pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Attend to the beginning: A study on using bidirectional attention for extractive summarization
Authors: Ahmed Magooda, Cezary Marcjan
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Extractive Summarization

Forum discussion data differ in both structure and properties from generic form of textual data such as news. Henceforth, summarization techniques should, in turn, make use of such differences, and craft models that can benefit from the structural nature of discussion data. In this work, we propose attending to the beginning of a document, to improve the performance of extractive summarization models when applied to forum discussion data. Evaluations demonstrated that with the help of bidirectional attention mechanism, attending to the beginning of a document (initial comment/post) in a discussion thread, can introduce a consistent boost in ROUGE scores, as well as introducing a new State Of The Art (SOTA) ROUGE scores on the forum discussions dataset. Additionally, we explored whether this hypothesis is extendable to other generic forms of textual data. We make use of the tendency of introducing important information early in the text, by attending to the first few sentences in generic textual data. Evaluations demonstrated that attending to introductory sentences using bidirectional attention, improves the performance of extractive summarization models when even applied to more generic form of textual data.
Medical Image Registration Using Deep Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Review
Authors: Hamid Reza Boveiri, Raouf Khayami, Reza Javidan, Ali Reza MehdiZadeh
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Image-guided interventions are saving the lives of a large number of patients where the image registration problem should indeed be considered as the most complex and complicated issue to be tackled. On the other hand, the recently huge progress in the field of machine learning made by the possibility of implementing deep neural networks on the contemporary many-core GPUs opened up a promising window to challenge with many medical applications, where the registration is not an exception. In this paper, a comprehensive review on the state-of-the-art literature known as medical image registration using deep neural networks is presented. The review is systematic and encompasses all the related works previously published in the field. Key concepts, statistical analysis from different points of view, confiding challenges, novelties and main contributions, key-enabling techniques, future directions and prospective trends all are discussed and surveyed in details in this comprehensive review. This review allows a deep understanding and insight for the readers active in the field who are investigating the state-of-the-art and seeking to contribute the future literature.
Two-Stream Aural-Visual Affect Analysis in the Wild
Authors: Felix Kuhnke, Lars Rumberg, Jörn Ostermann
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Alignment, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Human affect recognition is an essential part of natural human-computer interaction. However, current methods are still in their infancy, especially for in-the-wild data. In this work, we introduce our submission to the Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) 2020 competition. We propose a two-stream aural-visual analysis model to recognize affective behavior from videos. Audio and image streams are first processed separately and fed into a convolutional neural network. Instead of applying recurrent architectures for temporal analysis we only use temporal convolutions. Furthermore, the model is given access to additional features extracted during face-alignment. At training time, we exploit correlations between different emotion representations to improve performance. Our model achieves promising results on the challenging Aff-Wild2 database.
Trust in Data Science: Collaboration, Translation, and Accountability in Corporate Data Science Projects
Authors: Samir Passi, Steven J. Jackson
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Sociology, Translation

The trustworthiness of data science systems in applied and real-world settings emerges from the resolution of specific tensions through situated, pragmatic, and ongoing forms of work. Drawing on research in CSCW, critical data studies, and history and sociology of science, and six months of immersive ethnographic fieldwork with a corporate data science team, we describe four common tensions in applied data science work: (un)equivocal numbers, (counter)intuitive knowledge, (in)credible data, and (in)scrutable models. We show how organizational actors establish and re-negotiate trust under messy and uncertain analytic conditions through practices of skepticism, assessment, and credibility. Highlighting the collaborative and heterogeneous nature of real-world data science, we show how the management of trust in applied corporate data science settings depends not only on pre-processing and quantification, but also on negotiation and translation. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for data science research and practice, both within and beyond CSCW.
Bin2vec: Learning Representations of Binary Executable Programs for Security Tasks
Authors: Shushan Arakelyan, Sima Arasteh, Christophe Hauser, Erik Kline, Aram Galstyan
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Vulnerability Detection

