pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CUDA-Self-Organizing feature map based visual sentiment analysis of bank customer complaints for Analytical CRM
Authors: Rohit Gavval, Vadlamani Ravi, Kalavala Revanth Harshal, Akhilesh Gangwar, Kumar Ravi
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Management, Sentiment Analysis

With the widespread use of social media, companies now have access to a wealth of customer feedback data which has valuable applications to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Analyzing customer grievances data, is paramount as their speedy non-redressal would lead to customer churn resulting in lower profitability. In this paper, we propose a descriptive analytics framework using Self-organizing feature map (SOM), for Visual Sentiment Analysis of customer complaints. The network learns the inherent grouping of the complaints automatically which can then be visualized too using various techniques. Analytical Customer Relationship Management (ACRM) executives can draw useful business insights from the maps and take timely remedial action. We also propose a high-performance version of the algorithm CUDASOM (CUDA based Self Organizing feature Map) implemented using NVIDIA parallel computing platform, CUDA, which speeds up the processing of high-dimensional text data and generates fast results. The efficacy of the proposed model has been demonstrated on the customer complaints data regarding the products and services of four leading Indian banks. CUDASOM achieved an average speed up of 44 times. Our approach can expand research into intelligent grievance redressal system to provide rapid solutions to the complaining customers.
Non-monotone DR-submodular Maximization: Approximation and Regret Guarantees
Authors: Christoph Dürr, Nguyen Kim Thang, Abhinav Srivastav, Léo Tible
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Diminishing-returns (DR) submodular optimization is an important field with many real-world applications in machine learning, economics and communication systems. It captures a subclass of non-convex optimization that provides both practical and theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we study the fundamental problem of maximizing non-monotone DR-submodular functions over down-closed and general convex sets in both offline and online settings. First, we show that for offline maximizing non-monotone DR-submodular functions over a general convex set, the Frank-Wolfe algorithm achieves an approximation guarantee which depends on the convex set. Next, we show that the Stochastic Gradient Ascent algorithm achieves a 1/4-approximation ratio with the regret of $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ for the problem of maximizing non-monotone DR-submodular functions over down-closed convex sets. These are the first approximation guarantees in the corresponding settings. Finally we benchmark these algorithms on problems arising in machine learning domain with the real-world datasets.
A Direct Approach to Robust Deep Learning Using Adversarial Networks
Authors: Huaxia Wang, Chun-Nam Yu
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2019 5
Tasks: Deep Learning, General Classification, Generative Adversarial Network, image-classification, Image Classification

Deep neural networks have been shown to perform well in many classical machine learning problems, especially in image classification tasks. However, researchers have found that neural networks can be easily fooled, and they are surprisingly sensitive to small perturbations imperceptible to humans. Carefully crafted input images (adversarial examples) can force a well-trained neural network to provide arbitrary outputs. Including adversarial examples during training is a popular defense mechanism against adversarial attacks. In this paper we propose a new defensive mechanism under the generative adversarial network (GAN) framework. We model the adversarial noise using a generative network, trained jointly with a classification discriminative network as a minimax game. We show empirically that our adversarial network approach works well against black box attacks, with performance on par with state-of-art methods such as ensemble adversarial training and adversarial training with projected gradient descent.
Glioma Grade Prediction Using Wavelet Scattering-Based Radiomics
Authors: Qijian Chen, Lihui Wang, Li Wang, Zeyu Deng, Jian Zhang, Yuemin Zhu
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Prediction, Prognosis, regression

Glioma grading before surgery is very critical for the prognosis prediction and treatment plan making. We present a novel wavelet scattering-based radiomic method to predict noninvasively and accurately the glioma grades. The method consists of wavelet scattering feature extraction, dimensionality reduction, and glioma grade prediction. The dimensionality reduction was achieved using partial least squares (PLS) regression and the glioma grade prediction using support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR) and random forest (RF). The prediction obtained on multimodal magnetic resonance images of 285 patients with well-labeled intratumoral and peritumoral regions showed that the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of glioma grade prediction was increased up to 0.99 when considering both intratumoral and peritumoral features in multimodal images, which represents an increase of about 13% compared to traditional radiomics. In addition, the features extracted from peritumoral regions further increase the accuracy of glioma grading.
Underwater Stereo using Refraction-free Image Synthesized from Light Field Camera
Authors: Kazuto Ichimaru, Hiroshi Kawasaki
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00

