pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Interactive Insight Identification and Annotation Framework for Power Grid Pixel Maps using DenseU-Hierarchical VAE
Authors: Tianye Zhang, Haozhe Feng, Zexian Chen, Can Wang, Yanhao Huang, Yong Tang, Wei Chen
Date: 2019-05-22 00:00:00

Insights in power grid pixel maps (PGPMs) refer to important facility operating states and unexpected changes in the power grid. Identifying insights helps analysts understand the collaboration of various parts of the grid so that preventive and correct operations can be taken to avoid potential accidents. Existing solutions for identifying insights in PGPMs are performed manually, which may be laborious and expertise-dependent. In this paper, we propose an interactive insight identification and annotation framework by leveraging an enhanced variational autoencoder (VAE). In particular, a new architecture, DenseU-Hierarchical VAE (DUHiV), is designed to learn representations from large-sized PGPMs, which achieves a significantly tighter evidence lower bound (ELBO) than existing Hierarchical VAEs with a Multilayer Perceptron architecture. Our approach supports modulating the derived representations in an interactive visual interface, discover potential insights and create multi-label annotations. Evaluations using real-world PGPMs datasets show that our framework outperforms the baseline models in identifying and annotating insights.
VecHGrad for Solving Accurately Complex Tensor Decomposition
Authors: Jeremy Charlier, Vladimir Makarenkov
Date: 2019-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Tensor Decomposition

Tensor decomposition, a collection of factorization techniques for multidimensional arrays, are among the most general and powerful tools for scientific analysis. However, because of their increasing size, today's data sets require more complex tensor decomposition involving factorization with multiple matrices and diagonal tensors such as DEDICOM or PARATUCK2. Traditional tensor resolution algorithms such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Non-linear Conjugate Gradient descent (NCG) or Alternating Least Square (ALS), cannot be easily applied to complex tensor decomposition or often lead to poor accuracy at convergence. We propose a new resolution algorithm, called VecHGrad, for accurate and efficient stochastic resolution over all existing tensor decomposition, specifically designed for complex decomposition. VecHGrad relies on gradient, Hessian-vector product and adaptive line search to ensure the convergence during optimization. Our experiments on five real-world data sets with the state-of-the-art deep learning gradient optimization models show that VecHGrad is capable of converging considerably faster because of its superior theoretical convergence rate per step. Therefore, VecHGrad targets as well deep learning optimizer algorithms. The experiments are performed for various tensor decomposition including CP, DEDICOM and PARATUCK2. Although it involves a slightly more complex update rule, VecHGrad's runtime is similar in practice to that of gradient methods such as SGD, Adam or RMSProp.
MQLV: Optimal Policy of Money Management in Retail Banking with Q-Learning
Authors: Jeremy Charlier, Gaston Ormazabal, Radu State, Jean Hilger
Date: 2019-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Management, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Time Series Analysis

Reinforcement learning has become one of the best approach to train a computer game emulator capable of human level performance. In a reinforcement learning approach, an optimal value function is learned across a set of actions, or decisions, that leads to a set of states giving different rewards, with the objective to maximize the overall reward. A policy assigns to each state-action pairs an expected return. We call an optimal policy a policy for which the value function is optimal. QLBS, Q-Learner in the Black-Scholes(-Merton) Worlds, applies the reinforcement learning concepts, and noticeably, the popular Q-learning algorithm, to the financial stochastic model of Black, Scholes and Merton. It is, however, specifically optimized for the geometric Brownian motion and the vanilla options. Its range of application is, therefore, limited to vanilla option pricing within financial markets. We propose MQLV, Modified Q-Learner for the Vasicek model, a new reinforcement learning approach that determines the optimal policy of money management based on the aggregated financial transactions of the clients. It unlocks new frontiers to establish personalized credit card limits or to fulfill bank loan applications, targeting the retail banking industry. MQLV extends the simulation to mean reverting stochastic diffusion processes and it uses a digital function, a Heaviside step function expressed in its discrete form, to estimate the probability of a future event such as a payment default. In our experiments, we first show the similarities between a set of historical financial transactions and Vasicek generated transactions and, then, we underline the potential of MQLV on generated Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, MQLV is the first Q-learning Vasicek-based methodology addressing transparent decision making processes in retail banking.
Predicting Sparse Clients' Actions with CPOPT-Net in the Banking Environment
Authors: Jeremy Charlier, Radu State, Jean Hilger
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Tensor Decomposition, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The digital revolution of the banking system with evolving European regulations have pushed the major banking actors to innovate by a newly use of their clients' digital information. Given highly sparse client activities, we propose CPOPT-Net, an algorithm that combines the CP canonical tensor decomposition, a multidimensional matrix decomposition that factorizes a tensor as the sum of rank-one tensors, and neural networks. CPOPT-Net removes efficiently sparse information with a gradient-based resolution while relying on neural networks for time series predictions. Our experiments show that CPOPT-Net is capable to perform accurate predictions of the clients' actions in the context of personalized recommendation. CPOPT-Net is the first algorithm to use non-linear conjugate gradient tensor resolution with neural networks to propose predictions of financial activities on a public data set.
The Supermarket Model with Known and Predicted Service Times
Authors: Michael Mitzenmacher, Matteo Dell'Amico
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00

