pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Coresets for Estimating Means and Mean Square Error with Limited Greedy Samples
Authors: Saeed Vahidian, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Alexander Cloninger
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Node Classification

In a number of situations, collecting a function value for every data point may be prohibitively expensive, and random sampling ignores any structure in the underlying data. We introduce a scalable optimization algorithm with no correction steps (in contrast to Frank-Wolfe and its variants), a variant of gradient ascent for coreset selection in graphs, that greedily selects a weighted subset of vertices that are deemed most important to sample. Our algorithm estimates the mean of the function by taking a weighted sum only at these vertices, and we provably bound the estimation error in terms of the location and weights of the selected vertices in the graph. In addition, we consider the case where nodes have different selection costs and provide bounds on the quality of the low-cost selected coresets. We demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm on the semi-supervised node classification of graph convolutional neural network, point clouds and structured graphs, as well as sensor placement where the cost of placing sensors depends on the location of the placement. We also elucidate that the empirical convergence of our proposed method is faster than random selection and various clustering methods while still respecting sensor placement cost. The paper concludes with validation of the developed algorithm on both synthetic and real datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms the current state of the art.
Terminal Brain Damage: Exposing the Graceless Degradation in Deep Neural Networks Under Hardware Fault Attacks
Authors: Sanghyun Hong, Pietro Frigo, Yiğitcan Kaya, Cristiano Giuffrida, Tudor Dumitraş
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been shown to tolerate "brain damage": cumulative changes to the network's parameters (e.g., pruning, numerical perturbations) typically result in a graceful degradation of classification accuracy. However, the limits of this natural resilience are not well understood in the presence of small adversarial changes to the DNN parameters' underlying memory representation, such as bit-flips that may be induced by hardware fault attacks. We study the effects of bitwise corruptions on 19 DNN models---six architectures on three image classification tasks---and we show that most models have at least one parameter that, after a specific bit-flip in their bitwise representation, causes an accuracy loss of over 90%. We employ simple heuristics to efficiently identify the parameters likely to be vulnerable. We estimate that 40-50% of the parameters in a model might lead to an accuracy drop greater than 10% when individually subjected to such single-bit perturbations. To demonstrate how an adversary could take advantage of this vulnerability, we study the impact of an exemplary hardware fault attack, Rowhammer, on DNNs. Specifically, we show that a Rowhammer enabled attacker co-located in the same physical machine can inflict significant accuracy drops (up to 99%) even with single bit-flip corruptions and no knowledge of the model. Our results expose the limits of DNNs' resilience against parameter perturbations induced by real-world fault attacks. We conclude by discussing possible mitigations and future research directions towards fault attack-resilient DNNs.
Mining YouTube - A dataset for learning fine-grained action concepts from webly supervised video data
Authors: Hilde Kuehne, Ahsan Iqbal, Alexander Richard, Juergen Gall
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, General Classification, Temporal Action Localization

Action recognition is so far mainly focusing on the problem of classification of hand selected preclipped actions and reaching impressive results in this field. But with the performance even ceiling on current datasets, it also appears that the next steps in the field will have to go beyond this fully supervised classification. One way to overcome those problems is to move towards less restricted scenarios. In this context we present a large-scale real-world dataset designed to evaluate learning techniques for human action recognition beyond hand-crafted datasets. To this end we put the process of collecting data on its feet again and start with the annotation of a test set of 250 cooking videos. The training data is then gathered by searching for the respective annotated classes within the subtitles of freely available videos. The uniqueness of the dataset is attributed to the fact that the whole process of collecting the data and training does not involve any human intervention. To address the problem of semantic inconsistencies that arise with this kind of training data, we further propose a semantical hierarchical structure for the mined classes.
A computational linguistic study of personal recovery in bipolar disorder
Authors: Glorianna Jagfeld
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7

Mental health research can benefit increasingly fruitfully from computational linguistics methods, given the abundant availability of language data in the internet and advances of computational tools. This interdisciplinary project will collect and analyse social media data of individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder with regard to their recovery experiences. Personal recovery - living a satisfying and contributing life along symptoms of severe mental health issues - so far has only been investigated qualitatively with structured interviews and quantitatively with standardised questionnaires with mainly English-speaking participants in Western countries. Complementary to this evidence, computational linguistic methods allow us to analyse first-person accounts shared online in large quantities, representing unstructured settings and a more heterogeneous, multilingual population, to draw a more complete picture of the aspects and mechanisms of personal recovery in bipolar disorder.
Optimal Learning of Mallows Block Model
Authors: Róbert Busa-Fekete, Dimitris Fotakis, Balázs Szörényi, Manolis Zampetakis
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: model, parameter estimation