There is a strong demand on capturing underwater scenes without distortions caused by refraction. Since a light field camera can capture several light rays at each point of an image plane from various directions, if geometrically correct rays are chosen, it is possible to synthesize a refraction-free image. In this paper, we propose a novel technique to efficiently select such rays to synthesize a refraction-free image from an underwater image captured by a light field camera. In addition, we propose a stereo technique to reconstruct 3D shapes using a pair of our refraction-free images, which are central projection. In the experiment, we captured several underwater scenes by two light field cameras, synthesized refraction free images and applied stereo technique to reconstruct 3D shapes. The results are compared with previous techniques which are based on approximation, showing the strength of our method.
Improving Neural Networks by Adopting Amplifying and Attenuating Neurons
Authors: Seongmun Jung, Oh Joon Kwon
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00

In the present study, an amplifying neuron and attenuating neuron, which can be easily implemented into neural networks without any significant additional computational effort, are proposed. The activated output value is squared for the amplifying neuron, while the value becomes its reciprocal for the attenuating one. Theoretically, the order of neural networks increases when the amplifying neuron is placed in the hidden layer. The performance assessments of neural networks were conducted to verify that the amplifying and attenuating neurons enhance the performance of neural networks. From the numerical experiments, it was revealed that the neural networks that contain the amplifying and attenuating neurons yield more accurate results, compared to those without them.
Gravity-Inspired Graph Autoencoders for Directed Link Prediction
Authors: Guillaume Salha, Stratis Limnios, Romain Hennequin, Viet Anh Tran, Michalis Vazirgiannis
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Link Prediction, Prediction

Graph autoencoders (AE) and variational autoencoders (VAE) recently emerged as powerful node embedding methods. In particular, graph AE and VAE were successfully leveraged to tackle the challenging link prediction problem, aiming at figuring out whether some pairs of nodes from a graph are connected by unobserved edges. However, these models focus on undirected graphs and therefore ignore the potential direction of the link, which is limiting for numerous real-life applications. In this paper, we extend the graph AE and VAE frameworks to address link prediction in directed graphs. We present a new gravity-inspired decoder scheme that can effectively reconstruct directed graphs from a node embedding. We empirically evaluate our method on three different directed link prediction tasks, for which standard graph AE and VAE perform poorly. We achieve competitive results on three real-world graphs, outperforming several popular baselines.
Fire Now, Fire Later: Alarm-Based Systems for Prescriptive Process Monitoring
Authors: Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen, Niek Tax, Irene Teinemaa, Marlon Dumas, Massimiliano de Leoni, Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Matthias Weidlich
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Predictive Process Monitoring

Predictive process monitoring is a family of techniques to analyze events produced during the execution of a business process in order to predict the future state or the final outcome of running process instances. Existing techniques in this field are able to predict, at each step of a process instance, the likelihood that it will lead to an undesired outcome.These techniques, however, focus on generating predictions and do not prescribe when and how process workers should intervene to decrease the cost of undesired outcomes. This paper proposes a framework for prescriptive process monitoring, which extends predictive monitoring with the ability to generate alarms that trigger interventions to prevent an undesired outcome or mitigate its effect. The framework incorporates a parameterized cost model to assess the cost-benefit trade-off of generating alarms. We show how to optimize the generation of alarms given an event log of past process executions and a set of cost model parameters. The proposed approaches are empirically evaluated using a range of real-life event logs. The experimental results show that the net cost of undesired outcomes can be minimized by changing the threshold for generating alarms, as the process instance progresses. Moreover, introducing delays for triggering alarms, instead of triggering them as soon as the probability of an undesired outcome exceeds a threshold, leads to lower net costs.
ENIGMAWatch: ProofWatch Meets ENIGMA
Authors: Zarathustra Goertzel, Jan Jakubův, Josef Urban
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00

In this work we describe a new learning-based proof guidance -- ENIGMAWatch -- for saturation-style first-order theorem provers. ENIGMAWatch combines two guiding approaches for the given-clause selection implemented for the E ATP system: ProofWatch and ENIGMA. ProofWatch is motivated by the watchlist (hints) method and based on symbolic matching of multiple related proofs, while ENIGMA is based on statistical machine learning. The two methods are combined by using the evolving information about symbolic proof matching as an additional information that characterizes the saturation-style proof search for the statistical learning methods. The new system is experimentally evaluated on a large set of problems from the Mizar Library. We show that the added proof-matching information is considered important by the statistical machine learners, and that it leads to improvements in E's Performance over ProofWatch and ENIGMA.
Recurrent Value Functions
Authors: Pierre Thodoroff, Nishanth Anand, Lucas Caccia, Doina Precup, Joelle Pineau
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Despite recent successes in Reinforcement Learning, value-based methods often suffer from high variance hindering performance. In this paper, we illustrate this in a continuous control setting where state of the art methods perform poorly whenever sensor noise is introduced. To overcome this issue, we introduce Recurrent Value Functions (RVFs) as an alternative to estimate the value function of a state. We propose to estimate the value function of the current state using the value function of past states visited along the trajectory. Due to the nature of their formulation, RVFs have a natural way of learning an emphasis function that selectively emphasizes important states. First, we establish RVF's asymptotic convergence properties in tabular settings. We then demonstrate their robustness on a partially observable domain and continuous control tasks. Finally, we provide a qualitative interpretation of the learned emphasis function.
Binary Classification with Bounded Abstention Rate
Authors: Shubhanshu Shekhar, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Tara Javidi
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification, General Classification