The supermarket model refers to a system with a large number of queues, where new customers choose d queues at random and join the one with the fewest customers. This model demonstrates the power of even small amounts of choice, as compared to simply joining a queue chosen uniformly at random, for load balancing systems. In this work we perform simulation-based studies to consider variations where service times for a customer are predicted, as might be done in modern settings using machine learning techniques or related mechanisms. Our primary takeaway is that using even seemingly weak predictions of service times can yield significant benefits over blind First In First Out queueing in this context. However, some care must be taken when using predicted service time information to both choose a queue and order elements for service within a queue; while in many cases using the information for both choosing and ordering is beneficial, in many of our simulation settings we find that simply using the number of jobs to choose a queue is better when using predicted service times to order jobs in a queue. In our simulations, we evaluate both synthetic and real-world workloads--in the latter, service times are predicted by machine learning. Our results provide practical guidance for the design of real-world systems; moreover, we leave many natural theoretical open questions for future work, validating their relevance to real-world situations.
Exploiting Cognitive Structure for Adaptive Learning
Authors: Qi Liu, Shiwei Tong, Chuanren Liu, Hongke Zhao, Enhong Chen, Haiping Ma, Shijin Wang
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00

Adaptive learning, also known as adaptive teaching, relies on learning path recommendation, which sequentially recommends personalized learning items (e.g., lectures, exercises) to satisfy the unique needs of each learner. Although it is well known that modeling the cognitive structure including knowledge level of learners and knowledge structure (e.g., the prerequisite relations) of learning items is important for learning path recommendation, existing methods for adaptive learning often separately focus on either knowledge levels of learners or knowledge structure of learning items. To fully exploit the multifaceted cognitive structure for learning path recommendation, we propose a Cognitive Structure Enhanced framework for Adaptive Learning, named CSEAL. By viewing path recommendation as a Markov Decision Process and applying an actor-critic algorithm, CSEAL can sequentially identify the right learning items to different learners. Specifically, we first utilize a recurrent neural network to trace the evolving knowledge levels of learners at each learning step. Then, we design a navigation algorithm on the knowledge structure to ensure the logicality of learning paths, which reduces the search space in the decision process. Finally, the actor-critic algorithm is used to determine what to learn next and whose parameters are dynamically updated along the learning path. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CSEAL.
A Novel Chaos Theory Inspired Neuronal Architecture
Authors: Harikrishnan N B, Nithin Nagaraj
Date: 2019-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

The practical success of widely used machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) algorithms in Artificial Intelligence (AI) community owes to availability of large datasets for training and huge computational resources. Despite the enormous practical success of AI, these algorithms are only loosely inspired from the biological brain and do not mimic any of the fundamental properties of neurons in the brain, one such property being the chaotic firing of biological neurons. This motivates us to develop a novel neuronal architecture where the individual neurons are intrinsically chaotic in nature. By making use of the topological transitivity property of chaos, our neuronal network is able to perform classification tasks with very less number of training samples. For the MNIST dataset, with as low as $0.1 \%$ of the total training data, our method outperforms ML and matches DL in classification accuracy for up to $7$ training samples/class. For the Iris dataset, our accuracy is comparable with ML algorithms, and even with just two training samples/class, we report an accuracy as high as $95.8 \%$. This work highlights the effectiveness of chaos and its properties for learning and paves the way for chaos-inspired neuronal architectures by closely mimicking the chaotic nature of neurons in the brain.
Use of Artificial Intelligence Techniques / Applications in Cyber Defense
Authors: Ensar Şeker
Date: 2019-05-24 00:00:00

