pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ConCare: Personalized Clinical Feature Embedding via Capturing the Healthcare Context
Authors: Liantao Ma, Chaohe Zhang, Yasha Wang, Wenjie Ruan, Jiantao Wang, Wen Tang, Xinyu Ma, Xin Gao, Junyi Gao
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Predicting the patient's clinical outcome from the historical electronic medical records (EMR) is a fundamental research problem in medical informatics. Most deep learning-based solutions for EMR analysis concentrate on learning the clinical visit embedding and exploring the relations between visits. Although those works have shown superior performances in healthcare prediction, they fail to explore the personal characteristics during the clinical visits thoroughly. Moreover, existing works usually assume that the more recent record weights more in the prediction, but this assumption is not suitable for all conditions. In this paper, we propose ConCare to handle the irregular EMR data and extract feature interrelationship to perform individualized healthcare prediction. Our solution can embed the feature sequences separately by modeling the time-aware distribution. ConCare further improves the multi-head self-attention via the cross-head decorrelation, so that the inter-dependencies among dynamic features and static baseline information can be effectively captured to form the personal health context. Experimental results on two real-world EMR datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ConCare. The medical findings extracted by ConCare are also empirically confirmed by human experts and medical literature.
Orthogonal Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Jiayun Wang, Yubei Chen, Rudrasis Chakraborty, Stella X. Yu
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Retrieval

Deep convolutional neural networks are hindered by training instability and feature redundancy towards further performance improvement. A promising solution is to impose orthogonality on convolutional filters. We develop an efficient approach to impose filter orthogonality on a convolutional layer based on the doubly block-Toeplitz matrix representation of the convolutional kernel instead of using the common kernel orthogonality approach, which we show is only necessary but not sufficient for ensuring orthogonal convolutions. Our proposed orthogonal convolution requires no additional parameters and little computational overhead. This method consistently outperforms the kernel orthogonality alternative on a wide range of tasks such as image classification and inpainting under supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised settings. Further, it learns more diverse and expressive features with better training stability, robustness, and generalization. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/samaonline/Orthogonal-Convolutional-Neural-Networks.
AdaCare: Explainable Clinical Health Status Representation Learning via Scale-Adaptive Feature Extraction and Recalibration
Authors: Liantao Ma, Junyi Gao, Yasha Wang, Chaohe Zhang, Jiangtao Wang, Wenjie Ruan, Wen Tang, Xin Gao, Xinyu Ma
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Representation Learning

Deep learning-based health status representation learning and clinical prediction have raised much research interest in recent years. Existing models have shown superior performance, but there are still several major issues that have not been fully taken into consideration. First, the historical variation pattern of the biomarker in diverse time scales plays a vital role in indicating the health status, but it has not been explicitly extracted by existing works. Second, key factors that strongly indicate the health risk are different among patients. It is still challenging to adaptively make use of the features for patients in diverse conditions. Third, using prediction models as the black box will limit the reliability in clinical practice. However, none of the existing works can provide satisfying interpretability and meanwhile achieve high prediction performance. In this work, we develop a general health status representation learning model, named AdaCare. It can capture the long and short-term variations of biomarkers as clinical features to depict the health status in multiple time scales. It also models the correlation between clinical features to enhance the ones which strongly indicate the health status and thus can maintain a state-of-the-art performance in terms of prediction accuracy while providing qualitative interpretability. We conduct a health risk prediction experiment on two real-world datasets. Experiment results indicate that AdaCare outperforms state-of-the-art approaches and provides effective interpretability, which is verifiable by clinical experts.
Learning Neural Search Policies for Classical Planning
Authors: Pawel Gomoluch, Dalal Alrajeh, Alessandra Russo, Antonio Bucchiarone
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Stochastic Optimization

Heuristic forward search is currently the dominant paradigm in classical planning. Forward search algorithms typically rely on a single, relatively simple variation of best-first search and remain fixed throughout the process of solving a planning problem. Existing work combining multiple search techniques usually aims at supporting best-first search with an additional exploratory mechanism, triggered using a handcrafted criterion. A notable exception is very recent work which combines various search techniques using a trainable policy. It is, however, confined to a discrete action space comprising several fixed subroutines. In this paper, we introduce a parametrized search algorithm template which combines various search techniques within a single routine. The template's parameter space defines an infinite space of search algorithms, including, among others, BFS, local and random search. We further introduce a neural architecture for designating the values of the search parameters given the state of the search. This enables expressing neural search policies that change the values of the parameters as the search progresses. The policies can be learned automatically, with the objective of maximizing the planner's performance on a given distribution of planning problems. We consider a training setting based on a stochastic optimization algorithm known as the cross-entropy method (CEM). Experimental evaluation of our approach shows that it is capable of finding effective distribution-specific search policies, outperforming the relevant baselines.
FOCUS: Flexible Optimizable Counterfactual Explanations for Tree Ensembles
Authors: Ana Lucic, Harrie Oosterhuis, Hinda Haned, Maarten de Rijke
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

