pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Embedded Bayesian Network Classifiers
Authors: David Heckerman, Chris Meek
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00

Low-dimensional probability models for local distribution functions in a Bayesian network include decision trees, decision graphs, and causal independence models. We describe a new probability model for discrete Bayesian networks, which we call an embedded Bayesian network classifier or EBNC. The model for a node $Y$ given parents $\bf X$ is obtained from a (usually different) Bayesian network for $Y$ and $\bf X$ in which $\bf X$ need not be the parents of $Y$. We show that an EBNC is a special case of a softmax polynomial regression model. Also, we show how to identify a non-redundant set of parameters for an EBNC, and describe an asymptotic approximation for learning the structure of Bayesian networks that contain EBNCs. Unlike the decision tree, decision graph, and causal independence models, we are unaware of a semantic justification for the use of these models. Experiments are needed to determine whether the models presented in this paper are useful in practice.
Smoothness-Adaptive Contextual Bandits
Authors: Yonatan Gur, Ahmadreza Momeni, Stefan Wager
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-Armed Bandits

We study a non-parametric multi-armed bandit problem with stochastic covariates, where a key complexity driver is the smoothness of payoff functions with respect to covariates. Previous studies have focused on deriving minimax-optimal algorithms in cases where it is a priori known how smooth the payoff functions are. In practice, however, the smoothness of payoff functions is typically not known in advance, and misspecification of smoothness may severely deteriorate the performance of existing methods. In this work, we consider a framework where the smoothness of payoff functions is not known, and study when and how algorithms may adapt to unknown smoothness. First, we establish that designing algorithms that adapt to unknown smoothness of payoff functions is, in general, impossible. However, under a self-similarity condition (which does not reduce the minimax complexity of the dynamic optimization problem at hand), we establish that adapting to unknown smoothness is possible, and further devise a general policy for achieving smoothness-adaptive performance. Our policy infers the smoothness of payoffs throughout the decision-making process, while leveraging the structure of off-the-shelf non-adaptive policies. We establish that for problem settings with either differentiable or non-differentiable payoff functions, this policy matches (up to a logarithmic scale) the regret rate that is achievable when the smoothness of payoffs is known a priori.
ALGAMES: A Fast Solver for Constrained Dynamic Games
Authors: Simon Le Cleac'h, Mac Schwager, Zachary Manchester
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Model Predictive Control

Dynamic games are an effective paradigm for dealing with the control of multiple interacting actors. This paper introduces ALGAMES (Augmented Lagrangian GAME-theoretic Solver), a solver that handles trajectory optimization problems with multiple actors and general nonlinear state and input constraints. Its novelty resides in satisfying the first order optimality conditions with a quasi-Newton root-finding algorithm and rigorously enforcing constraints using an augmented Lagrangian formulation. We evaluate our solver in the context of autonomous driving on scenarios with a strong level of interactions between the vehicles. We assess the robustness of the solver using Monte Carlo simulations. It is able to reliably solve complex problems like ramp merging with three vehicles three times faster than a state-of-the-art DDP-based approach. A model predictive control (MPC) implementation of the algorithm demonstrates real-time performance on complex autonomous driving scenarios with an update frequency higher than 60 Hz.
Collaborative Graph Walk for Semi-supervised Multi-Label Node Classification
Authors: Uchenna Akujuobi, Han Yufei, Qiannan Zhang, Xiangliang Zhang
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Node Classification, Reinforcement Learning

