pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fixed smooth convolutional layer for avoiding checkerboard artifacts in CNNs
Authors: Yuma Kinoshita, Hitoshi Kiya
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation

In this paper, we propose a fixed convolutional layer with an order of smoothness not only for avoiding checkerboard artifacts in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but also for enhancing the performance of CNNs, where the smoothness of its filter kernel can be controlled by a parameter. It is well-known that a number of CNNs generate checkerboard artifacts in both of two process: forward-propagation of upsampling layers and backward-propagation of strided convolutional layers. The proposed layer can perfectly prevent checkerboard artifacts caused by strided convolutional layers or upsampling layers including transposed convolutional layers. In an image-classification experiment with four CNNs: a simple CNN, VGG8, ResNet-18, and ResNet-101, applying the fixed layers to these CNNs is shown to improve the classification performance of all CNNs. In addition, the fixed layer are applied to generative adversarial networks (GANs), for the first time. From image-generation results, a smoother fixed convolutional layer is demonstrated to enable us to improve the quality of images generated with GANs.
Unbalanced GANs: Pre-training the Generator of Generative Adversarial Network using Variational Autoencoder
Authors: Hyungrok Ham, Tae Joon Jun, Daeyoung Kim
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

We propose Unbalanced GANs, which pre-trains the generator of the generative adversarial network (GAN) using variational autoencoder (VAE). We guarantee the stable training of the generator by preventing the faster convergence of the discriminator at early epochs. Furthermore, we balance between the generator and the discriminator at early epochs and thus maintain the stabilized training of GANs. We apply Unbalanced GANs to well known public datasets and find that Unbalanced GANs reduce mode collapses. We also show that Unbalanced GANs outperform ordinary GANs in terms of stabilized learning, faster convergence and better image quality at early epochs.
Multilingual acoustic word embedding models for processing zero-resource languages
Authors: Herman Kamper, Yevgen Matusevych, Sharon Goldwater
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning, Word Embeddings

Acoustic word embeddings are fixed-dimensional representations of variable-length speech segments. In settings where unlabelled speech is the only available resource, such embeddings can be used in "zero-resource" speech search, indexing and discovery systems. Here we propose to train a single supervised embedding model on labelled data from multiple well-resourced languages and then apply it to unseen zero-resource languages. For this transfer learning approach, we consider two multilingual recurrent neural network models: a discriminative classifier trained on the joint vocabularies of all training languages, and a correspondence autoencoder trained to reconstruct word pairs. We test these using a word discrimination task on six target zero-resource languages. When trained on seven well-resourced languages, both models perform similarly and outperform unsupervised models trained on the zero-resource languages. With just a single training language, the second model works better, but performance depends more on the particular training--testing language pair.
Damage-sensitive and domain-invariant feature extraction for vehicle-vibration-based bridge health monitoring
Authors: Jingxiao Liu, Bingqing Chen, Siheng Chen, Mario Berges, Jacobo Bielak, HaeYoung Noh
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00

We introduce a physics-guided signal processing approach to extract a damage-sensitive and domain-invariant (DS & DI) feature from acceleration response data of a vehicle traveling over a bridge to assess bridge health. Motivated by indirect sensing methods' benefits, such as low-cost and low-maintenance, vehicle-vibration-based bridge health monitoring has been studied to efficiently monitor bridges in real-time. Yet applying this approach is challenging because 1) physics-based features extracted manually are generally not damage-sensitive, and 2) features from machine learning techniques are often not applicable to different bridges. Thus, we formulate a vehicle bridge interaction system model and find a physics-guided DS & DI feature, which can be extracted using the synchrosqueezed wavelet transform representing non-stationary signals as intrinsic-mode-type components. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed feature with simulated experiments. Compared to conventional time- and frequency-domain features, our feature provides the best damage quantification and localization results across different bridges in five of six experiments.
An Information-rich Sampling Technique over Spatio-Temporal CNN for Classification of Human Actions in Videos
Authors: S. H. Shabbeer Basha, Viswanath Pulabaigari, Snehasis Mukherjee
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Action Recognition In Videos, Activity Recognition, General Classification, Human Activity Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

