pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Signal retrieval with measurement system knowledge using variational generative model
Authors: Zheyuan Zhu, Yangyang Sun, Johnathon White, Zenghu Chang, Shuo Pang
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Signal retrieval from a series of indirect measurements is a common task in many imaging, metrology and characterization platforms in science and engineering. Because most of the indirect measurement processes are well-described by physical models, signal retrieval can be solved with an iterative optimization that enforces measurement consistency and prior knowledge on the signal. These iterative processes are time-consuming and only accommodate a linear measurement process and convex signal constraints. Recently, neural networks have been widely adopted to supersede iterative signal retrieval methods by approximating the inverse mapping of the measurement model. However, networks with deterministic processes have failed to distinguish signal ambiguities in an ill-posed measurement system, and retrieved signals often lack consistency with the measurement. In this work we introduce a variational generative model to capture the distribution of all possible signals, given a particular measurement. By exploiting the known measurement model in the variational generative framework, our signal retrieval process resolves the ambiguity in the forward process, and learns to retrieve signals that satisfy the measurement with high fidelity in a variety of linear and nonlinear ill-posed systems, including ultrafast pulse retrieval, coded aperture compressive video sensing and image retrieval from Fresnel hologram.
Learning Object-specific Distance from a Monocular Image
Authors: Jing Zhu, Yi Fang, Husam Abu-Haimed, Kuo-Chin Lien, Dongdong Fu, Junli Gu
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Environment perception, including object detection and distance estimation, is one of the most crucial tasks for autonomous driving. Many attentions have been paid on the object detection task, but distance estimation only arouse few interests in the computer vision community. Observing that the traditional inverse perspective mapping algorithm performs poorly for objects far away from the camera or on the curved road, in this paper, we address the challenging distance estimation problem by developing the first end-to-end learning-based model to directly predict distances for given objects in the images. Besides the introduction of a learning-based base model, we further design an enhanced model with a keypoint regressor, where a projection loss is defined to enforce a better distance estimation, especially for objects close to the camera. To facilitate the research on this task, we construct the extented KITTI and nuScenes (mini) object detection datasets with a distance for each object. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform alternative approaches (e.g., the traditional IPM, SVR) on object-specific distance estimation, particularly for the challenging cases that objects are on a curved road. Moreover, the performance margin implies the effectiveness of our enhanced method.
BERT-Based Arabic Social Media Author Profiling
Authors: Chiyu Zhang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Author Profiling, Deception Detection

We report our models for detecting age, language variety, and gender from social media data in the context of the Arabic author profiling and deception detection shared task (APDA). We build simple models based on pre-trained bidirectional encoders from transformers (BERT). We first fine-tune the pre-trained BERT model on each of the three datasets with shared task released data. Then we augment shared task data with in-house data for gender and dialect, showing the utility of augmenting training data. Our best models on the shared task test data are acquired with a majority voting of various BERT models trained under different data conditions. We acquire 54.72% accuracy for age, 93.75% for dialect, 81.67% for gender, and 40.97% joint accuracy across the three tasks.
Learning to Learn and Predict: A Meta-Learning Approach for Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Jiawei Wu, Wenhan Xiong, William Yang Wang
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Classification, Entity Typing, General Classification, Meta-Learning, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Prediction, text-classification, Text Classification

Many tasks in natural language processing can be viewed as multi-label classification problems. However, most of the existing models are trained with the standard cross-entropy loss function and use a fixed prediction policy (e.g., a threshold of 0.5) for all the labels, which completely ignores the complexity and dependencies among different labels. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning method to capture these complex label dependencies. More specifically, our method utilizes a meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. The training policies are then used to train the classifier with the cross-entropy loss function, and the prediction policies are further implemented for prediction. Experimental results on fine-grained entity typing and text classification demonstrate that our proposed method can obtain more accurate multi-label classification results.
An Efficient Algorithm for Multiple-Pursuer-Multiple-Evader Pursuit/Evasion Game
Authors: Joshua R. Bertram, Peng Wei
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00

