pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Joint Learning of Word and Label Embeddings for Sequence Labelling in Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Jiewen Wu, Luis Fernando D'Haro, Nancy F. Chen, Pavitra Krishnaswamy, Rafael E. Banchs
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: slot-filling, Slot Filling, Spoken Language Understanding, Word Embeddings

We propose an architecture to jointly learn word and label embeddings for slot filling in spoken language understanding. The proposed approach encodes labels using a combination of word embeddings and straightforward word-label association from the training data. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our approach does not require label embeddings as part of the input and therefore lends itself nicely to a wide range of model architectures. In addition, our architecture computes contextual distances between words and labels to avoid adding contextual windows, thus reducing memory footprint. We validate the approach on established spoken dialogue datasets and show that it can achieve state-of-the-art performance with much fewer trainable parameters.
Efficiency through Auto-Sizing: Notre Dame NLP's Submission to the WNGT 2019 Efficiency Task
Authors: Kenton Murray, Brian DuSell, David Chiang
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 11

This paper describes the Notre Dame Natural Language Processing Group's (NDNLP) submission to the WNGT 2019 shared task (Hayashi et al., 2019). We investigated the impact of auto-sizing (Murray and Chiang, 2015; Murray et al., 2019) to the Transformer network (Vaswani et al., 2017) with the goal of substantially reducing the number of parameters in the model. Our method was able to eliminate more than 25% of the model's parameters while suffering a decrease of only 1.1 BLEU.
Design of a Simple Orthogonal Multiwavelet Filter by Matrix Spectral Factorization
Authors: Vasil Kolev, Todor Cooklev, Fritz Keinert
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00

We consider the design of an orthogonal symmetric/antisymmetric multiwavelet from its matrix product filter by matrix spectral factorization (MSF). As a test problem, we construct a simple matrix product filter with desirable properties, and factor it using Bauer's method, which in this case can be done in closed form. The corresponding orthogonal multiwavelet function is derived using algebraic techniques which allow symmetry to be considered. This leads to the known orthogonal multiwavelet SA1, which can also be derived directly. We also give a lifting scheme for SA1, investigate the influence of the number of significant digits in the calculations, and show some numerical experiments.
SCG: Spotting Coordinated Groups in Social Media
Authors: Junhao Wang, Sacha Levy, Ren Wang, Aayushi Kulshrestha, Reihaneh Rabbany
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection, Misinformation

Recent events have led to a burgeoning awareness on the misuse of social media sites to affect political events, sway public opinion, and confuse the voters. Such serious, hostile mass manipulation has motivated a large body of works on bots/troll detection and fake news detection, which mostly focus on classifying at the user level based on the content generated by the users. In this study, we jointly analyze the connections among the users, as well as the content generated by them to Spot Coordinated Groups (SCG), sets of users that are likely to be organized towards impacting the general discourse. Given their tiny size (relative to the whole data), detecting these groups is computationally hard. Our proposed method detects these tiny-clusters effectively and efficiently. We deploy our SCG method to summarize and explain the coordinated groups on Twitter around the 2019 Canadian Federal Elections, by analyzing over 60 thousand user accounts with 3.4 million followership connections, and 1.3 million unique hashtags in the content of their tweets. The users in the detected coordinated groups are over 4x more likely to get suspended, whereas the hashtags which characterize their creed are linked to misinformation campaigns.
Large-Scale Landslides Detection from Satellite Images with Incomplete Labels
Authors: Masanari Kimura
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00

Earthquakes and tropical cyclones cause the suffering of millions of people around the world every year. The resulting landslides exacerbate the effects of these disasters. Landslide detection is, therefore, a critical task for the protection of human life and livelihood in mountainous areas. To tackle this problem, we propose a combination of satellite technology and Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). We evaluate the performance of multiple DNN-based methods for landslide detection on actual satellite images of landslide damage. Our analysis demonstrates the potential for a meaningful social impact in terms of disasters and rescue.
FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification
Authors: Tianyu Gao, Xu Han, Hao Zhu, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie zhou
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Classification, Domain Adaptation, Few-Shot Relation Classification, General Classification, Relation, Relation Classification