Tackling binary program analysis problems has traditionally implied manually defining rules and heuristics, a tedious and time-consuming task for human analysts. In order to improve automation and scalability, we propose an alternative direction based on distributed representations of binary programs with applicability to a number of downstream tasks. We introduce Bin2vec, a new approach leveraging Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) along with computational program graphs in order to learn a high dimensional representation of binary executable programs. We demonstrate the versatility of this approach by using our representations to solve two semantically different binary analysis tasks - functional algorithm classification and vulnerability discovery. We compare the proposed approach to our own strong baseline as well as published results and demonstrate improvement over state-of-the-art methods for both tasks. We evaluated Bin2vec on 49191 binaries for the functional algorithm classification task, and on 30 different CWE-IDs including at least 100 CVE entries each for the vulnerability discovery task. We set a new state-of-the-art result by reducing the classification error by 40% compared to the source-code-based inst2vec approach, while working on binary code. For almost every vulnerability class in our dataset, our prediction accuracy is over 80% (and over 90% in multiple classes).
Data Vision: Learning to See Through Algorithmic Abstraction
Authors: Samir Passi, Steven J. Jackson
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00

Learning to see through data is central to contemporary forms of algorithmic knowledge production. While often represented as a mechanical application of rules, making algorithms work with data requires a great deal of situated work. This paper examines how the often-divergent demands of mechanization and discretion manifest in data analytic learning environments. Drawing on research in CSCW and the social sciences, and ethnographic fieldwork in two data learning environments, we show how an algorithm's application is seen sometimes as a mechanical sequence of rules and at other times as an array of situated decisions. Casting data analytics as a rule-based (rather than rule-bound) practice, we show that effective data vision requires would-be analysts to straddle the competing demands of formal abstraction and empirical contingency. We conclude by discussing how the notion of data vision can help better leverage the role of human work in data analytic learning, research, and practice.
Stochastic tree ensembles for regularized nonlinear regression
Authors: Jingyu He, P. Richard Hahn
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

This paper develops a novel stochastic tree ensemble method for nonlinear regression, which we refer to as XBART, short for Accelerated Bayesian Additive Regression Trees. By combining regularization and stochastic search strategies from Bayesian modeling with computationally efficient techniques from recursive partitioning approaches, the new method attains state-of-the-art performance: in many settings it is both faster and more accurate than the widely-used XGBoost algorithm. Via careful simulation studies, we demonstrate that our new approach provides accurate point-wise estimates of the mean function and does so faster than popular alternatives, such as BART, XGBoost and neural networks (using Keras). We also prove a number of basic theoretical results about the new algorithm, including consistency of the single tree version of the model and stationarity of the Markov chain produced by the ensemble version. Furthermore, we demonstrate that initializing standard Bayesian additive regression trees Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) at XBART-fitted trees considerably improves credible interval coverage and reduces total run-time.
A Unified End-to-End Framework for Efficient Deep Image Compression
Authors: Jiaheng Liu, Guo Lu, Zhihao Hu, Dong Xu
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Compression, Video Compression

Image compression is a widely used technique to reduce the spatial redundancy in images. Recently, learning based image compression has achieved significant progress by using the powerful representation ability from neural networks. However, the current state-of-the-art learning based image compression methods suffer from the huge computational cost, which limits their capacity for practical applications. In this paper, we propose a unified framework called Efficient Deep Image Compression (EDIC) based on three new technologies, including a channel attention module, a Gaussian mixture model and a decoder-side enhancement module. Specifically, we design an auto-encoder style network for learning based image compression. To improve the coding efficiency, we exploit the channel relationship between latent representations by using the channel attention module. Besides, the Gaussian mixture model is introduced for the entropy model and improves the accuracy for bitrate estimation. Furthermore, we introduce the decoder-side enhancement module to further improve image compression performance. Our EDIC method can also be readily incorporated with the Deep Video Compression (DVC) framework to further improve the video compression performance. Simultaneously, our EDIC method boosts the coding performance significantly while bringing slightly increased computational cost. More importantly, experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art image compression methods and is up to more than 150 times faster in terms of decoding speed when compared with Minnen's method. The proposed framework also successfully improves the performance of the recent deep video compression system DVC. Our code will be released at https://github.com/liujiaheng/compression.
MS-Net: Multi-Site Network for Improving Prostate Segmentation with Heterogeneous MRI Data
Authors: Quande Liu, Qi Dou, Lequan Yu, Pheng Ann Heng
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Automated prostate segmentation in MRI is highly demanded for computer-assisted diagnosis. Recently, a variety of deep learning methods have achieved remarkable progress in this task, usually relying on large amounts of training data. Due to the nature of scarcity for medical images, it is important to effectively aggregate data from multiple sites for robust model training, to alleviate the insufficiency of single-site samples. However, the prostate MRIs from different sites present heterogeneity due to the differences in scanners and imaging protocols, raising challenges for effective ways of aggregating multi-site data for network training. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-site network (MS-Net) for improving prostate segmentation by learning robust representations, leveraging multiple sources of data. To compensate for the inter-site heterogeneity of different MRI datasets, we develop Domain-Specific Batch Normalization layers in the network backbone, enabling the network to estimate statistics and perform feature normalization for each site separately. Considering the difficulty of capturing the shared knowledge from multiple datasets, a novel learning paradigm, i.e., Multi-site-guided Knowledge Transfer, is proposed to enhance the kernels to extract more generic representations from multi-site data. Extensive experiments on three heterogeneous prostate MRI datasets demonstrate that our MS-Net improves the performance across all datasets consistently, and outperforms state-of-the-art methods for multi-site learning.
Weakly Supervised Attention Pyramid Convolutional Neural Network for Fine-Grained Visual Classification
Authors: Yifeng Ding, Shaoguo Wen, Jiyang Xie, Dongliang Chang, Zhanyu Ma, Zhongwei Si, Haibin Ling
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Classification, General Classification