We propose a novel scheme for human action recognition in videos, using a 3-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (3D CNN) based classifier. Traditionally in deep learning based human activity recognition approaches, either a few random frames or every $k^{th}$ frame of the video is considered for training the 3D CNN, where $k$ is a small positive integer, like 4, 5, or 6. This kind of sampling reduces the volume of the input data, which speeds-up training of the network and also avoids over-fitting to some extent, thus enhancing the performance of the 3D CNN model. In the proposed video sampling technique, consecutive $k$ frames of a video are aggregated into a single frame by computing a Gaussian-weighted summation of the $k$ frames. The resulting frame (aggregated frame) preserves the information in a better way than the conventional approaches and experimentally shown to perform better. In this paper, a 3D CNN architecture is proposed to extract the spatio-temporal features and follows Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to recognize human actions. The proposed 3D CNN architecture is capable of handling the videos where the camera is placed at a distance from the performer. Experiments are performed with KTH and WEIZMANN human actions datasets, whereby it is shown to produce comparable results with the state-of-the-art techniques.
Privacy-Preserving Boosting in the Local Setting
Authors: Sen Wang, J. Morris Chang
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Privacy Preserving

In machine learning, boosting is one of the most popular methods that designed to combine multiple base learners to a superior one. The well-known Boosted Decision Tree classifier, has been widely adopted in many areas. In the big data era, the data held by individual and entities, like personal images, browsing history and census information, are more likely to contain sensitive information. The privacy concern raises when such data leaves the hand of the owners and be further explored or mined. Such privacy issue demands that the machine learning algorithm should be privacy aware. Recently, Local Differential Privacy is proposed as an effective privacy protection approach, which offers a strong guarantee to the data owners, as the data is perturbed before any further usage, and the true values never leave the hands of the owners. Thus the machine learning algorithm with the private data instances is of great value and importance. In this paper, we are interested in developing the privacy-preserving boosting algorithm that a data user is allowed to build a classifier without knowing or deriving the exact value of each data samples. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed boosting algorithm and the high utility of the learned classifiers.
Attractive or Faithful? Popularity-Reinforced Learning for Inspired Headline Generation
Authors: Yun-Zhu Song, Hong-Han Shuai, Sung-Lin Yeh, Yi-Lun Wu, Lun-Wei Ku, Wen-Chih Peng
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Headline Generation, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sentence

With the rapid proliferation of online media sources and published news, headlines have become increasingly important for attracting readers to news articles, since users may be overwhelmed with the massive information. In this paper, we generate inspired headlines that preserve the nature of news articles and catch the eye of the reader simultaneously. The task of inspired headline generation can be viewed as a specific form of Headline Generation (HG) task, with the emphasis on creating an attractive headline from a given news article. To generate inspired headlines, we propose a novel framework called POpularity-Reinforced Learning for inspired Headline Generation (PORL-HG). PORL-HG exploits the extractive-abstractive architecture with 1) Popular Topic Attention (PTA) for guiding the extractor to select the attractive sentence from the article and 2) a popularity predictor for guiding the abstractor to rewrite the attractive sentence. Moreover, since the sentence selection of the extractor is not differentiable, techniques of reinforcement learning (RL) are utilized to bridge the gap with rewards obtained from a popularity score predictor. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments, we show that the proposed PORL-HG significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art headline generation models in terms of attractiveness evaluated by both human (71.03%) and the predictor (at least 27.60%), while the faithfulness of PORL-HG is also comparable to the state-of-the-art generation model.
Privacy Preserving PCA for Multiparty Modeling
Authors: Yingting Liu, Chaochao Chen, Longfei Zheng, Li Wang, Jun Zhou, Guiquan Liu, Shuang Yang
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, Privacy Preserving

