pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Model Development Process
Authors: Przemyslaw Biecek
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Predictive modeling has an increasing number of applications in various fields. High demand for predictive models drives creation of tools that automate and support work of data scientist on the model development. To better understand what can be automated we need first a description of the model life-cycle. In this paper we propose a generic Model Development Process (MDP). This process is inspired by Rational Unified Process (RUP) which was designed for software development. There are other approached to process description, like CRISP DM or ASUM DM, in this paper we discuss similarities and differences between these methodologies. We believe that the proposed open standard for model development will facilitate creation of tools for automation of model training, testing and maintaining.
Partially Observable Planning and Learning for Systems with Non-Uniform Dynamics
Authors: Nicholas Collins, Hanna Kurniawati
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Navigation

We propose a neural network architecture, called TransNet, that combines planning and model learning for solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) with non-uniform system dynamics. The past decade has seen a substantial advancement in solving POMDP problems. However, constructing a suitable POMDP model remains difficult. Recently, neural network architectures have been proposed to alleviate the difficulty in acquiring such models. Although the results are promising, existing architectures restrict the type of system dynamics that can be learned --that is, system dynamics must be the same in all parts of the state space. TransNet relaxes such a restriction. Key to this relaxation is a novel neural network module that classifies the state space into classes and then learns the system dynamics of the different classes. TransNet uses this module together with the overall architecture of QMDP-Net[1] to allow solving POMDPs that have more expressive dynamic models, while maintaining efficient data requirement. Its evaluation on typical benchmarks in robot navigation with initially unknown system and environment models indicates that TransNet substantially out-performs the quality of the generated policies and learning efficiency of the state-of-the-art method QMDP-Net.
SNAP: Finding Approximate Second-Order Stationary Solutions Efficiently for Non-convex Linearly Constrained Problems
Authors: Songtao Lu, Meisam Razaviyayn, Bo Yang, Kejun Huang, Mingyi Hong
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00

This paper proposes low-complexity algorithms for finding approximate second-order stationary points (SOSPs) of problems with smooth non-convex objective and linear constraints. While finding (approximate) SOSPs is computationally intractable, we first show that generic instances of the problem can be solved efficiently. More specifically, for a generic problem instance, certain strict complementarity (SC) condition holds for all Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) solutions (with probability one). The SC condition is then used to establish an equivalence relationship between two different notions of SOSPs, one of which is computationally easy to verify. Based on this particular notion of SOSP, we design an algorithm named the Successive Negative-curvature grAdient Projection (SNAP), which successively performs either conventional gradient projection or some negative curvature based projection steps to find SOSPs. SNAP and its first-order extension SNAP$^+$, require $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^{2.5})$ iterations to compute an $(\epsilon, \sqrt{\epsilon})$-SOSP, and their per-iteration computational complexities are polynomial in the number of constraints and problem dimension. To our knowledge, this is the first time that first-order algorithms with polynomial per-iteration complexity and global sublinear rate have been designed to find SOSPs of the important class of non-convex problems with linear constraints.
PhysGAN: Generating Physical-World-Resilient Adversarial Examples for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Zelun Kong, Junfeng Guo, Ang Li, Cong Liu
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Image Classification

Although Deep neural networks (DNNs) are being pervasively used in vision-based autonomous driving systems, they are found vulnerable to adversarial attacks where small-magnitude perturbations into the inputs during test time cause dramatic changes to the outputs. While most of the recent attack methods target at digital-world adversarial scenarios, it is unclear how they perform in the physical world, and more importantly, the generated perturbations under such methods would cover a whole driving scene including those fixed background imagery such as the sky, making them inapplicable to physical world implementation. We present PhysGAN, which generates physical-world-resilient adversarial examples for mislead-ing autonomous driving systems in a continuous manner. We show the effectiveness and robustness of PhysGAN via extensive digital and real-world evaluations. Digital experiments show that PhysGAN is effective for various steer-ing models and scenes, which misleads the average steer-ing angle by up to 23.06 degrees under various scenarios. The real-world studies further demonstrate that PhysGAN is sufficiently resilient in practice, which misleads the average steering angle by up to 19.17 degrees. We compare PhysGAN with a set of state-of-the-art baseline methods including several of our self-designed ones, which further demonstrate the robustness and efficacy of our approach. We also show that PhysGAN outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods To the best of our knowledge, PhysGANis probably the first technique of generating realistic and physical-world-resilient adversarial examples for attacking common autonomous driving scenarios.
Learning to Speak Fluently in a Foreign Language: Multilingual Speech Synthesis and Cross-Language Voice Cloning
Authors: Yu Zhang, Ron J. Weiss, Heiga Zen, Yonghui Wu, Zhifeng Chen, RJ Skerry-Ryan, Ye Jia, Andrew Rosenberg, Bhuvana Ramabhadran
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Cloning