The Mallows model, introduced in the seminal paper of Mallows 1957, is one of the most fundamental ranking distribution over the symmetric group $S_m$. To analyze more complex ranking data, several studies considered the Generalized Mallows model defined by Fligner and Verducci 1986. Despite the significant research interest of ranking distributions, the exact sample complexity of estimating the parameters of a Mallows and a Generalized Mallows Model is not well-understood. The main result of the paper is a tight sample complexity bound for learning Mallows and Generalized Mallows Model. We approach the learning problem by analyzing a more general model which interpolates between the single parameter Mallows Model and the $m$ parameter Mallows model. We call our model Mallows Block Model -- referring to the Block Models that are a popular model in theoretical statistics. Our sample complexity analysis gives tight bound for learning the Mallows Block Model for any number of blocks. We provide essentially matching lower bounds for our sample complexity results. As a corollary of our analysis, it turns out that, if the central ranking is known, one single sample from the Mallows Block Model is sufficient to estimate the spread parameters with error that goes to zero as the size of the permutations goes to infinity. In addition, we calculate the exact rate of the parameter estimation error.
Gated recurrent units viewed through the lens of continuous time dynamical systems
Authors: Ian D. Jordan, Piotr Aleksander Sokol, Il Memming Park
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00

Gated recurrent units (GRUs) are specialized memory elements for building recurrent neural networks. Despite their incredible success on various tasks, including extracting dynamics underlying neural data, little is understood about the specific dynamics representable in a GRU network. As a result, it is both difficult to know a priori how successful a GRU network will perform on a given task, and also their capacity to mimic the underlying behavior of their biological counterparts. Using a continuous time analysis, we gain intuition on the inner workings of GRU networks. We restrict our presentation to low dimensions, allowing for a comprehensive visualization. We found a surprisingly rich repertoire of dynamical features that includes stable limit cycles (nonlinear oscillations), multi-stable dynamics with various topologies, and homoclinic bifurcations. At the same time we were unable to train GRU networks to produce continuous attractors, which are hypothesized to exist in biological neural networks. We contextualize the usefulness of different kinds of observed dynamics and support our claims experimentally.
Frontal Low-rank Random Tensors for Fine-grained Action Segmentation
Authors: Yan Zhang, Krikamol Muandet, Qianli Ma, Heiko Neumann, Siyu Tang
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Parsing, Action Segmentation, Form, Segmentation, Temporal Action Segmentation

Fine-grained action segmentation in long untrimmed videos is an important task for many applications such as surveillance, robotics, and human-computer interaction. To understand subtle and precise actions within a long time period, second-order information (e.g. feature covariance) or higher is reported to be effective in the literature. However, extracting such high-order information is considerably non-trivial. In particular, the dimensionality increases exponentially with the information order, and hence gaining more representation power also increases the computational cost and the risk of overfitting. In this paper, we propose an approach to representing high-order information for temporal action segmentation via a simple yet effective bilinear form. Specifically, our contributions are: (1) From the multilinear perspective, we derive a bilinear form of low complexity, assuming that the three-way tensor has low-rank frontal slices. (2) Rather than learning the tensor entries from data, we sample the entries from different underlying distributions, and prove that the underlying distribution influences the information order. (3) We employed our bilinear form as an intermediate layer in state-of-the-art deep neural networks, enabling to represent high-order information in complex deep models effectively and efficiently. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed bilinear form outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on the challenging temporal action segmentation task. One can see our project page for data, model and code: \url{https://vlg.inf.ethz.ch/projects/BilinearTCN/}.
Comparing two- and three-view Computer Vision
Authors: Zsolt Levente Kucsván
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

