pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Convex Nonparanormal Regression
Authors: Yonatan Woodbridge, Gal Elidan, Ami Wiesel
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Quantifying uncertainty in predictions or, more generally, estimating the posterior conditional distribution, is a core challenge in machine learning and statistics. We introduce Convex Nonparanormal Regression (CNR), a conditional nonparanormal approach for coping with this task. CNR involves a convex optimization of a posterior defined via a rich dictionary of pre-defined non linear transformations on Gaussians. It can fit an arbitrary conditional distribution, including multimodal and non-symmetric posteriors. For the special but powerful case of a piecewise linear dictionary, we provide a closed form of the posterior mean which can be used for point-wise predictions. Finally, we demonstrate the advantages of CNR over classical competitors using synthetic and real world data.
Certifying Joint Adversarial Robustness for Model Ensembles
Authors: Mainuddin Ahmad Jonas, David Evans
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, model

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are often vulnerable to adversarial examples.Several proposed defenses deploy an ensemble of models with the hope that, although the individual models may be vulnerable, an adversary will not be able to find an adversarial example that succeeds against the ensemble. Depending on how the ensemble is used, an attacker may need to find a single adversarial example that succeeds against all, or a majority, of the models in the ensemble. The effectiveness of ensemble defenses against strong adversaries depends on the vulnerability spaces of models in the ensemble being disjoint. We consider the joint vulnerability of an ensemble of models, and propose a novel technique for certifying the joint robustness of ensembles, building upon prior works on single-model robustness certification. We evaluate the robustness of various models ensembles, including models trained using cost-sensitive robustness to be diverse, to improve understanding of the potential effectiveness of ensemble models as a defense against adversarial examples.
Music Generation with Temporal Structure Augmentation
Authors: Shakeel Raja
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Music Generation

In this paper we introduce a novel feature augmentation approach for generating structured musical compositions comprising melodies and harmonies. The proposed method augments a connectionist generation model with count-down to song conclusion and meter markers as extra input features to study whether neural networks can learn to produce more aesthetically pleasing and structured musical output as a consequence of augmenting the input data with structural features. An RNN architecture with LSTM cells is trained on the Nottingham folk music dataset in a supervised sequence learning setup, following a Music Language Modelling approach, and then applied to generation of harmonies and melodies. Our experiments show an improved prediction performance for both types of annotation. The generated music was also subjectively evaluated using an on-line Turing style listening test which confirms a substantial improvement in the aesthetic quality and in the perceived structure of the music generated using the temporal structure.
On-the-Fly Joint Feature Selection and Classification
Authors: Yasitha Warahena Liyanage, Daphney-Stavroula Zois, Charalampos Chelmis
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Decision Making, feature selection, General Classification

Joint feature selection and classification in an online setting is essential for time-sensitive decision making. However, most existing methods treat this coupled problem independently. Specifically, online feature selection methods can handle either streaming features or data instances offline to produce a fixed set of features for classification, while online classification methods classify incoming instances using full knowledge about the feature space. Nevertheless, all existing methods utilize a set of features, common for all data instances, for classification. Instead, we propose a framework to perform joint feature selection and classification on-the-fly, so as to minimize the number of features evaluated for every data instance and maximize classification accuracy. We derive the optimum solution of the associated optimization problem and analyze its structure. Two algorithms are proposed, ETANA and F-ETANA, which are based on the optimum solution and its properties. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms on several public datasets, demonstrating (i) the dominance of the proposed algorithms over the state-of-the-art, and (ii) its applicability to broad range of application domains including clinical research and natural language processing.
Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting: Tutorial and Literature Survey
Authors: Konstantinos Benidis, Syama Sundar Rangapuram, Valentin Flunkert, Yuyang Wang, Danielle Maddix, Caner Turkmen, Jan Gasthaus, Michael Bohlke-Schneider, David Salinas, Lorenzo Stella, Francois-Xavier Aubet, Laurent Callot, Tim Januschowski
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Survey, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting, Time Series Prediction

Deep learning based forecasting methods have become the methods of choice in many applications of time series prediction or forecasting often outperforming other approaches. Consequently, over the last years, these methods are now ubiquitous in large-scale industrial forecasting applications and have consistently ranked among the best entries in forecasting competitions (e.g., M4 and M5). This practical success has further increased the academic interest to understand and improve deep forecasting methods. In this article we provide an introduction and overview of the field: We present important building blocks for deep forecasting in some depth; using these building blocks, we then survey the breadth of the recent deep forecasting literature.
ESPnet-ST: All-in-One Speech Translation Toolkit
Authors: Hirofumi Inaguma, Shun Kiyono, Kevin Duh, Shigeki Karita, Nelson Enrique Yalta Soplin, Tomoki Hayashi, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: All, Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Speech Translation, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Translation