In this work, we study semi-supervised multi-label node classification problem in attributed graphs. Classic solutions to multi-label node classification follow two steps, first learn node embedding and then build a node classifier on the learned embedding. To improve the discriminating power of the node embedding, we propose a novel collaborative graph walk, named Multi-Label-Graph-Walk, to finely tune node representations with the available label assignments in attributed graphs via reinforcement learning. The proposed method formulates the multi-label node classification task as simultaneous graph walks conducted by multiple label-specific agents. Furthermore, policies of the label-wise graph walks are learned in a cooperative way to capture first the predictive relation between node labels and structural attributes of graphs; and second, the correlation among the multiple label-specific classification tasks. A comprehensive experimental study demonstrates that the proposed method can achieve significantly better multi-label classification performance than the state-of-the-art approaches and conduct more efficient graph exploration.
Mobile Recognition of Wikipedia Featured Sites using Deep Learning and Crowd-sourced Imagery
Authors: Jimin Tan, Anastasios Noulas, Diego Sáez, Rossano Schifanella
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Rendering Wikipedia content through mobile and augmented reality mediums can enable new forms of interaction in urban-focused user communities facilitating learning, communication and knowledge exchange. With this objective in mind, in this work we develop a mobile application that allows for the recognition of notable sites featured on Wikipedia. The application is powered by a deep neural network that has been trained on crowd-sourced imagery describing sites of interest, such as buildings, statues, museums or other physical entities that are present and visually accessible in an urban environment. We describe an end-to-end pipeline that describes data collection, model training and evaluation of our application considering online and real world scenarios. We identify a number of challenges in the site recognition task which arise due to visual similarities amongst the classified sites as well as due to noise introduce by the surrounding built environment. We demonstrate how using mobile contextual information, such as user location, orientation and attention patterns can significantly alleviate such challenges. Moreover, we present an unsupervised learning technique to de-noise crowd-sourced imagery which improves classification performance further.
Discriminative Neural Clustering for Speaker Diarisation
Authors: Qiujia Li, Florian L. Kreyssig, Chao Zhang, Philip C. Woodland
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Data Augmentation

In this paper, we propose Discriminative Neural Clustering (DNC) that formulates data clustering with a maximum number of clusters as a supervised sequence-to-sequence learning problem. Compared to traditional unsupervised clustering algorithms, DNC learns clustering patterns from training data without requiring an explicit definition of a similarity measure. An implementation of DNC based on the Transformer architecture is shown to be effective on a speaker diarisation task using the challenging AMI dataset. Since AMI contains only 147 complete meetings as individual input sequences, data scarcity is a significant issue for training a Transformer model for DNC. Accordingly, this paper proposes three data augmentation schemes: sub-sequence randomisation, input vector randomisation, and Diaconis augmentation, which generates new data samples by rotating the entire input sequence of L2-normalised speaker embeddings. Experimental results on AMI show that DNC achieves a reduction in speaker error rate (SER) of 29.4% relative to spectral clustering.
Fine-Tuned Neural Models for Propaganda Detection at the Sentence and Fragment levels
Authors: Tariq Alhindi, Jonas Pfeiffer, Smaranda Muresan
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 11
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Propaganda detection, Sentence

This paper presents the CUNLP submission for the NLP4IF 2019 shared-task on FineGrained Propaganda Detection. Our system finished 5th out of 26 teams on the sentence-level classification task and 5th out of 11 teams on the fragment-level classification task based on our scores on the blind test set. We present our models, a discussion of our ablation studies and experiments, and an analysis of our performance on all eighteen propaganda techniques present in the corpus of the shared task.
Direct Estimation of Differential Functional Graphical Models
Authors: Boxin Zhao, Y. Samuel Wang, Mladen Kolar
Date: 2019-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

We consider the problem of estimating the difference between two functional undirected graphical models with shared structures. In many applications, data are naturally regarded as high-dimensional random function vectors rather than multivariate scalars. For example, electroencephalography (EEG) data are more appropriately treated as functions of time. In these problems, not only can the number of functions measured per sample be large, but each function is itself an infinite dimensional object, making estimation of model parameters challenging. We develop a method that directly estimates the difference of graphs, avoiding separate estimation of each graph, and show it is consistent in certain high-dimensional settings. We illustrate finite sample properties of our method through simulation studies. Finally, we apply our method to EEG data to uncover differences in functional brain connectivity between alcoholics and control subjects.
Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning
Authors: Alexandre Lacoste, Alexandra Luccioni, Victor Schmidt, Thomas Dandres
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

From an environmental standpoint, there are a few crucial aspects of training a neural network that have a major impact on the quantity of carbon that it emits. These factors include: the location of the server used for training and the energy grid that it uses, the length of the training procedure, and even the make and model of hardware on which the training takes place. In order to approximate these emissions, we present our Machine Learning Emissions Calculator, a tool for our community to better understand the environmental impact of training ML models. We accompany this tool with an explanation of the factors cited above, as well as concrete actions that individual practitioners and organizations can take to mitigate their carbon emissions.
A Domain-agnostic, Noise-resistant, Hardware-efficient Evolutionary Variational Quantum Eigensolver
Authors: Arthur G. Rattew, Shaohan Hu, Marco Pistoia, Richard Chen, Steve Wood
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00

