pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
COVID-MobileXpert: On-Device COVID-19 Patient Triage and Follow-up using Chest X-rays
Authors: Xin Li, Chengyin Li, Dongxiao Zhu
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Trajectory Prediction, Transfer Learning

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an emerging need for rapid, dedicated, and point-of-care COVID-19 patient disposition techniques to optimize resource utilization and clinical workflow. In view of this need, we present COVID-MobileXpert: a lightweight deep neural network (DNN) based mobile app that can use chest X-ray (CXR) for COVID-19 case screening and radiological trajectory prediction. We design and implement a novel three-player knowledge transfer and distillation (KTD) framework including a pre-trained attending physician (AP) network that extracts CXR imaging features from a large scale of lung disease CXR images, a fine-tuned resident fellow (RF) network that learns the essential CXR imaging features to discriminate COVID-19 from pneumonia and/or normal cases with a small amount of COVID-19 cases, and a trained lightweight medical student (MS) network to perform on-device COVID-19 patient triage and follow-up. To tackle the challenge of vastly similar and dominant fore- and background in medical images, we employ novel loss functions and training schemes for the MS network to learn the robust features. We demonstrate the significant potential of COVID-MobileXpert for rapid deployment via extensive experiments with diverse MS architecture and tuning parameter settings. The source codes for cloud and mobile based models are available from the following url: https://github.com/xinli0928/COVID-Xray.
Deep Neural Network Learning with Second-Order Optimizers -- a Practical Study with a Stochastic Quasi-Gauss-Newton Method
Authors: Christopher Thiele, Mauricio Araya-Polo, Detlef Hohl
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00

Training in supervised deep learning is computationally demanding, and the convergence behavior is usually not fully understood. We introduce and study a second-order stochastic quasi-Gauss-Newton (SQGN) optimization method that combines ideas from stochastic quasi-Newton methods, Gauss-Newton methods, and variance reduction to address this problem. SQGN provides excellent accuracy without the need for experimenting with many hyper-parameter configurations, which is often computationally prohibitive given the number of combinations and the cost of each training process. We discuss the implementation of SQGN with TensorFlow, and we compare its convergence and computational performance to selected first-order methods using the MNIST benchmark and a large-scale seismic tomography application from Earth science.
Dense Steerable Filter CNNs for Exploiting Rotational Symmetry in Histology Images
Authors: Simon Graham, David Epstein, Nasir Rajpoot
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Breast Tumour Classification, Colorectal Gland Segmentation:, Multi-tissue Nucleus Segmentation, Nuclear Segmentation, Tumour Classification

Histology images are inherently symmetric under rotation, where each orientation is equally as likely to appear. However, this rotational symmetry is not widely utilised as prior knowledge in modern Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), resulting in data hungry models that learn independent features at each orientation. Allowing CNNs to be rotation-equivariant removes the necessity to learn this set of transformations from the data and instead frees up model capacity, allowing more discriminative features to be learned. This reduction in the number of required parameters also reduces the risk of overfitting. In this paper, we propose Dense Steerable Filter CNNs (DSF-CNNs) that use group convolutions with multiple rotated copies of each filter in a densely connected framework. Each filter is defined as a linear combination of steerable basis filters, enabling exact rotation and decreasing the number of trainable parameters compared to standard filters. We also provide the first in-depth comparison of different rotation-equivariant CNNs for histology image analysis and demonstrate the advantage of encoding rotational symmetry into modern architectures. We show that DSF-CNNs achieve state-of-the-art performance, with significantly fewer parameters, when applied to three different tasks in the area of computational pathology: breast tumour classification, colon gland segmentation and multi-tissue nuclear segmentation.
Directional approach to gradual cover: the continuous case
Authors: Tammy Drezner, Zvi Drezner, Pawel Kalczynski
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00

The objective of the cover location models is covering demand by facilities within a given distance. The gradual (or partial) cover replaces abrupt drop from full cover to no cover by defining gradual decline in cover. In this paper we use a recently proposed rule for calculating the joint cover of a demand point by several facilities termed "directional gradual cover". Contrary to all gradual cover models, the joint cover depends on the facilities' directions. In order to calculate the joint cover, existing models apply the partial cover by each facility disregarding their direction. We develop a genetic algorithm to solve the facilities location problem and also solve the problem for facilities that can be located anywhere in the plane. The proposed modifications were extensively tested on a case study of covering Orange County, California.
The Role of Pragmatic and Discourse Context in Determining Argument Impact
Authors: Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Claire Cardie
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Persuasiveness