We consider the problem of binary classification with abstention in the relatively less studied \emph{bounded-rate} setting. We begin by obtaining a characterization of the Bayes optimal classifier for an arbitrary input-label distribution $P_{XY}$. Our result generalizes and provides an alternative proof for the result first obtained by \cite{chow1957optimum}, and then re-derived by \citet{denis2015consistency}, under a continuity assumption on $P_{XY}$. We then propose a plug-in classifier that employs unlabeled samples to decide the region of abstention and derive an upper-bound on the excess risk of our classifier under standard \emph{H\"older smoothness} and \emph{margin} assumptions. Unlike the plug-in rule of \citet{denis2015consistency}, our constructed classifier satisfies the abstention constraint with high probability and can also deal with discontinuities in the empirical cdf. We also derive lower-bounds that demonstrate the minimax near-optimality of our proposed algorithm. To address the excessive complexity of the plug-in classifier in high dimensions, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm that builds upon prior work on convex loss surrogates, and obtain bounds on its excess risk in the \emph{realizable} case. We empirically compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with a baseline on a number of UCI benchmark datasets.
MR-GNN: Multi-Resolution and Dual Graph Neural Network for Predicting Structured Entity Interactions
Authors: Nuo Xu, Pinghui Wang, Long Chen, Jing Tao, Junzhou Zhao
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Predicting interactions between structured entities lies at the core of numerous tasks such as drug regimen and new material design. In recent years, graph neural networks have become attractive. They represent structured entities as graphs and then extract features from each individual graph using graph convolution operations. However, these methods have some limitations: i) their networks only extract features from a fix-sized subgraph structure (i.e., a fix-sized receptive field) of each node, and ignore features in substructures of different sizes, and ii) features are extracted by considering each entity independently, which may not effectively reflect the interaction between two entities. To resolve these problems, we present MR-GNN, an end-to-end graph neural network with the following features: i) it uses a multi-resolution based architecture to extract node features from different neighborhoods of each node, and, ii) it uses dual graph-state long short-term memory networks (L-STMs) to summarize local features of each graph and extracts the interaction features between pairwise graphs. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets show that MR-GNN improves the prediction of state-of-the-art methods.
Knowledge Graph Embedding Bi-Vector Models for Symmetric Relation
Authors: Jinkui Yao, Lianghua Xu
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Link Prediction, Relation

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models have been proposed to improve the performance of knowledge graph reasoning. However, there is a general phenomenon in most of KGEs, as the training progresses, the symmetric relations tend to zero vector, if the symmetric triples ratio is high enough in the dataset. This phenomenon causes subsequent tasks, e.g. link prediction etc., of symmetric relations to fail. The root cause of the problem is that KGEs do not utilize the semantic information of symmetric relations. We propose KGE bi-vector models, which represent the symmetric relations as vector pair, significantly increasing the processing capability of the symmetry relations. We generate the benchmark datasets based on FB15k and WN18 by completing the symmetric relation triples to verify models. The experiment results of our models clearly affirm the effectiveness and superiority of our models against baseline.
Revisiting Graph Neural Networks: All We Have is Low-Pass Filters
Authors: Hoang NT, Takanori Maehara
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: All, General Classification, Graph Neural Network

Graph neural networks have become one of the most important techniques to solve machine learning problems on graph-structured data. Recent work on vertex classification proposed deep and distributed learning models to achieve high performance and scalability. However, we find that the feature vectors of benchmark datasets are already quite informative for the classification task, and the graph structure only provides a means to denoise the data. In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework based on graph signal processing for analyzing graph neural networks. Our results indicate that graph neural networks only perform low-pass filtering on feature vectors and do not have the non-linear manifold learning property. We further investigate their resilience to feature noise and propose some insights on GCN-based graph neural network design.
Replicated Vector Approximate Message Passing For Resampling Problem
Authors: Takashi Takahashi, Yoshiyuki Kabashima
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, Variable Selection

