pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Unifying Framework for Information Processing in Stochastically Driven Dynamical Systems
Authors: Tomoyuki Kubota, Hirokazu Takahashi, Kohei Nakajima
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00

A dynamical system can be regarded as an information processing apparatus that encodes input streams from the external environment to its state and processes them through state transitions. The information processing capacity (IPC) is an excellent tool that comprehensively evaluates these processed inputs, providing details of unknown information processing in black box systems; however, this measure can be applied to only time-invariant systems. This paper extends the applicable range to time-variant systems and further reveals that the IPC is equivalent to coefficients of polynomial chaos (PC) expansion in more general dynamical systems. To achieve this objective, we tackle three issues. First, we establish a connection between the IPC for time-invariant systems and PC expansion, which is a type of polynomial expansion using orthogonal functions of input history as bases. We prove that the IPC corresponds to the squared norm of the coefficient vector of the basis in the PC expansion. Second, we show that an input following an arbitrary distribution can be used for the IPC, removing previous restrictions to specific input distributions. Third, we extend the conventional orthogonal bases to functions of both time and input history and propose the IPC for time-variant systems. To show the significance of our approach, we demonstrate that our measure can reveal information representations in not only machine learning networks but also a real, cultured neural network. Our generalized measure paves the way for unveiling the information processing capabilities of a wide variety of physical dynamics which has been left behind in nature.
Mimic and Fool: A Task Agnostic Adversarial Attack
Authors: Akshay Chaturvedi, Utpal Garain
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Image Captioning, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

At present, adversarial attacks are designed in a task-specific fashion. However, for downstream computer vision tasks such as image captioning, image segmentation etc., the current deep learning systems use an image classifier like VGG16, ResNet50, Inception-v3 etc. as a feature extractor. Keeping this in mind, we propose Mimic and Fool, a task agnostic adversarial attack. Given a feature extractor, the proposed attack finds an adversarial image which can mimic the image feature of the original image. This ensures that the two images give the same (or similar) output regardless of the task. We randomly select 1000 MSCOCO validation images for experimentation. We perform experiments on two image captioning models, Show and Tell, Show Attend and Tell and one VQA model, namely, end-to-end neural module network (N2NMN). The proposed attack achieves success rate of 74.0%, 81.0% and 87.1% for Show and Tell, Show Attend and Tell and N2NMN respectively. We also propose a slight modification to our attack to generate natural-looking adversarial images. In addition, we also show the applicability of the proposed attack for invertible architecture. Since Mimic and Fool only requires information about the feature extractor of the model, it can be considered as a gray-box attack.
Joint Subspace Recovery and Enhanced Locality Driven Robust Flexible Discriminative Dictionary Learning
Authors: Zhao Zhang, Jiahuan Ren, Weiming Jiang, Zheng Zhang, Richang Hong, Shuicheng Yan, Meng Wang
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dictionary Learning

We propose a joint subspace recovery and enhanced locality based robust flexible label consistent dictionary learning method called Robust Flexible Discriminative Dictionary Learning (RFDDL). RFDDL mainly improves the data representation and classification abilities by enhancing the robust property to sparse errors and encoding the locality, reconstruction error and label consistency more accurately. First, for the robustness to noise and sparse errors in data and atoms, RFDDL aims at recovering the underlying clean data and clean atom subspaces jointly, and then performs DL and encodes the locality in the recovered subspaces. Second, to enable the data sampled from a nonlinear manifold to be handled potentially and obtain the accurate reconstruction by avoiding the overfitting, RFDDL minimizes the reconstruction error in a flexible manner. Third, to encode the label consistency accurately, RFDDL involves a discriminative flexible sparse code error to encourage the coefficients to be soft. Fourth, to encode the locality well, RFDDL defines the Laplacian matrix over recovered atoms, includes label information of atoms in terms of intra-class compactness and inter-class separation, and associates with group sparse codes and classifier to obtain the accurate discriminative locality-constrained coefficients and classifier. Extensive results on public databases show the effectiveness of our RFDDL.
k-Nearest Neighbor Optimization via Randomized Hyperstructure Convex Hull
Authors: Jasper Kyle Catapang
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Unsupervised Spatial Clustering