Research in the social sciences and psychology has shown that the persuasiveness of an argument depends not only the language employed, but also on attributes of the source/communicator, the audience, and the appropriateness and strength of the argument's claims given the pragmatic and discourse context of the argument. Among these characteristics of persuasive arguments, prior work in NLP does not explicitly investigate the effect of the pragmatic and discourse context when determining argument quality. This paper presents a new dataset to initiate the study of this aspect of argumentation: it consists of a diverse collection of arguments covering 741 controversial topics and comprising over 47,000 claims. We further propose predictive models that incorporate the pragmatic and discourse context of argumentative claims and show that they outperform models that rely only on claim-specific linguistic features for predicting the perceived impact of individual claims within a particular line of argument.
A Systematic Analysis of Morphological Content in BERT Models for Multiple Languages
Authors: Daniel Edmiston
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00

This work describes experiments which probe the hidden representations of several BERT-style models for morphological content. The goal is to examine the extent to which discrete linguistic structure, in the form of morphological features and feature values, presents itself in the vector representations and attention distributions of pre-trained language models for five European languages. The experiments contained herein show that (i) Transformer architectures largely partition their embedding space into convex sub-regions highly correlated with morphological feature value, (ii) the contextualized nature of transformer embeddings allows models to distinguish ambiguous morphological forms in many, but not all cases, and (iii) very specific attention head/layer combinations appear to hone in on subject-verb agreement.
Learning Generative Models of Shape Handles
Authors: Matheus Gadelha, Giorgio Gori, Duygu Ceylan, Radomir Mech, Nathan Carr, Tamy Boubekeur, Rui Wang, Subhransu Maji
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6

We present a generative model to synthesize 3D shapes as sets of handles -- lightweight proxies that approximate the original 3D shape -- for applications in interactive editing, shape parsing, and building compact 3D representations. Our model can generate handle sets with varying cardinality and different types of handles (Figure 1). Key to our approach is a deep architecture that predicts both the parameters and existence of shape handles, and a novel similarity measure that can easily accommodate different types of handles, such as cuboids or sphere-meshes. We leverage the recent advances in semantic 3D annotation as well as automatic shape summarizing techniques to supervise our approach. We show that the resulting shape representations are intuitive and achieve superior quality than previous state-of-the-art. Finally, we demonstrate how our method can be used in applications such as interactive shape editing, completion, and interpolation, leveraging the latent space learned by our model to guide these tasks. Project page: http://mgadelha.me/shapehandles.
Query Focused Multi-Document Summarization with Distant Supervision
Authors: Yumo Xu, Mirella Lapata
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Summarization, Multi-Document Summarization, Question Answering, Retrieval

We consider the problem of better modeling query-cluster interactions to facilitate query focused multi-document summarization (QFS). Due to the lack of training data, existing work relies heavily on retrieval-style methods for estimating the relevance between queries and text segments. In this work, we leverage distant supervision from question answering where various resources are available to more explicitly capture the relationship between queries and documents. We propose a coarse-to-fine modeling framework which introduces separate modules for estimating whether segments are relevant to the query, likely to contain an answer, and central. Under this framework, a trained evidence estimator further discerns which retrieved segments might answer the query for final selection in the summary. We demonstrate that our framework outperforms strong comparison systems on standard QFS benchmarks.
Field-Level Crop Type Classification with k Nearest Neighbors: A Baseline for a New Kenya Smallholder Dataset
Authors: Hannah Kerner, Catherine Nakalembe, Inbal Becker-Reshef
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Accurate crop type maps provide critical information for ensuring food security, yet there has been limited research on crop type classification for smallholder agriculture, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where risk of food insecurity is highest. Publicly-available ground-truth data such as the newly-released training dataset of crop types in Kenya (Radiant MLHub) are catalyzing this research, but it is important to understand the context of when, where, and how these datasets were obtained when evaluating classification performance and using them as a benchmark across methods. In this paper, we provide context for the new western Kenya dataset which was collected during an atypical 2019 main growing season and demonstrate classification accuracy up to 64% for maize and 70% for cassava using k Nearest Neighbors--a fast, interpretable, and scalable method that can serve as a baseline for future work.
LogicNets: Co-Designed Neural Networks and Circuits for Extreme-Throughput Applications
Authors: Yaman Umuroglu, Yash Akhauri, Nicholas J. Fraser, Michaela Blott
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection, Quantization