Resampling techniques are widely used in statistical inference and ensemble learning, in which estimators' statistical properties are essential. However, existing methods are computationally demanding, because repetitions of estimation/learning via numerical optimization/integral for each resampled data are required. In this study, we introduce a computationally efficient method to resolve such problem: replicated vector approximate message passing. This is based on a combination of the replica method of statistical physics and an accurate approximate inference algorithm, namely the vector approximate message passing of information theory. The method provides tractable densities without repeating estimation/learning, and the densities approximately offer an arbitrary degree of the estimators' moment in practical time. In the experiment, we apply the proposed method to the stability selection method, which is commonly used in variable selection problems. The numerical results show its fast convergence and high approximation accuracy for problems involving both synthetic and real-world datasets.
AMSI-Based Detection of Malicious PowerShell Code Using Contextual Embeddings
Authors: Amir Rubin, Shay Kels, Danny Hendler
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

PowerShell is a command-line shell, supporting a scripting language. It is widely used in organizations for configuration management and task automation but is also increasingly used by cybercriminals for launching cyberattacks against organizations, mainly because it is pre-installed on Windows machines and exposes strong functionality that may be leveraged by attackers. This makes the problem of detecting malicious PowerShell code both urgent and challenging. Microsoft's Antimalware Scan Interface (AMSI) allows defending systems to scan all the code passed to scripting engines such as PowerShell prior to its execution. In this work, we conduct the first study of malicious PowerShell code detection using the information made available by AMSI. We present several novel deep-learning based detectors of malicious PowerShell code that employ pretrained contextual embeddings of words from the PowerShell "language". A known problem in the cybersecurity domain is that labeled data is relatively scarce in comparison with unlabeled data, making it difficult to devise effective supervised detection of malicious activity of many types. This is also the case with PowerShell code. Our work shows that this problem can be mitigated by learning a pretrained contextual embedding based on unlabeled data. We trained and evaluated our models using real-world data, collected using AMSI from a large antimalware vendor. Our performance analysis establishes that the use of unlabeled data for the embedding significantly improved the performance of our detectors. Our best-performing model uses an architecture that enables the processing of textual signals from both the character and token levels and obtains a true positive rate of nearly 90% while maintaining a low false-positive rate of less than 0.1%.
Incorporating Human Domain Knowledge in 3D LiDAR-based Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jilin Mei, Huijing Zhao
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Semantic Segmentation

This work studies semantic segmentation using 3D LiDAR data. Popular deep learning methods applied for this task require a large number of manual annotations to train the parameters. We propose a new method that makes full use of the advantages of traditional methods and deep learning methods via incorporating human domain knowledge into the neural network model to reduce the demand for large numbers of manual annotations and improve the training efficiency. We first pretrain a model with autogenerated samples from a rule-based classifier so that human knowledge can be propagated into the network. Based on the pretrained model, only a small set of annotations is required for further fine-tuning. Quantitative experiments show that the pretrained model achieves better performance than random initialization in almost all cases; furthermore, our method can achieve similar performance with fewer manual annotations.
MCScript2.0: A Machine Comprehension Corpus Focused on Script Events and Participants
Authors: Simon Ostermann, Michael Roth, Manfred Pinkal
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2019 6
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

We introduce MCScript2.0, a machine comprehension corpus for the end-to-end evaluation of script knowledge. MCScript2.0 contains approx. 20,000 questions on approx. 3,500 texts, crowdsourced based on a new collection process that results in challenging questions. Half of the questions cannot be answered from the reading texts, but require the use of commonsense and, in particular, script knowledge. We give a thorough analysis of our corpus and show that while the task is not challenging to humans, existing machine comprehension models fail to perform well on the data, even if they make use of a commonsense knowledge base. The dataset is available at http://www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de/?page_id=2582
Hierarchical Annotation of Images with Two-Alternative-Forced-Choice Metric Learning
Authors: Niels Hellinga, Vlado Menkovski
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Retrieval, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Many tasks such as retrieval and recommendations can significantly benefit from structuring the data, commonly in a hierarchical way. To achieve this through annotations of high dimensional data such as images or natural text can be significantly labor intensive. We propose an approach for uncovering the hierarchical structure of data based on efficient discriminative testing rather than annotations of individual datapoints. Using two-alternative-forced-choice (2AFC) testing and deep metric learning we achieve embedding of the data in semantic space where we are able to successfully hierarchically cluster. We actively select triplets for the 2AFC test such that the modeling process is highly efficient with respect to the number of tests presented to the annotator. We empirically demonstrate the feasibility of the method by confirming the shape bias on synthetic data and extract hierarchical structure on the Fashion-MNIST dataset to a finer granularity than the original labels.