pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Phase transitions and optimal algorithms for semi-supervised classifications on graphs: from belief propagation to graph convolution network
Authors: Pengfei Zhou, Tianyi Li, Pan Zhang
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Clustering, General Classification, Stochastic Block Model

We perform theoretical and algorithmic studies for the problem of clustering and semi-supervised classification on graphs with both pairwise relational information and single-point feature information, upon a joint stochastic block model for generating synthetic graphs with both edges and node features. Asymptotically exact analysis based on the Bayesian inference of the underlying model are conducted, using the cavity method in statistical physics. Theoretically, we identify a phase transition of the generative model, which puts fundamental limits on the ability of all possible algorithms in the clustering task of the underlying model. Algorithmically, we propose a belief propagation algorithm that is asymptotically optimal on the generative model, and can be further extended to a belief propagation graph convolution neural network (BPGCN) for semi-supervised classification on graphs. For the first time, well-controlled benchmark datasets with asymptotially exact properties and optimal solutions could be produced for the evaluation of graph convolution neural networks, and for the theoretical understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. In particular, on these synthetic benchmark networks we observe that existing graph convolution neural networks are subject to an sparsity issue and an ovefitting issue in practice, both of which are successfully overcome by our BPGCN. Moreover, when combined with classic neural network methods, BPGCN yields extraordinary classification performances on some real-world datasets that have never been achieved before.
Rotation Invariant Point Cloud Classification: Where Local Geometry Meets Global Topology
Authors: Chen Zhao, Jiaqi Yang, Xin Xiong, Angfan Zhu, Zhiguo Cao, Xin Li
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Point Cloud Classification

Point cloud analysis is a fundamental task in 3D computer vision. Most previous works have conducted experiments on synthetic datasets with well-aligned data; while real-world point clouds are often not pre-aligned. How to achieve rotation invariance remains an open problem in point cloud analysis. To meet this challenge, we propose a novel approach toward achieving rotation-invariant (RI) representations by combining local geometry with global topology. In our local-global-representation (LGR)-Net, we have designed a two-branch network where one stream encodes local geometric RI features and the other encodes global topology-preserving RI features. Motivated by the observation that local geometry and global topology have different yet complementary RI responses in varying regions, two-branch RI features are fused by an innovative multi-layer perceptron (MLP) based attention module. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first principled approach toward adaptively combining global and local information under the context of RI point cloud analysis. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our LGR-Net achieves the state-of-the-art performance on various rotation-augmented versions of ModelNet40, ShapeNet, ScanObjectNN, and S3DIS.
Personality-Aware Probabilistic Map for Trajectory Prediction of Pedestrians
Authors: Chaochao Li, Pei Lv, Mingliang Xu, Xinyu Wang, Dinesh Manocha, Bing Zhou, Meng Wang
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

We present a novel trajectory prediction algorithm for pedestrians based on a personality-aware probabilistic feature map. This map is computed using a spatial query structure and each value represents the probability of the predicted pedestrian passing through various positions in the crowd space. We update this map dynamically based on the agents in the environment and prior trajectory of a pedestrian. Furthermore, we estimate the personality characteristics of each pedestrian and use them to improve the prediction by estimating the shortest path in this map. Our approach is general and works well on crowd videos with low and high pedestrian density. We evaluate our model on standard human-trajectory datasets. In practice, our prediction algorithm improves the accuracy by 5-9% over prior algorithms.
Randomization as Regularization: A Degrees of Freedom Explanation for Random Forest Success
Authors: Lucas Mentch, Siyu Zhou
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Random forests remain among the most popular off-the-shelf supervised machine learning tools with a well-established track record of predictive accuracy in both regression and classification settings. Despite their empirical success as well as a bevy of recent work investigating their statistical properties, a full and satisfying explanation for their success has yet to be put forth. Here we aim to take a step forward in this direction by demonstrating that the additional randomness injected into individual trees serves as a form of implicit regularization, making random forests an ideal model in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) settings. Specifically, from a model-complexity perspective, we show that the mtry parameter in random forests serves much the same purpose as the shrinkage penalty in explicitly regularized regression procedures like lasso and ridge regression. To highlight this point, we design a randomized linear-model-based forward selection procedure intended as an analogue to tree-based random forests and demonstrate its surprisingly strong empirical performance. Numerous demonstrations on both real and synthetic data are provided.
Learning-based Real-time Detection of Intrinsic Reflectional Symmetry
Authors: Yi-Ling Qiao, Lin Gao, Shu-Zhi Liu, Ligang Liu, Yu-Kun Lai, Xilin Chen
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Symmetry Detection

