pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Local Propagation in Constraint-based Neural Network
Authors: Giuseppe Marra, Matteo Tiezzi, Stefano Melacci, Alessandro Betti, Marco Maggini, Marco Gori
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00

In this paper we study a constraint-based representation of neural network architectures. We cast the learning problem in the Lagrangian framework and we investigate a simple optimization procedure that is well suited to fulfil the so-called architectural constraints, learning from the available supervisions. The computational structure of the proposed Local Propagation (LP) algorithm is based on the search for saddle points in the adjoint space composed of weights, neural outputs, and Lagrange multipliers. All the updates of the model variables are locally performed, so that LP is fully parallelizable over the neural units, circumventing the classic problem of gradient vanishing in deep networks. The implementation of popular neural models is described in the context of LP, together with those conditions that trace a natural connection with Backpropagation. We also investigate the setting in which we tolerate bounded violations of the architectural constraints, and we provide experimental evidence that LP is a feasible approach to train shallow and deep networks, opening the road to further investigations on more complex architectures, easily describable by constraints.
Reinforcement Learning for Molecular Design Guided by Quantum Mechanics
Authors: Gregor N. C. Simm, Robert Pinsler, José Miguel Hernández-Lobato
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Translation

Automating molecular design using deep reinforcement learning (RL) holds the promise of accelerating the discovery of new chemical compounds. Existing approaches work with molecular graphs and thus ignore the location of atoms in space, which restricts them to 1) generating single organic molecules and 2) heuristic reward functions. To address this, we present a novel RL formulation for molecular design in Cartesian coordinates, thereby extending the class of molecules that can be built. Our reward function is directly based on fundamental physical properties such as the energy, which we approximate via fast quantum-chemical methods. To enable progress towards de-novo molecular design, we introduce MolGym, an RL environment comprising several challenging molecular design tasks along with baselines. In our experiments, we show that our agent can efficiently learn to solve these tasks from scratch by working in a translation and rotation invariant state-action space.
Neural Relation Prediction for Simple Question Answering over Knowledge Graph
Authors: Amin Abolghasemi, Saeedeh Momtazi
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering, Relation, Relation Extraction, Relation Prediction

Knowledge graphs are widely used as a typical resource to provide answers to factoid questions. In simple question answering over knowledge graphs, relation extraction aims to predict the relation of a factoid question from a set of predefined relation types. Most recent methods take advantage of neural networks to match a question with all predefined relations. In this paper, we propose an instance-based method to capture the underlying relation of question and to this aim, we detect matching paraphrases of a new question which share the same relation, and their corresponding relation is selected as our prediction. The idea of our model roots in the fact that a relation can be expressed with various forms of questions while these forms share lexically or semantically similar terms and concepts. Our experiments on the SimpleQuestions dataset show that the proposed model achieves better accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art relation extraction models.
Intelligent and Reconfigurable Architecture for KL Divergence Based Online Machine Learning Algorithm
Authors: S. V. Sai Santosh, Sumit J. Darak
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Online machine learning (OML) algorithms do not need any training phase and can be deployed directly in an unknown environment. OML includes multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms that can identify the best arm among several arms by achieving a balance between exploration of all arms and exploitation of optimal arm. The Kullback-Leibler divergence based upper confidence bound (KLUCB) is the state-of-the-art MAB algorithm that optimizes exploration-exploitation trade-off but it is complex due to underlining optimization routine. This limits its usefulness for robotics and radio applications which demand integration of KLUCB with the PHY on the system on chip (SoC). In this paper, we efficiently map the KLUCB algorithm on SoC by realizing optimization routine via alternative synthesizable computation without compromising on the performance. The proposed architecture is dynamically reconfigurable such that the number of arms, as well as type of algorithm, can be changed on-the-fly. Specifically, after initial learning, on-the-fly switch to light-weight UCB offers around 10-factor improvement in latency and throughput. Since learning duration depends on the unknown arm statistics, we offer intelligence embedded in architecture to decide the switching instant. We validate the functional correctness and usefulness of the proposed architecture via a realistic wireless application and detailed complexity analysis demonstrates its feasibility in realizing intelligent radios.
Towards Bounding-Box Free Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Ujwal Bonde, Pablo F. Alcantarilla, Stefan Leutenegger
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Triplet

