pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Computing Valid p-value for Optimal Changepoint by Selective Inference using Dynamic Programming
Authors: Vo Nguyen Le Duy, Hiroki Toda, Ryota Sugiyama, Ichiro Takeuchi
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, valid

There is a vast body of literature related to methods for detecting changepoints (CP). However, less attention has been paid to assessing the statistical reliability of the detected CPs. In this paper, we introduce a novel method to perform statistical inference on the significance of the CPs, estimated by a Dynamic Programming (DP)-based optimal CP detection algorithm. Based on the selective inference (SI) framework, we propose an exact (non-asymptotic) approach to compute valid p-values for testing the significance of the CPs. Although it is well-known that SI has low statistical power because of over-conditioning, we address this disadvantage by introducing parametric programming techniques. Then, we propose an efficient method to conduct SI with the minimum amount of conditioning, leading to high statistical power. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets, through which we offer evidence that our proposed method is more powerful than existing methods, has decent performance in terms of computational efficiency, and provides good results in many practical applications.
Convolutional Tensor-Train LSTM for Spatio-temporal Learning
Authors: Jiahao Su, Wonmin Byeon, Jean Kossaifi, Furong Huang, Jan Kautz, Animashree Anandkumar
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Video Compression, Video Prediction

Learning from spatio-temporal data has numerous applications such as human-behavior analysis, object tracking, video compression, and physics simulation.However, existing methods still perform poorly on challenging video tasks such as long-term forecasting. This is because these kinds of challenging tasks require learning long-term spatio-temporal correlations in the video sequence. In this paper, we propose a higher-order convolutional LSTM model that can efficiently learn these correlations, along with a succinct representations of the history. This is accomplished through a novel tensor train module that performs prediction by combining convolutional features across time. To make this feasible in terms of computation and memory requirements, we propose a novel convolutional tensor-train decomposition of the higher-order model. This decomposition reduces the model complexity by jointly approximating a sequence of convolutional kernels asa low-rank tensor-train factorization. As a result, our model outperforms existing approaches, but uses only a fraction of parameters, including the baseline models.Our results achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of applications and datasets, including the multi-steps video prediction on the Moving-MNIST-2and KTH action datasets as well as early activity recognition on the Something-Something V2 dataset.
DSNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search without Parameter Retraining
Authors: Shoukang Hu, Sirui Xie, Hehui Zheng, Chunxiao Liu, Jianping Shi, Xunying Liu, Dahua Lin
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: GPU, Neural Architecture Search

If NAS methods are solutions, what is the problem? Most existing NAS methods require two-stage parameter optimization. However, performance of the same architecture in the two stages correlates poorly. In this work, we propose a new problem definition for NAS, task-specific end-to-end, based on this observation. We argue that given a computer vision task for which a NAS method is expected, this definition can reduce the vaguely-defined NAS evaluation to i) accuracy of this task and ii) the total computation consumed to finally obtain a model with satisfying accuracy. Seeing that most existing methods do not solve this problem directly, we propose DSNAS, an efficient differentiable NAS framework that simultaneously optimizes architecture and parameters with a low-biased Monte Carlo estimate. Child networks derived from DSNAS can be deployed directly without parameter retraining. Comparing with two-stage methods, DSNAS successfully discovers networks with comparable accuracy (74.4%) on ImageNet in 420 GPU hours, reducing the total time by more than 34%. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/SNAS-Series/SNAS-Series.
Learning Dynamic Belief Graphs to Generalize on Text-Based Games
Authors: Ashutosh Adhikari, Xingdi Yuan, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Mikuláš Zelinka, Marc-Antoine Rondeau, Romain Laroche, Pascal Poupart, Jian Tang, Adam Trischler, William L. Hamilton
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Decision Making, Knowledge Graphs, Self-Supervised Learning, Sequential Decision Making, text-based games

