pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Graph Generators: State of the Art and Open Challenges
Authors: Angela Bonifati, Irena Holubová, Arnau Prat-Pérez, Sherif Sakr
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Graph Generation

The abundance of interconnected data has fueled the design and implementation of graph generators reproducing real-world linking properties, or gauging the effectiveness of graph algorithms, techniques and applications manipulating these data. We consider graph generation across multiple subfields, such as Semantic Web, graph databases, social networks, and community detection, along with general graphs. Despite the disparate requirements of modern graph generators throughout these communities, we analyze them under a common umbrella, reaching out the functionalities, the practical usage, and their supported operations. We argue that this classification is serving the need of providing scientists, researchers and practitioners with the right data generator at hand for their work. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art graph generators by focusing on those that are pertinent and suitable for several data-intensive tasks. Finally, we discuss open challenges and missing requirements of current graph generators along with their future extensions to new emerging fields.
Dynamic multi-object Gaussian process models: A framework for data-driven functional modelling of human joints
Authors: Jean-Rassaire Fouefack, Bhushan Borotikar, Tania S. Douglas, Valérie Burdin, Tinashe E. M. Mutsvangwa
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Management, Medical Image Analysis, Pose Prediction

Statistical shape models (SSMs) are state-of-the-art medical image analysis tools for extracting and explaining features across a set of biological structures. However, a principled and robust way to combine shape and pose features has been illusive due to three main issues: 1) Non-homogeneity of the data (data with linear and non-linear natural variation across features), 2) non-optimal representation of the $3D$ motion (rigid transformation representations that are not proportional to the kinetic energy that move an object from one position to the other), and 3) artificial discretization of the models. In this paper, we propose a new framework for dynamic multi-object statistical modelling framework for the analysis of human joints in a continuous domain. Specifically, we propose to normalise shape and dynamic spatial features in the same linearized statistical space permitting the use of linear statistics; we adopt an optimal 3D motion representation for more accurate rigid transformation comparisons; and we provide a 3D shape and pose prediction protocol using a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling-based fitting. The framework affords an efficient generative dynamic multi-object modelling platform for biological joints. We validate the framework using a controlled synthetic data. Finally, the framework is applied to an analysis of the human shoulder joint to compare its performance with standard SSM approaches in prediction of shape while adding the advantage of determining relative pose between bones in a complex. Excellent validity is observed and the shoulder joint shape-pose prediction results suggest that the novel framework may have utility for a range of medical image analysis applications. Furthermore, the framework is generic and can be extended to n$>$2 objects, making it suitable for clinical and diagnostic methods for the management of joint disorders.
Partially-Shared Variational Auto-encoders for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Target Shift
Authors: Ryuhei Takahashi, Atsushi Hashimoto, Motoharu Sonogashira, Masaaki Iiyama
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, General Classification, Pose Estimation, regression, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

This paper proposes a novel approach for unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) with target shift. Target shift is a problem of mismatch in label distribution between source and target domains. Typically it appears as class-imbalance in target domain. In practice, this is an important problem in UDA; as we do not know labels in target domain datasets, we do not know whether or not its distribution is identical to that in the source domain dataset. Many traditional approaches achieve UDA with distribution matching by minimizing mean maximum discrepancy or adversarial training; however these approaches implicitly assume a coincidence in the distributions and do not work under situations with target shift. Some recent UDA approaches focus on class boundary and some of them are robust to target shift, but they are only applicable to classification and not to regression. To overcome the target shift problem in UDA, the proposed method, partially shared variational autoencoders (PS-VAEs), uses pair-wise feature alignment instead of feature distribution matching. PS-VAEs inter-convert domain of each sample by a CycleGAN-based architecture while preserving its label-related content. To evaluate the performance of PS-VAEs, we carried out two experiments: UDA with class-unbalanced digits datasets (classification), and UDA from synthesized data to real observation in human-pose-estimation (regression). The proposed method presented its robustness against the class-imbalance in the classification task, and outperformed the other methods in the regression task with a large margin.
Normalization of Input-output Shared Embeddings in Text Generation Models
Authors: Jinyang Liu, Yujia Zhai, Zizhong Chen
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: de-en, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Text Summarization, Translation

