pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Expecting the Unexpected: Developing Autonomous-System Design Principles for Reacting to Unpredicted Events and Conditions
Authors: Assaf Marron, Lior Limonad, Sarah Pollack, David Harel
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Ethics

When developing autonomous systems, engineers and other stakeholders make great effort to prepare the system for all foreseeable events and conditions. However, these systems are still bound to encounter events and conditions that were not considered at design time. For reasons like safety, cost, or ethics, it is often highly desired that these new situations be handled correctly upon first encounter. In this paper we first justify our position that there will always exist unpredicted events and conditions, driven among others by: new inventions in the real world; the diversity of world-wide system deployments and uses; and, the non-negligible probability that multiple seemingly unlikely events, which may be neglected at design time, will not only occur, but occur together. We then argue that despite this unpredictability property, handling these events and conditions is indeed possible. Hence, we offer and exemplify design principles that when applied in advance, can enable systems to deal, in the future, with unpredicted circumstances. We conclude with a discussion of how this work and a broader theoretical study of the unexpected can contribute toward a foundation of engineering principles for developing trustworthy next-generation autonomous systems.
Extracting more from boosted decision trees: A high energy physics case study
Authors: Vidhi Lalchand
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning

Particle identification is one of the core tasks in the data analysis pipeline at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Statistically, this entails the identification of rare signal events buried in immense backgrounds that mimic the properties of the former. In machine learning parlance, particle identification represents a classification problem characterized by overlapping and imbalanced classes. Boosted decision trees (BDTs) have had tremendous success in the particle identification domain but more recently have been overshadowed by deep learning (DNNs) approaches. This work proposes an algorithm to extract more out of standard boosted decision trees by targeting their main weakness, susceptibility to overfitting. This novel construction harnesses the meta-learning techniques of boosting and bagging simultaneously and performs remarkably well on the ATLAS Higgs (H) to tau-tau data set (ATLAS et al., 2014) which was the subject of the 2014 Higgs ML Challenge (Adam-Bourdarios et al., 2015). While the decay of Higgs to a pair of tau leptons was established in 2018 (CMS collaboration et al., 2017) at the 4.9$\sigma$ significance based on the 2016 data taking period, the 2014 public data set continues to serve as a benchmark data set to test the performance of supervised classification schemes. We show that the score achieved by the proposed algorithm is very close to the published winning score which leverages an ensemble of deep neural networks (DNNs). Although this paper focuses on a single application, it is expected that this simple and robust technique will find wider applications in high energy physics.
Nonparametric inference for interventional effects with multiple mediators
Authors: David Benkeser
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00

Understanding the pathways whereby an intervention has an effect on an outcome is a common scientific goal. A rich body of literature provides various decompositions of the total intervention effect into pathway specific effects. Interventional direct and indirect effects provide one such decomposition. Existing estimators of these effects are based on parametric models with confidence interval estimation facilitated via the nonparametric bootstrap. We provide theory that allows for more flexible, possibly machine learning-based, estimation techniques to be considered. In particular, we establish weak convergence results that facilitate the construction of closed-form confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. Finally, we demonstrate multiple robustness properties of the proposed estimators. Simulations show that inference based on large-sample theory has adequate small-sample performance. Our work thus provides a means of leveraging modern statistical learning techniques in estimation of interventional mediation effects.
User-in-the-loop Adaptive Intent Detection for Instructable Digital Assistant
Authors: Nicolas Lair, Clément Delgrange, David Mugisha, Jean-Michel Dussoux, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Peter Ford Dominey
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Intent Detection, Natural Language Understanding, One-Shot Learning, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

People are becoming increasingly comfortable using Digital Assistants (DAs) to interact with services or connected objects. However, for non-programming users, the available possibilities for customizing their DA are limited and do not include the possibility of teaching the assistant new tasks. To make the most of the potential of DAs, users should be able to customize assistants by instructing them through Natural Language (NL). To provide such functionalities, NL interpretation in traditional assistants should be improved: (1) The intent identification system should be able to recognize new forms of known intents, and to acquire new intents as they are expressed by the user. (2) In order to be adaptive to novel intents, the Natural Language Understanding module should be sample efficient, and should not rely on a pretrained model. Rather, the system should continuously collect the training data as it learns new intents from the user. In this work, we propose AidMe (Adaptive Intent Detection in Multi-Domain Environments), a user-in-the-loop adaptive intent detection framework that allows the assistant to adapt to its user by learning his intents as their interaction progresses. AidMe builds its repertoire of intents and collects data to train a model of semantic similarity evaluation that can discriminate between the learned intents and autonomously discover new forms of known intents. AidMe addresses two major issues - intent learning and user adaptation - for instructable digital assistants. We demonstrate the capabilities of AidMe as a standalone system by comparing it with a one-shot learning system and a pretrained NLU module through simulations of interactions with a user. We also show how AidMe can smoothly integrate to an existing instructable digital assistant.
Fast Compliance Checking with General Vocabularies
Authors: P. A. Bonatti, L. Ioffredo, I. M. Petrova, L. Sauro
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00