Model interpretability has become an important problem in machine learning (ML) due to the increased effect that algorithmic decisions have on humans. Counterfactual explanations can help users understand not only why ML models make certain decisions, but also how these decisions can be changed. We frame the problem of finding counterfactual explanations as a gradient-based optimization task and extend previous work that could only be applied to differentiable models. In order to accommodate non-differentiable models such as tree ensembles, we use probabilistic model approximations in the optimization framework. We introduce an approximation technique that is effective for finding counterfactual explanations for predictions of the original model and show that our counterfactual examples are significantly closer to the original instances than those produced by other methods specifically designed for tree ensembles.
The Nonstochastic Control Problem
Authors: Elad Hazan, Sham M. Kakade, Karan Singh
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00

We consider the problem of controlling an unknown linear dynamical system in the presence of (nonstochastic) adversarial perturbations and adversarial convex loss functions. In contrast to classical control, the a priori determination of an optimal controller here is hindered by the latter's dependence on the yet unknown perturbations and costs. Instead, we measure regret against an optimal linear policy in hindsight, and give the first efficient algorithm that guarantees a sublinear regret bound, scaling as T^{2/3}, in this setting.
Document Structure Extraction using Prior based High Resolution Hierarchical Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Mausoom Sarkar, Milan Aggarwal, Arneh Jain, Hiresh Gupta, Balaji Krishnamurthy
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Table Detection, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Structure extraction from document images has been a long-standing research topic due to its high impact on a wide range of practical applications. In this paper, we share our findings on employing a hierarchical semantic segmentation network for this task of structure extraction. We propose a prior based deep hierarchical CNN network architecture that enables document structure extraction using very high resolution(1800 x 1000) images. We divide the document image into overlapping horizontal strips such that the network segments a strip and uses its prediction mask as prior for predicting the segmentation of the subsequent strip. We perform experiments establishing the effectiveness of our strip based network architecture through ablation methods and comparison with low-resolution variations. Further, to demonstrate our network's capabilities, we train it on only one type of documents (Forms) and achieve state-of-the-art results over other general document datasets. We introduce our new human-annotated forms dataset and show that our method significantly outperforms different segmentation baselines on this dataset in extracting hierarchical structures. Our method is currently being used in Adobe's AEM Forms for automated conversion of paper and PDF forms to modern HTML based forms.
High- and Low-level image component decomposition using VAEs for improved reconstruction and anomaly detection
Authors: David Zimmerer, Jens Petersen, Klaus Maier-Hein
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Variational Auto-Encoders have often been used for unsupervised pretraining, feature extraction and out-of-distribution and anomaly detection in the medical field. However, VAEs often lack the ability to produce sharp images and learn high-level features. We propose to alleviate these issues by adding a new branch to conditional hierarchical VAEs. This enforces a division between higher-level and lower-level features. Despite the additional computational overhead compared to a normal VAE it results in sharper and better reconstructions and can capture the data distribution similarly well (indicated by a similar or slightly better OoD detection performance).
Shearlets as Feature Extractor for Semantic Edge Detection: The Model-Based and Data-Driven Realm
Authors: Héctor Andrade-Loarca, Gitta Kutyniok, Ozan Öktem
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Classification, Edge Detection

Semantic edge detection has recently gained a lot of attention as an image processing task, mainly due to its wide range of real-world applications. This is based on the fact that edges in images contain most of the semantic information. Semantic edge detection involves two tasks, namely pure edge detecion and edge classification. Those are in fact fundamentally distinct in terms of the level of abstraction that each task requires, which is known as the distracted supervision paradox that limits the possible performance of a supervised model in semantic edge detection. In this work, we will present a novel hybrid method to avoid the distracted supervision paradox and achieve high-performance in semantic edge detection. Our approach is based on a combination of the model-based concept of shearlets, which provides probably optimally sparse approximations of a model-class of images, and the data-driven method of a suitably designed convolutional neural netwok. Finally, we present several applications such as tomographic reconstruction and show that our approach signifiantly outperforms former methods, thereby indicating the value of such hybrid methods for the area in biomedical imaging.
Towards Precise End-to-end Weakly Supervised Object Detection Network
Authors: Ke Yang, Dongsheng Li, Yong Dou
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Multiple Instance Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, regression, Weakly Supervised Object Detection