We present FewRel 2.0, a more challenging task to investigate two aspects of few-shot relation classification models: (1) Can they adapt to a new domain with only a handful of instances? (2) Can they detect none-of-the-above (NOTA) relations? To construct FewRel 2.0, we build upon the FewRel dataset (Han et al., 2018) by adding a new test set in a quite different domain, and a NOTA relation choice. With the new dataset and extensive experimental analysis, we found (1) that the state-of-the-art few-shot relation classification models struggle on these two aspects, and (2) that the commonly-used techniques for domain adaptation and NOTA detection still cannot handle the two challenges well. Our research calls for more attention and further efforts to these two real-world issues. All details and resources about the dataset and baselines are released at https: //github.com/thunlp/fewrel.
Parametric Gaussian Process Regressors
Authors: Martin Jankowiak, Geoff Pleiss, Jacob R. Gardner
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: regression, Variational Inference

The combination of inducing point methods with stochastic variational inference has enabled approximate Gaussian Process (GP) inference on large datasets. Unfortunately, the resulting predictive distributions often exhibit substantially underestimated uncertainties. Notably, in the regression case the predictive variance is typically dominated by observation noise, yielding uncertainty estimates that make little use of the input-dependent function uncertainty that makes GP priors attractive. In this work we propose two simple methods for scalable GP regression that address this issue and thus yield substantially improved predictive uncertainties. The first applies variational inference to FITC (Fully Independent Training Conditional; Snelson et.~al.~2006). The second bypasses posterior approximations and instead directly targets the posterior predictive distribution. In an extensive empirical comparison with a number of alternative methods for scalable GP regression, we find that the resulting predictive distributions exhibit significantly better calibrated uncertainties and higher log likelihoods--often by as much as half a nat per datapoint.
Automated Detection of Left Ventricle in Arterial Input Function Images for Inline Perfusion Mapping using Deep Learning: A study of 15,000 Patients
Authors: Hui Xue, Ethan Tseng, Kristopher D Knott, Tushar Kotecha, Louise Brown, Sven Plein, Marianna Fontana, James C. Moon, Peter Kellman
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series Analysis

Quantification of myocardial perfusion has the potential to improve detection of regional and global flow reduction. Significant effort has been made to automate the workflow, where one essential step is the arterial input function (AIF) extraction. Since failure here invalidates quantification, high accuracy is required. For this purpose, this study presents a robust AIF detection method using the convolutional neural net (CNN) model. CNN models were trained by assembling 25,027 scans (N=12,984 patients) from three hospitals, seven scanners. A test set of 5,721 scans (N=2,805 patients) evaluated model performance. The 2D+T AIF time series was inputted into CNN. Two variations were investigated: a) Two Classes (2CS) for background and foreground (LV mask); b) Three Classes (3CS) for background, foreground LV and RV. Final model was deployed on MR scanners via the Gadgetron InlineAI. Model loading time on MR scanner was ~340ms and applying it took ~180ms. The 3CS model successfully detect LV for 99.98% of all test cases (1 failed out of 5,721 cases). The mean Dice ratio for 3CS was 0.87+/-0.08 with 92.0% of all test cases having Dice ratio >0.75, while the 2CS model gave lower Dice of 0.82+/-0.22 (P<1e-5). Extracted AIF signals using CNN were further compared to manual ground-truth for foot-time, peak-time, first-pass duration, peak value and area-under-curve. No significant differences were found for all features (P>0.2). This study proposed, validated, and deployed a robust CNN solution to detect the LV for the extraction of the AIF signal used in fully automated perfusion flow mapping. A very large data cohort was assembled and resulting models were deployed to MR scanners for fully inline AI in clinical hospitals.
Analyzing the Forgetting Problem in the Pretrain-Finetuning of Dialogue Response Models
Authors: Tianxing He, Jun Liu, Kyunghyun Cho, Myle Ott, Bing Liu, James Glass, Fuchun Peng
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Response Generation, Text Generation, Transfer Learning