We address the problem of complying with the GDPR while processing and transferring personal data on the web. For this purpose we introduce an extensible profile of OWL2 for representing data protection policies. With this language, a company's data usage policy can be checked for compliance with data subjects' consent and with a formalized fragment of the GDPR by means of subsumption queries. The outer structure of the policies is restricted in order to make compliance checking highly scalable, as required when processing high-frequency data streams or large data volumes. However, the vocabularies for specifying policy properties can be chosen rather freely from expressive Horn fragments of OWL2. We exploit IBQ reasoning to integrate specialized reasoners for the policy language and the vocabulary's language. Our experiments show that this approach significantly improves performance.
Wine quality rapid detection using a compact electronic nose system: application focused on spoilage thresholds by acetic acid
Authors: Juan C. Rodriguez Gamboa, Eva Susana Albarracin E., Adenilton J. da Silva, Luciana Leite, Tiago A. E. Ferreira
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00

It is crucial for the wine industry to have methods like electronic nose systems (E-Noses) for real-time monitoring thresholds of acetic acid in wines, preventing its spoilage or determining its quality. In this paper, we prove that the portable and compact self-developed E-Nose, based on thin film semiconductor (SnO2) sensors and trained with an approach that uses deep Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network, can perform early detection of wine spoilage thresholds in routine tasks of wine quality control. To obtain rapid and online detection, we propose a method of rising-window focused on raw data processing to find an early portion of the sensor signals with the best recognition performance. Our approach was compared with the conventional approach employed in E-Noses for gas recognition that involves feature extraction and selection techniques for preprocessing data, succeeded by a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The results evidence that is possible to classify three wine spoilage levels in 2.7 seconds after the gas injection point, implying in a methodology 63 times faster than the results obtained with the conventional approach in our experimental setup.
Universal Adversarial Attack on Attention and the Resulting Dataset DAmageNet
Authors: Sizhe Chen, Zhengbao He, Chengjin Sun, Jie Yang, Xiaolin Huang
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Adversarial attacks on deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found for several years. However, the existing adversarial attacks have high success rates only when the information of the victim DNN is well-known or could be estimated by the structure similarity or massive queries. In this paper, we propose to Attack on Attention (AoA), a semantic property commonly shared by DNNs. AoA enjoys a significant increase in transferability when the traditional cross entropy loss is replaced with the attention loss. Since AoA alters the loss function only, it could be easily combined with other transferability-enhancement techniques and then achieve SOTA performance. We apply AoA to generate 50000 adversarial samples from ImageNet validation set to defeat many neural networks, and thus name the dataset as DAmageNet. 13 well-trained DNNs are tested on DAmageNet, and all of them have an error rate over 85%. Even with defenses or adversarial training, most models still maintain an error rate over 70% on DAmageNet. DAmageNet is the first universal adversarial dataset. It could be downloaded freely and serve as a benchmark for robustness testing and adversarial training.
Predicting the Physical Dynamics of Unseen 3D Objects
Authors: Davis Rempe, Srinath Sridhar, He Wang, Leonidas J. Guibas
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Machines that can predict the effect of physical interactions on the dynamics of previously unseen object instances are important for creating better robots and interactive virtual worlds. In this work, we focus on predicting the dynamics of 3D objects on a plane that have just been subjected to an impulsive force. In particular, we predict the changes in state - 3D position, rotation, velocities, and stability. Different from previous work, our approach can generalize dynamics predictions to object shapes and initial conditions that were unseen during training. Our method takes the 3D object's shape as a point cloud and its initial linear and angular velocities as input. We extract shape features and use a recurrent neural network to predict the full change in state at each time step. Our model can support training with data from both a physics engine or the real world. Experiments show that we can accurately predict the changes in state for unseen object geometries and initial conditions.
Curriculum Labeling: Revisiting Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Fuwen Tan, Yanjun Qi, Vicente Ordonez
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification

In this paper we revisit the idea of pseudo-labeling in the context of semi-supervised learning where a learning algorithm has access to a small set of labeled samples and a large set of unlabeled samples. Pseudo-labeling works by applying pseudo-labels to samples in the unlabeled set by using a model trained on the combination of the labeled samples and any previously pseudo-labeled samples, and iteratively repeating this process in a self-training cycle. Current methods seem to have abandoned this approach in favor of consistency regularization methods that train models under a combination of different styles of self-supervised losses on the unlabeled samples and standard supervised losses on the labeled samples. We empirically demonstrate that pseudo-labeling can in fact be competitive with the state-of-the-art, while being more resilient to out-of-distribution samples in the unlabeled set. We identify two key factors that allow pseudo-labeling to achieve such remarkable results (1) applying curriculum learning principles and (2) avoiding concept drift by restarting model parameters before each self-training cycle. We obtain 94.91% accuracy on CIFAR-10 using only 4,000 labeled samples, and 68.87% top-1 accuracy on Imagenet-ILSVRC using only 10% of the labeled samples. The code is available at https://github.com/uvavision/Curriculum-Labeling
Detection and Tracking Meet Drones Challenge
Authors: Pengfei Zhu, Longyin Wen, Dawei Du, Xiao Bian, Heng Fan, QinGhua Hu, Haibin Ling
Date: 2020-01-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking, Video Object Detection

Drones, or general UAVs, equipped with cameras have been fast deployed with a wide range of applications, including agriculture, aerial photography, and surveillance. Consequently, automatic understanding of visual data collected from drones becomes highly demanding, bringing computer vision and drones more and more closely. To promote and track the developments of object detection and tracking algorithms, we have organized three challenge workshops in conjunction with ECCV 2018, ICCV 2019 and ECCV 2020, attracting more than 100 teams around the world. We provide a large-scale drone captured dataset, VisDrone, which includes four tracks, i.e., (1) image object detection, (2) video object detection, (3) single object tracking, and (4) multi-object tracking. In this paper, we first present a thorough review of object detection and tracking datasets and benchmarks, and discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale drone-based object detection and tracking datasets with fully manual annotations. After that, we describe our VisDrone dataset, which is captured over various urban/suburban areas of 14 different cities across China from North to South. Being the largest such dataset ever published, VisDrone enables extensive evaluation and investigation of visual analysis algorithms for the drone platform. We provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale object detection and tracking on drones, and conclude the challenge as well as propose future directions. We expect the benchmark largely boost the research and development in video analysis on drone platforms. All the datasets and experimental results can be downloaded from https://github.com/VisDrone/VisDrone-Dataset.
Overly Optimistic Prediction Results on Imbalanced Data: a Case Study of Flaws and Benefits when Applying Over-sampling
Authors: Gilles Vandewiele, Isabelle Dehaene, György Kovács, Lucas Sterckx, Olivier Janssens, Femke Ongenae, Femke De Backere, Filip De Turck, Kristien Roelens, Johan Decruyenaere, Sofie Van Hoecke, Thomas Demeester
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00

Information extracted from electrohysterography recordings could potentially prove to be an interesting additional source of information to estimate the risk on preterm birth. Recently, a large number of studies have reported near-perfect results to distinguish between recordings of patients that will deliver term or preterm using a public resource, called the Term/Preterm Electrohysterogram database. However, we argue that these results are overly optimistic due to a methodological flaw being made. In this work, we focus on one specific type of methodological flaw: applying over-sampling before partitioning the data into mutually exclusive training and testing sets. We show how this causes the results to be biased using two artificial datasets and reproduce results of studies in which this flaw was identified. Moreover, we evaluate the actual impact of over-sampling on predictive performance, when applied prior to data partitioning, using the same methodologies of related studies, to provide a realistic view of these methodologies' generalization capabilities. We make our research reproducible by providing all the code under an open license.
DeepSUM++: Non-local Deep Neural Network for Super-Resolution of Unregistered Multitemporal Images
Authors: Andrea Bordone Molini, Diego Valsesia, Giulia Fracastoro, Enrico Magli
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Deep learning methods for super-resolution of a remote sensing scene from multiple unregistered low-resolution images have recently gained attention thanks to a challenge proposed by the European Space Agency. This paper presents an evolution of the winner of the challenge, showing how incorporating non-local information in a convolutional neural network allows to exploit self-similar patterns that provide enhanced regularization of the super-resolution problem. Experiments on the dataset of the challenge show improved performance over the state-of-the-art, which does not exploit non-local information.
Tethered Aerial Visual Assistance
Authors: Xuesu Xiao, Jan Dufek, Robin R. Murphy
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