We present a method for pursuit/evasion that is highly efficient and and scales to large teams of aircraft. The underlying algorithm is an efficient algorithm for solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that supports fully continuous state spaces. We demonstrate the algorithm in a team pursuit/evasion setting in a 3D environment using a pseudo-6DOF model and study performance by varying sizes of team members. We show that as the number of aircraft in the simulation grows, computational performance remains efficient and is suitable for real-time systems. We also define probability-to-win and survivability metrics that describe the teams' performance over multiple trials, and show that the algorithm performs consistently. We provide numerical results showing control inputs for a typical 1v1 encounter and provide videos for 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4, and 10v10 contests to demonstrate the ability of the algorithm to adapt seamlessly to complex environments.
Meta-learnt priors slow down catastrophic forgetting in neural networks
Authors: Giacomo Spigler
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Current training regimes for deep learning usually involve exposure to a single task / dataset at a time. Here we start from the observation that in this context the trained model is not given any knowledge of anything outside its (single-task) training distribution, and has thus no way to learn parameters (i.e., feature detectors or policies) that could be helpful to solve other tasks, and to limit future interference with the acquired knowledge, and thus catastrophic forgetting. Here we show that catastrophic forgetting can be mitigated in a meta-learning context, by exposing a neural network to multiple tasks in a sequential manner during training. Finally, we present SeqFOMAML, a meta-learning algorithm that implements these principles, and we evaluate it on sequential learning problems composed by Omniglot and MiniImageNet classification tasks.
OncoNetExplainer: Explainable Predictions of Cancer Types Based on Gene Expression Data
Authors: Md. Rezaul Karim, Michael Cochez, Oya Beyan, Stefan Decker, Christoph Lange
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance, Prognosis

The discovery of important biomarkers is a significant step towards understanding the molecular mechanisms of carcinogenesis; enabling accurate diagnosis for, and prognosis of, a certain cancer type. Before recommending any diagnosis, genomics data such as gene expressions(GE) and clinical outcomes need to be analyzed. However, complex nature, high dimensionality, and heterogeneity in genomics data make the overall analysis challenging. Convolutional neural networks(CNN) have shown tremendous success in solving such problems. However, neural network models are perceived mostly as `black box' methods because of their not well-understood internal functioning. However, interpretability is important to provide insights on why a given cancer case has a certain type. Besides, finding the most important biomarkers can help in recommending more accurate treatments and drug repositioning. In this paper, we propose a new approach called OncoNetExplainer to make explainable predictions of cancer types based on GE data. We used genomics data about 9,074 cancer patients covering 33 different cancer types from the Pan-Cancer Atlas on which we trained CNN and VGG16 networks using guided-gradient class activation maps++(GradCAM++). Further, we generate class-specific heat maps to identify significant biomarkers and computed feature importance in terms of mean absolute impact to rank top genes across all the cancer types. Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that both models exhibit high confidence at predicting the cancer types correctly giving an average precision of 96.25%. To provide comparisons with the baselines, we identified top genes, and cancer-specific driver genes using gradient boosted trees and SHapley Additive exPlanations(SHAP). Finally, our findings were validated with the annotations provided by the TumorPortal.
Learning Semantic Parsers from Denotations with Latent Structured Alignments and Abstract Programs
Authors: Bailin Wang, Ivan Titov, Mirella Lapata
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Semantic Parsing

Semantic parsing aims to map natural language utterances onto machine interpretable meaning representations, aka programs whose execution against a real-world environment produces a denotation. Weakly-supervised semantic parsers are trained on utterance-denotation pairs treating programs as latent. The task is challenging due to the large search space and spuriousness of programs which may execute to the correct answer but do not generalize to unseen examples. Our goal is to instill an inductive bias in the parser to help it distinguish between spurious and correct programs. We capitalize on the intuition that correct programs would likely respect certain structural constraints were they to be aligned to the question (e.g., program fragments are unlikely to align to overlapping text spans) and propose to model alignments as structured latent variables. In order to make the latent-alignment framework tractable, we decompose the parsing task into (1) predicting a partial "abstract program" and (2) refining it while modeling structured alignments with differential dynamic programming. We obtain state-of-the-art performance on the WIKITABLEQUESTIONS and WIKISQL datasets. When compared to a standard attention baseline, we observe that the proposed structured-alignment mechanism is highly beneficial.
Knowledge Enhanced Contextual Word Representations
Authors: Matthew E. Peters, Mark Neumann, Robert L. Logan IV, Roy Schwartz, Vidur Joshi, Sameer Singh, Noah A. Smith
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Entity Linking, Entity Typing, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Relation Classification, Relation Extraction, Word Sense Disambiguation