Reflectional symmetry is ubiquitous in nature. While extrinsic reflectional symmetry can be easily parametrized and detected, intrinsic symmetry is much harder due to the high solution space. Previous works usually solve this problem by voting or sampling, which suffer from high computational cost and randomness. In this paper, we propose \YL{a} learning-based approach to intrinsic reflectional symmetry detection. Instead of directly finding symmetric point pairs, we parametrize this self-isometry using a functional map matrix, which can be easily computed given the signs of Laplacian eigenfunctions under the symmetric mapping. Therefore, we train a novel deep neural network to predict the sign of each eigenfunction under symmetry, which in addition takes the first few eigenfunctions as intrinsic features to characterize the mesh while avoiding coping with the connectivity explicitly. Our network aims at learning the global property of functions, and consequently converts the problem defined on the manifold to the functional domain. By disentangling the prediction of the matrix into separated basis, our method generalizes well to new shapes and is invariant under perturbation of eigenfunctions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of our method in challenging cases, including different topology and incomplete shapes with holes. By avoiding random sampling, our learning-based algorithm is over 100 times faster than state-of-the-art methods, and meanwhile, is more robust, achieving higher correspondence accuracy in commonly used metrics.
Energy-Aware Analog Aggregation for Federated Learning with Redundant Data
Authors: Yuxuan Sun, Sheng Zhou, Deniz Gündüz
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Scheduling

Federated learning (FL) enables workers to learn a model collaboratively by using their local data, with the help of a parameter server (PS) for global model aggregation. The high communication cost for periodic model updates and the non-independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data become major bottlenecks for FL. In this work, we consider analog aggregation to scale down the communication cost with respect to the number of workers, and introduce data redundancy to the system to deal with non-i.i.d. data. We propose an online energy-aware dynamic worker scheduling policy, which maximizes the average number of workers scheduled for gradient update at each iteration under a long-term energy constraint, and analyze its performance based on Lyapunov optimization. Experiments using MNIST dataset show that, for non-i.i.d. data, doubling data storage can improve the accuracy by 9.8% under a stringent energy budget, while the proposed policy can achieve close-to-optimal accuracy without violating the energy constraint.
ItLnc-BXE: a Bagging-XGBoost-ensemble method with multiple features for identification of plant lncRNAs
Authors: Guangyan Zhang, Ziru Liu, Jichen Dai, Zilan Yu, Shuai Liu, Wen Zhang
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, feature selection

Motivation: Since long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) have involved in a wide range of functions in cellular and developmental processes, an increasing number of methods have been proposed for distinguishing lncRNAs from coding RNAs. However, most of the existing methods are designed for lncRNAs in animal systems, and only a few methods focus on the plant lncRNA identification. Different from lncRNAs in animal systems, plant lncRNAs have distinct characteristics. It is desirable to develop a computational method for accurate and robust identification of plant lncRNAs. Results: Herein, we present a plant lncRNA identification method ItLnc-BXE, which utilizes multiple features and the ensemble learning strategy. First, a diversity of lncRNA features is collected and filtered by feature selection to represent RNA transcripts. Then, several base learners are trained and further combined into a single meta-learner by ensemble learning, and thus an ItLnc-BXE model is constructed. ItLnc-BXE models are evaluated on datasets of six plant species, the results show that ItLnc-BXE outperforms other state-of-the-art plant lncRNA identification methods, achieving better and robust performances (AUC>95.91%). We also perform some experiments about cross-species lncRNA identification, and the results indicate that dicots-based and monocots-based models can be used to accurately identify lncRNAs in lower plant species, such as mosses and algae. Availability: source codes are available at https://github.com/BioMedicalBigDataMiningLab/ItLnc-BXE. Contact: zhangwen@mail.hzau.edu.cn (or) zhangwen@whu.edu.cn Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Integrated Clustering and Anomaly Detection (INCAD) for Streaming Data (Revised)
Authors: Sreelekha Guggilam, Syed M. A. Zaidi, Varun Chandola, Abani K. Patra
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Clustering

