pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AI for Social Impact: Learning and Planning in the Data-to-Deployment Pipeline
Authors: Andrew Perrault, Fei Fang, Arunesh Sinha, Milind Tambe
Date: 2019-12-16 00:00:00

With the maturing of AI and multiagent systems research, we have a tremendous opportunity to direct these advances towards addressing complex societal problems. In pursuit of this goal of AI for Social Impact, we as AI researchers must go beyond improvements in computational methodology; it is important to step out in the field to demonstrate social impact. To this end, we focus on the problems of public safety and security, wildlife conservation, and public health in low-resource communities, and present research advances in multiagent systems to address one key cross-cutting challenge: how to effectively deploy our limited intervention resources in these problem domains. We present case studies from our deployments around the world as well as lessons learned that we hope are of use to researchers who are interested in AI for Social Impact. In pushing this research agenda, we believe AI can indeed play an important role in fighting social injustice and improving society.
Measuring Non-Expert Comprehension of Machine Learning Fairness Metrics
Authors: Debjani Saha, Candice Schumann, Duncan C. McElfresh, John P. Dickerson, Michelle L. Mazurek, Michael Carl Tschantz
Date: 2019-12-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Fairness

Bias in machine learning has manifested injustice in several areas, such as medicine, hiring, and criminal justice. In response, computer scientists have developed myriad definitions of fairness to correct this bias in fielded algorithms. While some definitions are based on established legal and ethical norms, others are largely mathematical. It is unclear whether the general public agrees with these fairness definitions, and perhaps more importantly, whether they understand these definitions. We take initial steps toward bridging this gap between ML researchers and the public, by addressing the question: does a lay audience understand a basic definition of ML fairness? We develop a metric to measure comprehension of three such definitions--demographic parity, equal opportunity, and equalized odds. We evaluate this metric using an online survey, and investigate the relationship between comprehension and sentiment, demographics, and the definition itself.
Exploiting the Sensitivity of $L_2$ Adversarial Examples to Erase-and-Restore
Authors: Fei Zuo, Qiang Zeng
Date: 2020-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Ended Question Answering, Sensitivity

By adding carefully crafted perturbations to input images, adversarial examples (AEs) can be generated to mislead neural-network-based image classifiers. $L_2$ adversarial perturbations by Carlini and Wagner (CW) are among the most effective but difficult-to-detect attacks. While many countermeasures against AEs have been proposed, detection of adaptive CW-$L_2$ AEs is still an open question. We find that, by randomly erasing some pixels in an $L_2$ AE and then restoring it with an inpainting technique, the AE, before and after the steps, tends to have different classification results, while a benign sample does not show this symptom. We thus propose a novel AE detection technique, Erase-and-Restore (E&R), that exploits the intriguing sensitivity of $L_2$ attacks. Experiments conducted on two popular image datasets, CIFAR-10 and ImageNet, show that the proposed technique is able to detect over 98% of $L_2$ AEs and has a very low false positive rate on benign images. The detection technique exhibits high transferability: a detection system trained using CW-$L_2$ AEs can accurately detect AEs generated using another $L_2$ attack method. More importantly, our approach demonstrates strong resilience to adaptive $L_2$ attacks, filling a critical gap in AE detection. Finally, we interpret the detection technique through both visualization and quantification.
A Freeform Dielectric Metasurface Modeling Approach Based on Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Sensong An, Bowen Zheng, Mikhail Y. Shalaginov, Hong Tang, Hang Li, Li Zhou, Jun Ding, Anuradha Murthy Agarwal, Clara Rivero-Baleine, Myungkoo Kang, Kathleen A. Richardson, Tian Gu, Juejun Hu, Clayton Fowler, Hualiang Zhang
Date: 2020-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Metasurfaces have shown promising potentials in shaping optical wavefronts while remaining compact compared to bulky geometric optics devices. Design of meta-atoms, the fundamental building blocks of metasurfaces, relies on trial-and-error method to achieve target electromagnetic responses. This process includes the characterization of an enormous amount of different meta-atom designs with different physical and geometric parameters, which normally demands huge computational resources. In this paper, a deep learning-based metasurface/meta-atom modeling approach is introduced to significantly reduce the characterization time while maintaining accuracy. Based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) structure, the proposed deep learning network is able to model meta-atoms with free-form 2D patterns and different lattice sizes, material refractive indexes and thicknesses. Moreover, the presented approach features the capability to predict meta-atoms' wide spectrum responses in the timescale of milliseconds, which makes it attractive for applications such as fast meta-atom/metasurface on-demand designs and optimizations.
Inf-VAE: A Variational Autoencoder Framework to Integrate Homophily and Influence in Diffusion Prediction
Authors: Aravind Sankar, Xinyang Zhang, Adit Krishnan, Jiawei Han
Date: 2020-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Recent years have witnessed tremendous interest in understanding and predicting information spread on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. Existing diffusion prediction methods primarily exploit the sequential order of influenced users by projecting diffusion cascades onto their local social neighborhoods. However, this fails to capture global social structures that do not explicitly manifest in any of the cascades, resulting in poor performance for inactive users with limited historical activities. In this paper, we present a novel variational autoencoder framework (Inf-VAE) to jointly embed homophily and influence through proximity-preserving social and position-encoded temporal latent variables. To model social homophily, Inf-VAE utilizes powerful graph neural network architectures to learn social variables that selectively exploit the social connections of users. Given a sequence of seed user activations, Inf-VAE uses a novel expressive co-attentive fusion network that jointly attends over their social and temporal variables to predict the set of all influenced users. Our experimental results on multiple real-world social network datasets, including Digg, Weibo, and Stack-Exchanges demonstrate significant gains (22% MAP@10) for Inf-VAE over state-of-the-art diffusion prediction models; we achieve massive gains for users with sparse activities, and users who lack direct social neighbors in seed sets.
Handwritten Optical Character Recognition (OCR): A Comprehensive Systematic Literature Review (SLR)
Authors: Jamshed Memon, Maira Sami, Rizwan Ahmed Khan
Date: 2020-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Systematic Literature Review

