pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Joint embedding of structure and features via graph convolutional networks
Authors: Sébastien Lerique, Jacob Levy Abitbol, Márton Karsai
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00

The creation of social ties is largely determined by the entangled effects of people's similarities in terms of individual characters and friends. However, feature and structural characters of people usually appear to be correlated, making it difficult to determine which has greater responsibility in the formation of the emergent network structure. We propose \emph{AN2VEC}, a node embedding method which ultimately aims at disentangling the information shared by the structure of a network and the features of its nodes. Building on the recent developments of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), we develop a multitask GCN Variational Autoencoder where different dimensions of the generated embeddings can be dedicated to encoding feature information, network structure, and shared feature-network information. We explore the interaction between these disentangled characters by comparing the embedding reconstruction performance to a baseline case where no shared information is extracted. We use synthetic datasets with different levels of interdependency between feature and network characters and show (i) that shallow embeddings relying on shared information perform better than the corresponding reference with unshared information, (ii) that this performance gap increases with the correlation between network and feature structure, and (iii) that our embedding is able to capture joint information of structure and features. Our method can be relevant for the analysis and prediction of any featured network structure ranging from online social systems to network medicine.
Generic Multilayer Network Data Analysis with the Fusion of Content and Structure
Authors: Xuan-Son Vu, Abhishek Santra, Sharma Chakravarthy, Lili Jiang
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00

Multi-feature data analysis (e.g., on Facebook, LinkedIn) is challenging especially if one wants to do it efficiently and retain the flexibility by choosing features of interest for analysis. Features (e.g., age, gender, relationship, political view etc.) can be explicitly given from datasets, but also can be derived from content (e.g., political view based on Facebook posts). Analysis from multiple perspectives is needed to understand the datasets (or subsets of it) and to infer meaningful knowledge. For example, the influence of age, location, and marital status on political views may need to be inferred separately (or in combination). In this paper, we adapt multilayer network (MLN) analysis, a nontraditional approach, to model the Facebook datasets, integrate content analysis, and conduct analysis, which is driven by a list of desired application based queries. Our experimental analysis shows the flexibility and efficiency of the proposed approach when modeling and analyzing datasets with multiple features.
Deep Energy-Based Modeling of Discrete-Time Physics
Authors: Takashi Matsubara, Ai Ishikawa, Takaharu Yaguchi
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

Physical phenomena in the real world are often described by energy-based modeling theories, such as Hamiltonian mechanics or the Landau theory, which yield various physical laws. Recent developments in neural networks have enabled the mimicking of the energy conservation law by learning the underlying continuous-time differential equations. However, this may not be possible in discrete time, which is often the case in practical learning and computation. Moreover, other physical laws have been overlooked in the previous neural network models. In this study, we propose a deep energy-based physical model that admits a specific differential geometric structure. From this structure, the conservation or dissipation law of energy and the mass conservation law follow naturally. To ensure the energetic behavior in discrete time, we also propose an automatic discrete differential algorithm that enables neural networks to employ the discrete gradient method.
Geometric Estimation of Multivariate Dependency
Authors: Salimeh Yasaei Sekeh, Alfred O. Hero
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

This paper proposes a geometric estimator of dependency between a pair of multivariate samples. The proposed estimator of dependency is based on a randomly permuted geometric graph (the minimal spanning tree) over the two multivariate samples. This estimator converges to a quantity that we call the geometric mutual information (GMI), which is equivalent to the Henze-Penrose divergence [1] between the joint distribution of the multivariate samples and the product of the marginals. The GMI has many of the same properties as standard MI but can be estimated from empirical data without density estimation; making it scalable to large datasets. The proposed empirical estimator of GMI is simple to implement, involving the construction of an MST spanning over both the original data and a randomly permuted version of this data. We establish asymptotic convergence of the estimator and convergence rates of the bias and variance for smooth multivariate density functions belonging to a H\"{o}lder class. We demonstrate the advantages of our proposed geometric dependency estimator in a series of experiments.
Marginalized Average Attentional Network for Weakly-Supervised Learning
Authors: Yuan Yuan, Yueming Lyu, Xi Shen, Ivor W. Tsang, Dit-yan Yeung
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2019 5
Tasks: Action Localization, Temporal Action Localization, Weakly Supervised Action Localization, Weakly-supervised Learning, Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization

In weakly-supervised temporal action localization, previous works have failed to locate dense and integral regions for each entire action due to the overestimation of the most salient regions. To alleviate this issue, we propose a marginalized average attentional network (MAAN) to suppress the dominant response of the most salient regions in a principled manner. The MAAN employs a novel marginalized average aggregation (MAA) module and learns a set of latent discriminative probabilities in an end-to-end fashion. MAA samples multiple subsets from the video snippet features according to a set of latent discriminative probabilities and takes the expectation over all the averaged subset features. Theoretically, we prove that the MAA module with learned latent discriminative probabilities successfully reduces the difference in responses between the most salient regions and the others. Therefore, MAAN is able to generate better class activation sequences and identify dense and integral action regions in the videos. Moreover, we propose a fast algorithm to reduce the complexity of constructing MAA from O($2^T$) to O($T^2$). Extensive experiments on two large-scale video datasets show that our MAAN achieves superior performance on weakly-supervised temporal action localization
Similarity Measure Development for Case-Based Reasoning- A Data-driven Approach
Authors: Deepika Verma, Kerstin Bach, Paul Jarle Mork
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00

In this paper, we demonstrate a data-driven methodology for modelling the local similarity measures of various attributes in a dataset. We analyse the spread in the numerical attributes and estimate their distribution using polynomial function to showcase an approach for deriving strong initial value ranges of numerical attributes and use a non-overlapping distribution for categorical attributes such that the entire similarity range [0,1] is utilized. We use an open source dataset for demonstrating modelling and development of the similarity measures and will present a case-based reasoning (CBR) system that can be used to search for the most relevant similar cases.
Exploring the effects of Lx-norm penalty terms in multivariate curve resolution methods for resolving LC/GC-MS data
Authors: Ahmad Mani-Varnosfaderani, Mohammad Javad Masroor
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00

There are different problems for resolution of complex LC-MS or GC-MS data, such as the existence of embedded chromatographic peaks, continuum background and overlapping in mass channels for different components. These problems cause rotational ambiguity in recovered profiles calculated using multivariate curve resolution (MCR) methods. Since mass spectra are sparse in nature, sparsity has been proposed recently as a constraint in MCR methods for analyzing LC-MS data. There are different ways for implementation of the sparsity constraint, and majority of methods rely on imposing a penalty based on the L0-, L1- and L2-norms of recovered mass spectra. Ridge regression and least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) can be used for implementation of L2- and L1-norm penalties in MCR, respectively. The main question is which Lx-norm penalty is more worthwhile for implementation of the sparsity constraint in MCR methods. In order to address this question, two and three component LC-MS data were simulated and used for the case study in this work. The areas of feasible solutions (AFS) were calculated using the grid search strategy. Calculating Lx-norms values in AFS for x between zero and two revealed that the gradient of optimization surface increased from x values equal to two to x values near zero. However, for x equal to zero, the optimization surface was similar to a plateau, which increased the risk of sticking in local minima. Generally, results in this work, recommend the use of L1-norm penalty methods like Lasso for implementation of sparsity constraint in MCR-ALS algorithm for finding more sparse solutions and reducing the extent of rotational ambiguity.
Online Signature Verification Based on Writer Specific Feature Selection and Fuzzy Similarity Measure
Authors: Chandra Sekhar V, Prerana Mukherjee, D. S. Guru, Viswanath Pulabaigari
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, feature selection

Online Signature Verification (OSV) is a widely used biometric attribute for user behavioral characteristic verification in digital forensics. In this manuscript, owing to large intra-individual variability, a novel method for OSV based on an interval symbolic representation and a fuzzy similarity measure grounded on writer specific parameter selection is proposed. The two parameters, namely, writer specific acceptance threshold and optimal feature set to be used for authenticating the writer are selected based on minimum equal error rate (EER) attained during parameter fixation phase using the training signature samples. This is in variation to current techniques for OSV, which are primarily writer independent, in which a common set of features and acceptance threshold are chosen. To prove the robustness of our system, we have exhaustively assessed our system with four standard datasets i.e. MCYT-100 (DB1), MCYT-330 (DB2), SUSIG-Visual corpus and SVC-2004- Task2. Experimental outcome confirms the effectiveness of fuzzy similarity metric-based writer dependent parameter selection for OSV by achieving a lower error rate as compared to many recent and state-of-the art OSV models.
Bayesian Pitch Tracking Based on the Harmonic Model
Authors: Liming Shi, Jesper Kjaer Nielsen, Jesper Rindom Jensen, Max A. Little, Mads Graesboll Christensen
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00