Most current clustering based anomaly detection methods use scoring schema and thresholds to classify anomalies. These methods are often tailored to target specific data sets with "known" number of clusters. The paper provides a streaming clustering and anomaly detection algorithm that does not require strict arbitrary thresholds on the anomaly scores or knowledge of the number of clusters while performing probabilistic anomaly detection and clustering simultaneously. This ensures that the cluster formation is not impacted by the presence of anomalous data, thereby leading to more reliable definition of "normal vs abnormal" behavior. The motivations behind developing the INCAD model and the path that leads to the streaming model is discussed.
Regularized Non-negative Spectral Embedding for Clustering
Authors: Yifei Wang, Rui Liu, Yong Chen, Hui Zhangs, Zhiwen Ye
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Spectral Clustering is a popular technique to split data points into groups, especially for complex datasets. The algorithms in the Spectral Clustering family typically consist of multiple separate stages (such as similarity matrix construction, low-dimensional embedding, and K-Means clustering as post processing), which may lead to sub-optimal results because of the possible mismatch between different stages. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end single-stage learning method to clustering called Regularized Non-negative Spectral Embedding (RNSE) which extends Spectral Clustering with the adaptive learning of similarity matrix and meanwhile utilizes non-negative constraints to facilitate one-step clustering (directly from data points to clustering labels). Two well-founded methods, successive alternating projection and strategic multiplicative update, are employed to work out the quite challenging optimization problems in RNSE. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate RNSE superior clustering performance to some state-of-the-art competitors.
Sequence Modeling with Unconstrained Generation Order
Authors: Dmitrii Emelianenko, Elena Voita, Pavel Serdyukov
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Image Captioning, Machine Translation, Translation

The dominant approach to sequence generation is to produce a sequence in some predefined order, e.g. left to right. In contrast, we propose a more general model that can generate the output sequence by inserting tokens in any arbitrary order. Our model learns decoding order as a result of its training procedure. Our experiments show that this model is superior to fixed order models on a number of sequence generation tasks, such as Machine Translation, Image-to-LaTeX and Image Captioning.
Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models
Authors: Urvashi Khandelwal, Omer Levy, Dan Jurafsky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mike Lewis
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Memorization

We introduce $k$NN-LMs, which extend a pre-trained neural language model (LM) by linearly interpolating it with a $k$-nearest neighbors ($k$NN) model. The nearest neighbors are computed according to distance in the pre-trained LM embedding space, and can be drawn from any text collection, including the original LM training data. Applying this augmentation to a strong Wikitext-103 LM, with neighbors drawn from the original training set, our $k$NN-LM achieves a new state-of-the-art perplexity of 15.79 - a 2.9 point improvement with no additional training. We also show that this approach has implications for efficiently scaling up to larger training sets and allows for effective domain adaptation, by simply varying the nearest neighbor datastore, again without further training. Qualitatively, the model is particularly helpful in predicting rare patterns, such as factual knowledge. Together, these results strongly suggest that learning similarity between sequences of text is easier than predicting the next word, and that nearest neighbor search is an effective approach for language modeling in the long tail.
PODNet: A Neural Network for Discovery of Plannable Options
Authors: Ritwik Bera, Vinicius G. Goecks, Gregory M. Gremillion, John Valasek, Nicholas R. Waytowich
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00

Learning from demonstration has been widely studied in machine learning but becomes challenging when the demonstrated trajectories are unstructured and follow different objectives. This short-paper proposes PODNet, Plannable Option Discovery Network, addressing how to segment an unstructured set of demonstrated trajectories for option discovery. This enables learning from demonstration to perform multiple tasks and plan high-level trajectories based on the discovered option labels. PODNet combines a custom categorical variational autoencoder, a recurrent option inference network, option-conditioned policy network, and option dynamics model in an end-to-end learning architecture. Due to the concurrently trained option-conditioned policy network and option dynamics model, the proposed architecture has implications in multi-task and hierarchical learning, explainable and interpretable artificial intelligence, and applications where the agent is required to learn only from observations.
A2: Extracting Cyclic Switchings from DOB-nets for Rejecting Excessive Disturbances
Authors: Wen-jie Lu, Dikai Liu
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is limited in practice by its gray-box nature, which is responsible for insufficient trustiness from users, unsatisfied interpretation for human intervention, inadequate analysis for future improvement, etc. This paper seeks to partially characterize the interplay between dynamical environments and the DOB-net. The DOB-net obtained from RL solves a set of Partially Observable Markovian Decision Processes (POMDPs). The transition function of each POMDP is largely determined by the environments, which are excessive external disturbances in this research. This paper proposes an Attention-based Abstraction (A${}^2$) approach to extract a finite-state automaton, referred to as a Key Moore Machine Network (KMMN), to capture the switching mechanisms exhibited by the DOB-net in dealing with multiple such POMDPs. This approach first quantizes the controlled platform by learning continuous-discrete interfaces. Then it extracts the KMMN by finding the key hidden states and transitions that attract sufficient attention from the DOB-net. Within the resultant KMMN, this study found three patterns of cyclic switchings (between key hidden states), showing controls near their saturation are synchronized with unknown disturbances. Interestingly, the found switching mechanism has appeared previously in the design of hybrid control for often-saturated systems. It is further interpreted via an analogy to the discrete-event subsystem in the hybrid control.
Centroid Based Concept Learning for RGB-D Indoor Scene Classification
Authors: Ali Ayub, Alan R. Wagner
Date: 2019-11-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: BMVC 2020 8
Tasks: Classification, Clustering, General Classification, Hippocampus, Scene Classification