Variational quantum algorithms have shown promise in numerous fields due to their versatility in solving problems of scientific and commercial interest. However, leading algorithms for Hamiltonian simulation, such as the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), use fixed preconstructed ansatzes, limiting their general applicability and accuracy. Thus, variational forms---the quantum circuits that implement ansatzes ---are either crafted heuristically or by encoding domain-specific knowledge. In this paper, we present an Evolutionary Variational Quantum Eigensolver (EVQE), a novel variational algorithm that uses evolutionary programming techniques to minimize the expectation value of a given Hamiltonian by dynamically generating and optimizing an ansatz. The algorithm is equally applicable to optimization problems in all domains, obtaining accurate energy evaluations with hardware-efficient ansatzes. In molecular simulations, the variational forms generated by EVQE are up to $18.6\times$ shallower and use up to $12\times$ fewer CX gates than those obtained by VQE with a unitary coupled cluster ansatz. EVQE demonstrates significant noise-resistance properties, obtaining results in noisy simulation with at least $3.6\times$ less error than VQE using any tested ansatz configuration. We successfully evaluated EVQE on a real 5-qubit IBMQ quantum computer. The experimental results, which we obtained both via simulation and on real quantum hardware, demonstrate the effectiveness of EVQE for general-purpose optimization on the quantum computers of the present and near future.
Learning to Make Generalizable and Diverse Predictions for Retrosynthesis
Authors: Benson Chen, Tianxiao Shen, Tommi S. Jaakkola, Regina Barzilay
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrosynthesis, Single-step retrosynthesis

We propose a new model for making generalizable and diverse retrosynthetic reaction predictions. Given a target compound, the task is to predict the likely chemical reactants to produce the target. This generative task can be framed as a sequence-to-sequence problem by using the SMILES representations of the molecules. Building on top of the popular Transformer architecture, we propose two novel pre-training methods that construct relevant auxiliary tasks (plausible reactions) for our problem. Furthermore, we incorporate a discrete latent variable model into the architecture to encourage the model to produce a diverse set of alternative predictions. On the 50k subset of reaction examples from the United States patent literature (USPTO-50k) benchmark dataset, our model greatly improves performance over the baseline, while also generating predictions that are more diverse.
Signal Combination for Language Identification
Authors: Shengye Wang, Li Wan, Yang Yu, Ignacio Lopez Moreno
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Identification, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Google's multilingual speech recognition system combines low-level acoustic signals with language-specific recognizer signals to better predict the language of an utterance. This paper presents our experience with different signal combination methods to improve overall language identification accuracy. We compare the performance of a lattice-based ensemble model and a deep neural network model to combine signals from recognizers with that of a baseline that only uses low-level acoustic signals. Experimental results show that the deep neural network model outperforms the lattice-based ensemble model, and it reduced the error rate from 5.5% in the baseline to 4.3%, which is a 21.8% relative reduction.
Self-Attentive Document Interaction Networks for Permutation Equivariant Ranking
Authors: Rama Kumar Pasumarthi, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky, Marc Najork
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Learning-To-Rank, Retrieval

How to leverage cross-document interactions to improve ranking performance is an important topic in information retrieval (IR) research. However, this topic has not been well-studied in the learning-to-rank setting and most of the existing work still treats each document independently while scoring. The recent development of deep learning shows strength in modeling complex relationships across sequences and sets. It thus motivates us to study how to leverage cross-document interactions for learning-to-rank in the deep learning framework. In this paper, we formally define the permutation-equivariance requirement for a scoring function that captures cross-document interactions. We then propose a self-attention based document interaction network and show that it satisfies the permutation-equivariant requirement, and can generate scores for document sets of varying sizes. Our proposed methods can automatically learn to capture document interactions without any auxiliary information, and can scale across large document sets. We conduct experiments on three ranking datasets: the benchmark Web30k, a Gmail search, and a Google Drive Quick Access dataset. Experimental results show that our proposed methods are both more effective and efficient than baselines.
Coercing Machine Learning to Output Physically Accurate Results
Authors: Zhenglin Geng, Dan Johnson, Ronald Fedkiw
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Many machine/deep learning artificial neural networks are trained to simply be interpolation functions that map input variables to output values interpolated from the training data in a linear/nonlinear fashion. Even when the input/output pairs of the training data are physically accurate (e.g. the results of an experiment or numerical simulation), interpolated quantities can deviate quite far from being physically accurate. Although one could project the output of a network into a physically feasible region, such a postprocess is not captured by the energy function minimized when training the network; thus, the final projected result could incorrectly deviate quite far from the training data. We propose folding any such projection or postprocess directly into the network so that the final result is correctly compared to the training data by the energy function. Although we propose a general approach, we illustrate its efficacy on a specific convolutional neural network that takes in human pose parameters (joint rotations) and outputs a prediction of vertex positions representing a triangulated cloth mesh. While the original network outputs vertex positions with erroneously high stretching and compression energies, the new network trained with our physics prior remedies these issues producing highly improved results.
History-Gradient Aided Batch Size Adaptation for Variance Reduced Algorithms
Authors: Kaiyi Ji, Zhe Wang, Bowen Weng, Yi Zhou, Wei zhang, Yingbin Liang
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning

Variance-reduced algorithms, although achieve great theoretical performance, can run slowly in practice due to the periodic gradient estimation with a large batch of data. Batch-size adaptation thus arises as a promising approach to accelerate such algorithms. However, existing schemes either apply prescribed batch-size adaption rule or exploit the information along optimization path via additional backtracking and condition verification steps. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, which eliminates backtracking line search but still exploits the information along optimization path by adapting the batch size via history stochastic gradients. We further theoretically show that such a scheme substantially reduces the overall complexity for popular variance-reduced algorithms SVRG and SARAH/SPIDER for both conventional nonconvex optimization and reinforcement learning problems. To this end, we develop a new convergence analysis framework to handle the dependence of the batch size on history stochastic gradients. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed batch-size adaptation scheme.
Combining Benefits from Trajectory Optimization and Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Guillaume Bellegarda, Katie Byl
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent breakthroughs both in reinforcement learning and trajectory optimization have made significant advances towards real world robotic system deployment. Reinforcement learning (RL) can be applied to many problems without needing any modeling or intuition about the system, at the cost of high sample complexity and the inability to prove any metrics about the learned policies. Trajectory optimization (TO) on the other hand allows for stability and robustness analyses on generated motions and trajectories, but is only as good as the often over-simplified derived model, and may have prohibitively expensive computation times for real-time control. This paper seeks to combine the benefits from these two areas while mitigating their drawbacks by (1) decreasing RL sample complexity by using existing knowledge of the problem with optimal control, and (2) providing an upper bound estimate on the time-to-arrival of the combined learned-optimized policy, allowing online policy deployment at any point in the training process by using the TO as a worst-case scenario action. This method is evaluated for a car model, with applicability to any mobile robotic system. A video showing policy execution comparisons can be found at https://youtu.be/mv2xw83NyWU .
Learning to Map Natural Language Instructions to Physical Quadcopter Control using Simulated Flight
Authors: Valts Blukis, Yannick Terme, Eyvind Niklasson, Ross A. Knepper, Yoav Artzi
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Instruction Following, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a joint simulation and real-world learning framework for mapping navigation instructions and raw first-person observations to continuous control. Our model estimates the need for environment exploration, predicts the likelihood of visiting environment positions during execution, and controls the agent to both explore and visit high-likelihood positions. We introduce Supervised Reinforcement Asynchronous Learning (SuReAL). Learning uses both simulation and real environments without requiring autonomous flight in the physical environment during training, and combines supervised learning for predicting positions to visit and reinforcement learning for continuous control. We evaluate our approach on a natural language instruction-following task with a physical quadcopter, and demonstrate effective execution and exploration behavior.
Multiphase flow prediction with deep neural networks
Authors: Gege Wen, Meng Tang, Sally M. Benson
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Prediction, Small Data Image Classification, Transfer Learning, Uncertainty Quantification

This paper proposes a deep neural network approach for predicting multiphase flow in heterogeneous domains with high computational efficiency. The deep neural network model is able to handle permeability heterogeneity in high dimensional systems, and can learn the interplay of viscous, gravity, and capillary forces from small data sets. Using the example of carbon dioxide (CO2) storage, we demonstrate that the model can generate highly accurate predictions of a CO2 saturation distribution given a permeability field, injection duration, injection rate, and injection location. The trained neural network model has an excellent ability to interpolate and to a limited extent, the ability to extrapolate beyond the training data ranges. To improve the prediction accuracy when the neural network model needs to extrapolate, we propose a transfer learning (fine-tuning) procedure that can quickly teach the neural network model new information without going through massive data collection and retraining. Based on this trained neural network model, a web-based tool is provided that allows users to perform CO2-water multiphase flow calculations online. With the tools provided in this paper, the deep neural network approach can provide a computationally efficient substitute for repetitive forward multiphase flow simulations, which can be adopted to the context of history matching and uncertainty quantification.