Playing text-based games requires skills in processing natural language and sequential decision making. Achieving human-level performance on text-based games remains an open challenge, and prior research has largely relied on hand-crafted structured representations and heuristics. In this work, we investigate how an agent can plan and generalize in text-based games using graph-structured representations learned end-to-end from raw text. We propose a novel graph-aided transformer agent (GATA) that infers and updates latent belief graphs during planning to enable effective action selection by capturing the underlying game dynamics. GATA is trained using a combination of reinforcement and self-supervised learning. Our work demonstrates that the learned graph-based representations help agents converge to better policies than their text-only counterparts and facilitate effective generalization across game configurations. Experiments on 500+ unique games from the TextWorld suite show that our best agent outperforms text-based baselines by an average of 24.2%.
GANs May Have No Nash Equilibria
Authors: Farzan Farnia, Asuman Ozdaglar
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) represent a zero-sum game between two machine players, a generator and a discriminator, designed to learn the distribution of data. While GANs have achieved state-of-the-art performance in several benchmark learning tasks, GAN minimax optimization still poses great theoretical and empirical challenges. GANs trained using first-order optimization methods commonly fail to converge to a stable solution where the players cannot improve their objective, i.e., the Nash equilibrium of the underlying game. Such issues raise the question of the existence of Nash equilibrium solutions in the GAN zero-sum game. In this work, we show through several theoretical and numerical results that indeed GAN zero-sum games may not have any local Nash equilibria. To characterize an equilibrium notion applicable to GANs, we consider the equilibrium of a new zero-sum game with an objective function given by a proximal operator applied to the original objective, a solution we call the proximal equilibrium. Unlike the Nash equilibrium, the proximal equilibrium captures the sequential nature of GANs, in which the generator moves first followed by the discriminator. We prove that the optimal generative model in Wasserstein GAN problems provides a proximal equilibrium. Inspired by these results, we propose a new approach, which we call proximal training, for solving GAN problems. We discuss several numerical experiments demonstrating the existence of proximal equilibrium solutions in GAN minimax problems.
Affective Expression Analysis in-the-wild using Multi-Task Temporal Statistical Deep Learning Model
Authors: Nhu-Tai Do, Tram-Tran Nguyen-Quynh, Soo-Hyung Kim
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing, regression

Affective behavior analysis plays an important role in human-computer interaction, customer marketing, health monitoring. ABAW Challenge and Aff-Wild2 dataset raise the new challenge for classifying basic emotions and regression valence-arousal value under in-the-wild environments. In this paper, we present an affective expression analysis model that deals with the above challenges. Our approach includes STAT and Temporal Module for fine-tuning again face feature model. We experimented on Aff-Wild2 dataset, a large-scale dataset for ABAW Challenge with the annotations for both the categorical and valence-arousal emotion. We achieved the expression score 0.543 and valence-arousal score 0.534 on the validation set.
Learning Deep Kernels for Non-Parametric Two-Sample Tests
Authors: Feng Liu, Wenkai Xu, Jie Lu, Guangquan Zhang, Arthur Gretton, Danica J. Sutherland
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Two-sample testing, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

We propose a class of kernel-based two-sample tests, which aim to determine whether two sets of samples are drawn from the same distribution. Our tests are constructed from kernels parameterized by deep neural nets, trained to maximize test power. These tests adapt to variations in distribution smoothness and shape over space, and are especially suited to high dimensions and complex data. By contrast, the simpler kernels used in prior kernel testing work are spatially homogeneous, and adaptive only in lengthscale. We explain how this scheme includes popular classifier-based two-sample tests as a special case, but improves on them in general. We provide the first proof of consistency for the proposed adaptation method, which applies both to kernels on deep features and to simpler radial basis kernels or multiple kernel learning. In experiments, we establish the superior performance of our deep kernels in hypothesis testing on benchmark and real-world data. The code of our deep-kernel-based two sample tests is available at https://github.com/fengliu90/DK-for-TST.
Deep Sigma Point Processes
Authors: Martin Jankowiak, Geoff Pleiss, Jacob R. Gardner
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, Point Processes, regression

We introduce Deep Sigma Point Processes, a class of parametric models inspired by the compositional structure of Deep Gaussian Processes (DGPs). Deep Sigma Point Processes (DSPPs) retain many of the attractive features of (variational) DGPs, including mini-batch training and predictive uncertainty that is controlled by kernel basis functions. Importantly, since DSPPs admit a simple maximum likelihood inference procedure, the resulting predictive distributions are not degraded by any posterior approximations. In an extensive empirical comparison on univariate and multivariate regression tasks we find that the resulting predictive distributions are significantly better calibrated than those obtained with other probabilistic methods for scalable regression, including variational DGPs--often by as much as a nat per datapoint.
Learning Precise 3D Manipulation from Multiple Uncalibrated Cameras
Authors: Iretiayo Akinola, Jacob Varley, Dmitry Kalashnikov
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration

In this work, we present an effective multi-view approach to closed-loop end-to-end learning of precise manipulation tasks that are 3D in nature. Our method learns to accomplish these tasks using multiple statically placed but uncalibrated RGB camera views without building an explicit 3D representation such as a pointcloud or voxel grid. This multi-camera approach achieves superior task performance on difficult stacking and insertion tasks compared to single-view baselines. Single view robotic agents struggle from occlusion and challenges in estimating relative poses between points of interest. While full 3D scene representations (voxels or pointclouds) are obtainable from registered output of multiple depth sensors, several challenges complicate operating off such explicit 3D representations. These challenges include imperfect camera calibration, poor depth maps due to object properties such as reflective surfaces, and slower inference speeds over 3D representations compared to 2D images. Our use of static but uncalibrated cameras does not require camera-robot or camera-camera calibration making the proposed approach easy to setup and our use of \textit{sensor dropout} during training makes it resilient to the loss of camera-views after deployment.
An Evolutionary Deep Learning Method for Short-term Wind Speed Prediction: A Case Study of the Lillgrund Offshore Wind Farm
Authors: Mehdi Neshat, Meysam Majidi Nezhad, Ehsan Abbasnejad, Lina Bertling Tjernberg, Davide Astiaso Garcia, Bradley Alexander, Markus Wagner
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00

Accurate short-term wind speed forecasting is essential for large-scale integration of wind power generation. However, the seasonal and stochastic characteristics of wind speed make forecasting a challenging task. This study uses a new hybrid evolutionary approach that uses a popular evolutionary search algorithm, CMA-ES, to tune the hyper-parameters of two Long short-term memory(LSTM) ANN models for wind prediction. The proposed hybrid approach is trained on data gathered from an offshore wind turbine installed in a Swedish wind farm located in the Baltic Sea. Two forecasting horizons including ten-minutes ahead (absolute short term) and one-hour ahead (short term) are considered in our experiments. Our experimental results indicate that the new approach is superior to five other applied machine learning models, i.e., polynomial neural network (PNN), feed-forward neural network (FNN), nonlinear autoregressive neural network (NAR) and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), as measured by five performance criteria.
Greedy Policy Search: A Simple Baseline for Learnable Test-Time Augmentation
Authors: Dmitry Molchanov, Alexander Lyzhov, Yuliya Molchanova, Arsenii Ashukha, Dmitry Vetrov
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification

Test-time data augmentation$-$averaging the predictions of a machine learning model across multiple augmented samples of data$-$is a widely used technique that improves the predictive performance. While many advanced learnable data augmentation techniques have emerged in recent years, they are focused on the training phase. Such techniques are not necessarily optimal for test-time augmentation and can be outperformed by a policy consisting of simple crops and flips. The primary goal of this paper is to demonstrate that test-time augmentation policies can be successfully learned too. We introduce greedy policy search (GPS), a simple but high-performing method for learning a policy of test-time augmentation. We demonstrate that augmentation policies learned with GPS achieve superior predictive performance on image classification problems, provide better in-domain uncertainty estimation, and improve the robustness to domain shift.
Estimation-Action-Reflection: Towards Deep Interaction Between Conversational and Recommender Systems
Authors: Wenqiang Lei, Xiangnan He, Yisong Miao, Qingyun Wu, Richang Hong, Min-Yen Kan, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems are embracing conversational technologies to obtain user preferences dynamically, and to overcome inherent limitations of their static models. A successful Conversational Recommender System (CRS) requires proper handling of interactions between conversation and recommendation. We argue that three fundamental problems need to be solved: 1) what questions to ask regarding item attributes, 2) when to recommend items, and 3) how to adapt to the users' online feedback. To the best of our knowledge, there lacks a unified framework that addresses these problems. In this work, we fill this missing interaction framework gap by proposing a new CRS framework named Estimation-Action-Reflection, or EAR, which consists of three stages to better converse with users. (1) Estimation, which builds predictive models to estimate user preference on both items and item attributes; (2) Action, which learns a dialogue policy to determine whether to ask attributes or recommend items, based on Estimation stage and conversation history; and (3) Reflection, which updates the recommender model when a user rejects the recommendations made by the Action stage. We present two conversation scenarios on binary and enumerated questions, and conduct extensive experiments on two datasets from Yelp and LastFM, for each scenario, respectively. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art method CRM [32], corresponding to fewer conversation turns and a higher level of recommendation hits.
Using Deep Learning to Improve Ensemble Smoother: Applications to Subsurface Characterization
Authors: Jiangjiang Zhang, Qiang Zheng, Laosheng Wu, Lingzao Zeng
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation, State Estimation