This paper contributes a novel cognitively-inspired method for RGB-D indoor scene classification. High intra-class variance and low inter-class variance make indoor scene classification an extremely challenging task. To cope with this problem, we propose a clustering approach inspired by the concept learning model of the hippocampus and the neocortex, to generate clusters and centroids for different scene categories. Test images depicting different scenes are classified by using their distance to the closest centroids (concepts). Modeling of RGB-D scenes as centroids not only leads to state-of-the-art classification performance on benchmark datasets (SUN RGB-D and NYU Depth V2), but also offers a method for inspecting and interpreting the space of centroids. Inspection of the centroids generated by our approach on RGB-D datasets leads us to propose a method for merging conceptually similar categories, resulting in improved accuracy for all approaches.
Implementation of an Index Optimize Technology for Highly Specialized Terms based on the Phonetic Algorithm Metaphone
Authors: V. Buriachok, M. Hadzhyiev, V. Sokolov, P. Skladannyi, L. Kuzmenko
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00

When compiling databases, for example to meet the needs of healthcare establishments, there is quite a common problem with the introduction and further processing of names and last names of doctors and patients that are highly specialized both in terms of pronunciation and writing. This is because names and last names of people cannot be unique, their notation is not subject to any rules of phonetics, while their length in different languages may not match. With the advent of the Internet, this situation has become generally critical and can lead to that multiple copies of e-mails are sent to one address. It is possible to solve the specified problem by using phonetic algorithms for comparing words Daitch-Mokotoff, Soundex, NYSIIS, Polyphone, and Metaphone, as well as the Levenshtein and Jaro algorithms, Q-gram-based algorithms, which make it possible to find distances between words. The most widespread among them are the Soundex and Metaphone algorithms, which are designed to index the words based on their sound, taking into consideration the rules of pronunciation. By applying the Metaphone algorithm, an attempt has been made to optimize the phonetic search processes for tasks of fuzzy coincidence, for example, at data deduplication in various databases and registries, in order to reduce the number of errors of incorrect input of last names. An analysis of the most common last names reveals that some of them are of the Ukrainian or Russian origin. At the same time, the rules following which the names are pronounced and written, for example in Ukrainian, differ radically from basic algorithms for English and differ quite significantly for the Russian language. That is why a phonetic algorithm should take into consideration first of all the peculiarities in the formation of Ukrainian last names, which is of special relevance now.
Predicting the Politics of an Image Using Webly Supervised Data
Authors: Christopher Thomas, Adriana Kovashka
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Articles, Diversity

The news media shape public opinion, and often, the visual bias they contain is evident for human observers. This bias can be inferred from how different media sources portray different subjects or topics. In this paper, we model visual political bias in contemporary media sources at scale, using webly supervised data. We collect a dataset of over one million unique images and associated news articles from left- and right-leaning news sources, and develop a method to predict the image's political leaning. This problem is particularly challenging because of the enormous intra-class visual and semantic diversity of our data. We propose a two-stage method to tackle this problem. In the first stage, the model is forced to learn relevant visual concepts that, when joined with document embeddings computed from articles paired with the images, enable the model to predict bias. In the second stage, we remove the requirement of the text domain and train a visual classifier from the features of the former model. We show this two-stage approach facilitates learning and outperforms several strong baselines. We also present extensive qualitative results demonstrating the nuances of the data.
Multivariate Medians for Image and Shape Analysis
Authors: Martin Welk
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Having been studied since long by statisticians, multivariate median concepts found their way into the image processing literature in the course of the last decades, being used to construct robust and efficient denoising filters for multivariate images such as colour images but also matrix-valued images. Based on the similarities between image and geometric data as results of the sampling of continuous physical quantities, it can be expected that the understanding of multivariate median filters for images provides a starting point for the development of shape processing techniques. This paper presents an overview of multivariate median concepts relevant for image and shape processing. It focusses on their mathematical principles and discusses important properties especially in the context of image processing.