It is challenging for weakly supervised object detection network to precisely predict the positions of the objects, since there are no instance-level category annotations. Most existing methods tend to solve this problem by using a two-phase learning procedure, i.e., multiple instance learning detector followed by a fully supervised learning detector with bounding-box regression. Based on our observation, this procedure may lead to local minima for some object categories. In this paper, we propose to jointly train the two phases in an end-to-end manner to tackle this problem. Specifically, we design a single network with both multiple instance learning and bounding-box regression branches that share the same backbone. Meanwhile, a guided attention module using classification loss is added to the backbone for effectively extracting the implicit location information in the features. Experimental results on public datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
NorNE: Annotating Named Entities for Norwegian
Authors: Fredrik Jørgensen, Tobias Aasmoe, Anne-Stine Ruud Husevåg, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5

This paper presents NorNE, a manually annotated corpus of named entities which extends the annotation of the existing Norwegian Dependency Treebank. Comprising both of the official standards of written Norwegian (Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk), the corpus contains around 600,000 tokens and annotates a rich set of entity types including persons, organizations, locations, geo-political entities, products, and events, in addition to a class corresponding to nominals derived from names. We here present details on the annotation effort, guidelines, inter-annotator agreement and an experimental analysis of the corpus using a neural sequence labeling architecture.
Fair DARTS: Eliminating Unfair Advantages in Differentiable Architecture Search
Authors: Xiangxiang Chu, Tianbao Zhou, Bo Zhang, Jixiang Li
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: AutoML, Neural Architecture Search

Differentiable Architecture Search (DARTS) is now a widely disseminated weight-sharing neural architecture search method. However, it suffers from well-known performance collapse due to an inevitable aggregation of skip connections. In this paper, we first disclose that its root cause lies in an unfair advantage in exclusive competition. Through experiments, we show that if either of two conditions is broken, the collapse disappears. Thereby, we present a novel approach called Fair DARTS where the exclusive competition is relaxed to be collaborative. Specifically, we let each operation's architectural weight be independent of others. Yet there is still an important issue of discretization discrepancy. We then propose a zero-one loss to push architectural weights towards zero or one, which approximates an expected multi-hot solution. Our experiments are performed on two mainstream search spaces, and we derive new state-of-the-art results on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Our code is available on https://github.com/xiaomi-automl/fairdarts .
Towards Similarity Graphs Constructed by Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Dmitry Baranchuk, Artem Babenko
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, graph construction, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Similarity graphs are an active research direction for the nearest neighbor search (NNS) problem. New algorithms for similarity graph construction are continuously being proposed and analyzed by both theoreticians and practitioners. However, existing construction algorithms are mostly based on heuristics and do not explicitly maximize the target performance measure, i.e., search recall. Therefore, at the moment it is not clear whether the performance of similarity graphs has plateaued or more effective graphs can be constructed with more theoretically grounded methods. In this paper, we introduce a new principled algorithm, based on adjacency matrix optimization, which explicitly maximizes search efficiency. Namely, we propose a probabilistic model of a similarity graph defined in terms of its edge probabilities and show how to learn these probabilities from data as a reinforcement learning task. As confirmed by experiments, the proposed construction method can be used to refine the state-of-the-art similarity graphs, achieving higher recall rates for the same number of distance computations. Furthermore, we analyze the learned graphs and reveal the structural properties that are responsible for more efficient search.
Analysis of Explainers of Black Box Deep Neural Networks for Computer Vision: A Survey
Authors: Vanessa Buhrmester, David Münch, Michael Arens
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Survey

Deep Learning is a state-of-the-art technique to make inference on extensive or complex data. As a black box model due to their multilayer nonlinear structure, Deep Neural Networks are often criticized to be non-transparent and their predictions not traceable by humans. Furthermore, the models learn from artificial datasets, often with bias or contaminated discriminating content. Through their increased distribution, decision-making algorithms can contribute promoting prejudge and unfairness which is not easy to notice due to lack of transparency. Hence, scientists developed several so-called explanators or explainers which try to point out the connection between input and output to represent in a simplified way the inner structure of machine learning black boxes. In this survey we differ the mechanisms and properties of explaining systems for Deep Neural Networks for Computer Vision tasks. We give a comprehensive overview about taxonomy of related studies and compare several survey papers that deal with explainability in general. We work out the drawbacks and gaps and summarize further research ideas.
AdaSample: Adaptive Sampling of Hard Positives for Descriptor Learning
Authors: Xin-Yu Zhang, Le Zhang, Zao-Yi Zheng, Yun Liu, Jia-Wang Bian, Ming-Ming Cheng
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Informativeness, Triplet