Deployment of deep neural networks for applications that require very high throughput or extremely low latency is a severe computational challenge, further exacerbated by inefficiencies in mapping the computation to hardware. We present a novel method for designing neural network topologies that directly map to a highly efficient FPGA implementation. By exploiting the equivalence of artificial neurons with quantized inputs/outputs and truth tables, we can train quantized neural networks that can be directly converted to a netlist of truth tables, and subsequently deployed as a highly pipelinable, massively parallel FPGA circuit. However, the neural network topology requires careful consideration since the hardware cost of truth tables grows exponentially with neuron fan-in. To obtain smaller networks where the whole netlist can be placed-and-routed onto a single FPGA, we derive a fan-in driven hardware cost model to guide topology design, and combine high sparsity with low-bit activation quantization to limit the neuron fan-in. We evaluate our approach on two tasks with very high intrinsic throughput requirements in high-energy physics and network intrusion detection. We show that the combination of sparsity and low-bit activation quantization results in high-speed circuits with small logic depth and low LUT cost, demonstrating competitive accuracy with less than 15 ns of inference latency and throughput in the hundreds of millions of inferences per second.
Enhancing Review Comprehension with Domain-Specific Commonsense
Authors: Aaron Traylor, Chen Chen, Behzad Golshan, Xiaolan Wang, Yuliang Li, Yoshihiko Suhara, Jinfeng Li, Cagatay Demiralp, Wang-Chiew Tan
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect Extraction, Knowledge Distillation, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Review comprehension has played an increasingly important role in improving the quality of online services and products and commonsense knowledge can further enhance review comprehension. However, existing general-purpose commonsense knowledge bases lack sufficient coverage and precision to meaningfully improve the comprehension of domain-specific reviews. In this paper, we introduce xSense, an effective system for review comprehension using domain-specific commonsense knowledge bases (xSense KBs). We show that xSense KBs can be constructed inexpensively and present a knowledge distillation method that enables us to use xSense KBs along with BERT to boost the performance of various review comprehension tasks. We evaluate xSense over three review comprehension tasks: aspect extraction, aspect sentiment classification, and question answering. We find that xSense outperforms the state-of-the-art models for the first two tasks and improves the baseline BERT QA model significantly, demonstrating the usefulness of incorporating commonsense into review comprehension pipelines. To facilitate future research and applications, we publicly release three domain-specific knowledge bases and a domain-specific question answering benchmark along with this paper.
Disentangled Sticky Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Hidden Markov Model
Authors: Ding Zhou, Yuanjun Gao, Liam Paninski
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Hidden Markov Model (HDP-HMM) has been used widely as a natural Bayesian nonparametric extension of the classical Hidden Markov Model for learning from sequential and time-series data. A sticky extension of the HDP-HMM has been proposed to strengthen the self-persistence probability in the HDP-HMM. However, the sticky HDP-HMM entangles the strength of the self-persistence prior and transition prior together, limiting its expressiveness. Here, we propose a more general model: the disentangled sticky HDP-HMM (DS-HDP-HMM). We develop novel Gibbs sampling algorithms for efficient inference in this model. We show that the disentangled sticky HDP-HMM outperforms the sticky HDP-HMM and HDP-HMM on both synthetic and real data, and apply the new approach to analyze neural data and segment behavioral video data.
Adaptive Fractional Dilated Convolution Network for Image Aesthetics Assessment
Authors: Qiuyu Chen, Wei zhang, Ning Zhou, Peng Lei, Yi Xu, Yu Zheng, Jianping Fan
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6

To leverage deep learning for image aesthetics assessment, one critical but unsolved issue is how to seamlessly incorporate the information of image aspect ratios to learn more robust models. In this paper, an adaptive fractional dilated convolution (AFDC), which is aspect-ratio-embedded, composition-preserving and parameter-free, is developed to tackle this issue natively in convolutional kernel level. Specifically, the fractional dilated kernel is adaptively constructed according to the image aspect ratios, where the interpolation of nearest two integers dilated kernels is used to cope with the misalignment of fractional sampling. Moreover, we provide a concise formulation for mini-batch training and utilize a grouping strategy to reduce computational overhead. As a result, it can be easily implemented by common deep learning libraries and plugged into popular CNN architectures in a computation-efficient manner. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on image aesthetics assessment over the AVA dataset.
"You are grounded!": Latent Name Artifacts in Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Vered Shwartz, Rachel Rudinger, Oyvind Tafjord
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

Pre-trained language models (LMs) may perpetuate biases originating in their training corpus to downstream models. We focus on artifacts associated with the representation of given names (e.g., Donald), which, depending on the corpus, may be associated with specific entities, as indicated by next token prediction (e.g., Trump). While helpful in some contexts, grounding happens also in under-specified or inappropriate contexts. For example, endings generated for `Donald is a' substantially differ from those of other names, and often have more-than-average negative sentiment. We demonstrate the potential effect on downstream tasks with reading comprehension probes where name perturbation changes the model answers. As a silver lining, our experiments suggest that additional pre-training on different corpora may mitigate this bias.
The multi-objective optimisation of breakwaters using evolutionary approach
Authors: Nikolay O. Nikitin, Iana S. Polonskaia, Anna V. Kalyuzhnaya, Alexander V. Boukhanovsky
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00