We present a multispeaker, multilingual text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis model based on Tacotron that is able to produce high quality speech in multiple languages. Moreover, the model is able to transfer voices across languages, e.g. synthesize fluent Spanish speech using an English speaker's voice, without training on any bilingual or parallel examples. Such transfer works across distantly related languages, e.g. English and Mandarin. Critical to achieving this result are: 1. using a phonemic input representation to encourage sharing of model capacity across languages, and 2. incorporating an adversarial loss term to encourage the model to disentangle its representation of speaker identity (which is perfectly correlated with language in the training data) from the speech content. Further scaling up the model by training on multiple speakers of each language, and incorporating an autoencoding input to help stabilize attention during training, results in a model which can be used to consistently synthesize intelligible speech for training speakers in all languages seen during training, and in native or foreign accents.
A review on deep learning techniques for 3D sensed data classification
Authors: David Griffiths, Jan Boehm
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, General Classification

Over the past decade deep learning has driven progress in 2D image understanding. Despite these advancements, techniques for automatic 3D sensed data understanding, such as point clouds, is comparatively immature. However, with a range of important applications from indoor robotics navigation to national scale remote sensing there is a high demand for algorithms that can learn to automatically understand and classify 3D sensed data. In this paper we review the current state-of-the-art deep learning architectures for processing unstructured Euclidean data. We begin by addressing the background concepts and traditional methodologies. We review the current main approaches including; RGB-D, multi-view, volumetric and fully end-to-end architecture designs. Datasets for each category are documented and explained. Finally, we give a detailed discussion about the future of deep learning for 3D sensed data, using literature to justify the areas where future research would be most valuable.
GluonCV and GluonNLP: Deep Learning in Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing
Authors: Jian Guo, He He, Tong He, Leonard Lausen, Mu Li, Haibin Lin, Xingjian Shi, Chenguang Wang, Junyuan Xie, Sheng Zha, Aston Zhang, Hang Zhang, Zhi Zhang, Zhongyue Zhang, Shuai Zheng, Yi Zhu
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We present GluonCV and GluonNLP, the deep learning toolkits for computer vision and natural language processing based on Apache MXNet (incubating). These toolkits provide state-of-the-art pre-trained models, training scripts, and training logs, to facilitate rapid prototyping and promote reproducible research. We also provide modular APIs with flexible building blocks to enable efficient customization. Leveraging the MXNet ecosystem, the deep learning models in GluonCV and GluonNLP can be deployed onto a variety of platforms with different programming languages. The Apache 2.0 license has been adopted by GluonCV and GluonNLP to allow for software distribution, modification, and usage.
Application Inference using Machine Learning based Side Channel Analysis
Authors: Nikhil Chawla, Arvind Singh, Monodeep Kar, Saibal Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, BIG-bench Machine Learning, CPU, Side Channel Analysis

The proliferation of ubiquitous computing requires energy-efficient as well as secure operation of modern processors. Side channel attacks are becoming a critical threat to security and privacy of devices embedded in modern computing infrastructures. Unintended information leakage via physical signatures such as power consumption, electromagnetic emission (EM) and execution time have emerged as a key security consideration for SoCs. Also, information published on purpose at user privilege level accessible through software interfaces results in software only attacks. In this paper, we used a supervised learning based approach for inferring applications executing on android platform based on features extracted from EM side-channel emissions and software exposed dynamic voltage frequency scaling(DVFS) states. We highlight the importance of machine learning based approach in utilizing these multi-dimensional features on a complex SoC, against profiling-based approaches. We also show that learning the instantaneous frequency states polled from onboard frequency driver (cpufreq) is adequate to identify a known application and flag potentially malicious unknown application. The experimental results on benchmarking applications running on ARMv8 processor in Snapdragon 820 board demonstrates early detection of these apps, and atleast 85% accuracy in detecting unknown applications. Overall, the highlight is to utilize a low-complexity path to application inference attacks through learning instantaneous frequency states pattern of CPU core.
Automatic Mass Detection in Breast Using Deep Convolutional Neural Network and SVM Classifier
Authors: Md. Kamrul Hasan, Tajwar Abrar Aleef
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Mammography is the most widely used gold standard for screening breast cancer, where, mass detection is considered as the prominent step. Detecting mass in the breast is, however, an arduous problem as they usually have large variations between them in terms of shape, size, boundary, and texture. In this literature, the process of mass detection is automated with the use of transfer learning techniques of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNN). Pre-trained VGG19 network is used to extract features which are then followed by bagged decision tree for features selection and then a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is trained and used for classifying between the mass and non-mass. Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) is chosen as the performance metric, which is then maximized during classifier selection and hyper-parameter tuning. The robustness of the two selected type of classifiers, C-SVM, and \u{psion}-SVM, are investigated with extensive experiments before selecting the best performing classifier. All experiments in this paper were conducted using the INbreast dataset. The best AUC obtained from the experimental results is 0.994 +/- 0.003 i.e. [0.991, 0.997]. Our results conclude that by using pre-trained VGG19 network, high-level distinctive features can be extracted from Mammograms which when used with the proposed SVM classifier is able to robustly distinguish between the mass and non-mass present in breast.
Global Optimality Guarantees for Nonconvex Unsupervised Video Segmentation
Authors: Brendon G. Anderson, Somayeh Sojoudi
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we consider the problem of unsupervised video object segmentation via background subtraction. Specifically, we pose the nonsemantic extraction of a video's moving objects as a nonconvex optimization problem via a sum of sparse and low-rank matrices. The resulting formulation, a nonnegative variant of robust principal component analysis, is more computationally tractable than its commonly employed convex relaxation, although not generally solvable to global optimality. In spite of this limitation, we derive intuitive and interpretable conditions on the video data under which the uniqueness and global optimality of the object segmentation are guaranteed using local search methods. We illustrate these novel optimality criteria through example segmentations using real video data.
Sentiment Analysis Challenges in Persian Language
Authors: Mohammad Heydari
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Recommendation Systems, Sentiment Analysis