In the k-nearest neighbor algorithm (k-NN), the determination of classes for test instances is usually performed via a majority vote system, which may ignore the similarities among data. In this research, the researcher proposes an approach to fine-tune the selection of neighbors to be passed to the majority vote system through the construction of a random n-dimensional hyperstructure around the test instance by introducing a new threshold parameter. The accuracy of the proposed k-NN algorithm is 85.71%, while the accuracy of the conventional k-NN algorithm is 80.95% when performed on the Haberman's Cancer Survival dataset, and 94.44% for the proposed k-NN algorithm, compared to the conventional's 88.89% accuracy score on the Seeds dataset. The proposed k-NN algorithm is also on par with the conventional support vector machine algorithm accuracy, even on the Banknote Authentication and Iris datasets, even surpassing the accuracy of support vector machine on the Seeds dataset.
Challenges in Time-Stamp Aware Anomaly Detection in Traffic Videos
Authors: Kuldeep Marotirao Biradar, Ayushi Gupta, Murari Mandal, Santosh Kumar Vipparthi
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Time-stamp aware anomaly detection in traffic videos is an essential task for the advancement of the intelligent transportation system. Anomaly detection in videos is a challenging problem due to sparse occurrence of anomalous events, inconsistent behavior of a different type of anomalies and imbalanced available data for normal and abnormal scenarios. In this paper, we present a three-stage pipeline to learn the motion patterns in videos to detect a visual anomaly. First, the background is estimated from recent history frames to identify the motionless objects. This background image is used to localize the normal/abnormal behavior within the frame. Further, we detect an object of interest in the estimated background and categorize it into anomaly based on a time-stamp aware anomaly detection algorithm. We also discuss the challenges faced in improving performance over the unseen test data for traffic anomaly detection. Experiments are conducted over Track 3 of NVIDIA AI city challenge 2019. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed method in detecting time-stamp aware anomalies in traffic/road videos.
Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Languages with Rich Morphology
Authors: Ran Zmigrod, Sabrina J. Mielke, Hanna Wallach, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: counterfactual, Data Augmentation

Gender stereotypes are manifest in most of the world's languages and are consequently propagated or amplified by NLP systems. Although research has focused on mitigating gender stereotypes in English, the approaches that are commonly employed produce ungrammatical sentences in morphologically rich languages. We present a novel approach for converting between masculine-inflected and feminine-inflected sentences in such languages. For Spanish and Hebrew, our approach achieves F1 scores of 82% and 73% at the level of tags and accuracies of 90% and 87% at the level of forms. By evaluating our approach using four different languages, we show that, on average, it reduces gender stereotyping by a factor of 2.5 without any sacrifice to grammaticality.
Principled Training of Neural Networks with Direct Feedback Alignment
Authors: Julien Launay, Iacopo Poli, Florent Krzakala
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00

The backpropagation algorithm has long been the canonical training method for neural networks. Modern paradigms are implicitly optimized for it, and numerous guidelines exist to ensure its proper use. Recently, synthetic gradients methods -where the error gradient is only roughly approximated - have garnered interest. These methods not only better portray how biological brains are learning, but also open new computational possibilities, such as updating layers asynchronously. Even so, they have failed to scale past simple tasks like MNIST or CIFAR-10. This is in part due to a lack of standards, leading to ill-suited models and practices forbidding such methods from performing to the best of their abilities. In this work, we focus on direct feedback alignment and present a set of best practices justified by observations of the alignment angles. We characterize a bottleneck effect that prevents alignment in narrow layers, and hypothesize it may explain why feedback alignment methods have yet to scale to large convolutional networks.
Anomaly Detection in High Performance Computers: A Vicinity Perspective
Authors: Siavash Ghiasvand, Florina M. Ciorba
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

In response to the demand for higher computational power, the number of computing nodes in high performance computers (HPC) increases rapidly. Exascale HPC systems are expected to arrive by 2020. With drastic increase in the number of HPC system components, it is expected to observe a sudden increase in the number of failures which, consequently, poses a threat to the continuous operation of the HPC systems. Detecting failures as early as possible and, ideally, predicting them, is a necessary step to avoid interruptions in HPC systems operation. Anomaly detection is a well-known general purpose approach for failure detection, in computing systems. The majority of existing methods are designed for specific architectures, require adjustments on the computing systems hardware and software, need excessive information, or pose a threat to users' and systems' privacy. This work proposes a node failure detection mechanism based on a vicinity-based statistical anomaly detection approach using passively collected and anonymized system log entries. Application of the proposed approach on system logs collected over 8 months indicates an anomaly detection precision between 62% to 81%.
Learning robust visual representations using data augmentation invariance
Authors: Alex Hernández-García, Peter König, Tim C. Kietzmann
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Object Categorization