In this work, we study how the finetuning stage in the pretrain-finetune framework changes the behavior of a pretrained neural language generator. We focus on the transformer encoder-decoder model for the open-domain dialogue response generation task. Our major finding is that after standard finetuning, the model forgets some of the important language generation skills acquired during large-scale pretraining. We demonstrate the forgetting phenomenon through a set of detailed behavior analysis from the perspectives of knowledge transfer, context sensitivity, and function space projection. As a preliminary attempt to alleviate the forgetting problem, we propose an intuitive finetuning strategy named "mix-review". We find that mix-review effectively regularizes the finetuning process, and the forgetting problem is alleviated to some extent. Finally, we discuss interesting behavior of the resulting dialogue model and its implications.
HiGitClass: Keyword-Driven Hierarchical Classification of GitHub Repositories
Authors: Yu Zhang, Frank F. Xu, Sha Li, Yu Meng, Xuan Wang, Qi Li, Jiawei Han
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Network Embedding

GitHub has become an important platform for code sharing and scientific exchange. With the massive number of repositories available, there is a pressing need for topic-based search. Even though the topic label functionality has been introduced, the majority of GitHub repositories do not have any labels, impeding the utility of search and topic-based analysis. This work targets the automatic repository classification problem as keyword-driven hierarchical classification. Specifically, users only need to provide a label hierarchy with keywords to supply as supervision. This setting is flexible, adaptive to the users' needs, accounts for the different granularity of topic labels and requires minimal human effort. We identify three key challenges of this problem, namely (1) the presence of multi-modal signals; (2) supervision scarcity and bias; (3) supervision format mismatch. In recognition of these challenges, we propose the HiGitClass framework, comprising of three modules: heterogeneous information network embedding; keyword enrichment; topic modeling and pseudo document generation. Experimental results on two GitHub repository collections confirm that HiGitClass is superior to existing weakly-supervised and dataless hierarchical classification methods, especially in its ability to integrate both structured and unstructured data for repository classification.
Solving Rubik's Cube with a Robot Hand
Authors: OpenAI, Ilge Akkaya, Marcin Andrychowicz, Maciek Chociej, Mateusz Litwin, Bob McGrew, Arthur Petron, Alex Paino, Matthias Plappert, Glenn Powell, Raphael Ribas, Jonas Schneider, Nikolas Tezak, Jerry Tworek, Peter Welinder, Lilian Weng, Qiming Yuan, Wojciech Zaremba, Lei Zhang
Date: 2019-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, Rubik's Cube, State Estimation

We demonstrate that models trained only in simulation can be used to solve a manipulation problem of unprecedented complexity on a real robot. This is made possible by two key components: a novel algorithm, which we call automatic domain randomization (ADR) and a robot platform built for machine learning. ADR automatically generates a distribution over randomized environments of ever-increasing difficulty. Control policies and vision state estimators trained with ADR exhibit vastly improved sim2real transfer. For control policies, memory-augmented models trained on an ADR-generated distribution of environments show clear signs of emergent meta-learning at test time. The combination of ADR with our custom robot platform allows us to solve a Rubik's cube with a humanoid robot hand, which involves both control and state estimation problems. Videos summarizing our results are available: https://openai.com/blog/solving-rubiks-cube/
Orthogonal Gradient Descent for Continual Learning
Authors: Mehrdad Farajtabar, Navid Azizan, Alex Mott, Ang Li
Date: 2019-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Neural networks are achieving state of the art and sometimes super-human performance on learning tasks across a variety of domains. Whenever these problems require learning in a continual or sequential manner, however, neural networks suffer from the problem of catastrophic forgetting; they forget how to solve previous tasks after being trained on a new task, despite having the essential capacity to solve both tasks if they were trained on both simultaneously. In this paper, we propose to address this issue from a parameter space perspective and study an approach to restrict the direction of the gradient updates to avoid forgetting previously-learned data. We present the Orthogonal Gradient Descent (OGD) method, which accomplishes this goal by projecting the gradients from new tasks onto a subspace in which the neural network output on previous task does not change and the projected gradient is still in a useful direction for learning the new task. Our approach utilizes the high capacity of a neural network more efficiently and does not require storing the previously learned data that might raise privacy concerns. Experiments on common benchmarks reveal the effectiveness of the proposed OGD method.
Entire Space Multi-Task Modeling via Post-Click Behavior Decomposition for Conversion Rate Prediction
Authors: Hong Wen, Jing Zhang, Yu-An Wang, Fuyu Lv, Wentian Bao, Quan Lin, Keping Yang
Date: 2019-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Multi-Task Learning, Recommendation Systems, Selection bias