In this work we introduce a new Bounding-Box Free Network (BBFNet) for panoptic segmentation. Panoptic segmentation is an ideal problem for proposal-free methods as it already requires per-pixel semantic class labels. We use this observation to exploit class boundaries from off-the-shelf semantic segmentation networks and refine them to predict instance labels. Towards this goal BBFNet predicts coarse watershed levels and uses them to detect large instance candidates where boundaries are well defined. For smaller instances, whose boundaries are less reliable, BBFNet also predicts instance centers by means of Hough voting followed by mean-shift to reliably detect small objects. A novel triplet loss network helps merging fragmented instances while refining boundary pixels. Our approach is distinct from previous works in panoptic segmentation that rely on a combination of a semantic segmentation network with a computationally costly instance segmentation network based on bounding box proposals, such as Mask R-CNN, to guide the prediction of instance labels using a Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) approach. We benchmark our proposal-free method on Cityscapes and Microsoft COCO datasets and show competitive performance with other MoE based approaches while outperforming existing non-proposal based methods on the COCO dataset. We show the flexibility of our method using different semantic segmentation backbones.
Deep Learning in Medical Ultrasound Image Segmentation: a Review
Authors: Ziyang Wang
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Applying machine learning technologies, especially deep learning, into medical image segmentation is being widely studied because of its state-of-the-art performance and results. It can be a key step to provide a reliable basis for clinical diagnosis, such as 3D reconstruction of human tissues, image-guided interventions, image analyzing and visualization. In this review article, deep-learning-based methods for ultrasound image segmentation are categorized into six main groups according to their architectures and training at first. Secondly, for each group, several current representative algorithms are selected, introduced, analyzed and summarized in detail. In addition, common evaluation methods for image segmentation and ultrasound image segmentation datasets are summarized. Further, the performance of the current methods and their evaluations are reviewed. In the end, the challenges and potential research directions for medical ultrasound image segmentation are discussed.
Neural Attentive Multiview Machines
Authors: Oren Barkan, Ori Katz, Noam Koenigstein
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

An important problem in multiview representation learning is finding the optimal combination of views with respect to the specific task at hand. To this end, we introduce NAM: a Neural Attentive Multiview machine that learns multiview item representations and similarity by employing a novel attention mechanism. NAM harnesses multiple information sources and automatically quantifies their relevancy with respect to a supervised task. Finally, a very practical advantage of NAM is its robustness to the case of dataset with missing views. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NAM for the task of movies and app recommendations. Our evaluations indicate that NAM outperforms single view models as well as alternative multiview methods on item recommendations tasks, including cold-start scenarios.
Voxel-Based Indoor Reconstruction From HoloLens Triangle Meshes
Authors: P. Hübner, M. Weinmann, S. Wursthorn
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00

Current mobile augmented reality devices are often equipped with range sensors. The Microsoft HoloLens for instance is equipped with a Time-Of-Flight (ToF) range camera providing coarse triangle meshes that can be used in custom applications. We suggest to use the triangle meshes for the automatic generation of indoor models that can serve as basis for augmenting their physical counterpart with location-dependent information. In this paper, we present a novel voxel-based approach for automated indoor reconstruction from unstructured three-dimensional geometries like triangle meshes. After an initial voxelization of the input data, rooms are detected in the resulting voxel grid by segmenting connected voxel components of ceiling candidates and extruding them downwards to find floor candidates. Semantic class labels like 'Wall', 'Wall Opening', 'Interior Object' and 'Empty Interior' are then assigned to the room voxels in-between ceiling and floor by a rule-based voxel sweep algorithm. Finally, the geometry of the detected walls and their openings is refined in voxel representation. The proposed approach is not restricted to Manhattan World scenarios and does not rely on room surfaces being planar.
Mind Your Weight(s): A Large-scale Study on Insufficient Machine Learning Model Protection in Mobile Apps
Authors: Zhichuang Sun, Ruimin Sun, Long Lu, Alan Mislove
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Malware Detection

On-device machine learning (ML) is quickly gaining popularity among mobile apps. It allows offline model inference while preserving user privacy. However, ML models, considered as core intellectual properties of model owners, are now stored on billions of untrusted devices and subject to potential thefts. Leaked models can cause both severe financial loss and security consequences. This paper presents the first empirical study of ML model protection on mobile devices. Our study aims to answer three open questions with quantitative evidence: How widely is model protection used in apps? How robust are existing model protection techniques? What impacts can (stolen) models incur? To that end, we built a simple app analysis pipeline and analyzed 46,753 popular apps collected from the US and Chinese app markets. We identified 1,468 ML apps spanning all popular app categories. We found that, alarmingly, 41% of ML apps do not protect their models at all, which can be trivially stolen from app packages. Even for those apps that use model protection or encryption, we were able to extract the models from 66% of them via unsophisticated dynamic analysis techniques. The extracted models are mostly commercial products and used for face recognition, liveness detection, ID/bank card recognition, and malware detection. We quantitatively estimated the potential financial and security impact of a leaked model, which can amount to millions of dollars for different stakeholders. Our study reveals that on-device models are currently at high risk of being leaked; attackers are highly motivated to steal such models. Drawn from our large-scale study, we report our insights into this emerging security problem and discuss the technical challenges, hoping to inspire future research on robust and practical model protection for mobile devices.
Robust Quantization: One Model to Rule Them All
Authors: Moran Shkolnik, Brian Chmiel, Ron Banner, Gil Shomron, Yury Nahshan, Alex Bronstein, Uri Weiser
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: All, model, Quantization