Deep convolutional neural networks trained for image object categorization have shown remarkable similarities with representations found across the primate ventral visual stream. Yet, artificial and biological networks still exhibit important differences. Here we investigate one such property: increasing invariance to identity-preserving image transformations found along the ventral stream. Despite theoretical evidence that invariance should emerge naturally from the optimization process, we present empirical evidence that the activations of convolutional neural networks trained for object categorization are not robust to identity-preserving image transformations commonly used in data augmentation. As a solution, we propose data augmentation invariance, an unsupervised learning objective which improves the robustness of the learned representations by promoting the similarity between the activations of augmented image samples. Our results show that this approach is a simple, yet effective and efficient (10 % increase in training time) way of increasing the invariance of the models while obtaining similar categorization performance.
Fast Rates for a kNN Classifier Robust to Unknown Asymmetric Label Noise
Authors: Henry W. J. Reeve, Ata Kaban
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00

We consider classification in the presence of class-dependent asymmetric label noise with unknown noise probabilities. In this setting, identifiability conditions are known, but additional assumptions were shown to be required for finite sample rates, and so far only the parametric rate has been obtained. Assuming these identifiability conditions, together with a measure-smoothness condition on the regression function and Tsybakov's margin condition, we show that the Robust kNN classifier of Gao et al. attains, the minimax optimal rates of the noise-free setting, up to a log factor, even when trained on data with unknown asymmetric label noise. Hence, our results provide a solid theoretical backing for this empirically successful algorithm. By contrast the standard kNN is not even consistent in the setting of asymmetric label noise. A key idea in our analysis is a simple kNN based method for estimating the maximum of a function that requires far less assumptions than existing mode estimators do, and which may be of independent interest for noise proportion estimation and randomised optimisation problems.
Characterizing the implicit bias via a primal-dual analysis
Authors: Ziwei Ji, Matus Telgarsky
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00

This paper shows that the implicit bias of gradient descent on linearly separable data is exactly characterized by the optimal solution of a dual optimization problem given by a smoothed margin, even for general losses. This is in contrast to prior results, which are often tailored to exponentially-tailed losses. For the exponential loss specifically, with $n$ training examples and $t$ gradient descent steps, our dual analysis further allows us to prove an $O(\ln(n)/\ln(t))$ convergence rate to the $\ell_2$ maximum margin direction, when a constant step size is used. This rate is tight in both $n$ and $t$, which has not been presented by prior work. On the other hand, with a properly chosen but aggressive step size schedule, we prove $O(1/t)$ rates for both $\ell_2$ margin maximization and implicit bias, whereas prior work (including all first-order methods for the general hard-margin linear SVM problem) proved $\widetilde{O}(1/\sqrt{t})$ margin rates, or $O(1/t)$ margin rates to a suboptimal margin, with an implied (slower) bias rate. Our key observations include that gradient descent on the primal variable naturally induces a mirror descent update on the dual variable, and that the dual objective in this setting is smooth enough to give a faster rate.
WikiDataSets: Standardized sub-graphs from Wikidata
Authors: Armand Boschin, Thomas Bonald
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Relational Reasoning

Developing new ideas and algorithms in the fields of graph processing and relational learning requires public datasets. While Wikidata is the largest open source knowledge graph, involving more than fifty million entities, it is larger than needed in many cases and even too large to be processed easily. Still, it is a goldmine of relevant facts and relations. Using this knowledge graph is time consuming and prone to task specific tuning which can affect reproducibility of results. Providing a unified framework to extract topic-specific subgraphs solves this problem and allows researchers to evaluate algorithms on common datasets. This paper presents various topic-specific subgraphs of Wikidata along with the generic Python code used to extract them. These datasets can help develop new methods of knowledge graph processing and relational learning.
Asymptotic Guarantees for Learning Generative Models with the Sliced-Wasserstein Distance
Authors: Kimia Nadjahi, Alain Durmus, Umut Şimşekli, Roland Badeau
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

Minimum expected distance estimation (MEDE) algorithms have been widely used for probabilistic models with intractable likelihood functions and they have become increasingly popular due to their use in implicit generative modeling (e.g. Wasserstein generative adversarial networks, Wasserstein autoencoders). Emerging from computational optimal transport, the Sliced-Wasserstein (SW) distance has become a popular choice in MEDE thanks to its simplicity and computational benefits. While several studies have reported empirical success on generative modeling with SW, the theoretical properties of such estimators have not yet been established. In this study, we investigate the asymptotic properties of estimators that are obtained by minimizing SW. We first show that convergence in SW implies weak convergence of probability measures in general Wasserstein spaces. Then we show that estimators obtained by minimizing SW (and also an approximate version of SW) are asymptotically consistent. We finally prove a central limit theorem, which characterizes the asymptotic distribution of the estimators and establish a convergence rate of $\sqrt{n}$, where $n$ denotes the number of observed data points. We illustrate the validity of our theory on both synthetic data and neural networks.
BasisConv: A method for compressed representation and learning in CNNs
Authors: Muhammad Tayyab, Abhijit Mahalanobis
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