Recommender system, as an essential part of modern e-commerce, consists of two fundamental modules, namely Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Conversion Rate (CVR) prediction. While CVR has a direct impact on the purchasing volume, its prediction is well-known challenging due to the Sample Selection Bias (SSB) and Data Sparsity (DS) issues. Although existing methods, typically built on the user sequential behavior path ``impression$\to$click$\to$purchase'', is effective for dealing with SSB issue, they still struggle to address the DS issue due to rare purchase training samples. Observing that users always take several purchase-related actions after clicking, we propose a novel idea of post-click behavior decomposition. Specifically, disjoint purchase-related Deterministic Action (DAction) and Other Action (OAction) are inserted between click and purchase in parallel, forming a novel user sequential behavior graph ``impression$\to$click$\to$D(O)Action$\to$purchase''. Defining model on this graph enables to leverage all the impression samples over the entire space and extra abundant supervised signals from D(O)Action, which will effectively address the SSB and DS issues together. To this end, we devise a novel deep recommendation model named Elaborated Entire Space Supervised Multi-task Model ($ESM^{2}$). According to the conditional probability rule defined on the graph, it employs multi-task learning to predict some decomposed sub-targets in parallel and compose them sequentially to formulate the final CVR. Extensive experiments on both offline and online environments demonstrate the superiority of $ESM^{2}$ over state-of-the-art models. The source code and dataset will be released.
Explainable Semantic Mapping for First Responders
Authors: Jean Oh, Martial Hebert, Hae-Gon Jeon, Xavier Perez, Chia Dai, Yeeho Song
Date: 2019-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

One of the key challenges in the semantic mapping problem in postdisaster environments is how to analyze a large amount of data efficiently with minimal supervision. To address this challenge, we propose a deep learning-based semantic mapping tool consisting of three main ideas. First, we develop a frugal semantic segmentation algorithm that uses only a small amount of labeled data. Next, we investigate on the problem of learning to detect a new class of object using just a few training examples. Finally, we develop an explainable cost map learning algorithm that can be quickly trained to generate traversability cost maps using only raw sensor data such as aerial-view imagery. This paper presents an overview of the proposed idea and the lessons learned.
Challenges of Human-Aware AI Systems
Authors: Subbarao Kambhampati
Date: 2019-10-15 00:00:00