We present ESPnet-ST, which is designed for the quick development of speech-to-speech translation systems in a single framework. ESPnet-ST is a new project inside end-to-end speech processing toolkit, ESPnet, which integrates or newly implements automatic speech recognition, machine translation, and text-to-speech functions for speech translation. We provide all-in-one recipes including data pre-processing, feature extraction, training, and decoding pipelines for a wide range of benchmark datasets. Our reproducible results can match or even outperform the current state-of-the-art performances; these pre-trained models are downloadable. The toolkit is publicly available at https://github.com/espnet/espnet.
In the Eyes of the Beholder: Analyzing Social Media Use of Neutral and Controversial Terms for COVID-19
Authors: Long Chen, Hanjia Lyu, Tongyu Yang, Yu Wang, Jiebo Luo
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

During the COVID-19 pandemic, "Chinese Virus" emerged as a controversial term for coronavirus. To some, it may seem like a neutral term referring to the physical origin of the virus. To many others, however, the term is in fact attaching ethnicity to the virus. While both arguments appear reasonable, quantitative analysis of the term's real-world usage is lacking to shed light on the issues behind the controversy. In this paper, we attempt to fill this gap. To model the substantive difference of tweets with controversial terms and those with non-controversial terms, we apply topic modeling and LIWC-based sentiment analysis. To test whether "Chinese Virus" and "COVID-19" are interchangeable, we formulate it as a classification task, mask out these terms, and classify them using the state-of-the-art transformer models. Our experiments consistently show that the term "Chinese Virus" is associated with different substantive topics and sentiment compared with "COVID-19" and that the two terms are easily distinguishable by looking at their context.
Partial Volume Segmentation of Brain MRI Scans of any Resolution and Contrast
Authors: Benjamin Billot, Eleanor D. Robinson, Adrian V. Dalca, Juan Eugenio Iglesias
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00

Partial voluming (PV) is arguably the last crucial unsolved problem in Bayesian segmentation of brain MRI with probabilistic atlases. PV occurs when voxels contain multiple tissue classes, giving rise to image intensities that may not be representative of any one of the underlying classes. PV is particularly problematic for segmentation when there is a large resolution gap between the atlas and the test scan, e.g., when segmenting clinical scans with thick slices, or when using a high-resolution atlas. In this work, we present PV-SynthSeg, a convolutional neural network (CNN) that tackles this problem by directly learning a mapping between (possibly multi-modal) low resolution (LR) scans and underlying high resolution (HR) segmentations. PV-SynthSeg simulates LR images from HR label maps with a generative model of PV, and can be trained to segment scans of any desired target contrast and resolution, even for previously unseen modalities where neither images nor segmentations are available at training. PV-SynthSeg does not require any preprocessing, and runs in seconds. We demonstrate the accuracy and flexibility of the method with extensive experiments on three datasets and 2,680 scans. The code is available at https://github.com/BBillot/SynthSeg.
MT-Clinical BERT: Scaling Clinical Information Extraction with Multitask Learning
Authors: Andriy Mulyar, Bridget T. McInnes
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Extraction using GAN

Clinical notes contain an abundance of important but not-readily accessible information about patients. Systems to automatically extract this information rely on large amounts of training data for which their exists limited resources to create. Furthermore, they are developed dis-jointly; meaning that no information can be shared amongst task-specific systems. This bottle-neck unnecessarily complicates practical application, reduces the performance capabilities of each individual solution and associates the engineering debt of managing multiple information extraction systems. We address these challenges by developing Multitask-Clinical BERT: a single deep learning model that simultaneously performs eight clinical tasks spanning entity extraction, PHI identification, language entailment and similarity by sharing representations amongst tasks. We find our single system performs competitively with all state-the-art task-specific systems while also benefiting from massive computational benefits at inference.
Domain-Guided Task Decomposition with Self-Training for Detecting Personal Events in Social Media
Authors: Payam Karisani, Joyce C. Ho, Eugene Agichtein
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Semi-Supervised Text Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Mining social media content for tasks such as detecting personal experiences or events, suffer from lexical sparsity, insufficient training data, and inventive lexicons. To reduce the burden of creating extensive labeled data and improve classification performance, we propose to perform these tasks in two steps: 1. Decomposing the task into domain-specific sub-tasks by identifying key concepts, thus utilizing human domain understanding; and 2. Combining the results of learners for each key concept using co-training to reduce the requirements for labeled training data. We empirically show the effectiveness and generality of our approach, Co-Decomp, using three representative social media mining tasks, namely Personal Health Mention detection, Crisis Report detection, and Adverse Drug Reaction monitoring. The experiments show that our model is able to outperform the state-of-the-art text classification models--including those using the recently introduced BERT model--when small amounts of training data are available.
Simple Dataset for Proof Method Recommendation in Isabelle/HOL (Dataset Description)
Authors: Yutaka Nagashima
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Theorem Proving, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Formal Logic