Neural network quantization methods often involve simulating the quantization process during training, making the trained model highly dependent on the target bit-width and precise way quantization is performed. Robust quantization offers an alternative approach with improved tolerance to different classes of data-types and quantization policies. It opens up new exciting applications where the quantization process is not static and can vary to meet different circumstances and implementations. To address this issue, we propose a method that provides intrinsic robustness to the model against a broad range of quantization processes. Our method is motivated by theoretical arguments and enables us to store a single generic model capable of operating at various bit-widths and quantization policies. We validate our method's effectiveness on different ImageNet models.
A Lagrangian Approach to Information Propagation in Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Matteo Tiezzi, Giuseppe Marra, Stefano Melacci, Marco Maggini, Marco Gori
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

In many real world applications, data are characterized by a complex structure, that can be naturally encoded as a graph. In the last years, the popularity of deep learning techniques has renewed the interest in neural models able to process complex patterns. In particular, inspired by the Graph Neural Network (GNN) model, different architectures have been proposed to extend the original GNN scheme. GNNs exploit a set of state variables, each assigned to a graph node, and a diffusion mechanism of the states among neighbor nodes, to implement an iterative procedure to compute the fixed point of the (learnable) state transition function. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the state computation and the learning algorithm for GNNs, based on a constraint optimisation task solved in the Lagrangian framework. The state convergence procedure is implicitly expressed by the constraint satisfaction mechanism and does not require a separate iterative phase for each epoch of the learning procedure. In fact, the computational structure is based on the search for saddle points of the Lagrangian in the adjoint space composed of weights, neural outputs (node states), and Lagrange multipliers. The proposed approach is compared experimentally with other popular models for processing graphs.
How to Solve Fair $k$-Center in Massive Data Models
Authors: Ashish Chiplunkar, Sagar Kale, Sivaramakrishnan Natarajan Ramamoorthy
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Summarization, Decision Making, Fairness

Fueled by massive data, important decision making is being automated with the help of algorithms, therefore, fairness in algorithms has become an especially important research topic. In this work, we design new streaming and distributed algorithms for the fair $k$-center problem that models fair data summarization. The streaming and distributed models of computation have an attractive feature of being able to handle massive data sets that do not fit into main memory. Our main contributions are: (a) the first distributed algorithm; which has provably constant approximation ratio and is extremely parallelizable, and (b) a two-pass streaming algorithm with a provable approximation guarantee matching the best known algorithm (which is not a streaming algorithm). Our algorithms have the advantages of being easy to implement in practice, being fast with linear running times, having very small working memory and communication, and outperforming existing algorithms on several real and synthetic data sets. To complement our distributed algorithm, we also give a hardness result for natural distributed algorithms, which holds for even the special case of $k$-center.
Fair Prediction with Endogenous Behavior
Authors: Christopher Jung, Sampath Kannan, Changhwa Lee, Mallesh M. Pai, Aaron Roth, Rakesh Vohra
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness, Prediction

There is increasing regulatory interest in whether machine learning algorithms deployed in consequential domains (e.g. in criminal justice) treat different demographic groups "fairly." However, there are several proposed notions of fairness, typically mutually incompatible. Using criminal justice as an example, we study a model in which society chooses an incarceration rule. Agents of different demographic groups differ in their outside options (e.g. opportunity for legal employment) and decide whether to commit crimes. We show that equalizing type I and type II errors across groups is consistent with the goal of minimizing the overall crime rate; other popular notions of fairness are not.
Deep Neural Networks for the Correction of Mie Scattering in Fourier-Transformed Infrared Spectra of Biological Samples
Authors: Arne P. Raulf, Joshua Butke, Lukas Menzen, Claus Küpper, Frederik Großerueschkamp, Klaus Gerwert, Axel Mosig
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00