In this paper, we present a general multiparty modeling paradigm with Privacy Preserving Principal Component Analysis (PPPCA) for horizontally partitioned data. PPPCA can accomplish multiparty cooperative execution of PCA under the premise of keeping plaintext data locally. We also propose implementations using two techniques, i.e., homomorphic encryption and secret sharing. The output of PPPCA can be sent directly to data consumer to build any machine learning models. We conduct experiments on three UCI benchmark datasets and a real-world fraud detection dataset. Results show that the accuracy of the model built upon PPPCA is the same as the model with PCA that is built based on centralized plaintext data.
Faster On-Device Training Using New Federated Momentum Algorithm
Authors: Zhouyuan Huo, Qian Yang, Bin Gu, Lawrence Carin. Heng Huang
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Mobile crowdsensing has gained significant attention in recent years and has become a critical paradigm for emerging Internet of Things applications. The sensing devices continuously generate a significant quantity of data, which provide tremendous opportunities to develop innovative intelligent applications. To utilize these data to train machine learning models while not compromising user privacy, federated learning has become a promising solution. However, there is little understanding of whether federated learning algorithms are guaranteed to converge. We reconsider model averaging in federated learning and formulate it as a gradient-based method with biased gradients. This novel perspective assists analysis of its convergence rate and provides a new direction for more acceleration. We prove for the first time that the federated averaging algorithm is guaranteed to converge for non-convex problems, without imposing additional assumptions. We further propose a novel accelerated federated learning algorithm and provide a convergence guarantee. Simulated federated learning experiments are conducted to train deep neural networks on benchmark datasets, and experimental results show that our proposed method converges faster than previous approaches.
Soft Hindsight Experience Replay
Authors: Qiwei He, Liansheng Zhuang, Houqiang Li
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Efficient learning in the environment with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). In continuous DRL environments such as robotic arms control, Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) has been shown an effective solution. However, due to the brittleness of deterministic methods, HER and its variants typically suffer from a major challenge for stability and convergence, which significantly affects the final performance. This challenge severely limits the applicability of such methods to complex real-world domains. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose Soft Hindsight Experience Replay (SHER), a novel approach based on HER and Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MERL), combining the failed experiences reuse and maximum entropy probabilistic inference model. We evaluate SHER on Open AI Robotic manipulation tasks with sparse rewards. Experimental results show that, in contrast to HER and its variants, our proposed SHER achieves state-of-the-art performance, especially in the difficult HandManipulation tasks. Furthermore, our SHER method is more stable, achieving very similar performance across different random seeds.
Secure Social Recommendation based on Secret Sharing
Authors: Chaochao Chen, Liang Li, Bingzhe Wu, Cheng Hong, Li Wang, Jun Zhou
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Recommendation Systems

Nowadays, privacy preserving machine learning has been drawing much attention in both industry and academy. Meanwhile, recommender systems have been extensively adopted by many commercial platforms (e.g. Amazon) and they are mainly built based on user-item interactions. Besides, social platforms (e.g. Facebook) have rich resources of user social information. It is well known that social information, which is rich on social platforms such as Facebook, are useful to recommender systems. It is anticipated to combine the social information with the user-item ratings to improve the overall recommendation performance. Most existing recommendation models are built based on the assumptions that the social information are available. However, different platforms are usually reluctant to (or cannot) share their data due to certain concerns. In this paper, we first propose a SEcure SOcial RECommendation (SeSoRec) framework which can (1) collaboratively mine knowledge from social platform to improve the recommendation performance of the rating platform, and (2) securely keep the raw data of both platforms. We then propose a Secret Sharing based Matrix Multiplication (SSMM) protocol to optimize SeSoRec and prove its correctness and security theoretically. By applying minibatch gradient descent, SeSoRec has linear time complexities in terms of both computation and communication. The comprehensive experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SeSoRec and SSMM.
Data-based computation of stabilizing minimum dwell times for discrete-time switched linear systems
Authors: Atreyee Kundu
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: State Space Models

We present an algorithm to compute stabilizing minimum dwell times for discrete-time switched linear systems without the explicit knowledge of state-space models of their subsystems. Given a set of finite traces of state trajectories of the subsystems that satisfies certain properties, our algorithm involves the following tasks: first, multiple Lyapunov functions are designed from the given data; second, a set of relevant scalars is computed from these functions; and third, a stabilizing minimum dwell time is determined as a function of these scalars. A numerical example is presented to demonstrate the proposed algorithm.
DeepBrain: Towards Personalized EEG Interaction through Attentional and Embedded LSTM Learning
Authors: Di Wu, Huayan Wan, Siping Liu, Weiren Yu, Zhanpeng Jin, Dakuo Wang
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Computer Interface, EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