Contextual word representations, typically trained on unstructured, unlabeled text, do not contain any explicit grounding to real world entities and are often unable to remember facts about those entities. We propose a general method to embed multiple knowledge bases (KBs) into large scale models, and thereby enhance their representations with structured, human-curated knowledge. For each KB, we first use an integrated entity linker to retrieve relevant entity embeddings, then update contextual word representations via a form of word-to-entity attention. In contrast to previous approaches, the entity linkers and self-supervised language modeling objective are jointly trained end-to-end in a multitask setting that combines a small amount of entity linking supervision with a large amount of raw text. After integrating WordNet and a subset of Wikipedia into BERT, the knowledge enhanced BERT (KnowBert) demonstrates improved perplexity, ability to recall facts as measured in a probing task and downstream performance on relationship extraction, entity typing, and word sense disambiguation. KnowBert's runtime is comparable to BERT's and it scales to large KBs.
MLOD: A multi-view 3D object detection based on robust feature fusion method
Authors: Jian Deng, Krzysztof Czarnecki
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Region Proposal

This paper presents Multi-view Labelling Object Detector (MLOD). The detector takes an RGB image and a LIDAR point cloud as input and follows the two-stage object detection framework. A Region Proposal Network (RPN) generates 3D proposals in a Bird's Eye View (BEV) projection of the point cloud. The second stage projects the 3D proposal bounding boxes to the image and BEV feature maps and sends the corresponding map crops to a detection header for classification and bounding-box regression. Unlike other multi-view based methods, the cropped image features are not directly fed to the detection header, but masked by the depth information to filter out parts outside 3D bounding boxes. The fusion of image and BEV features is challenging, as they are derived from different perspectives. We introduce a novel detection header, which provides detection results not just from fusion layer, but also from each sensor channel. Hence the object detector can be trained on data labelled in different views to avoid the degeneration of feature extractors. MLOD achieves state-of-the-art performance on the KITTI 3D object detection benchmark. Most importantly, the evaluation shows that the new header architecture is effective in preventing image feature extractor degeneration.
Joint Learning of Saliency Detection and Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yu Zeng, Yunzhi Zhuge, Huchuan Lu, Lihe Zhang
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Saliency Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods usually utilize the results of pre-trained saliency detection (SD) models without explicitly modeling the connections between the two tasks, which is not the most efficient configuration. Here we propose a unified multi-task learning framework to jointly solve WSSS and SD using a single network, \ie saliency, and segmentation network (SSNet). SSNet consists of a segmentation network (SN) and a saliency aggregation module (SAM). For an input image, SN generates the segmentation result and, SAM predicts the saliency of each category and aggregating the segmentation masks of all categories into a saliency map. The proposed network is trained end-to-end with image-level category labels and class-agnostic pixel-level saliency labels. Experiments on PASCAL VOC 2012 segmentation dataset and four saliency benchmark datasets show the performance of our method compares favorably against state-of-the-art weakly supervised segmentation methods and fully supervised saliency detection methods.
Self-Teaching Networks
Authors: Liang Lu, Eric Sun, Yifan Gong
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We propose self-teaching networks to improve the generalization capacity of deep neural networks. The idea is to generate soft supervision labels using the output layer for training the lower layers of the network. During the network training, we seek an auxiliary loss that drives the lower layer to mimic the behavior of the output layer. The connection between the two network layers through the auxiliary loss can help the gradient flow, which works similar to the residual networks. Furthermore, the auxiliary loss also works as a regularizer, which improves the generalization capacity of the network. We evaluated the self-teaching network with deep recurrent neural networks on speech recognition tasks, where we trained the acoustic model using 30 thousand hours of data. We tested the acoustic model using data collected from 4 scenarios. We show that the self-teaching network can achieve consistent improvements and outperform existing methods such as label smoothing and confidence penalization.
DaTscan SPECT Image Classification for Parkinson's Disease
Authors: Justin Quan, Lin Xu, Rene Xu, Tyrael Tong, Jean Su
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Diagnostic, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Management, Object Recognition

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is a neurodegenerative disease that currently does not have a cure. In order to facilitate disease management and reduce the speed of symptom progression, early diagnosis is essential. The current clinical, diagnostic approach is to have radiologists perform human visual analysis of the degeneration of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra region of the brain. Clinically, dopamine levels are monitored through observing dopamine transporter (DaT) activity. One method of DaT activity analysis is performed with the injection of an Iodine-123 fluoropropyl (123I-FP-CIT) tracer combined with single photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) imaging. The tracer illustrates the region of interest in the resulting DaTscan SPECT images. Human visual analysis is slow and vulnerable to subjectivity between radiologists, so the goal was to develop an introductory implementation of a deep convolutional neural network that can objectively and accurately classify DaTscan SPECT images as Parkinson's Disease or normal. This study illustrates the approach of using a deep convolutional neural network and evaluates its performance on DaTscan SPECT image classification. The data used in this study was obtained through a database provided by the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI). The deep neural network in this study utilizes the InceptionV3 architecture, 1st runner up in the 2015 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition (ILSVRC), as a base model. A custom, binary classifier block was added on top of this base. In order to account for the small dataset size, a ten fold cross validation was implemented to evaluate the model's performance.
Detection and Classification of Breast Cancer Metastates Based on U-Net
Authors: Lin Xu, Cheng Xu, Yi Tong, Yu Chun Su
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

