pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Applying Deep Learning to Detect Traffic Accidents in Real Time Using Spatiotemporal Sequential Data
Authors: Amir Bahador Parsa, Rishabh Singh Chauhan, Homa Taghipour, Sybil Derrible, Abolfazl Mohammadian
Date: 2019-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Accident detection is a vital part of traffic safety. Many road users suffer from traffic accidents, as well as their consequences such as delay, congestion, air pollution, and so on. In this study, we utilize two advanced deep learning techniques, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), to detect traffic accidents in Chicago. These two techniques are selected because they are known to perform well with sequential data (i.e., time series). The full dataset consists of 241 accident and 6,038 non-accident cases selected from Chicago expressway, and it includes traffic spatiotemporal data, weather condition data, and congestion status data. Moreover, because the dataset is imbalanced (i.e., the dataset contains many more non-accident cases than accident cases), Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) is employed. Overall, the two models perform significantly well, both with an Area Under Curve (AUC) of 0.85. Nonetheless, the GRU model is observed to perform slightly better than LSTM model with respect to detection rate. The performance of both models is similar in terms of false alarm rate.
Polynomial Matrix Completion for Missing Data Imputation and Transductive Learning
Authors: Jicong Fan, Yuqian Zhang, Madeleine Udell
Date: 2019-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Imputation, Matrix Completion, Transductive Learning

This paper develops new methods to recover the missing entries of a high-rank or even full-rank matrix when the intrinsic dimension of the data is low compared to the ambient dimension. Specifically, we assume that the columns of a matrix are generated by polynomials acting on a low-dimensional intrinsic variable, and wish to recover the missing entries under this assumption. We show that we can identify the complete matrix of minimum intrinsic dimension by minimizing the rank of the matrix in a high dimensional feature space. We develop a new formulation of the resulting problem using the kernel trick together with a new relaxation of the rank objective, and propose an efficient optimization method. We also show how to use our methods to complete data drawn from multiple nonlinear manifolds. Comparative studies on synthetic data, subspace clustering with missing data, motion capture data recovery, and transductive learning verify the superiority of our methods over the state-of-the-art.
The Generalization Error of the Minimum-norm Solutions for Over-parameterized Neural Networks
Authors: Weinan E, Chao Ma, Lei Wu
Date: 2019-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We study the generalization properties of minimum-norm solutions for three over-parametrized machine learning models including the random feature model, the two-layer neural network model and the residual network model. We proved that for all three models, the generalization error for the minimum-norm solution is comparable to the Monte Carlo rate, up to some logarithmic terms, as long as the models are sufficiently over-parametrized.
Brain-Inspired Inference on Missing Video Sequence
Authors: Weimian Li, Baoyang Chen, Wenmin Wang
Date: 2019-12-15 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end architecture that could generate a variety of plausible video sequences correlating two given discontinuous frames. Our work is inspired by the human ability of inference. Specifically, given two static images, human are capable of inferring what might happen in between as well as present diverse versions of their inference. We firstly train our model to learn the transformation to understand the movement trends within given frames. For the sake of imitating the inference of human, we introduce a latent variable sampled from Gaussian distribution. By means of integrating different latent variables with learned transformation features, the model could learn more various possible motion modes. Then applying these motion modes on the original frame, we could acquire various corresponding intermediate video sequence. Moreover, the framework is trained in adversarial fashion with unsupervised learning. Evaluating on the moving Mnist dataset and the 2D Shapes dataset, we show that our model is capable of imitating the human inference to some extent.
Breaking Speech Recognizers to Imagine Lyrics
Authors: Jon Gillick, David Bamman
Date: 2019-12-15 00:00:00

We introduce a new method for generating text, and in particular song lyrics, based on the speech-like acoustic qualities of a given audio file. We repurpose a vocal source separation algorithm and an acoustic model trained to recognize isolated speech, instead inputting instrumental music or environmental sounds. Feeding the "mistakes" of the vocal separator into the recognizer, we obtain a transcription of words \emph{imagined} to be spoken in the input audio. We describe the key components of our approach, present initial analysis, and discuss the potential of the method for machine-in-the-loop collaboration in creative applications.
Estimation and Validation of Ratio-based Conditional Average Treatment Effects Using Observational Data
Authors: Steve Yadlowsky, Fabio Pellegrini, Federica Lionetto, Stefan Braune, Lu Tian
Date: 2019-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