It is well known that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have significant redundancy in their filter weights. Various methods have been proposed in the literature to compress trained CNNs. These include techniques like pruning weights, filter quantization and representing filters in terms of a basis functions. Our approach falls in this latter class of strategies, but is distinct in that that we show both compressed learning and representation can be achieved without significant modifications of popular CNN architectures. Specifically, any convolution layer of the CNN is easily replaced by two successive convolution layers: the first is a set of fixed filters (that represent the knowledge space of the entire layer and do not change), which is followed by a layer of one-dimensional filters (that represent the learned knowledge in this space). For the pre-trained networks, the fixed layer is just the truncated eigen-decompositions of the original filters. The 1D filters are initialized as the weights of linear combination, but are fine-tuned to recover any performance loss due to the truncation. For training networks from scratch, we use a set of random orthogonal fixed filters (that never change), and learn the 1D weight vector directly from the labeled data. Our method substantially reduces i) the number of learnable parameters during training, and ii) the number of multiplication operations and filter storage requirements during implementation. It does so without requiring any special operators in the convolution layer, and extends to all known popular CNN architectures. We apply our method to four well known network architectures trained with three different data sets. Results show a consistent reduction in i) the number of operations by up to a factor of 5, and ii) number of learnable parameters by up to a factor of 18, with less than 3% drop in performance on the CIFAR100 dataset.
Approximate Variational Inference Based on a Finite Sample of Gaussian Latent Variables
Authors: Nikolaos Gianniotis, Christoph Schnörr, Christian Molkenthin, Sanjay Singh Bora
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Variational Inference

Variational methods are employed in situations where exact Bayesian inference becomes intractable due to the difficulty in performing certain integrals. Typically, variational methods postulate a tractable posterior and formulate a lower bound on the desired integral to be approximated, e.g. marginal likelihood. The lower bound is then optimised with respect to its free parameters, the so called variational parameters. However, this is not always possible as for certain integrals it is very challenging (or tedious) to come up with a suitable lower bound. Here we propose a simple scheme that overcomes some of the awkward cases where the usual variational treatment becomes difficult. The scheme relies on a rewriting of the lower bound on the model log-likelihood. We demonstrate the proposed scheme on a number of synthetic and real examples, as well as on a real geophysical model for which the standard variational approaches are inapplicable.
Simultaneously Learning Architectures and Features of Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Tinghuai Wang, Lixin Fan, Huiling Wang
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, Classification, Diversity, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Compression

This paper presents a novel method which simultaneously learns the number of filters and network features repeatedly over multiple epochs. We propose a novel pruning loss to explicitly enforces the optimizer to focus on promising candidate filters while suppressing contributions of less relevant ones. In the meanwhile, we further propose to enforce the diversities between filters and this diversity-based regularization term improves the trade-off between model sizes and accuracies. It turns out the interplay between architecture and feature optimizations improves the final compressed models, and the proposed method is compared favorably to existing methods, in terms of both models sizes and accuracies for a wide range of applications including image classification, image compression and audio classification.
Modeling Sentiment Dependencies with Graph Convolutional Networks for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification
Authors: Pinlong Zhaoa, Linlin Houb, Ou Wua
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Classification, General Classification, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Aspect-level sentiment classification aims to distinguish the sentiment polarities over one or more aspect terms in a sentence. Existing approaches mostly model different aspects in one sentence independently, which ignore the sentiment dependencies between different aspects. However, we find such dependency information between different aspects can bring additional valuable information. In this paper, we propose a novel aspect-level sentiment classification model based on graph convolutional networks (GCN) which can effectively capture the sentiment dependencies between multi-aspects in one sentence. Our model firstly introduces bidirectional attention mechanism with position encoding to model aspect-specific representations between each aspect and its context words, then employs GCN over the attention mechanism to capture the sentiment dependencies between different aspects in one sentence. We evaluate the proposed approach on the SemEval 2014 datasets. Experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. We also conduct experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of GCN module, which indicates that the dependencies between different aspects is highly helpful in aspect-level sentiment classification.
The Snippets Taxonomy in Web Search Engines
Authors: Artur Strzelecki, Paulina Rutecka
Date: 2019-06-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

In this paper authors analyzed 50 000 keywords results collected from localized Polish Google search engine. We proposed a taxonomy for snippets displayed in search results as regular, rich, news, featured and entity types snippets. We observed some correlations between overlapping snippets in the same keywords. Results show that commercial keywords do not cause results having rich or entity types snippets, whereas keywords resulting with snippets are not commercial nature. We found that significant number of snippets are scholarly articles and rich cards carousel. We conclude our findings with conclusion and research limitations.