Recently, a growing number of researchers have applied machine learning to assist users of interactive theorem provers. However, the expressive nature of underlying logics and esoteric structures of proof documents impede machine learning practitioners, who often do not have much expertise in formal logic, let alone Isabelle/HOL, from achieving a large scale success in this field. In this data description, we present a simple dataset that contains data on over 400k proof method applications along with over 100 extracted features for each in a format that can be processed easily without any knowledge about formal logic. Our simple data format allows machine learning practitioners to try machine learning tools to predict proof methods in Isabelle/HOL without requiring domain expertise in logic.
Explainable Goal-Driven Agents and Robots -- A Comprehensive Review
Authors: Fatai Sado, Chu Kiong Loo, Wei Shiung Liew, Matthias Kerzel, Stefan Wermter
Date: 2020-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Self-Driving Cars

Recent applications of autonomous agents and robots, such as self-driving cars, scenario-based trainers, exploration robots, and service robots have brought attention to crucial trust-related challenges associated with the current generation of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. AI systems based on the connectionist deep learning neural network approach lack capabilities of explaining their decisions and actions to others, despite their great successes. Without symbolic interpretation capabilities, they are black boxes, which renders their decisions or actions opaque, making it difficult to trust them in safety-critical applications. The recent stance on the explainability of AI systems has witnessed several approaches on eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI); however, most of the studies have focused on data-driven XAI systems applied in computational sciences. Studies addressing the increasingly pervasive goal-driven agents and robots are still missing. This paper reviews approaches on explainable goal-driven intelligent agents and robots, focusing on techniques for explaining and communicating agents perceptual functions (example, senses, and vision) and cognitive reasoning (example, beliefs, desires, intention, plans, and goals) with humans in the loop. The review highlights key strategies that emphasize transparency, understandability, and continual learning for explainability. Finally, the paper presents requirements for explainability and suggests a roadmap for the possible realization of effective goal-driven explainable agents and robots.
Energy Disaggregation with Semi-supervised Sparse Coding
Authors: Mengheng Xue, Samantha Kappagoda, David K. A. Mordecai
Date: 2020-04-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Structured Prediction

Residential smart meters have been widely installed in urban houses nationwide to provide efficient and responsive monitoring and billing for consumers. Studies have shown that providing customers with device-level usage information can lead consumers to economize significant amounts of energy, while modern smart meters can only provide informative whole-home data with low resolution. Thus, energy disaggregation research which aims to decompose the aggregated energy consumption data into its component appliances has attracted broad attention. In this paper, a discriminative disaggregation model based on sparse coding has been evaluated on large-scale household power usage dataset for energy conservation. We utilize a structured prediction model for providing discriminative sparse coding training, accordingly, maximizing the energy disaggregation performance. Designing such large scale disaggregation task is investigated analytically, and examined in the real-world smart meter dataset compared with benchmark models.
ktrain: A Low-Code Library for Augmented Machine Learning
Authors: Arun S. Maiya
Date: 2020-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Link Prediction, Node Classification, Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering, Text Classification

We present ktrain, a low-code Python library that makes machine learning more accessible and easier to apply. As a wrapper to TensorFlow and many other libraries (e.g., transformers, scikit-learn, stellargraph), it is designed to make sophisticated, state-of-the-art machine learning models simple to build, train, inspect, and apply by both beginners and experienced practitioners. Featuring modules that support text data (e.g., text classification, sequence tagging, open-domain question-answering), vision data (e.g., image classification), graph data (e.g., node classification, link prediction), and tabular data, ktrain presents a simple unified interface enabling one to quickly solve a wide range of tasks in as little as three or four "commands" or lines of code.
A Committee of Convolutional Neural Networks for Image Classication in the Concurrent Presence of Feature and Label Noise
Authors: Stanisław Kaźmierczak, Jacek Mańdziuk
Date: 2020-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, image-classification, Image Classification