While sample sizes in randomized clinical trials are large enough to estimate the average treatment effect well, they are often insufficient for estimation of treatment-covariate interactions critical to studying data-driven precision medicine. Observational data from real world practice may play an important role in alleviating this problem. One common approach in trials is to predict the outcome of interest with separate regression models in each treatment arm, and estimate the treatment effect based on the contrast of the predictions. Unfortunately, this simple approach may induce spurious treatment-covariate interaction in observational studies when the regression model is misspecified. Motivated by the need of modeling the number of relapses in multiple sclerosis patients, where the ratio of relapse rates is a natural choice of the treatment effect, we propose to estimate the conditional average treatment effect (CATE) as the ratio of expected potential outcomes, and derive a doubly robust estimator of this CATE in a semiparametric model of treatment-covariate interactions. We also provide a validation procedure to check the quality of the estimator on an independent sample. We conduct simulations to demonstrate the finite sample performance of the proposed methods, and illustrate their advantages on real data by examining the treatment effect of dimethyl fumarate compared to teriflunomide in multiple sclerosis patients.
Skeleton-Based Action Recognition with Multi-Stream Adaptive Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Lei Shi, Yifan Zhang, Jian Cheng, Hanqing Lu
Date: 2019-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, graph construction, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs), which generalize CNNs to more generic non-Euclidean structures, have achieved remarkable performance for skeleton-based action recognition. However, there still exist several issues in the previous GCN-based models. First, the topology of the graph is set heuristically and fixed over all the model layers and input data. This may not be suitable for the hierarchy of the GCN model and the diversity of the data in action recognition tasks. Second, the second-order information of the skeleton data, i.e., the length and orientation of the bones, is rarely investigated, which is naturally more informative and discriminative for the human action recognition. In this work, we propose a novel multi-stream attention-enhanced adaptive graph convolutional neural network (MS-AAGCN) for skeleton-based action recognition. The graph topology in our model can be either uniformly or individually learned based on the input data in an end-to-end manner. This data-driven approach increases the flexibility of the model for graph construction and brings more generality to adapt to various data samples. Besides, the proposed adaptive graph convolutional layer is further enhanced by a spatial-temporal-channel attention module, which helps the model pay more attention to important joints, frames and features. Moreover, the information of both the joints and bones, together with their motion information, are simultaneously modeled in a multi-stream framework, which shows notable improvement for the recognition accuracy. Extensive experiments on the two large-scale datasets, NTU-RGBD and Kinetics-Skeleton, demonstrate that the performance of our model exceeds the state-of-the-art with a significant margin.
Breast Cancer Diagnosis by Higher-Order Probabilistic Perceptrons
Authors: Aditya Cowsik, John W. Clark
Date: 2019-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

A two-layer neural network model that systematically includes correlations among input variables to arbitrary order and is designed to implement Bayes inference has been adapted to classify breast cancer tumors as malignant or benign, assigning a probability for either outcome. The inputs to the network represent measured characteristics of cell nuclei imaged in Fine Needle Aspiration biopsies. The present machine-learning approach to diagnosis (known as HOPP, for higher-order probabilistic perceptron) is tested on the much-studied, open-access Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnosis) Data Set of Wolberg et al. This set lists, for each tumor, measured physical parameters of the cell nuclei of each sample. The HOPP model can identify the key factors -- input features and their combinations -- most relevant for reliable diagnosis. HOPP networks were trained on 90\% of the examples in the Wisconsin database, and tested on the remaining 10\%. Referred to ensembles of 300 networks, selected randomly for cross-validation, accuracy of classification for the test sets of up to 97\% was readily achieved, with standard deviation around 2\%, together with average Matthews correlation coefficients reaching 0.94 indicating excellent predictive performance. Demonstrably, the HOPP is capable of matching the predictive power attained by other advanced machine-learning algorithms applied to this much-studied database, over several decades. Analysis shows that in this special problem, which is almost linearly separable, the effects of irreducible correlations among the measured features of the Wisconsin database are of relatively minor importance, as the Naive Bayes approximation can itself yield predictive accuracy approaching 95\%. The advantages of the HOPP algorithm will be more clearly revealed in application to more challenging machine-learning problems.
What Else Can Fool Deep Learning? Addressing Color Constancy Errors on Deep Neural Network Performance
Authors: Mahmoud Afifi, Michael S. Brown
Date: 2019-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Color Constancy, Image Augmentation, Image Manipulation, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