Neural Network based models have been state-of-the-art models for various Natural Language Processing tasks, however, the input and output dimension problem in the networks has still not been fully resolved, especially in text generation tasks (e.g. Machine Translation, Text Summarization), in which input and output both have huge sizes of vocabularies. Therefore, input-output embedding weight sharing has been introduced and adopted widely, which remains to be improved. Based on linear algebra and statistical theories, this paper locates the shortcoming of existed input-output embedding weight sharing method, then raises methods for improving input-output weight shared embedding, among which methods of normalization of embedding weight matrices show best performance. These methods are nearly computational cost-free, can get combined with other embedding techniques, and show good effectiveness when applied on state-of-the-art Neural Network models. For Transformer-big models, the normalization techniques can get at best 0.6 BLEU improvement compared to the original version of model on WMT'16 En-De dataset, and similar BLEU improvements on IWSLT 14' datasets. For DynamicConv models, 0.5 BLEU improvement can be attained on WMT'16 En-De dataset, and 0.41 BLEU improvement on IWSLT 14' De-En translation task is achieved.
Curvature Regularized Surface Reconstruction from Point Cloud
Authors: Yuchen He, Sung Ha Kang, Hao Liu
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Surface Reconstruction

We propose a variational functional and fast algorithms to reconstruct implicit surface from point cloud data with a curvature constraint. The minimizing functional balances the distance function from the point cloud and the mean curvature term. Only the point location is used, without any local normal or curvature estimation at each point. With the added curvature constraint, the computation becomes particularly challenging. To enhance the computational efficiency, we solve the problem by a novel operator splitting scheme. It replaces the original high-order PDEs by a decoupled PDE system, which is solved by a semi-implicit method. We also discuss approach using an augmented Lagrangian method. The proposed method shows robustness against noise, and recovers concave features and sharp corners better compared to models without curvature constraint. Numerical experiments in two and three dimensional data sets, noisy and sparse data are presented to validate the model.
Learning functions varying along a central subspace
Authors: Hao Liu, Wenjing Liao
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Ended Question Answering, regression

Many functions of interest are in a high-dimensional space but exhibit low-dimensional structures. This paper studies regression of a $s$-H\"{o}lder function $f$ in $\mathbb{R}^D$ which varies along a central subspace of dimension $d$ while $d\ll D$. A direct approximation of $f$ in $\mathbb{R}^D$ with an $\varepsilon$ accuracy requires the number of samples $n$ in the order of $\varepsilon^{-(2s+D)/s}$. In this paper, we analyze the Generalized Contour Regression (GCR) algorithm for the estimation of the central subspace and use piecewise polynomials for function approximation. GCR is among the best estimators for the central subspace, but its sample complexity is an open question. We prove that GCR leads to a mean squared estimation error of $O(n^{-1})$ for the central subspace, if a variance quantity is exactly known. The estimation error of this variance quantity is also given in this paper. The mean squared regression error of $f$ is proved to be in the order of $\left(n/\log n\right)^{-\frac{2s}{2s+d}}$ where the exponent depends on the dimension of the central subspace $d$ instead of the ambient space $D$. This result demonstrates that GCR is effective in learning the low-dimensional central subspace. We also propose a modified GCR with improved efficiency. The convergence rate is validated through several numerical experiments.
VoiceCoach: Interactive Evidence-based Training for Voice Modulation Skills in Public Speaking
Authors: Xingbo Wang, Haipeng Zeng, Yong Wang, Aoyu Wu, Zhida Sun, Xiaojuan Ma, Huamin Qu
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

The modulation of voice properties, such as pitch, volume, and speed, is crucial for delivering a successful public speech. However, it is challenging to master different voice modulation skills. Though many guidelines are available, they are often not practical enough to be applied in different public speaking situations, especially for novice speakers. We present VoiceCoach, an interactive evidence-based approach to facilitate the effective training of voice modulation skills. Specifically, we have analyzed the voice modulation skills from 2623 high-quality speeches (i.e., TED Talks) and use them as the benchmark dataset. Given a voice input, VoiceCoach automatically recommends good voice modulation examples from the dataset based on the similarity of both sentence structures and voice modulation skills. Immediate and quantitative visual feedback is provided to guide further improvement. The expert interviews and the user study provide support for the effectiveness and usability of VoiceCoach.
M^2 Deep-ID: A Novel Model for Multi-View Face Identification Using Convolutional Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Sara Shahsavarani, Morteza Analoui, Reza Shoja Ghiass
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Identification, Face Recognition