In engineering practice, it is often necessary to increase the effectiveness of existing protective constructions for ports and coasts (i. e. breakwaters) by extending their configuration, because existing configurations don't provide the appropriate environmental conditions. That extension task can be considered as an optimisation problem. In the paper, the multi-objective evolutionary approach for the breakwaters optimisation is proposed. Also, a greedy heuristic is implemented and included to algorithm, that allows achieving the appropriate solution faster. The task of the identification of the attached breakwaters optimal variant that provides the safe ship parking and manoeuvring in large Black Sea Port of Sochi has been used as a case study. The results of the experiments demonstrated the possibility to apply the proposed multi-objective evolutionary approach in real-world engineering problems. It allows identifying the Pareto-optimal set of the possible configuration, which can be analysed by decision makers and used for final construction
Hardware Trojan Detection Using Controlled Circuit Aging
Authors: Virinchi Roy Surabhi, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Hussam Amrouch, Kanad Basu, Jörg Henkel, Ramesh Karri, Farshad Khorrami
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00

This paper reports a novel approach that uses transistor aging in an integrated circuit (IC) to detect hardware Trojans. When a transistor is aged, it results in delays along several paths of the IC. This increase in delay results in timing violations that reveal as timing errors at the output of the IC during its operation. We present experiments using aging-aware standard cell libraries to illustrate the usefulness of the technique in detecting hardware Trojans. Combining IC aging with over-clocking produces a pattern of bit errors at the IC output by the induced timing violations. We use machine learning to learn the bit error distribution at the output of a clean IC. We differentiate the divergence in the pattern of bit errors because of a Trojan in the IC from this baseline distribution. We simulate the golden IC and show robustness to IC-to-IC manufacturing variations. The approach is effective and can detect a Trojan even if we place it far off the critical paths. Results on benchmarks from the Trust-hub show a detection accuracy of $\geq$99%.
Multi-Step Inference for Reasoning Over Paragraphs
Authors: Jiangming Liu, Matt Gardner, Shay B. Cohen, Mirella Lapata
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Logical Reasoning

Complex reasoning over text requires understanding and chaining together free-form predicates and logical connectives. Prior work has largely tried to do this either symbolically or with black-box transformers. We present a middle ground between these two extremes: a compositional model reminiscent of neural module networks that can perform chained logical reasoning. This model first finds relevant sentences in the context and then chains them together using neural modules. Our model gives significant performance improvements (up to 29\% relative error reduction when comfibined with a reranker) on ROPES, a recently introduced complex reasoning dataset.
Evaluating the Evaluation of Diversity in Natural Language Generation
Authors: Guy Tevet, Jonathan Berant
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: Diversity, Text Generation

Despite growing interest in natural language generation (NLG) models that produce diverse outputs, there is currently no principled method for evaluating the diversity of an NLG system. In this work, we propose a framework for evaluating diversity metrics. The framework measures the correlation between a proposed diversity metric and a diversity parameter, a single parameter that controls some aspect of diversity in generated text. For example, a diversity parameter might be a binary variable used to instruct crowdsourcing workers to generate text with either low or high content diversity. We demonstrate the utility of our framework by: (a) establishing best practices for eliciting diversity judgments from humans, (b) showing that humans substantially outperform automatic metrics in estimating content diversity, and (c) demonstrating that existing methods for controlling diversity by tuning a "decoding parameter" mostly affect form but not meaning. Our framework can advance the understanding of different diversity metrics, an essential step on the road towards better NLG systems.
Probabilistic Diagnostic Tests for Degradation Problems in Supervised Learning
Authors: Gustavo A. Valencia-Zapata, Carolina Gonzalez-Canas, Michael G. Zentner, Okan Ersoy, Gerhard Klimeck
Date: 2020-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, General Classification

Several studies point out different causes of performance degradation in supervised machine learning. Problems such as class imbalance, overlapping, small-disjuncts, noisy labels, and sparseness limit accuracy in classification algorithms. Even though a number of approaches either in the form of a methodology or an algorithm try to minimize performance degradation, they have been isolated efforts with limited scope. Most of these approaches focus on remediation of one among many problems, with experimental results coming from few datasets and classification algorithms, insufficient measures of prediction power, and lack of statistical validation for testing the real benefit of the proposed approach. This paper consists of two main parts: In the first part, a novel probabilistic diagnostic model based on identifying signs and symptoms of each problem is presented. Thereby, early and correct diagnosis of these problems is to be achieved in order to select not only the most convenient remediation treatment but also unbiased performance metrics. Secondly, the behavior and performance of several supervised algorithms are studied when training sets have such problems. Therefore, prediction of success for treatments can be estimated across classifiers.