There is active research targeting local image manipulations that can fool deep neural networks (DNNs) into producing incorrect results. This paper examines a type of global image manipulation that can produce similar adverse effects. Specifically, we explore how strong color casts caused by incorrectly applied computational color constancy - referred to as white balance (WB) in photography - negatively impact the performance of DNNs targeting image segmentation and classification. In addition, we discuss how existing image augmentation methods used to improve the robustness of DNNs are not well suited for modeling WB errors. To address this problem, a novel augmentation method is proposed that can emulate accurate color constancy degradation. We also explore pre-processing training and testing images with a recent WB correction algorithm to reduce the effects of incorrectly white-balanced images. We examine both augmentation and pre-processing strategies on different datasets and demonstrate notable improvements on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ADE20K datasets.
Global and country-specific mainstreaminess measures: Definitions, analysis, and usage for improving personalized music recommendation systems
Authors: Christine Bauer, Markus Schedl
Date: 2019-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Popularity-based approaches are widely adopted in music recommendation systems, both in industry and research. However, as the popularity distribution of music items typically is a long-tail distribution, popularity-based approaches to music recommendation fall short in satisfying listeners that have specialized music. The contribution of this article is three-fold. We provide several quantitative measures describing the proximity of a user's music preference to the music mainstream. We define the measures at two levels: relating a listener's music preferences to the global music preferences of all users, or relating them to music preferences of the user's country. Moreover, we adopt a distribution-based and a rank-based approach as means to decrease bias towards the head of the long-tail distribution. We analyze differences between countries in terms of their level of mainstreaminess, uncover both positive and negative outliers (substantially higher and lower country-specific popularity, respectively, compared to the global mainstream), and investigate differences between countries in terms of listening preferences related to popular music artists. We use the standardized LFM-1b dataset, from which we analyze about 8 million listening events shared by about 53,000 users (from 47 countries) of the music streaming platform Last.fm. We show that there are substantial country-specific differences in listeners' music consumption behavior with respect to the most popular artists listened to. We conduct rating prediction experiments in which we tailor recommendations to a user's level of preference for the music mainstream using the proposed 6 mainstreaminess measures. Results suggest that, in terms of rating prediction accuracy, each of the presented mainstreaminess definitions has its merits.
Asymmetric GANs for Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Hao Tang, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2019-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Existing models for unsupervised image translation with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can learn the mapping from the source domain to the target domain using a cycle-consistency loss. However, these methods always adopt a symmetric network architecture to learn both forward and backward cycles. Because of the task complexity and cycle input difference between the source and target domains, the inequality in bidirectional forward-backward cycle translations is significant and the amount of information between two domains is different. In this paper, we analyze the limitation of existing symmetric GANs in asymmetric translation tasks, and propose an AsymmetricGAN model with both translation and reconstruction generators of unequal sizes and different parameter-sharing strategy to adapt to the asymmetric need in both unsupervised and supervised image translation tasks. Moreover, the training stage of existing methods has the common problem of model collapse that degrades the quality of the generated images, thus we explore different optimization losses for better training of AsymmetricGAN, making image translation with higher consistency and better stability. Extensive experiments on both supervised and unsupervised generative tasks with 8 datasets show that AsymmetricGAN achieves superior model capacity and better generation performance compared with existing GANs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the asymmetric GAN structure on both unsupervised and supervised image translation tasks.
#MeTooMA: Multi-Aspect Annotations of Tweets Related to the MeToo Movement
Authors: Akash Gautam, Puneet Mathur, Rakesh Gosangi, Debanjan Mahata, Ramit Sawhney, Rajiv Ratn Shah
Date: 2019-12-14 00:00:00

In this paper, we present a dataset containing 9,973 tweets related to the MeToo movement that were manually annotated for five different linguistic aspects: relevance, stance, hate speech, sarcasm, and dialogue acts. We present a detailed account of the data collection and annotation processes. The annotations have a very high inter-annotator agreement (0.79 to 0.93 k-alpha) due to the domain expertise of the annotators and clear annotation instructions. We analyze the data in terms of geographical distribution, label correlations, and keywords. Lastly, we present some potential use cases of this dataset. We expect this dataset would be of great interest to psycholinguists, socio-linguists, and computational linguists to study the discursive space of digitally mobilized social movements on sensitive issues like sexual harassment.
Adapting Behaviour for Learning Progress
Authors: Tom Schaul, Diana Borsa, David Ding, David Szepesvari, Georg Ostrovski, Will Dabney, Simon Osindero
Date: 2019-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Reinforcement Learning