To reconstruct the points in three dimensional space, we need at least two images. In this paper we compared two different methods: the first uses only two images, the second one uses three. During the research we measured how camera resolution, camera angles and camera distances influence the number of reconstructed points and the dispersion of them. The paper presents that using the two-view method, we can reconstruct significantly more points than using the other one, but the dispersion of points is smaller if we use the three-view method. Taking into consideration the different camera settings, we can say that both the two- and three-view method behaves the same, and the best parameters are also the same for both methods.
A Comprehensive Study on Deep Learning Bug Characteristics
Authors: Md Johirul Islam, Giang Nguyen, Rangeet Pan, Hridesh Rajan
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Deep learning has gained substantial popularity in recent years. Developers mainly rely on libraries and tools to add deep learning capabilities to their software. What kinds of bugs are frequently found in such software? What are the root causes of such bugs? What impacts do such bugs have? Which stages of deep learning pipeline are more bug prone? Are there any antipatterns? Understanding such characteristics of bugs in deep learning software has the potential to foster the development of better deep learning platforms, debugging mechanisms, development practices, and encourage the development of analysis and verification frameworks. Therefore, we study 2716 high-quality posts from Stack Overflow and 500 bug fix commits from Github about five popular deep learning libraries Caffe, Keras, Tensorflow, Theano, and Torch to understand the types of bugs, root causes of bugs, impacts of bugs, bug-prone stage of deep learning pipeline as well as whether there are some common antipatterns found in this buggy software. The key findings of our study include: data bug and logic bug are the most severe bug types in deep learning software appearing more than 48% of the times, major root causes of these bugs are Incorrect Model Parameter (IPS) and Structural Inefficiency (SI) showing up more than 43% of the times. We have also found that the bugs in the usage of deep learning libraries have some common antipatterns that lead to a strong correlation of bug types among the libraries.
Resolving Gendered Ambiguous Pronouns with BERT
Authors: Matei Ionita, Yury Kashnitsky, Ken Krige, Vladimir Larin, Denis Logvinenko, Atanas Atanasov
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 8
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Machine Translation, Natural Language Understanding, Translation

Pronoun resolution is part of coreference resolution, the task of pairing an expression to its referring entity. This is an important task for natural language understanding and a necessary component of machine translation systems, chat bots and assistants. Neural machine learning systems perform far from ideally in this task, reaching as low as 73% F1 scores on modern benchmark datasets. Moreover, they tend to perform better for masculine pronouns than for feminine ones. Thus, the problem is both challenging and important for NLP researchers and practitioners. In this project, we describe our BERT-based approach to solving the problem of gender-balanced pronoun resolution. We are able to reach 92% F1 score and a much lower gender bias on the benchmark dataset shared by Google AI Language team.
Voice Mimicry Attacks Assisted by Automatic Speaker Verification
Authors: Ville Vestman, Tomi Kinnunen, Rosa González Hautamäki, Md Sahidullah
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Verification

In this work, we simulate a scenario, where a publicly available ASV system is used to enhance mimicry attacks against another closed source ASV system. In specific, ASV technology is used to perform a similarity search between the voices of recruited attackers (6) and potential target speakers (7,365) from VoxCeleb corpora to find the closest targets for each of the attackers. In addition, we consider 'median', 'furthest', and 'common' targets to serve as a reference points. Our goal is to gain insights how well similarity rankings transfer from the attacker's ASV system to the attacked ASV system, whether the attackers are able to improve their attacks by mimicking, and how the properties of the voices of attackers change due to mimicking. We address these questions through ASV experiments, listening tests, and prosodic and formant analyses. For the ASV experiments, we use i-vector technology in the attacker side, and x-vectors in the attacked side. For the listening tests, we recruit listeners through crowdsourcing. The results of the ASV experiments indicate that the speaker similarity scores transfer well from one ASV system to another. Both the ASV experiments and the listening tests reveal that the mimicry attempts do not, in general, help in bringing attacker's scores closer to the target's. A detailed analysis shows that mimicking does not improve attacks, when the natural voices of attackers and targets are similar to each other. The analysis of prosody and formants suggests that the attackers were able to considerably change their speaking rates when mimicking, but the changes in F0 and formants were modest. Overall, the results suggest that untrained impersonators do not pose a high threat towards ASV systems, but the use of ASV systems to attack other ASV systems is a potential threat.
Transfer Learning in the Field of Renewable Energies -- A Transfer Learning Framework Providing Power Forecasts Throughout the Lifecycle of Wind Farms After Initial Connection to the Electrical Grid
Authors: Jens Schreiber
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Transfer Learning

In recent years, transfer learning gained particular interest in the field of vision and natural language processing. In the research field of vision, e.g., deep neural networks and transfer learning techniques achieve almost perfect classification scores within minutes. Nonetheless, these techniques are not yet widely applied in other domains. Therefore, this article identifies critical challenges and shows potential solutions for power forecasts in the field of renewable energies. It proposes a framework utilizing transfer learning techniques in wind power forecasts with limited or no historical data. On the one hand, this allows evaluating the applicability of transfer learning in the field of renewable energy. On the other hand, by developing automatic procedures, we assure that the proposed methods provide a framework that applies to domains in organic computing as well.
A Generic Acceleration Framework for Stochastic Composite Optimization
Authors: Andrei Kulunchakov, Julien Mairal
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