Nowadays, considering the speed of the processes and the amount of data used in cyber defense, it cannot be expected to have an effective defense by using only human power without the help of automation systems. However, for the effective defense against dynamically evolving attacks on networks, it is difficult to develop software with conventional fixed algorithms. This can be achieved by using artificial intelligence methods that provide flexibility and learning capability. The likelihood of developing cyber defense capabilities through increased intelligence of defense systems is quite high. Given the problems associated with cyber defense in real life, it is clear that many cyber defense problems can be successfully solved only when artificial intelligence methods are used. In this article, the current artificial intelligence practices and techniques are reviewed and the use and importance of artificial intelligence in cyber defense systems is mentioned. The aim of this article is to be able to explain the use of these methods in the field of cyber defense with current examples by considering and analyzing the artificial intelligence technologies and methodologies that are currently being developed and integrating them with the role and adaptation of the technology and methodology in the defense of cyberspace.
Understanding Perceptions and Attitudes in Breast Cancer Discussions on Twitter
Authors: Francois Modave, Yunpeng Zhao, Janice Krieger, Zhe He, Yi Guo, Jinhai Huo, Mattia Prosperi, Jiang Bian
Date: 2019-05-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Among American women, the rate of breast cancer is only second to lung cancer. An estimated 12.4% women will develop breast cancer over the course of their lifetime. The widespread use of social media across the socio-economic spectrum offers unparalleled ways to facilitate information sharing, in particular as it pertains to health. Social media is also used by many healthcare stakeholders, ranging from government agencies to healthcare industry, to disseminate health information and to engage patients. The purpose of this study is to investigate people's perceptions and attitudes relate to breast cancer, especially those that are related to physical activities, on Twitter. To achieve this, we first identified and collected tweets related to breast cancer; and then used topic modeling and sentiment analysis techniques to understanding discussion themes and quantify Twitter users' perceptions and emotions w.r.t breast cancer to answer 5 research questions.
Scene Induced Multi-Modal Trajectory Forecasting via Planning
Authors: Nachiket Deo, Mohan M. Trivedi
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Trajectory Forecasting

We address multi-modal trajectory forecasting of agents in unknown scenes by formulating it as a planning problem. We present an approach consisting of three models; a goal prediction model to identify potential goals of the agent, an inverse reinforcement learning model to plan optimal paths to each goal, and a trajectory generator to obtain future trajectories along the planned paths. Analysis of predictions on the Stanford drone dataset, shows generalizability of our approach to novel scenes.
Diverse communities behave like typical random ecosystems
Authors: Wenping Cui, Robert Marsland III, Pankaj Mehta
Date: 2019-04-01 00:00:00

In 1972, Robert May triggered a worldwide research program studying ecological communities using random matrix theory. Yet, it remains unclear if and when we can treat real communities as random ecosystems. Here, we draw on recent progress in random matrix theory and statistical physics to extend May's approach to generalized consumer-resource models. We show that in diverse ecosystems adding even modest amounts of noise to consumer preferences results in a transition to "typicality" where macroscopic ecological properties of communities are indistinguishable from those of random ecosystems, even when resource preferences have prominent designed structures. We test these ideas using numerical simulations on a wide variety of ecological models. Our work offers an explanation for the success of random consumer-resource models in reproducing experimentally observed ecological patterns in microbial communities and highlights the difficulty of scaling up bottom-up approaches in synthetic ecology to diverse communities.
GraRep: Learning Graph Representations with Global Structural Information
Authors: Shaosheng Cao, Wei Lu, Qiongkai Xu
Date: 2015-10-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: WWW 2015 10
Tasks: Clustering, General Classification, Node Classification

In this paper, we present {GraRep}, a novel model for learning vertex representations of weighted graphs. This model learns low dimensional vectors to represent vertices appearing in a graph and, unlike existing work, integrates global structural information of the graph into the learning process. We also formally analyze the connections between our work and several previous research efforts, including the DeepWalk model of Perozzi et al. as well as the skip-gram model with negative sampling of Mikolov et al. We conduct experiments on a language network, a social network as well as a citation network and show that our learned global representations can be effectively used as features in tasks such as clustering, classification and visualization. Empirical results demonstrate that our representation significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in such tasks.
A Hierarchical Probabilistic U-Net for Modeling Multi-Scale Ambiguities
Authors: Simon A. A. Kohl, Bernardino Romera-Paredes, Klaus H. Maier-Hein, Danilo Jimenez Rezende, S. M. Ali Eslami, Pushmeet Kohli, Andrew Zisserman, Olaf Ronneberger
Date: 2019-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Inductive Bias, Instance Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Medical imaging only indirectly measures the molecular identity of the tissue within each voxel, which often produces only ambiguous image evidence for target measures of interest, like semantic segmentation. This diversity and the variations of plausible interpretations are often specific to given image regions and may thus manifest on various scales, spanning all the way from the pixel to the image level. In order to learn a flexible distribution that can account for multiple scales of variations, we propose the Hierarchical Probabilistic U-Net, a segmentation network with a conditional variational auto-encoder (cVAE) that uses a hierarchical latent space decomposition. We show that this model formulation enables sampling and reconstruction of segmenations with high fidelity, i.e. with finely resolved detail, while providing the flexibility to learn complex structured distributions across scales. We demonstrate these abilities on the task of segmenting ambiguous medical scans as well as on instance segmentation of neurobiological and natural images. Our model automatically separates independent factors across scales, an inductive bias that we deem beneficial in structured output prediction tasks beyond segmentation.
An attention-based multi-resolution model for prostate whole slide imageclassification and localization
Authors: Jiayun Li, Wenyuan Li, Arkadiusz Gertych, Beatrice S. Knudsen, William Speier, Corey W. Arnold
Date: 2019-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Multiple Instance Learning