Determining what experience to generate to best facilitate learning (i.e. exploration) is one of the distinguishing features and open challenges in reinforcement learning. The advent of distributed agents that interact with parallel instances of the environment has enabled larger scales and greater flexibility, but has not removed the need to tune exploration to the task, because the ideal data for the learning algorithm necessarily depends on its process of learning. We propose to dynamically adapt the data generation by using a non-stationary multi-armed bandit to optimize a proxy of the learning progress. The data distribution is controlled by modulating multiple parameters of the policy (such as stochasticity, consistency or optimism) without significant overhead. The adaptation speed of the bandit can be increased by exploiting the factored modulation structure. We demonstrate on a suite of Atari 2600 games how this unified approach produces results comparable to per-task tuning at a fraction of the cost.
Migrating Monarch Butterfly Localization Using Multi-Sensor Fusion Neural Networks
Authors: Mingyu Yang, Roger Hsiao, Gordy Carichner, Katherine Ernst, Jaechan Lim, Delbert A. Green II, Inhee Lee, David Blaauw, Hun-Seok Kim
Date: 2019-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensor Fusion

Details of Monarch butterfly migration from the U.S. to Mexico remain a mystery due to lack of a proper localization technology to accurately localize and track butterfly migration. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based butterfly localization algorithm that can estimate a butterfly's daily location by analyzing a light and temperature sensor data log continuously obtained from an ultra-low power, mm-scale sensor attached to the butterfly. To train and test the proposed neural network based multi-sensor fusion localization algorithm, we collected over 1500 days of real world sensor measurement data with 82 volunteers all over the U.S. The proposed algorithm exhibits a mean absolute error of <1.5 degree in latitude and <0.5 degree in longitude Earth coordinate, satisfying our target goal for the Monarch butterfly migration study.
Long-length Legal Document Classification
Authors: Lulu Wan, George Papageorgiou, Michael Seddon, Mirko Bernardoni
Date: 2019-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Document Classification, Document Embedding, General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

One of the principal tasks of machine learning with major applications is text classification. This paper focuses on the legal domain and, in particular, on the classification of lengthy legal documents. The main challenge that this study addresses is the limitation that current models impose on the length of the input text. In addition, the present paper shows that dividing the text into segments and later combining the resulting embeddings with a BiLSTM architecture to form a single document embedding can improve results. These advancements are achieved by utilising a simpler structure, rather than an increasingly complex one, which is often the case in NLP research. The dataset used in this paper is obtained from an online public database containing lengthy legal documents with highly domain-specific vocabulary and thus, the comparison of our results to the ones produced by models implemented on the commonly used datasets would be unjustified. This work provides the foundation for future work in document classification in the legal field.
Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Diacritic Restoration
Authors: Sawsan Alqahtani, Ajay Mishra, Mona Diab
Date: 2019-12-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11

Diacritic restoration has gained importance with the growing need for machines to understand written texts. The task is typically modeled as a sequence labeling problem and currently Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory (BiLSTM) models provide state-of-the-art results. Recently, Bai et al. (2018) show the advantages of Temporal Convolutional Neural Networks (TCN) over Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) for sequence modeling in terms of performance and computational resources. As diacritic restoration benefits from both previous as well as subsequent timesteps, we further apply and evaluate a variant of TCN, Acausal TCN (A-TCN), which incorporates context from both directions (previous and future) rather than strictly incorporating previous context as in the case of TCN. A-TCN yields significant improvement over TCN for diacritization in three different languages: Arabic, Yoruba, and Vietnamese. Furthermore, A-TCN and BiLSTM have comparable performance, making A-TCN an efficient alternative over BiLSTM since convolutions can be trained in parallel. A-TCN is significantly faster than BiLSTM at inference time (270%-334% improvement in the amount of text diacritized per minute).
Deep Poisoning: Towards Robust Image Data Sharing against Visual Disclosure
Authors: Hao Guo, Brian Dolhansky, Eric Hsin, Phong Dinh, Cristian Canton Ferrer, Song Wang
Date: 2019-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, image-classification, Image Classification

Due to respectively limited training data, different entities addressing the same vision task based on certain sensitive images may not train a robust deep network. This paper introduces a new vision task where various entities share task-specific image data to enlarge each other's training data volume without visually disclosing sensitive contents (e.g. illegal images). Then, we present a new structure-based training regime to enable different entities learn task-specific and reconstruction-proof image representations for image data sharing. Specifically, each entity learns a private Deep Poisoning Module (DPM) and insert it to a pre-trained deep network, which is designed to perform the specific vision task. The DPM deliberately poisons convolutional image features to prevent image reconstructions, while ensuring that the altered image data is functionally equivalent to the non-poisoned data for the specific vision task. Given this equivalence, the poisoned features shared from one entity could be used by another entity for further model refinement. Experimental results on image classification prove the efficacy of the proposed method.