Ensemble smoother (ES) has been widely used in various research fields to reduce the uncertainty of the system-of-interest. However, the commonly-adopted ES method that employs the Kalman formula, that is, ES$_\text{(K)}$, does not perform well when the probability distributions involved are non-Gaussian. To address this issue, we suggest to use deep learning (DL) to derive an alternative update scheme for ES in complex data assimilation applications. Here we show that the DL-based ES method, that is, ES$_\text{(DL)}$, is more general and flexible. In this new update scheme, a high volume of training data are generated from a relatively small-sized ensemble of model parameters and simulation outputs, and possible non-Gaussian features can be preserved in the training data and captured by an adequate DL model. This new variant of ES is tested in two subsurface characterization problems with or without Gaussian assumptions. Results indicate that ES$_\text{(DL)}$ can produce similar (in the Gaussian case) or even better (in the non-Gaussian case) results compared to those from ES$_\text{(K)}$. The success of ES$_\text{(DL)}$ comes from the power of DL in extracting complex (including non-Gaussian) features and learning nonlinear relationships from massive amounts of training data. Although in this work we only apply the ES$_\text{(DL)}$ method in parameter estimation problems, the proposed idea can be conveniently extended to analysis of model structural uncertainty and state estimation in real-time forecasting studies.
Anonymizing Data for Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning
Authors: Olivia Choudhury, Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis, Theodoros Salonidis, Issa Sylla, Yoonyoung Park, Grace Hsu, Amar Das
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated learning enables training a global machine learning model from data distributed across multiple sites, without having to move the data. This is particularly relevant in healthcare applications, where data is rife with personal, highly-sensitive information, and data analysis methods must provably comply with regulatory guidelines. Although federated learning prevents sharing raw data, it is still possible to launch privacy attacks on the model parameters that are exposed during the training process, or on the generated machine learning model. In this paper, we propose the first syntactic approach for offering privacy in the context of federated learning. Unlike the state-of-the-art differential privacy-based frameworks, our approach aims to maximize utility or model performance, while supporting a defensible level of privacy, as demanded by GDPR and HIPAA. We perform a comprehensive empirical evaluation on two important problems in the healthcare domain, using real-world electronic health data of 1 million patients. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in achieving high model performance, while offering the desired level of privacy. Through comparative studies, we also show that, for varying datasets, experimental setups, and privacy budgets, our approach offers higher model performance than differential privacy-based techniques in federated learning.
Inverted-File k-Means Clustering: Performance Analysis
Authors: Kazuo Aoyama, Kazumi Saito, Tetsuo Ikeda
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This paper presents an inverted-file k-means clustering algorithm (IVF) suitable for a large-scale sparse data set with potentially numerous classes. Given such a data set, IVF efficiently works at high-speed and with low memory consumption, which keeps the same solution as a standard Lloyd's algorithm. The high performance arises from two distinct data representations. One is a sparse expression for both the object and mean feature vectors. The other is an inverted-file data structure for a set of the mean feature vectors. To confirm the effect of these representations, we design three algorithms using distinct data structures and expressions for comparison. We experimentally demonstrate that IVF achieves better performance than the designed algorithms when they are applied to large-scale real document data sets in a modern computer system equipped with superscalar out-of-order processors and a deep hierarchical memory system. We also introduce a simple yet practical clock-cycle per instruction (CPI) model for speed-performance analysis. Analytical results reveal that IVF suppresses three performance degradation factors: the numbers of cache misses, branch mispredictions, and the completed instructions.
Safe Imitation Learning via Fast Bayesian Reward Inference from Preferences
Authors: Daniel S. Brown, Russell Coleman, Ravi Srinivasan, Scott Niekum
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Atari Games, Bayesian Inference, Imitation Learning

Bayesian reward learning from demonstrations enables rigorous safety and uncertainty analysis when performing imitation learning. However, Bayesian reward learning methods are typically computationally intractable for complex control problems. We propose Bayesian Reward Extrapolation (Bayesian REX), a highly efficient Bayesian reward learning algorithm that scales to high-dimensional imitation learning problems by pre-training a low-dimensional feature encoding via self-supervised tasks and then leveraging preferences over demonstrations to perform fast Bayesian inference. Bayesian REX can learn to play Atari games from demonstrations, without access to the game score and can generate 100,000 samples from the posterior over reward functions in only 5 minutes on a personal laptop. Bayesian REX also results in imitation learning performance that is competitive with or better than state-of-the-art methods that only learn point estimates of the reward function. Finally, Bayesian REX enables efficient high-confidence policy evaluation without having access to samples of the reward function. These high-confidence performance bounds can be used to rank the performance and risk of a variety of evaluation policies and provide a way to detect reward hacking behaviors.