Fundamental frequency is one of the most important characteristics of speech and audio signals. Harmonic model-based fundamental frequency estimators offer a higher estimation accuracy and robustness against noise than the widely used autocorrelation-based methods. However, the traditional harmonic model-based estimators do not take the temporal smoothness of the fundamental frequency, the model order, and the voicing into account as they process each data segment independently. In this paper, a fully Bayesian fundamental frequency tracking algorithm based on the harmonic model and a first-order Markov process model is proposed. Smoothness priors are imposed on the fundamental frequencies, model orders, and voicing using first-order Markov process models. Using these Markov models, fundamental frequency estimation and voicing detection errors can be reduced. Using the harmonic model, the proposed fundamental frequency tracker has an improved robustness to noise. An analytical form of the likelihood function, which can be computed efficiently, is derived. Compared to the state-of-the-art neural network and non-parametric approaches, the proposed fundamental frequency tracking algorithm reduces the mean absolute errors and gross errors by 15\% and 20\% on the Keele pitch database and 36\% and 26\% on sustained /a/ sounds from a database of Parkinson's disease voices under 0 dB white Gaussian noise. A MATLAB version of the proposed algorithm is made freely available for reproduction of the results\footnote{An implementation of the proposed algorithm using MATLAB may be found in \url{https://tinyurl.com/yxn4a543}
Conditional Sum-Product Networks: Imposing Structure on Deep Probabilistic Architectures
Authors: Xiaoting Shao, Alejandro Molina, Antonio Vergari, Karl Stelzner, Robert Peharz, Thomas Liebig, Kristian Kersting
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Probabilistic graphical models are a central tool in AI; however, they are generally not as expressive as deep neural models, and inference is notoriously hard and slow. In contrast, deep probabilistic models such as sum-product networks (SPNs) capture joint distributions in a tractable fashion, but still lack the expressive power of intractable models based on deep neural networks. Therefore, we introduce conditional SPNs (CSPNs), conditional density estimators for multivariate and potentially hybrid domains which allow harnessing the expressive power of neural networks while still maintaining tractability guarantees. One way to implement CSPNs is to use an existing SPN structure and condition its parameters on the input, e.g., via a deep neural network. This approach, however, might misrepresent the conditional independence structure present in data. Consequently, we also develop a structure-learning approach that derives both the structure and parameters of CSPNs from data. Our experimental evidence demonstrates that CSPNs are competitive with other probabilistic models and yield superior performance on multilabel image classification compared to mean field and mixture density networks. Furthermore, they can successfully be employed as building blocks for structured probabilistic models, such as autoregressive image models.
Benchmarking Deep Learning Architectures for Predicting Readmission to the ICU and Describing Patients-at-Risk
Authors: Sebastiano Barbieri, James Kemp, Oscar Perez-Concha, Sradha Kotwal, Martin Gallagher, Angus Ritchie, Louisa Jorm
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Benchmarking

Objective: To compare different deep learning architectures for predicting the risk of readmission within 30 days of discharge from the intensive care unit (ICU). The interpretability of attention-based models is leveraged to describe patients-at-risk. Methods: Several deep learning architectures making use of attention mechanisms, recurrent layers, neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and medical concept embeddings with time-aware attention were trained using publicly available electronic medical record data (MIMIC-III) associated with 45,298 ICU stays for 33,150 patients. Bayesian inference was used to compute the posterior over weights of an attention-based model. Odds ratios associated with an increased risk of readmission were computed for static variables. Diagnoses, procedures, medications, and vital signs were ranked according to the associated risk of readmission. Results: A recurrent neural network, with time dynamics of code embeddings computed by neural ODEs, achieved the highest average precision of 0.331 (AUROC: 0.739, F1-Score: 0.372). Predictive accuracy was comparable across neural network architectures. Groups of patients at risk included those suffering from infectious complications, with chronic or progressive conditions, and for whom standard medical care was not suitable. Conclusions: Attention-based networks may be preferable to recurrent networks if an interpretable model is required, at only marginal cost in predictive accuracy.
Contrast Enhancement of Medical X-Ray Image Using Morphological Operators with Optimal Structuring Element
Authors: Rafsanjany Kushol, Md. Nishat Raihan, Md Sirajus Salekin, A. B. M. Ashikur Rahman
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement

To guide surgical and medical treatment X-ray images have been used by physicians in every modern healthcare organization and hospitals. Doctor's evaluation process and disease identification in the area of skeletal system can be performed in a faster and efficient way with the help of X-ray imaging technique as they can depict bone structure painlessly. This paper presents an efficient contrast enhancement technique using morphological operators which will help to visualize important bone segments and soft tissues more clearly. Top-hat and Bottom-hat transform are utilized to enhance the image where gradient magnitude value is calculated for automatically selecting the structuring element (SE) size. Experimental evaluation on different x-ray imaging databases shows the effectiveness of our method which also produces comparatively better output against some existing image enhancement techniques.
Universal Approximation with Deep Narrow Networks
Authors: Patrick Kidger, Terry Lyons
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00