The "mind-controlling" capability has always been in mankind's fantasy. With the recent advancements of electroencephalograph (EEG) techniques, brain-computer interface (BCI) researchers have explored various solutions to allow individuals to perform various tasks using their minds. However, the commercial off-the-shelf devices to run accurate EGG signal collection are usually expensive and the comparably cheaper devices can only present coarse results, which prevents the practical application of these devices in domestic services. To tackle this challenge, we propose and develop an end-to-end solution that enables fine brain-robot interaction (BRI) through embedded learning of coarse EEG signals from the low-cost devices, namely DeepBrain, so that people having difficulty to move, such as the elderly, can mildly command and control a robot to perform some basic household tasks. Our contributions are two folds: 1) We present a stacked long short term memory (Stacked LSTM) structure with specific pre-processing techniques to handle the time-dependency of EEG signals and their classification. 2) We propose personalized design to capture multiple features and achieve accurate recognition of individual EEG signals by enhancing the signal interpretation of Stacked LSTM with attention mechanism. Our real-world experiments demonstrate that the proposed end-to-end solution with low cost can achieve satisfactory run-time speed, accuracy and energy-efficiency.
Minimizing Dynamic Regret and Adaptive Regret Simultaneously
Authors: Lijun Zhang, Shiyin Lu, Tianbao Yang
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00

Regret minimization is treated as the golden rule in the traditional study of online learning. However, regret minimization algorithms tend to converge to the static optimum, thus being suboptimal for changing environments. To address this limitation, new performance measures, including dynamic regret and adaptive regret have been proposed to guide the design of online algorithms. The former one aims to minimize the global regret with respect to a sequence of changing comparators, and the latter one attempts to minimize every local regret with respect to a fixed comparator. Existing algorithms for dynamic regret and adaptive regret are developed independently, and only target one performance measure. In this paper, we bridge this gap by proposing novel online algorithms that are able to minimize the dynamic regret and adaptive regret simultaneously. In fact, our theoretical guarantee is even stronger in the sense that one algorithm is able to minimize the dynamic regret over any interval.
Minimax Value Interval for Off-Policy Evaluation and Policy Optimization
Authors: Nan Jiang, Jiawei Huang
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Efficient Exploration, Off-policy evaluation, valid

We study minimax methods for off-policy evaluation (OPE) using value functions and marginalized importance weights. Despite that they hold promises of overcoming the exponential variance in traditional importance sampling, several key problems remain: (1) They require function approximation and are generally biased. For the sake of trustworthy OPE, is there anyway to quantify the biases? (2) They are split into two styles ("weight-learning" vs "value-learning"). Can we unify them? In this paper we answer both questions positively. By slightly altering the derivation of previous methods (one from each style; Uehara et al., 2020), we unify them into a single value interval that comes with a special type of double robustness: when either the value-function or the importance-weight class is well specified, the interval is valid and its length quantifies the misspecification of the other class. Our interval also provides a unified view of and new insights to some recent methods, and we further explore the implications of our results on exploration and exploitation in off-policy policy optimization with insufficient data coverage.
Temporal-adaptive Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Wen-Ji Zhou, Yang Yu
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) helps address large-scale and sparse reward issues in reinforcement learning. In HRL, the policy model has an inner representation structured in levels. With this structure, the reinforcement learning task is expected to be decomposed into corresponding levels with sub-tasks, and thus the learning can be more efficient. In HRL, although it is intuitive that a high-level policy only needs to make macro decisions in a low frequency, the exact frequency is hard to be simply determined. Previous HRL approaches often employed a fixed-time skip strategy or learn a terminal condition without taking account of the context, which, however, not only requires manual adjustments but also sacrifices some decision granularity. In this paper, we propose the \emph{temporal-adaptive hierarchical policy learning} (TEMPLE) structure, which uses a temporal gate to adaptively control the high-level policy decision frequency. We train the TEMPLE structure with PPO and test its performance in a range of environments including 2-D rooms, Mujoco tasks, and Atari games. The results show that the TEMPLE structure can lead to improved performance in these environments with a sequential adaptive high-level control.
Forensic Scanner Identification Using Machine Learning
Authors: Ruiting Shao, Edward J. Delp
Date: 2020-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Due to the increasing availability and functionality of image editing tools, many forensic techniques such as digital image authentication, source identification and tamper detection are important for forensic image analysis. In this paper, we describe a machine learning based system to address the forensic analysis of scanner devices. The proposed system uses deep-learning to automatically learn the intrinsic features from various scanned images. Our experimental results show that high accuracy can be achieved for source scanner identification. The proposed system can also generate a reliability map that indicates the manipulated regions in an scanned image.