs are available. For track 1, in total 7 teams competed in the final test phase, demonstrating novel and effective solutions to the problem. For track 2, some existing methods are evaluated, showing promising solutions to the weakly-supervised video quality mapping problem.
Time Dependence in Non-Autonomous Neural ODEs
Authors: Jared Quincy Davis, Krzysztof Choromanski, Jake Varley, Honglak Lee, Jean-Jacques Slotine, Valerii Likhosterov, Adrian Weller, Ameesh Makadia, Vikas Sindhwani
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR Workshop DeepDiffEq 2019 12
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Video Prediction

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) are elegant reinterpretations of deep networks where continuous time can replace the discrete notion of depth, ODE solvers perform forward propagation, and the adjoint method enables efficient, constant memory backpropagation. Neural ODEs are universal approximators only when they are non-autonomous, that is, the dynamics depends explicitly on time. We propose a novel family of Neural ODEs with time-varying weights, where time-dependence is non-parametric, and the smoothness of weight trajectories can be explicitly controlled to allow a tradeoff between expressiveness and efficiency. Using this enhanced expressiveness, we outperform previous Neural ODE variants in both speed and representational capacity, ultimately outperforming standard ResNet and CNN models on select image classification and video prediction tasks.
GraCIAS: Grassmannian of Corrupted Images for Adversarial Security
Authors: Ankita Shukla, Pavan Turaga, Saket Anand
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00

Input transformation based defense strategies fall short in defending against strong adversarial attacks. Some successful defenses adopt approaches that either increase the randomness within the applied transformations, or make the defense computationally intensive, making it substantially more challenging for the attacker. However, it limits the applicability of such defenses as a pre-processing step, similar to computationally heavy approaches that use retraining and network modifications to achieve robustness to perturbations. In this work, we propose a defense strategy that applies random image corruptions to the input image alone, constructs a self-correlation based subspace followed by a projection operation to suppress the adversarial perturbation. Due to its simplicity, the proposed defense is computationally efficient as compared to the state-of-the-art, and yet can withstand huge perturbations. Further, we develop proximity relationships between the projection operator of a clean image and of its adversarially perturbed version, via bounds relating geodesic distance on the Grassmannian to matrix Frobenius norms. We empirically show that our strategy is complementary to other weak defenses like JPEG compression and can be seamlessly integrated with them to create a stronger defense. We present extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset across four different models namely InceptionV3, ResNet50, VGG16 and MobileNet models with perturbation magnitude set to {\epsilon} = 16. Unlike state-of-the-art approaches, even without any retraining, the proposed strategy achieves an absolute improvement of ~ 4.5% in defense accuracy on ImageNet.
Machine Learning and Deep Learning methods for predictive modelling from Raman spectra in bioprocessing
Authors: Semion Rozov
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, regression

In chemical processing and bioprocessing, conventional online sensors are limited to measure only basic process variables like pressure and temperature, pH, dissolved O and CO$_2$ and viable cell density (VCD). The concentration of other chemical species is more difficult to measure, as it usually requires an at-line or off-line approach. Such approaches are invasive and slow compared to on-line sensing. It is known that different molecules can be distinguished by their interaction with monochromatic light, producing different profiles for the resulting Raman spectrum, depending on the concentration. Given the availability of reference measurements for the target variable, regression methods can be used to model the relationship between the profile of the Raman spectra and the concentration of the analyte. This work focused on pretreatment methods of Raman spectra for the facilitation of the regression task using Machine Learning and Deep Learning methods, as well as the development of new regression models based on these methods. In the majority of cases, this allowed to outperform conventional Raman models in terms of prediction error and prediction robustness.
Learning Adaptive Exploration Strategies in Dynamic Environments Through Informed Policy Regularization
Authors: Pierre-Alexandre Kamienny, Matteo Pirotta, Alessandro Lazaric, Thibault Lavril, Nicolas Usunier, Ludovic Denoyer
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00

We study the problem of learning exploration-exploitation strategies that effectively adapt to dynamic environments, where the task may change over time. While RNN-based policies could in principle represent such strategies, in practice their training time is prohibitive and the learning process often converges to poor solutions. In this paper, we consider the case where the agent has access to a description of the task (e.g., a task id or task parameters) at training time, but not at test time. We propose a novel algorithm that regularizes the training of an RNN-based policy using informed policies trained to maximize the reward in each task. This dramatically reduces the sample complexity of training RNN-based policies, without losing their representational power. As a result, our method learns exploration strategies that efficiently balance between gathering information about the unknown and changing task and maximizing the reward over time. We test the performance of our algorithm in a variety of environments where tasks may vary within each episode.
Groupwise Multimodal Image Registration using Joint Total Variation
Authors: Mikael Brudfors, Yaël Balbastre, John Ashburner
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

In medical imaging it is common practice to acquire a wide range of modalities (MRI, CT, PET, etc.), to highlight different structures or pathologies. As patient movement between scans or scanning session is unavoidable, registration is often an essential step before any subsequent image analysis. In this paper, we introduce a cost function based on joint total variation for such multimodal image registration. This cost function has the advantage of enabling principled, groupwise alignment of multiple images, whilst being insensitive to strong intensity non-uniformities. We evaluate our algorithm on rigidly aligning both simulated and real 3D brain scans. This validation shows robustness to strong intensity non-uniformities and low registration errors for CT/PET to MRI alignment. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/brudfors/coregistration-njtv.
Training robust neural networks using Lipschitz bounds
Authors: Patricia Pauli, Anne Koch, Julian Berberich, Paul Kohler, Frank Allgöwer
Date: 2020-05-06 00:00:00

Due to their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations, neural networks (NNs) are hardly used in safety-critical applications. One measure of robustness to such perturbations in the input is the Lipschitz constant of the input-output map defined by an NN. In this work, we propose a framework to train multi-layer NNs while at the same time encouraging robustness by keeping their Lipschitz constant small, thus addressing the robustness issue. More specifically, we design an optimization scheme based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers that minimizes not only the training loss of an NN but also its Lipschitz constant resulting in a semidefinite programming based training procedure that promotes robustness. We design two versions of this training procedure. The first one includes a regularizer that penalizes an accurate upper bound on the Lipschitz constant. The second one allows to enforce a desired Lipschitz bound on the NN at all times during training. Finally, we provide two examples to show that the proposed framework successfully increases the robustness of NNs.
SLEDGE: A Simple Yet Effective Baseline for COVID-19 Scientific Knowledge Search
Authors: Sean MacAvaney, Arman Cohan, Nazli Goharian
Date: 2020-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

With worldwide concerns surrounding the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), there is a rapidly growing body of literature on the virus. Clinicians, researchers, and policy-makers need a way to effectively search these articles. In this work, we present a search system called SLEDGE, which utilizes SciBERT to effectively re-rank articles. We train the model on a general-domain answer ranking dataset, and transfer the relevance signals to SARS-CoV-2 for evaluation. We observe SLEDGE's effectiveness as a strong baseline on the TREC-COVID challenge (topping the learderboard with an nDCG@10 of 0.6844). Insights provided by a detailed analysis provide some potential future directions to explore, including the importance of filtering by date and the potential of neural methods that rely more heavily on count signals. We release the code to facilitate future work on this critical task at https://github.com/Georgetown-IR-Lab/covid-neural-ir