Given the ubiquity of handwritten documents in human transactions, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of documents have invaluable practical worth. Optical character recognition is a science that enables to translate various types of documents or images into analyzable, editable and searchable data. During last decade, researchers have used artificial intelligence / machine learning tools to automatically analyze handwritten and printed documents in order to convert them into electronic format. The objective of this review paper is to summarize research that has been conducted on character recognition of handwritten documents and to provide research directions. In this Systematic Literature Review (SLR) we collected, synthesized and analyzed research articles on the topic of handwritten OCR (and closely related topics) which were published between year 2000 to 2018. We followed widely used electronic databases by following pre-defined review protocol. Articles were searched using keywords, forward reference searching and backward reference searching in order to search all the articles related to the topic. After carefully following study selection process 142 articles were selected for this SLR. This review article serves the purpose of presenting state of the art results and techniques on OCR and also provide research directions by highlighting research gaps.
Reinforcement Quantum Annealing: A Quantum-Assisted Learning Automata Approach
Authors: Ramin Ayanzadeh, Milton Halem, Tim Finin
Date: 2020-01-01 00:00:00

We introduce the reinforcement quantum annealing (RQA) scheme in which an intelligent agent interacts with a quantum annealer that plays the stochastic environment role of learning automata and tries to iteratively find better Ising Hamiltonians for the given problem of interest. As a proof-of-concept, we propose a novel approach for reducing the NP-complete problem of Boolean satisfiability (SAT) to minimizing Ising Hamiltonians and show how to apply the RQA for increasing the probability of finding the global optimum. Our experimental results on two different benchmark SAT problems (namely factoring pseudo-prime numbers and random SAT with phase transitions), using a D-Wave 2000Q quantum processor, demonstrated that RQA finds notably better solutions with fewer samples, compared to state-of-the-art techniques in the realm of quantum annealing.
Multi-lane Detection Using Instance Segmentation and Attentive Voting
Authors: Donghoon Chang, Vinjohn Chirakkal, Shubham Goswami, Munawar Hasan, Taekwon Jung, Jinkeon Kang, Seok-Cheol Kee, Dongkyu Lee, Ajit Pratap Singh
Date: 2020-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, Instance Segmentation, Lane Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Autonomous driving is becoming one of the leading industrial research areas. Therefore many automobile companies are coming up with semi to fully autonomous driving solutions. Among these solutions, lane detection is one of the vital driver-assist features that play a crucial role in the decision-making process of the autonomous vehicle. A variety of solutions have been proposed to detect lanes on the road, which ranges from using hand-crafted features to the state-of-the-art end-to-end trainable deep learning architectures. Most of these architectures are trained in a traffic constrained environment. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to multi-lane detection, which outperforms state of the art methods in terms of both accuracy and speed. To achieve this, we also offer a dataset with a more intuitive labeling scheme as compared to other benchmark datasets. Using our approach, we are able to obtain a lane segmentation accuracy of 99.87% running at 54.53 fps (average).
A Generalized Deep Learning Framework for Whole-Slide Image Segmentation and Analysis
Authors: Mahendra Khened, Avinash Kori, Haran Rajkumar, Balaji Srinivasan, Ganapathy Krishnamurthi
Date: 2020-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Lesion Detection, Prognosis, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Histopathology tissue analysis is considered the gold standard in cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Given the large size of these images and the increase in the number of potential cancer cases, an automated solution as an aid to histopathologists is highly desirable. In the recent past, deep learning-based techniques have provided state of the art results in a wide variety of image analysis tasks, including analysis of digitized slides. However, the size of images and variability in histopathology tasks makes it a challenge to develop an integrated framework for histopathology image analysis. We propose a deep learning-based framework for histopathology tissue analysis. We demonstrate the generalizability of our framework, including training and inference, on several open-source datasets, which include CAMELYON (breast cancer metastases), DigestPath (colon cancer), and PAIP (liver cancer) datasets. We discuss multiple types of uncertainties pertaining to data and model, namely aleatoric and epistemic, respectively. Simultaneously, we demonstrate our model generalization across different data distribution by evaluating some samples on TCGA data. On CAMELYON16 test data (n=139) for the task of lesion detection, the FROC score achieved was 0.86 and in the CAMELYON17 test-data (n=500) for the task of pN-staging the Cohen's kappa score achieved was 0.9090 (third in the open leaderboard). On DigestPath test data (n=212) for the task of tumor segmentation, a Dice score of 0.782 was achieved (fourth in the challenge). On PAIP test data (n=40) for the task of viable tumor segmentation, a Jaccard Index of 0.75 (third in the challenge) was achieved, and for viable tumor burden, a score of 0.633 was achieved (second in the challenge). Our entire framework and related documentation are freely available at GitHub and PyPi.