Infrared spectra obtained from cell or tissue specimen have commonly been observed to involve a significant degree of (resonant) Mie scattering, which often overshadows biochemically relevant spectral information by a non-linear, non-additive spectral component in Fourier transformed infrared (FTIR) spectroscopic measurements. Correspondingly, many successful machine learning approaches for FTIR spectra have relied on preprocessing procedures that computationally remove the scattering components from an infrared spectrum. We propose an approach to approximate this complex preprocessing function using deep neural networks. As we demonstrate, the resulting model is not just several orders of magnitudes faster, which is important for real-time clinical applications, but also generalizes strongly across different tissue types. Furthermore, our proposed method overcomes the trade-off between computation time and the corrected spectrum being biased towards an artificial reference spectrum.
A Possibility in Algorithmic Fairness: Can Calibration and Equal Error Rates Be Reconciled?
Authors: Claire Lazar Reich, Suhas Vijaykumar
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Decision makers increasingly rely on algorithmic risk scores to determine access to binary treatments including bail, loans, and medical interventions. In these settings, we reconcile two fairness criteria that were previously shown to be in conflict: calibration and error rate equality. In particular, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of calibrated scores that yield classifications achieving equal error rates at any given group-blind threshold. We then present an algorithm that searches for the most accurate score subject to both calibration and minimal error rate disparity. Applied to the COMPAS criminal risk assessment tool, we show that our method can eliminate error disparities while maintaining calibration. In a separate application to credit lending, we compare our procedure to the omission of sensitive features and show that it raises both profit and the probability that creditworthy individuals receive loans.
FeatureNMS: Non-Maximum Suppression by Learning Feature Embeddings
Authors: Niels Ole Salscheider
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Most state of the art object detectors output multiple detections per object. The duplicates are removed in a post-processing step called Non-Maximum Suppression. Classical Non-Maximum Suppression has shortcomings in scenes that contain objects with high overlap: This heuristic assumes that a high overlap between two bounding boxes corresponds to a high probability of one being a duplicate. We propose FeatureNMS to solve this problem. FeatureNMS recognizes duplicates not only based on the intersection over union between the bounding boxes, but also based on the difference of feature vectors. These feature vectors can encode more information like visual appearance. Our approach outperforms classical NMS and derived approaches and achieves state of the art performance.
Decidability of cutpoint isolation for probabilistic finite automata on letter-bounded inputs
Authors: Paul C. Bell, Pavel Semukhin
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00

We show the surprising result that the cutpoint isolation problem is decidable for Probabilistic Finite Automata (PFA) where input words are taken from a letter-bounded context-free language. A context-free language $\mathcal{L}$ is letter-bounded when $\mathcal{L} \subseteq a_1^*a_2^* \cdots a_\ell^*$ for some finite $\ell > 0$ where each letter is distinct. A cutpoint is isolated when it cannot be approached arbitrarily closely. The decidability of this problem is in marked contrast to the situation for the (strict) emptiness problem for PFA which is undecidable under the even more severe restrictions of PFA with polynomial ambiguity, commutative matrices and input over a letter-bounded language as well as to the injectivity problem which is undecidable for PFA over letter-bounded languages. We provide a constructive nondeterministic algorithm to solve the cutpoint isolation problem, which holds even when the PFA is exponentially ambiguous. We also show that the problem is at least NP-hard and use our decision procedure to solve several related problems.
Gravitational-wave parameter estimation with autoregressive neural network flows
Authors: Stephen R. Green, Christine Simpson, Jonathan Gair
Date: 2020-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

We introduce the use of autoregressive normalizing flows for rapid likelihood-free inference of binary black hole system parameters from gravitational-wave data with deep neural networks. A normalizing flow is an invertible mapping on a sample space that can be used to induce a transformation from a simple probability distribution to a more complex one: if the simple distribution can be rapidly sampled and its density evaluated, then so can the complex distribution. Our first application to gravitational waves uses an autoregressive flow, conditioned on detector strain data, to map a multivariate standard normal distribution into the posterior distribution over system parameters. We train the model on artificial strain data consisting of IMRPhenomPv2 waveforms drawn from a five-parameter $(m_1, m_2, \phi_0, t_c, d_L)$ prior and stationary Gaussian noise realizations with a fixed power spectral density. This gives performance comparable to current best deep-learning approaches to gravitational-wave parameter estimation. We then build a more powerful latent variable model by incorporating autoregressive flows within the variational autoencoder framework. This model has performance comparable to Markov chain Monte Carlo and, in particular, successfully models the multimodal $\phi_0$ posterior. Finally, we train the autoregressive latent variable model on an expanded parameter space, including also aligned spins $(\chi_{1z}, \chi_{2z})$ and binary inclination $\theta_{JN}$, and show that all parameters and degeneracies are well-recovered. In all cases, sampling is extremely fast, requiring less than two seconds to draw $10^4$ posterior samples.