Triplet loss has been widely employed in a wide range of computer vision tasks, including local descriptor learning. The effectiveness of the triplet loss heavily relies on the triplet selection, in which a common practice is to first sample intra-class patches (positives) from the dataset for batch construction and then mine in-batch negatives to form triplets. For high-informativeness triplet collection, researchers mostly focus on mining hard negatives in the second stage, while paying relatively less attention to constructing informative batches. To alleviate this issue, we propose AdaSample, an adaptive online batch sampler, in this paper. Specifically, hard positives are sampled based on their informativeness. In this way, we formulate a hardness-aware positive mining pipeline within a novel maximum loss minimization training protocol. The efficacy of the proposed method is evaluated on several standard benchmarks, where it demonstrates a significant and consistent performance gain on top of the existing strong baselines.
Adaptive Initialization Method for K-means Algorithm
Authors: Jie Yang, Yu-Kai Wang, Xin Yao, Chin-Teng Lin
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

The K-means algorithm is a widely used clustering algorithm that offers simplicity and efficiency. However, the traditional K-means algorithm uses the random method to determine the initial cluster centers, which make clustering results prone to local optima and then result in worse clustering performance. Many initialization methods have been proposed, but none of them can dynamically adapt to datasets with various characteristics. In our previous research, an initialization method for K-means based on hybrid distance was proposed, and this algorithm can adapt to datasets with different characteristics. However, it has the following drawbacks: (a) When calculating density, the threshold cannot be uniquely determined, resulting in unstable results. (b) Heavily depending on adjusting the parameter, the parameter must be adjusted five times to obtain better clustering results. (c) The time complexity of the algorithm is quadratic, which is difficult to apply to large datasets. In the current paper, we proposed an adaptive initialization method for the K-means algorithm (AIMK) to improve our previous work. AIMK can not only adapt to datasets with various characteristics but also obtain better clustering results within two interactions. In addition, we then leverage random sampling in AIMK, which is named as AIMK-RS, to reduce the time complexity. AIMK-RS is easily applied to large and high-dimensional datasets. We compared AIMK and AIMK-RS with 10 different algorithms on 16 normal and six extra-large datasets. The experimental results show that AIMK and AIMK-RS outperform the current initialization methods and several well-known clustering algorithms. Furthermore, AIMK-RS can significantly reduce the complexity of applying it to extra-large datasets with high dimensions. The time complexity of AIMK-RS is O(n).
Decision Propagation Networks for Image Classification
Authors: Keke Tang, Peng Song, Yuexin Ma, Zhaoquan Gu, Yu Su, Zhihong Tian, Wenping Wang
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

High-level (e.g., semantic) features encoded in the latter layers of convolutional neural networks are extensively exploited for image classification, leaving low-level (e.g., color) features in the early layers underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel Decision Propagation Module (DPM) to make an intermediate decision that could act as category-coherent guidance extracted from early layers, and then propagate it to the latter layers. Therefore, by stacking a collection of DPMs into a classification network, the generated Decision Propagation Network is explicitly formulated as to progressively encode more discriminative features guided by the decision, and then refine the decision based on the new generated features layer by layer. Comprehensive results on four publicly available datasets validate DPM could bring significant improvements for existing classification networks with minimal additional computational cost and is superior to the state-of-the-art methods.
Multi-Range Attentive Bicomponent Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Forecasting
Authors: Weiqi Chen, Ling Chen, Yu Xie, Wei Cao, Yusong Gao, Xiaojie Feng
Date: 2019-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Traffic forecasting is of great importance to transportation management and public safety, and very challenging due to the complicated spatial-temporal dependency and essential uncertainty brought about by the road network and traffic conditions. Latest studies mainly focus on modeling the spatial dependency by utilizing graph convolutional networks (GCNs) throughout a fixed weighted graph. However, edges, i.e., the correlations between pair-wise nodes, are much more complicated and interact with each other. In this paper, we propose the Multi-Range Attentive Bicomponent GCN (MRA-BGCN), a novel deep learning model for traffic forecasting. We first build the node-wise graph according to the road network distance and the edge-wise graph according to various edge interaction patterns. Then, we implement the interactions of both nodes and edges using bicomponent graph convolution. The multi-range attention mechanism is introduced to aggregate information in different neighborhood ranges and automatically learn the importance of different ranges. Extensive experiments on two real-world road network traffic datasets, METR-LA and PEMS-BAY, show that our MRA-BGCN achieves the state-of-the-art results.