Image classification has become a ubiquitous task. Models trained on good quality data achieve accuracy which in some application domains is already above human-level performance. Unfortunately, real-world data are quite often degenerated by the noise existing in features and/or labels. There are quite many papers that handle the problem of either feature or label noise, separately. However, to the best of our knowledge, this piece of research is the first attempt to address the problem of concurrent occurrence of both types of noise. Basing on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets, we experimentally proved that the difference by which committees beat single models increases along with noise level, no matter it is an attribute or label disruption. Thus, it makes ensembles legitimate to be applied to noisy images with noisy labels. The aforementioned committees' advantage over single models is positively correlated with dataset difficulty level as well. We propose three committee selection algorithms that outperform a strong baseline algorithm which relies on an ensemble of individual (nonassociated) best models.
Self-Supervised Representation Learning on Document Images
Authors: Adrian Cosma, Mihai Ghidoveanu, Michael Panaitescu-Liess, Marius Popescu
Date: 2020-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, document-image-classification, Document Image Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Representation Learning

This work analyses the impact of self-supervised pre-training on document images in the context of document image classification. While previous approaches explore the effect of self-supervision on natural images, we show that patch-based pre-training performs poorly on document images because of their different structural properties and poor intra-sample semantic information. We propose two context-aware alternatives to improve performance on the Tobacco-3482 image classification task. We also propose a novel method for self-supervision, which makes use of the inherent multi-modality of documents (image and text), which performs better than other popular self-supervised methods, including supervised ImageNet pre-training, on document image classification scenarios with a limited amount of data.
A Fortran-Keras Deep Learning Bridge for Scientific Computing
Authors: Jordan Ott, Mike Pritchard, Natalie Best, Erik Linstead, Milan Curcic, Pierre Baldi
Date: 2020-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Implementing artificial neural networks is commonly achieved via high-level programming languages like Python and easy-to-use deep learning libraries like Keras. These software libraries come pre-loaded with a variety of network architectures, provide autodifferentiation, and support GPUs for fast and efficient computation. As a result, a deep learning practitioner will favor training a neural network model in Python, where these tools are readily available. However, many large-scale scientific computation projects are written in Fortran, making it difficult to integrate with modern deep learning methods. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a software library, the Fortran-Keras Bridge (FKB). This two-way bridge connects environments where deep learning resources are plentiful, with those where they are scarce. The paper describes several unique features offered by FKB, such as customizable layers, loss functions, and network ensembles. The paper concludes with a case study that applies FKB to address open questions about the robustness of an experimental approach to global climate simulation, in which subgrid physics are outsourced to deep neural network emulators. In this context, FKB enables a hyperparameter search of one hundred plus candidate models of subgrid cloud and radiation physics, initially implemented in Keras, to be transferred and used in Fortran. Such a process allows the model's emergent behavior to be assessed, i.e. when fit imperfections are coupled to explicit planetary-scale fluid dynamics. The results reveal a previously unrecognized strong relationship between offline validation error and online performance, in which the choice of optimizer proves unexpectedly critical. This reveals many neural network architectures that produce considerable improvements in stability including some with reduced error, for an especially challenging training dataset.
Typilus: Neural Type Hints
Authors: Miltiadis Allamanis, Earl T. Barr, Soline Ducousso, Zheng Gao
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, One-Shot Learning, Vocal Bursts Type Prediction

Type inference over partial contexts in dynamically typed languages is challenging. In this work, we present a graph neural network model that predicts types by probabilistically reasoning over a program's structure, names, and patterns. The network uses deep similarity learning to learn a TypeSpace -- a continuous relaxation of the discrete space of types -- and how to embed the type properties of a symbol (i.e. identifier) into it. Importantly, our model can employ one-shot learning to predict an open vocabulary of types, including rare and user-defined ones. We realise our approach in Typilus for Python that combines the TypeSpace with an optional type checker. We show that Typilus accurately predicts types. Typilus confidently predicts types for 70% of all annotatable symbols; when it predicts a type, that type optionally type checks 95% of the time. Typilus can also find incorrect type annotations; two important and popular open source libraries, fairseq and allennlp, accepted our pull requests that fixed the annotation errors Typilus discovered.