Classifying the sub-categories of an object from the same super-category (e.g. bird species, car and aircraft models) in fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) highly relies on discriminative feature representation and accurate region localization. Existing approaches mainly focus on distilling information from high-level features. In this paper, however, we show that by integrating low-level information (e.g. color, edge junctions, texture patterns), performance can be improved with enhanced feature representation and accurately located discriminative regions. Our solution, named Attention Pyramid Convolutional Neural Network (AP-CNN), consists of a) a pyramidal hierarchy structure with a top-down feature pathway and a bottom-up attention pathway, and hence learns both high-level semantic and low-level detailed feature representation, and b) an ROI guided refinement strategy with ROI guided dropblock and ROI guided zoom-in, which refines features with discriminative local regions enhanced and background noises eliminated. The proposed AP-CNN can be trained end-to-end, without the need of additional bounding box/part annotations. Extensive experiments on three commonly used FGVC datasets (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars, and FGVC-Aircraft) demonstrate that our approach can achieve state-of-the-art performance. Code available at \url{http://dwz1.cc/ci8so8a}
Streaming Submodular Maximization under a $k$-Set System Constraint
Authors: Ran Haba, Ehsan Kazemi, Moran Feldman, Amin Karbasi
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Summarization, Movie Recommendation

In this paper, we propose a novel framework that converts streaming algorithms for monotone submodular maximization into streaming algorithms for non-monotone submodular maximization. This reduction readily leads to the currently tightest deterministic approximation ratio for submodular maximization subject to a $k$-matchoid constraint. Moreover, we propose the first streaming algorithm for monotone submodular maximization subject to $k$-extendible and $k$-set system constraints. Together with our proposed reduction, we obtain $O(k\log k)$ and $O(k^2\log k)$ approximation ratio for submodular maximization subject to the above constraints, respectively. We extensively evaluate the empirical performance of our algorithm against the existing work in a series of experiments including finding the maximum independent set in randomly generated graphs, maximizing linear functions over social networks, movie recommendation, Yelp location summarization, and Twitter data summarization.
Short Text Classification via Knowledge powered Attention with Similarity Matrix based CNN
Authors: Mingchen Li, Gabtone. Clinton, Yijia Miao, Feng Gao
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Short text is becoming more and more popular on the web, such as Chat Message, SMS and Product Reviews. Accurately classifying short text is an important and challenging task. A number of studies have difficulties in addressing this problem because of the word ambiguity and data sparsity. To address this issue, we propose a knowledge powered attention with similarity matrix based convolutional neural network (KASM) model, which can compute comprehensive information by utilizing the knowledge and deep neural network. We use knowledge graph (KG) to enrich the semantic representation of short text, specially, the information of parent-entity is introduced in our model. Meanwhile, we consider the word interaction in the literal-level between short text and the representation of label, and utilize similarity matrix based convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract it. For the purpose of measuring the importance of knowledge, we introduce the attention mechanisms to choose the important information. Experimental results on five standard datasets show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Dynamic Inference: A New Approach Toward Efficient Video Action Recognition
Authors: Wenhao Wu, Dongliang He, Xiao Tan, Shifeng Chen, Yi Yang, Shilei Wen
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Action Recognition In Videos, Temporal Action Localization