This paper presents U-net based breast cancer metastases detection and classification in lymph nodes, as well as patient-level classification based on metastases detection. The whole pipeline can be divided into five steps: preprocessing and data argumentation, patch-based segmentation, post processing, slide-level classification, and patient-level classification. In order to reduce overfitting and speedup convergence, we applied batch normalization and dropout into U-Net. The final Kappa score reaches 0.902 on training data.
Option Encoder: A Framework for Discovering a Policy Basis in Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Arjun Manoharan, Rahul Ramesh, Balaraman Ravindran
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Option discovery and skill acquisition frameworks are integral to the functioning of a Hierarchically organized Reinforcement learning agent. However, such techniques often yield a large number of options or skills, which can potentially be represented succinctly by filtering out any redundant information. Such a reduction can reduce the required computation while also improving the performance on a target task. In order to compress an array of option policies, we attempt to find a policy basis that accurately captures the set of all options. In this work, we propose Option Encoder, an auto-encoder based framework with intelligently constrained weights, that helps discover a collection of basis policies. The policy basis can be used as a proxy for the original set of skills in a suitable hierarchically organized framework. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on a collection of grid-worlds and on the high-dimensional Fetch-Reach robotic manipulation task by evaluating the obtained policy basis on a set of downstream tasks.
Super ensemble learning for daily streamflow forecasting: Large-scale demonstration and comparison with multiple machine learning algorithms
Authors: Hristos Tyralis, Georgia Papacharalampous, Andreas Langousis
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Ensemble Learning, regression, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Daily streamflow forecasting through data-driven approaches is traditionally performed using a single machine learning algorithm. Existing applications are mostly restricted to examination of few case studies, not allowing accurate assessment of the predictive performance of the algorithms involved. Here we propose super learning (a type of ensemble learning) by combining 10 machine learning algorithms. We apply the proposed algorithm in one-step ahead forecasting mode. For the application, we exploit a big dataset consisting of 10-year long time series of daily streamflow, precipitation and temperature from 511 basins. The super learner improves over the performance of the linear regression algorithm by 20.06%, outperforming the "hard to beat in practice" equal weight combiner. The latter improves over the performance of the linear regression algorithm by 19.21%. The best performing individual machine learning algorithm is neural networks, which improves over the performance of the linear regression algorithm by 16.73%, followed by extremely randomized trees (16.40%), XGBoost (15.92%), loess (15.36%), random forests (12.75%), polyMARS (12.36%), MARS (4.74%), lasso (0.11%) and support vector regression (-0.45%). Based on the obtained large-scale results, we propose super learning for daily streamflow forecasting.
Reverse Transfer Learning: Can Word Embeddings Trained for Different NLP Tasks Improve Neural Language Models?
Authors: Lyan Verwimp, Jerome R. Bellegarda
Date: 2019-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: domain classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Transfer Learning, Word Embeddings

Natural language processing (NLP) tasks tend to suffer from a paucity of suitably annotated training data, hence the recent success of transfer learning across a wide variety of them. The typical recipe involves: (i) training a deep, possibly bidirectional, neural network with an objective related to language modeling, for which training data is plentiful; and (ii) using the trained network to derive contextual representations that are far richer than standard linear word embeddings such as word2vec, and thus result in important gains. In this work, we wonder whether the opposite perspective is also true: can contextual representations trained for different NLP tasks improve language modeling itself? Since language models (LMs) are predominantly locally optimized, other NLP tasks may help them make better predictions based on the entire semantic fabric of a document. We test the performance of several types of pre-trained embeddings in neural LMs, and we investigate whether it is possible to make the LM more aware of global semantic information through embeddings pre-trained with a domain classification model. Initial experiments suggest that as long as the proper objective criterion is used during training, pre-trained embeddings are likely to be beneficial for neural language modeling.