In this paper, we introduce various mechanisms to obtain accelerated first-order stochastic optimization algorithms when the objective function is convex or strongly convex. Specifically, we extend the Catalyst approach originally designed for deterministic objectives to the stochastic setting. Given an optimization method with mild convergence guarantees for strongly convex problems, the challenge is to accelerate convergence to a noise-dominated region, and then achieve convergence with an optimal worst-case complexity depending on the noise variance of the gradients. A side contribution of our work is also a generic analysis that can handle inexact proximal operators, providing new insights about the robustness of stochastic algorithms when the proximal operator cannot be exactly computed.
Reconstruct and Represent Video Contents for Captioning via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Wei Zhang, Bairui Wang, Lin Ma, Wei Liu
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Sentence, Video Captioning

In this paper, the problem of describing visual contents of a video sequence with natural language is addressed. Unlike previous video captioning work mainly exploiting the cues of video contents to make a language description, we propose a reconstruction network (RecNet) in a novel encoder-decoder-reconstructor architecture, which leverages both forward (video to sentence) and backward (sentence to video) flows for video captioning. Specifically, the encoder-decoder component makes use of the forward flow to produce a sentence description based on the encoded video semantic features. Two types of reconstructors are subsequently proposed to employ the backward flow and reproduce the video features from local and global perspectives, respectively, capitalizing on the hidden state sequence generated by the decoder. Moreover, in order to make a comprehensive reconstruction of the video features, we propose to fuse the two types of reconstructors together. The generation loss yielded by the encoder-decoder component and the reconstruction loss introduced by the reconstructor are jointly cast into training the proposed RecNet in an end-to-end fashion. Furthermore, the RecNet is fine-tuned by CIDEr optimization via reinforcement learning, which significantly boosts the captioning performance. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed reconstructor can boost the performance of video captioning consistently.
A Fast-Optimal Guaranteed Algorithm For Learning Sub-Interval Relationships in Time Series
Authors: Saurabh Agrawal, Saurabh Verma, Anuj Karpatne, Stefan Liess, Snigdhansu Chatterjee, Vipin Kumar
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Traditional approaches focus on finding relationships between two entire time series, however, many interesting relationships exist in small sub-intervals of time and remain feeble during other sub-intervals. We define the notion of a sub-interval relationship (SIR) to capture such interactions that are prominent only in certain sub-intervals of time. To that end, we propose a fast-optimal guaranteed algorithm to find most interesting SIR relationship in a pair of time series. Lastly, we demonstrate the utility of our method in climate science domain based on a real-world dataset along with its scalability scope and obtain useful domain insights.
Heterogeneous Gaussian Mechanism: Preserving Differential Privacy in Deep Learning with Provable Robustness
Authors: NhatHai Phan, Minh Vu, Yang Liu, Ruoming Jin, Dejing Dou, Xintao Wu, My T. Thai
Date: 2019-06-02 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Gaussian Mechanism (HGM) to preserve differential privacy in deep neural networks, with provable robustness against adversarial examples. We first relax the constraint of the privacy budget in the traditional Gaussian Mechanism from (0, 1] to (0, \infty), with a new bound of the noise scale to preserve differential privacy. The noise in our mechanism can be arbitrarily redistributed, offering a distinctive ability to address the trade-off between model utility and privacy loss. To derive provable robustness, our HGM is applied to inject Gaussian noise into the first hidden layer. Then, a tighter robustness bound is proposed. Theoretical analysis and thorough evaluations show that our mechanism notably improves the robustness of differentially private deep neural networks, compared with baseline approaches, under a variety of model attacks.
Statistically Significant Discriminative Patterns Searching
Authors: Hoang Son Pham, Gwendal Virlet, Dominique Lavenier, Alexandre Termier
Date: 2019-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Discriminative pattern mining is an essential task of data mining. This task aims to discover patterns which occur more frequently in a class than other classes in a class-labeled dataset. This type of patterns is valuable in various domains such as bioinformatics, data classification. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, named SSDPS, to discover patterns in two-class datasets. The SSDPS algorithm owes its efficiency to an original enumeration strategy of the patterns, which allows to exploit some degrees of anti-monotonicity on the measures of discriminance and statistical significance. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the SSDPS algorithm is better than others. In addition, the number of generated patterns is much less than the number of other algorithms. Experiment on real data also shows that SSDPS efficiently detects multiple SNPs combinations in genetic data.