The classical Universal Approximation Theorem holds for neural networks of arbitrary width and bounded depth. Here we consider the natural `dual' scenario for networks of bounded width and arbitrary depth. Precisely, let $n$ be the number of inputs neurons, $m$ be the number of output neurons, and let $\rho$ be any nonaffine continuous function, with a continuous nonzero derivative at some point. Then we show that the class of neural networks of arbitrary depth, width $n + m + 2$, and activation function $\rho$, is dense in $C(K; \mathbb{R}^m)$ for $K \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ with $K$ compact. This covers every activation function possible to use in practice, and also includes polynomial activation functions, which is unlike the classical version of the theorem, and provides a qualitative difference between deep narrow networks and shallow wide networks. We then consider several extensions of this result. In particular we consider nowhere differentiable activation functions, density in noncompact domains with respect to the $L^p$-norm, and how the width may be reduced to just $n + m + 1$ for `most' activation functions.
A Two-stage Classification Method for High-dimensional Data and Point Clouds
Authors: Xiaohao Cai, Raymond Chan, Xiaoyu Xie, Tieyong Zeng
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

High-dimensional data classification is a fundamental task in machine learning and imaging science. In this paper, we propose a two-stage multiphase semi-supervised classification method for classifying high-dimensional data and unstructured point clouds. To begin with, a fuzzy classification method such as the standard support vector machine is used to generate a warm initialization. We then apply a two-stage approach named SaT (smoothing and thresholding) to improve the classification. In the first stage, an unconstraint convex variational model is implemented to purify and smooth the initialization, followed by the second stage which is to project the smoothed partition obtained at stage one to a binary partition. These two stages can be repeated, with the latest result as a new initialization, to keep improving the classification quality. We show that the convex model of the smoothing stage has a unique solution and can be solved by a specifically designed primal-dual algorithm whose convergence is guaranteed. We test our method and compare it with the state-of-the-art methods on several benchmark data sets. The experimental results demonstrate clearly that our method is superior in both the classification accuracy and computation speed for high-dimensional data and point clouds.
Adaptive Stochastic Natural Gradient Method for One-Shot Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Youhei Akimoto, Shinichi Shirakawa, Nozomu Yoshinari, Kento Uchida, Shota Saito, Kouhei Nishida
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Neural Architecture Search

High sensitivity of neural architecture search (NAS) methods against their input such as step-size (i.e., learning rate) and search space prevents practitioners from applying them out-of-the-box to their own problems, albeit its purpose is to automate a part of tuning process. Aiming at a fast, robust, and widely-applicable NAS, we develop a generic optimization framework for NAS. We turn a coupled optimization of connection weights and neural architecture into a differentiable optimization by means of stochastic relaxation. It accepts arbitrary search space (widely-applicable) and enables to employ a gradient-based simultaneous optimization of weights and architecture (fast). We propose a stochastic natural gradient method with an adaptive step-size mechanism built upon our theoretical investigation (robust). Despite its simplicity and no problem-dependent parameter tuning, our method exhibited near state-of-the-art performances with low computational budgets both on image classification and inpainting tasks.
CNNs found to jump around more skillfully than RNNs: Compositional generalization in seq2seq convolutional networks
Authors: Roberto Dessì, Marco Baroni
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7

Lake and Baroni (2018) introduced the SCAN dataset probing the ability of seq2seq models to capture compositional generalizations, such as inferring the meaning of "jump around" 0-shot from the component words. Recurrent networks (RNNs) were found to completely fail the most challenging generalization cases. We test here a convolutional network (CNN) on these tasks, reporting hugely improved performance with respect to RNNs. Despite the big improvement, the CNN has however not induced systematic rules, suggesting that the difference between compositional and non-compositional behaviour is not clear-cut.
Stochastic Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ce Ju
Date: 2019-05-21 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The goal of the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is to recover the reward functions from expert demonstrations. However, the IRL problem like any ill-posed inverse problem suffers the congenital defect that the policy may be optimal for many reward functions, and expert demonstrations may be optimal for many policies. In this work, we generalize the IRL problem to a well-posed expectation optimization problem stochastic inverse reinforcement learning (SIRL) to recover the probability distribution over reward functions. We adopt the Monte Carlo expectation-maximization (MCEM) method to estimate the parameter of the probability distribution as the first solution to the SIRL problem. The solution is succinct, robust, and transferable for a learning task and can generate alternative solutions to the IRL problem. Through our formulation, it is possible to observe the intrinsic property of the IRL problem from a global viewpoint, and our approach achieves a considerable performance on the objectworld.