Core-Collapse Supernova Gravitational-Wave Search and Deep Learning Classification
Authors: Alberto Iess, Elena Cuoco, Filip Morawski, Jade Powell
Date: 2020-01-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Deep Learning, General Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We describe a search and classification procedure for gravitational waves emitted by core-collapse supernova (CCSN) explosions, using a convolutional neural network (CNN) combined with an event trigger generator known as Wavelet Detection Filter (WDF). We employ both a 1-D CNN search using time series gravitational-wave data as input, and a 2-D CNN search with time-frequency representation of the data as input. To test the accuracies of our 1-D and 2-D CNN classification, we add CCSN waveforms from the most recent hydrodynamical simulations of neutrino-driven core-collapse to simulated Gaussian colored noise with the Virgo interferometer and the planned Einstein Telescope sensitivity curve. We find classification accuracies, for a single detector, of over 95% for both 1-D and 2-D CNN pipelines. For the first time in machine learning CCSN studies, we add short duration detector noise transients to our data to test the robustness of our method against false alarms created by detector noise artifacts. Further to this, we show that the CNN can distinguish between different types of CCSN waveform models.
Learning-Aided Deep Path Prediction for Sphere Decoding in Large MIMO Systems
Authors: Doyeon Weon, Kyungchun Lee
Date: 2020-01-02 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a novel learning-aided sphere decoding (SD) scheme for large multiple-input--multiple-output systems, namely, deep path prediction-based sphere decoding (DPP-SD). In this scheme, we employ a neural network (NN) to predict the minimum metrics of the ``deep'' paths in sub-trees before commencing the tree search in SD. To reduce the complexity of the NN, we employ the input vector with a reduced dimension rather than using the original received signals and full channel matrix. The outputs of the NN, i.e., the predicted minimum path metrics, are exploited to determine the search order between the sub-trees, as well as to optimize the initial search radius, which may reduce the computational complexity of SD. For further complexity reduction, an early termination scheme based on the predicted minimum path metrics is also proposed. Our simulation results show that the proposed DPP-SD scheme provides a significant reduction in computational complexity compared with the conventional SD algorithm, despite achieving near-optimal performance.
Deep Representation Learning in Speech Processing: Challenges, Recent Advances, and Future Trends
Authors: Siddique Latif, Rajib Rana, Sara Khalifa, Raja Jurdak, Junaid Qadir, Björn W. Schuller
Date: 2020-01-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Emotion Recognition, Feature Engineering, Representation Learning, Speaker Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech Representation Learning, Survey

Research on speech processing has traditionally considered the task of designing hand-engineered acoustic features (feature engineering) as a separate distinct problem from the task of designing efficient machine learning (ML) models to make prediction and classification decisions. There are two main drawbacks to this approach: firstly, the feature engineering being manual is cumbersome and requires human knowledge; and secondly, the designed features might not be best for the objective at hand. This has motivated the adoption of a recent trend in speech community towards utilisation of representation learning techniques, which can learn an intermediate representation of the input signal automatically that better suits the task at hand and hence lead to improved performance. The significance of representation learning has increased with advances in deep learning (DL), where the representations are more useful and less dependent on human knowledge, making it very conducive for tasks like classification, prediction, etc. The main contribution of this paper is to present an up-to-date and comprehensive survey on different techniques of speech representation learning by bringing together the scattered research across three distinct research areas including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Speaker Recognition (SR), and Speaker Emotion Recognition (SER). Recent reviews in speech have been conducted for ASR, SR, and SER, however, none of these has focused on the representation learning from speech -- a gap that our survey aims to bridge.
Temporal-Spatial Neural Filter: Direction Informed End-to-End Multi-channel Target Speech Separation
Authors: Rongzhi Gu, Yuexian Zou
Date: 2020-01-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Separation