In this paper, an autonomous tethered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is developed into a visual assistant in a marsupial co-robots team, collaborating with a tele-operated Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for robot operations in unstructured or confined environments. These environments pose extreme challenges to the remote tele-operator due to the lack of sufficient situational awareness, mostly caused by the unstructuredness and confinement, stationary and limited field-of-view and lack of depth perception from the robot's onboard cameras. To overcome these problems, a secondary tele-operated robot is used in current practices, who acts as a visual assistant and provides external viewpoints to overcome the perceptual limitations of the primary robot's onboard sensors. However, a second tele-operated robot requires extra manpower and teamwork demand between primary and secondary operators. The manually chosen viewpoints tend to be subjective and sub-optimal. Considering these intricacies, we develop an autonomous tethered aerial visual assistant in place of the secondary tele-operated robot and operator, to reduce human robot ratio from 2:2 to 1:2. Using a fundamental viewpoint quality theory, a formal risk reasoning framework, and a newly developed tethered motion suite, our visual assistant is able to autonomously navigate to good-quality viewpoints in a risk-aware manner through unstructured or confined spaces with a tether. The developed marsupial co-robots team could improve tele-operation efficiency in nuclear operations, bomb squad, disaster robots, and other domains with novel tasks or highly occluded environments, by reducing manpower and teamwork demand, and achieving better visual assistance quality with trustworthy risk-aware motion.
Epileptic Seizure Classification with Symmetric and Hybrid Bilinear Models
Authors: Tennison Liu, Nhan Duy Truong, Armin Nikpour, Luping Zhou, Omid Kavehei
Date: 2020-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Diagnostic, General Classification

Epilepsy affects nearly 1% of the global population, of which two thirds can be treated by anti-epileptic drugs and a much lower percentage by surgery. Diagnostic procedures for epilepsy and monitoring are highly specialized and labour-intensive. The accuracy of the diagnosis is also complicated by overlapping medical symptoms, varying levels of experience and inter-observer variability among clinical professions. This paper proposes a novel hybrid bilinear deep learning network with an application in the clinical procedures of epilepsy classification diagnosis, where the use of surface electroencephalogram (sEEG) and audiovisual monitoring is standard practice. Hybrid bilinear models based on two types of feature extractors, namely Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), are trained using Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) of one-second sEEG. In the proposed hybrid models, CNNs extract spatio-temporal patterns, while RNNs focus on the characteristics of temporal dynamics in relatively longer intervals given the same input data. Second-order features, based on interactions between these spatio-temporal features are further explored by bilinear pooling and used for epilepsy classification. Our proposed methods obtain an F1-score of 97.4% on the Temple University Hospital Seizure Corpus and 97.2% on the EPILEPSIAE dataset, comparing favourably to existing benchmarks for sEEG-based seizure type classification. The open-source implementation of this study is available at https://github.com/NeuroSyd/Epileptic-Seizure-Classification
A Hybrid Solution to Learn Turn-Taking in Multi-Party Service-based Chat Groups
Authors: Maira Gatti de Bayser, Melina Alberio Guerra, Paulo Cavalin, Claudio Pinhanez
Date: 2020-01-14 00:00:00

To predict the next most likely participant to interact in a multi-party conversation is a difficult problem. In a text-based chat group, the only information available is the sender, the content of the text and the dialogue history. In this paper we present our study on how these information can be used on the prediction task through a corpus and architecture that integrates turn-taking classifiers based on Maximum Likelihood Expectation (MLE), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Finite State Automata (FSA). The corpus is a synthetic adaptation of the Multi-Domain Wizard-of-Oz dataset (MultiWOZ) to a multiple travel service-based bots scenario with dialogue errors and was created to simulate user's interaction and evaluate the architecture. We present experimental results which show that the CNN approach achieves better performance than the baseline with an accuracy of 92.34%, but the integrated solution with MLE, CNN and FSA achieves performance even better, with 95.65%.
Supervised Speaker Embedding De-Mixing in Two-Speaker Environment
Authors: Yanpei Shi, Thomas Hain
Date: 2020-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Identification, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Separating different speaker properties from a multi-speaker environment is challenging. Instead of separating a two-speaker signal in signal space like speech source separation, a speaker embedding de-mixing approach is proposed. The proposed approach separates different speaker properties from a two-speaker signal in embedding space. The proposed approach contains two steps. In step one, the clean speaker embeddings are learned and collected by a residual TDNN based network. In step two, the two-speaker signal and the embedding of one of the speakers are both input to a speaker embedding de-mixing network. The de-mixing network is trained to generate the embedding of the other speaker by reconstruction loss. Speaker identification accuracy and the cosine similarity score between the clean embeddings and the de-mixed embeddings are used to evaluate the quality of the obtained embeddings. Experiments are done in two kind of data: artificial augmented two-speaker data (TIMIT) and real world recording of two-speaker data (MC-WSJ). Six different speaker embedding de-mixing architectures are investigated. Comparing with the performance on the clean speaker embeddings, the obtained results show that one of the proposed architectures obtained close performance, reaching 96.9% identification accuracy and 0.89 cosine similarity.