The rapid growth in data on the internet requires a data mining process to reach a decision to support insight. The Persian language has strong potential for deep research in any aspect of natural language processing, especially sentimental analysis approach. Thousands of websites and blogs updates and modifies by Persian users around the world that contains millions of Persian context. This range of application requires a comprehensive structured framework to extract beneficial information for helping enterprises to enhance their business and initiate a customer-centric management process by producing effective recommender systems. Sentimental analysis is an intelligent approach for extracting useful information from huge amounts of data to help an enterprise for smart management process. In this road, machine learning and deep learning techniques will become very helpful but there is the number of challenges which are face to them. This paper tried to present and assert the most important challenges of sentimental analysis in the Persian language. This language is an Indo-European language which spoken by over 110 million people around the world and is an official language in Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Its also widely used in Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Turkish by order.
A New Stereo Benchmarking Dataset for Satellite Images
Authors: Sonali Patil, Bharath Comandur, Tanmay Prakash, Avinash C. Kak
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

In order to facilitate further research in stereo reconstruction with multi-date satellite images, the goal of this paper is to provide a set of stereo-rectified images and the associated groundtruthed disparities for 10 AOIs (Area of Interest) drawn from two sources: 8 AOIs from IARPA's MVS Challenge dataset and 2 AOIs from the CORE3D-Public dataset. The disparities were groundtruthed by first constructing a fused DSM from the stereo pairs and by aligning 30 cm LiDAR with the fused DSM. Unlike the existing benckmarking datasets, we have also carried out a quantitative evaluation of our groundtruthed disparities using human annotated points in two of the AOIs. Additionally, the rectification accuracy in our dataset is comparable to the same in the existing state-of-the-art stereo datasets. In general, we have used the WorldView-3 (WV3) images for the dataset, the exception being the UCSD area for which we have used both WV3 and WorldView-2 (WV2) images. All of the dataset images are now in the public domain. Since multi-date satellite images frequently include images acquired in different seasons (which creates challenges in finding corresponding pairs of pixels for stereo), our dataset also includes for each image a building mask over which the disparities estimated by stereo should prove reliable. Additional metadata included in the dataset includes information about each image's acquisition date and time, the azimuth and elevation angles of the camera, and the intersection angles for the two views in a stereo pair. Also included in the dataset are both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the accuracy of the groundtruthed disparity maps. Our dataset is available for download at \url{https://engineering.purdue.edu/RVL/Database/SatStereo/index.html}
Informative Path Planning with Local Penalization for Decentralized and Asynchronous Swarm Robotic Search
Authors: Payam Ghassemi, Souma Chowdhury
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Task Planning