From its inception, AI has had a rather ambivalent relationship to humans---swinging between their augmentation and replacement. Now, as AI technologies enter our everyday lives at an ever increasing pace, there is a greater need for AI systems to work synergistically with humans. To do this effectively, AI systems must pay more attention to aspects of intelligence that helped humans work with each other---including social intelligence. I will discuss the research challenges in designing such human-aware AI systems, including modeling the mental states of humans in the loop, recognizing their desires and intentions, providing proactive support, exhibiting explicable behavior, giving cogent explanations on demand, and engendering trust. I will survey the progress made so far on these challenges, and highlight some promising directions. I will also touch on the additional ethical quandaries that such systems pose. I will end by arguing that the quest for human-aware AI systems broadens the scope of AI enterprise, necessitates and facilitates true inter-disciplinary collaborations, and can go a long way towards increasing public acceptance of AI technologies.
Model-free Reinforcement Learning in Infinite-horizon Average-reward Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Chen-Yu Wei, Mehdi Jafarnia-Jahromi, Haipeng Luo, Hiteshi Sharma, Rahul Jain
Date: 2019-10-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Multi-Armed Bandits, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Model-free reinforcement learning is known to be memory and computation efficient and more amendable to large scale problems. In this paper, two model-free algorithms are introduced for learning infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). The first algorithm reduces the problem to the discounted-reward version and achieves $\mathcal{O}(T^{2/3})$ regret after $T$ steps, under the minimal assumption of weakly communicating MDPs. To our knowledge, this is the first model-free algorithm for general MDPs in this setting. The second algorithm makes use of recent advances in adaptive algorithms for adversarial multi-armed bandits and improves the regret to $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$, albeit with a stronger ergodic assumption. This result significantly improves over the $\mathcal{O}(T^{3/4})$ regret achieved by the only existing model-free algorithm by Abbasi-Yadkori et al. (2019a) for ergodic MDPs in the infinite-horizon average-reward setting.
DeepErase: Weakly Supervised Ink Artifact Removal in Document Text Images
Authors: W. Ronny Huang, Yike Qi, Qianqian Li, Jonathan Degange
Date: 2019-10-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS Workshop Document_Intelligen 2019 12
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Paper-intensive industries like insurance, law, and government have long leveraged optical character recognition (OCR) to automatically transcribe hordes of scanned documents into text strings for downstream processing. Even in 2019, there are still many scanned documents and mail that come into businesses in non-digital format. Text to be extracted from real world documents is often nestled inside rich formatting, such as tabular structures or forms with fill-in-the-blank boxes or underlines whose ink often touches or even strikes through the ink of the text itself. Further, the text region could have random ink smudges or spurious strokes. Such ink artifacts can severely interfere with the performance of recognition algorithms or other downstream processing tasks. In this work, we propose DeepErase, a neural-based preprocessor to erase ink artifacts from text images. We devise a method to programmatically assemble real text images and real artifacts into realistic-looking "dirty" text images, and use them to train an artifact segmentation network in a weakly supervised manner, since pixel-level annotations are automatically obtained during the assembly process. In addition to high segmentation accuracy, we show that our cleansed images achieve a significant boost in recognition accuracy by popular OCR software such as Tesseract 4.0. Finally, we test DeepErase on out-of-distribution datasets (NIST SDB) of scanned IRS tax return forms and achieve double-digit improvements in accuracy. All experiments are performed on both printed and handwritten text. Code for all experiments is available at https://github.com/yikeqicn/DeepErase
On adversarial patches: real-world attack on ArcFace-100 face recognition system
Authors: Mikhail Pautov, Grigorii Melnikov, Edgar Kaziakhmedov, Klim Kireev, Aleksandr Petiushko
Date: 2019-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Face Recognition

Recent works showed the vulnerability of image classifiers to adversarial attacks in the digital domain. However, the majority of attacks involve adding small perturbation to an image to fool the classifier. Unfortunately, such procedures can not be used to conduct a real-world attack, where adding an adversarial attribute to the photo is a more practical approach. In this paper, we study the problem of real-world attacks on face recognition systems. We examine security of one of the best public face recognition systems, LResNet100E-IR with ArcFace loss, and propose a simple method to attack it in the physical world. The method suggests creating an adversarial patch that can be printed, added as a face attribute and photographed; the photo of a person with such attribute is then passed to the classifier such that the classifier's recognized class changes from correct to the desired one. Proposed generating procedure allows projecting adversarial patches not only on different areas of the face, such as nose or forehead but also on some wearable accessory, such as eyeglasses.