Though action recognition in videos has achieved great success recently, it remains a challenging task due to the massive computational cost. Designing lightweight networks is a possible solution, but it may degrade the recognition performance. In this paper, we innovatively propose a general dynamic inference idea to improve inference efficiency by leveraging the variation in the distinguishability of different videos. The dynamic inference approach can be achieved from aspects of the network depth and the number of input video frames, or even in a joint input-wise and network depth-wise manner. In a nutshell, we treat input frames and network depth of the computational graph as a 2-dimensional grid, and several checkpoints are placed on this grid in advance with a prediction module. The inference is carried out progressively on the grid by following some predefined route, whenever the inference process comes across a checkpoint, an early prediction can be made depending on whether the early stop criteria meets. For the proof-of-concept purpose, we instantiate three dynamic inference frameworks using two well-known backbone CNNs. In these instances, we overcome the drawback of limited temporal coverage resulted from an early prediction by a novel frame permutation scheme, and alleviate the conflict between progressive computation and video temporal relation modeling by introducing an online temporal shift module. Extensive experiments are conducted to thoroughly analyze the effectiveness of our ideas and to inspire future research efforts. Results on various datasets also evident the superiority of our approach.
Input Validation for Neural Networks via Runtime Local Robustness Verification
Authors: Jiangchao Liu, Liqian Chen, Antoine Mine, Ji Wang
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00

Local robustness verification can verify that a neural network is robust wrt. any perturbation to a specific input within a certain distance. We call this distance Robustness Radius. We observe that the robustness radii of correctly classified inputs are much larger than that of misclassified inputs which include adversarial examples, especially those from strong adversarial attacks. Another observation is that the robustness radii of correctly classified inputs often follow a normal distribution. Based on these two observations, we propose to validate inputs for neural networks via runtime local robustness verification. Experiments show that our approach can protect neural networks from adversarial examples and improve their accuracies.
Multi-Task Learning by a Top-Down Control Network
Authors: Hila Levi, Shimon Ullman
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

As the range of tasks performed by a general vision system expands, executing multiple tasks accurately and efficiently in a single network has become an important and still open problem. Recent computer vision approaches address this problem by branching networks, or by a channel-wise modulation of the network feature-maps with task specific vectors. We present a novel architecture that uses a dedicated top-down control network to modify the activation of all the units in the main recognition network in a manner that depends on the selected task, image content, and spatial location. We show the effectiveness of our scheme by achieving significantly better results than alternative state-of-the-art approaches on four datasets. We further demonstrate our advantages in terms of task selectivity, scaling the number of tasks and interpretability.
MDEA: Malware Detection with Evolutionary Adversarial Learning
Authors: Xiruo Wang, Risto Miikkulainen
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Malware Detection

Malware detection have used machine learning to detect malware in programs. These applications take in raw or processed binary data to neural network models to classify as benign or malicious files. Even though this approach has proven effective against dynamic changes, such as encrypting, obfuscating and packing techniques, it is vulnerable to specific evasion attacks where that small changes in the input data cause misclassification at test time. This paper proposes a new approach: MDEA, an Adversarial Malware Detection model uses evolutionary optimization to create attack samples to make the network robust against evasion attacks. By retraining the model with the evolved malware samples, its performance improves a significant margin.
Better Theory for SGD in the Nonconvex World
Authors: Ahmed Khaled, Peter Richtárik
Date: 2020-02-09 00:00:00

Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex setting and propose a new variant of the recently introduced expected smoothness assumption which governs the behaviour of the second moment of the stochastic gradient. We show that our assumption is both more general and more reasonable than assumptions made in all prior work. Moreover, our results yield the optimal $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ rate for finding a stationary point of nonconvex smooth functions, and recover the optimal $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ rate for finding a global solution if the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz condition is satisfied. We compare against convergence rates under convexity and prove a theorem on the convergence of SGD under Quadratic Functional Growth and convexity, which might be of independent interest. Moreover, we perform our analysis in a framework which allows for a detailed study of the effects of a wide array of sampling strategies and minibatch sizes for finite-sum optimization problems. We corroborate our theoretical results with experiments on real and synthetic data.