Decentralized swarm robotic solutions to searching for targets that emit a spatially varying signal promise task parallelism, time efficiency, and fault tolerance. It is, however, challenging for swarm algorithms to offer scalability and efficiency, while preserving mathematical insights into the exhibited behavior. A new decentralized search method (called Bayes-Swarm), founded on batch Bayesian Optimization (BO) principles, is presented here to address these challenges. Unlike swarm heuristics approaches, Bayes-Swarm decouples the knowledge generation and task planning process, thus preserving insights into the emergent behavior. Key contributions lie in: 1) modeling knowledge extraction over trajectories, unlike in BO; 2) time-adaptively balancing exploration/exploitation and using an efficient local penalization approach to account for potential interactions among different robots' planned samples; and 3) presenting an asynchronous implementation of the algorithm. This algorithm is tested on case studies with bimodal and highly multimodal signal distributions. Up to 76 times better efficiency is demonstrated compared to an exhaustive search baseline. The benefits of exploitation/exploration balancing, asynchronous planning, and local penalization, and scalability with swarm size, are also demonstrated.
Decentralized Dynamic Task Allocation in Swarm Robotic Systems for Disaster Response
Authors: Payam Ghassemi, David DePauw, Souma Chowdhury
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Disaster Response

Multiple robotic systems, working together, can provide important solutions to different real-world applications (e.g., disaster response), among which task allocation problems feature prominently. Very few existing decentralized multi-robotic task allocation (MRTA) methods simultaneously offer the following capabilities: consideration of task deadlines, consideration of robot range and task completion capacity limitations, and allowing asynchronous decision-making under dynamic task spaces. To provision these capabilities, this paper presents a computationally efficient algorithm that involves novel construction and matching of bipartite graphs. Its performance is tested on a multi-UAV flood response application.
On Adversarial Removal of Hypothesis-only Bias in Natural Language Inference
Authors: Yonatan Belinkov, Adam Poliak, Stuart M. Shieber, Benjamin Van Durme, Alexander M. Rush
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2019 6
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

Popular Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets have been shown to be tainted by hypothesis-only biases. Adversarial learning may help models ignore sensitive biases and spurious correlations in data. We evaluate whether adversarial learning can be used in NLI to encourage models to learn representations free of hypothesis-only biases. Our analyses indicate that the representations learned via adversarial learning may be less biased, with only small drops in NLI accuracy.
Don't Take the Premise for Granted: Mitigating Artifacts in Natural Language Inference
Authors: Yonatan Belinkov, Adam Poliak, Stuart M. Shieber, Benjamin Van Durme, Alexander M. Rush
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets often contain hypothesis-only biases---artifacts that allow models to achieve non-trivial performance without learning whether a premise entails a hypothesis. We propose two probabilistic methods to build models that are more robust to such biases and better transfer across datasets. In contrast to standard approaches to NLI, our methods predict the probability of a premise given a hypothesis and NLI label, discouraging models from ignoring the premise. We evaluate our methods on synthetic and existing NLI datasets by training on datasets containing biases and testing on datasets containing no (or different) hypothesis-only biases. Our results indicate that these methods can make NLI models more robust to dataset-specific artifacts, transferring better than a baseline architecture in 9 out of 12 NLI datasets. Additionally, we provide an extensive analysis of the interplay of our methods with known biases in NLI datasets, as well as the effects of encouraging models to ignore biases and fine-tuning on target datasets.
M3D-GAN: Multi-Modal Multi-Domain Translation with Universal Attention
Authors: Shuang Ma, Daniel McDuff, Yale Song
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Image Captioning, Image Generation, Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Translation

Generative adversarial networks have led to significant advances in cross-modal/domain translation. However, typically these networks are designed for a specific task (e.g., dialogue generation or image synthesis, but not both). We present a unified model, M3D-GAN, that can translate across a wide range of modalities (e.g., text, image, and speech) and domains (e.g., attributes in images or emotions in speech). Our model consists of modality subnets that convert data from different modalities into unified representations, and a unified computing body where data from different modalities share the same network architecture. We introduce a universal attention module that is jointly trained with the whole network and learns to encode a large range of domain information into a highly structured latent space. We use this to control synthesis in novel ways, such as producing diverse realistic pictures from a sketch or varying the emotion of synthesized speech. We evaluate our approach on extensive benchmark tasks, including image-to-image, text-to-image, image captioning, text-to-speech, speech recognition, and machine translation. Our results show state-of-the-art performance on some of the tasks.
Convergence Rates for Gaussian Mixtures of Experts
Authors: Nhat Ho, Chiao-Yu Yang, Michael. I. Jordan
Date: 2019-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

We provide a theoretical treatment of over-specified Gaussian mixtures of experts with covariate-free gating networks. We establish the convergence rates of the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for these models. Our proof technique is based on a novel notion of \emph{algebraic independence} of the expert functions. Drawing on optimal transport theory, we establish a connection between the algebraic independence and a certain class of partial differential equations (PDEs). Exploiting this connection allows us to derive convergence rates and minimax lower bounds for parameter estimation.