Despite significant advances in Deep Face Recognition (DFR) systems, introducing new DFRs under specific constraints such as varying pose still remains a big challenge. Most particularly, due to the 3D nature of a human head, facial appearance of the same subject introduces a high intra-class variability when projected to the camera image plane. In this paper, we propose a new multi-view Deep Face Recognition (MVDFR) system to address the mentioned challenge. In this context, multiple 2D images of each subject under different views are fed into the proposed deep neural network with a unique design to re-express the facial features in a single and more compact face descriptor, which in turn, produces a more informative and abstract way for face identification using convolutional neural networks. To extend the functionality of our proposed system to multi-view facial images, the golden standard Deep-ID model is modified in our proposed model. The experimental results indicate that our proposed method yields a 99.8% accuracy, while the state-of-the-art method achieves a 97% accuracy. We also gathered the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) face database with 6552 images of 504 subjects to accomplish our experiments.
Keyword-based Topic Modeling and Keyword Selection
Authors: Xingyu Wang, Lida Zhang, Diego Klabjan
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00

Certain type of documents such as tweets are collected by specifying a set of keywords. As topics of interest change with time it is beneficial to adjust keywords dynamically. The challenge is that these need to be specified ahead of knowing the forthcoming documents and the underlying topics. The future topics should mimic past topics of interest yet there should be some novelty in them. We develop a keyword-based topic model that dynamically selects a subset of keywords to be used to collect future documents. The generative process first selects keywords and then the underlying documents based on the specified keywords. The model is trained by using a variational lower bound and stochastic gradient optimization. The inference consists of finding a subset of keywords where given a subset the model predicts the underlying topic-word matrix for the unknown forthcoming documents. We compare the keyword topic model against a benchmark model using viral predictions of tweets combined with a topic model. The keyword-based topic model outperforms this sophisticated baseline model by 67%.
Optimal estimation of sparse topic models
Authors: Xin Bing, Florentina Bunea, Marten Wegkamp
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Topic Models, valid

Topic models have become popular tools for dimension reduction and exploratory analysis of text data which consists in observed frequencies of a vocabulary of $p$ words in $n$ documents, stored in a $p\times n$ matrix. The main premise is that the mean of this data matrix can be factorized into a product of two non-negative matrices: a $p\times K$ word-topic matrix $A$ and a $K\times n$ topic-document matrix $W$. This paper studies the estimation of $A$ that is possibly element-wise sparse, and the number of topics $K$ is unknown. In this under-explored context, we derive a new minimax lower bound for the estimation of such $A$ and propose a new computationally efficient algorithm for its recovery. We derive a finite sample upper bound for our estimator, and show that it matches the minimax lower bound in many scenarios. Our estimate adapts to the unknown sparsity of $A$ and our analysis is valid for any finite $n$, $p$, $K$ and document lengths. Empirical results on both synthetic data and semi-synthetic data show that our proposed estimator is a strong competitor of the existing state-of-the-art algorithms for both non-sparse $A$ and sparse $A$, and has superior performance is many scenarios of interest.
A Deep Learning Algorithm for High-Dimensional Exploratory Item Factor Analysis
Authors: Christopher J. Urban, Daniel J. Bauer
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Variational Inference, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Marginal maximum likelihood (MML) estimation is the preferred approach to fitting item response theory models in psychometrics due to the MML estimator's consistency, normality, and efficiency as the sample size tends to infinity. However, state-of-the-art MML estimation procedures such as the Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro (MH-RM) algorithm as well as approximate MML estimation procedures such as variational inference (VI) are computationally time-consuming when the sample size and the number of latent factors are very large. In this work, we investigate a deep learning-based VI algorithm for exploratory item factor analysis (IFA) that is computationally fast even in large data sets with many latent factors. The proposed approach applies a deep artificial neural network model called an importance-weighted autoencoder (IWAE) for exploratory IFA. The IWAE approximates the MML estimator using an importance sampling technique wherein increasing the number of importance-weighted (IW) samples drawn during fitting improves the approximation, typically at the cost of decreased computational efficiency. We provide a real data application that recovers results aligning with psychological theory across random starts. Via simulation studies, we show that the IWAE yields more accurate estimates as either the sample size or the number of IW samples increases (although factor correlation and intercepts estimates exhibit some bias) and obtains similar results to MH-RM in less time. Our simulations also suggest that the proposed approach performs similarly to and is potentially faster than constrained joint maximum likelihood estimation, a fast procedure that is consistent when the sample size and the number of items simultaneously tend to infinity.
Incentivising Exploration and Recommendations for Contextual Bandits with Payments
Authors: Priyank Agrawal, Theja Tulabandhula
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits

We propose a contextual bandit based model to capture the learning and social welfare goals of a web platform in the presence of myopic users. By using payments to incentivize these agents to explore different items/recommendations, we show how the platform can learn the inherent attributes of items and achieve a sublinear regret while maximizing cumulative social welfare. We also calculate theoretical bounds on the cumulative costs of incentivization to the platform. Unlike previous works in this domain, we consider contexts to be completely adversarial, and the behavior of the adversary is unknown to the platform. Our approach can improve various engagement metrics of users on e-commerce stores, recommendation engines and matching platforms.
Unsupervised Representation Disentanglement using Cross Domain Features and Adversarial Learning in Variational Autoencoder based Voice Conversion
Authors: Wen-Chin Huang, Hao Luo, Hsin-Te Hwang, Chen-Chou Lo, Yu-Huai Peng, Yu Tsao, Hsin-Min Wang
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Voice Conversion

An effective approach for voice conversion (VC) is to disentangle linguistic content from other components in the speech signal. The effectiveness of variational autoencoder (VAE) based VC (VAE-VC), for instance, strongly relies on this principle. In our prior work, we proposed a cross-domain VAE-VC (CDVAE-VC) framework, which utilized acoustic features of different properties, to improve the performance of VAE-VC. We believed that the success came from more disentangled latent representations. In this paper, we extend the CDVAE-VC framework by incorporating the concept of adversarial learning, in order to further increase the degree of disentanglement, thereby improving the quality and similarity of converted speech. More specifically, we first investigate the effectiveness of incorporating the generative adversarial networks (GANs) with CDVAE-VC. Then, we consider the concept of domain adversarial training and add an explicit constraint to the latent representation, realized by a speaker classifier, to explicitly eliminate the speaker information that resides in the latent code. Experimental results confirm that the degree of disentanglement of the learned latent representation can be enhanced by both GANs and the speaker classifier. Meanwhile, subjective evaluation results in terms of quality and similarity scores demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
A versatile anomaly detection method for medical images with a flow-based generative model in semi-supervision setting
Authors: H. Shibata, S. Hanaoka, Y. Nomura, T. Nakao, I. Sato, D. Sato, N. Hayashi, O. Abe
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Oversight in medical images is a crucial problem, and timely reporting of medical images is desired. Therefore, an all-purpose anomaly detection method that can detect virtually all types of lesions/diseases in a given image is strongly desired. However, few commercially available and versatile anomaly detection methods for medical images have been provided so far. Recently, anomaly detection methods built upon deep learning methods have been rapidly growing in popularity, and these methods seem to provide reasonable solutions to the problem. However, the workload to label the images necessary for training in deep learning remains heavy. In this study, we present an anomaly detection method based on two trained flow-based generative models. With this method, the posterior probability can be computed as a normality metric for any given image. The training of the generative models requires two sets of images: a set containing only normal images and another set containing both normal and abnormal images without any labels. In the latter set, each sample does not have to be labeled as normal or abnormal; therefore, any mixture of images (e.g., all cases in a hospital) can be used as the dataset without cumbersome manual labeling. The method was validated with two types of medical images: chest X-ray radiographs (CXRs) and brain computed tomographies (BCTs). The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves for logarithm posterior probabilities of CXRs (0.868 for pneumonia-like opacities) and BCTs (0.904 for infarction) were comparable to those in previous studies with other anomaly detection methods. This result showed the versatility of our method.
Convergence Time Optimization for Federated Learning over Wireless Networks
Authors: Mingzhe Chen, H. Vincent Poor, Walid Saad, Shuguang Cui
Date: 2020-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

In this paper, the convergence time of federated learning (FL), when deployed over a realistic wireless network, is studied. In particular, a wireless network is considered in which wireless users transmit their local FL models (trained using their locally collected data) to a base station (BS). The BS, acting as a central controller, generates a global FL model using the received local FL models and broadcasts it back to all users. Due to the limited number of resource blocks (RBs) in a wireless network, only a subset of users can be selected to transmit their local FL model parameters to the BS at each learning step. Moreover, since each user has unique training data samples, the BS prefers to include all local user FL models to generate a converged global FL model. Hence, the FL performance and convergence time will be significantly affected by the user selection scheme. Therefore, it is necessary to design an appropriate user selection scheme that enables users of higher importance to be selected more frequently. This joint learning, wireless resource allocation, and user selection problem is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the FL convergence time while optimizing the FL performance. To solve this problem, a probabilistic user selection scheme is proposed such that the BS is connected to the users whose local FL models have significant effects on its global FL model with high probabilities. Given the user selection policy, the uplink RB allocation can be determined. To further reduce the FL convergence time, artificial neural networks (ANNs) are used to estimate the local FL models of the users that are not allocated any RBs for local FL model transmission at each given learning step, which enables the BS to enhance its global FL model and improve the FL convergence speed and performance.