Histology review is often used as the `gold standard' for disease diagnosis. Computer aided diagnosis tools can potentially help improve current pathology workflows by reducing examination time and interobserver variability. Previous work in cancer grading has focused mainly on classifying pre-defined regions of interest (ROIs), or relied on large amounts of fine-grained labels. In this paper, we propose a two-stage attention-based multiple instance learning model for slide-level cancer grading and weakly-supervised ROI detection and demonstrate its use in prostate cancer. Compared with existing Gleason classification models, our model goes a step further by utilizing visualized saliency maps to select informative tiles for fine-grained grade classification. The model was primarily developed on a large-scale whole slide dataset consisting of 3,521 prostate biopsy slides with only slide-level labels from 718 patients. The model achieved state-of-the-art performance for prostate cancer grading with an accuracy of 85.11\% for classifying benign, low-grade (Gleason grade 3+3 or 3+4), and high-grade (Gleason grade 4+3 or higher) slides on an independent test set.
Video from Stills: Lensless Imaging with Rolling Shutter
Authors: Nick Antipa, Patrick Oare, Emrah Bostan, Ren Ng, Laura Waller
Date: 2019-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing

Because image sensor chips have a finite bandwidth with which to read out pixels, recording video typically requires a trade-off between frame rate and pixel count. Compressed sensing techniques can circumvent this trade-off by assuming that the image is compressible. Here, we propose using multiplexing optics to spatially compress the scene, enabling information about the whole scene to be sampled from a row of sensor pixels, which can be read off quickly via a rolling shutter CMOS sensor. Conveniently, such multiplexing can be achieved with a simple lensless, diffuser-based imaging system. Using sparse recovery methods, we are able to recover 140 video frames at over 4,500 frames per second, all from a single captured image with a rolling shutter sensor. Our proof-of-concept system uses easily-fabricated diffusers paired with an off-the-shelf sensor. The resulting prototype enables compressive encoding of high frame rate video into a single rolling shutter exposure, and exceeds the sampling-limited performance of an equivalent global shutter system for sufficiently sparse objects.
On Network Design Spaces for Visual Recognition
Authors: Ilija Radosavovic, Justin Johnson, Saining Xie, Wan-Yen Lo, Piotr Dollár
Date: 2019-05-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Over the past several years progress in designing better neural network architectures for visual recognition has been substantial. To help sustain this rate of progress, in this work we propose to reexamine the methodology for comparing network architectures. In particular, we introduce a new comparison paradigm of distribution estimates, in which network design spaces are compared by applying statistical techniques to populations of sampled models, while controlling for confounding factors like network complexity. Compared to current methodologies of comparing point and curve estimates of model families, distribution estimates paint a more complete picture of the entire design landscape. As a case study, we examine design spaces used in neural architecture search (NAS). We find significant statistical differences between recent NAS design space variants that have been largely overlooked. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that the design spaces for standard model families like ResNeXt can be comparable to the more complex ones used in recent NAS work. We hope these insights into distribution analysis will enable more robust progress toward discovering better networks for visual recognition.
What Can Neural Networks Reason About?
Authors: Keyulu Xu, Jingling Li, Mozhi Zhang, Simon S. Du, Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi, Stefanie Jegelka
Date: 2019-05-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Neural networks have succeeded in many reasoning tasks. Empirically, these tasks require specialized network structures, e.g., Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) perform well on many such tasks, but less structured networks fail. Theoretically, there is limited understanding of why and when a network structure generalizes better than others, although they have equal expressive power. In this paper, we develop a framework to characterize which reasoning tasks a network can learn well, by studying how well its computation structure aligns with the algorithmic structure of the relevant reasoning process. We formally define this algorithmic alignment and derive a sample complexity bound that decreases with better alignment. This framework offers an explanation for the empirical success of popular reasoning models, and suggests their limitations. As an example, we unify seemingly different reasoning tasks, such as intuitive physics, visual question answering, and shortest paths, via the lens of a powerful algorithmic paradigm, dynamic programming (DP). We show that GNNs align with DP and thus are expected to solve these tasks. On several reasoning tasks, our theory is supported by empirical results.