Target speech separation refers to extracting the target speaker's speech from mixed signals. Despite the recent advances in deep learning based close-talk speech separation, the applications to real-world are still an open issue. Two main challenges are the complex acoustic environment and the real-time processing requirement. To address these challenges, we propose a temporal-spatial neural filter, which directly estimates the target speech waveform from multi-speaker mixture in reverberant environments, assisted with directional information of the speaker(s). Firstly, against variations brought by complex environment, the key idea is to increase the acoustic representation completeness through the jointly modeling of temporal, spectral and spatial discriminability between the target and interference source. Specifically, temporal, spectral, spatial along with the designed directional features are integrated to create a joint acoustic representation. Secondly, to reduce the latency, we design a fully-convolutional autoencoder framework, which is purely end-to-end and single-pass. All the feature computation is implemented by the network layers and operations to speed up the separation procedure. Evaluation is conducted on simulated reverberant dataset WSJ0-2mix and WSJ0-3mix under speaker-independent scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning based multi-channel approaches with fewer parameters and faster processing speed. Furthermore, the proposed temporal-spatial neural filter can handle mixtures with varying and unknown number of speakers and exhibits persistent performance even when existing a direction estimation error. Codes and models will be released soon.
Graph Signal Processing -- Part III: Machine Learning on Graphs, from Graph Topology to Applications
Authors: Ljubisa Stankovic, Danilo Mandic, Milos Dakovic, Milos Brajovic, Bruno Scalzo, Shengxi Li, Anthony G. Constantinides
Date: 2020-01-02 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Many modern data analytics applications on graphs operate on domains where graph topology is not known a priori, and hence its determination becomes part of the problem definition, rather than serving as prior knowledge which aids the problem solution. Part III of this monograph starts by addressing ways to learn graph topology, from the case where the physics of the problem already suggest a possible topology, through to most general cases where the graph topology is learned from the data. A particular emphasis is on graph topology definition based on the correlation and precision matrices of the observed data, combined with additional prior knowledge and structural conditions, such as the smoothness or sparsity of graph connections. For learning sparse graphs (with small number of edges), the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, known as LASSO is employed, along with its graph specific variant, graphical LASSO. For completeness, both variants of LASSO are derived in an intuitive way, and explained. An in-depth elaboration of the graph topology learning paradigm is provided through several examples on physically well defined graphs, such as electric circuits, linear heat transfer, social and computer networks, and spring-mass systems. As many graph neural networks (GNN) and convolutional graph networks (GCN) are emerging, we have also reviewed the main trends in GNNs and GCNs, from the perspective of graph signal filtering. Tensor representation of lattice-structured graphs is next considered, and it is shown that tensors (multidimensional data arrays) are a special class of graph signals, whereby the graph vertices reside on a high-dimensional regular lattice structure. This part of monograph concludes with two emerging applications in financial data processing and underground transportation networks modeling.
Privacy for Rescue: A New Testimony Why Privacy is Vulnerable In Deep Models
Authors: Ruiyuan Gao, Ming Dun, Hailong Yang, Zhongzhi Luan, Depei Qian
Date: 2019-12-31 00:00:00

The huge computation demand of deep learning models and limited computation resources on the edge devices calls for the cooperation between edge device and cloud service by splitting the deep models into two halves. However, transferring the intermediates results from the partial models between edge device and cloud service makes the user privacy vulnerable since the attacker can intercept the intermediate results and extract privacy information from them. Existing research works rely on metrics that are either impractical or insufficient to measure the effectiveness of privacy protection methods in the above scenario, especially from the aspect of a single user. In this paper, we first present a formal definition of the privacy protection problem in the edge-cloud system running DNN models. Then, we analyze the-state-of-the-art methods and point out the drawbacks of their methods, especially the evaluation metrics such as the Mutual Information (MI). In addition, we perform several experiments to demonstrate that although existing methods perform well under MI, they are not effective enough to protect the privacy of a single user. To address the drawbacks of the evaluation metrics, we propose two new metrics that are more accurate to measure the effectiveness of privacy protection methods. Finally, we highlight several potential research directions to encourage future efforts addressing the privacy protection problem.