pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model
Authors: Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Thomas Hubert, Karen Simonyan, Laurent SIfre, Simon Schmitt, Arthur Guez, Edward Lockhart, Demis Hassabis, Thore Graepel, Timothy Lillicrap, David Silver
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Atari Games 100k, Game of Chess, Game of Go, Game of Shogi

Constructing agents with planning capabilities has long been one of the main challenges in the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Tree-based planning methods have enjoyed huge success in challenging domains, such as chess and Go, where a perfect simulator is available. However, in real-world problems the dynamics governing the environment are often complex and unknown. In this work we present the MuZero algorithm which, by combining a tree-based search with a learned model, achieves superhuman performance in a range of challenging and visually complex domains, without any knowledge of their underlying dynamics. MuZero learns a model that, when applied iteratively, predicts the quantities most directly relevant to planning: the reward, the action-selection policy, and the value function. When evaluated on 57 different Atari games - the canonical video game environment for testing AI techniques, in which model-based planning approaches have historically struggled - our new algorithm achieved a new state of the art. When evaluated on Go, chess and shogi, without any knowledge of the game rules, MuZero matched the superhuman performance of the AlphaZero algorithm that was supplied with the game rules.
Eliminating artefacts in Polarimetric Images using Deep Learning
Authors: Dhruv Paranjpye, Ashish Mahabal, A. N. Ramaprakash, Gina Panopoulou, Kieran Cleary, Anthony Readhead, Dmitry Blinov, Kostas Tassis
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Transfer Learning

Polarization measurements done using Imaging Polarimeters such as the Robotic Polarimeter are very sensitive to the presence of artefacts in images. Artefacts can range from internal reflections in a telescope to satellite trails that could contaminate an area of interest in the image. With the advent of wide-field polarimetry surveys, it is imperative to develop methods that automatically flag artefacts in images. In this paper, we implement a Convolutional Neural Network to identify the most dominant artefacts in the images. We find that our model can successfully classify sources with 98\% true positive and 97\% true negative rates. Such models, combined with transfer learning, will give us a running start in artefact elimination for near-future surveys like WALOP.
Neural Network based End-to-End Query by Example Spoken Term Detection
Authors: Dhananjay Ram, Lesly Miculicich, Hervé Bourlard
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, Template Matching

This paper focuses on the problem of query by example spoken term detection (QbE-STD) in zero-resource scenario. State-of-the-art approaches primarily rely on dynamic time warping (DTW) based template matching techniques using phone posterior or bottleneck features extracted from a deep neural network (DNN). We use both monolingual and multilingual bottleneck features, and show that multilingual features perform increasingly better with more training languages. Previously, it has been shown that the DTW based matching can be replaced with a CNN based matching while using posterior features. Here, we show that the CNN based matching outperforms DTW based matching using bottleneck features as well. In this case, the feature extraction and pattern matching stages of our QbE-STD system are optimized independently of each other. We propose to integrate these two stages in a fully neural network based end-to-end learning framework to enable joint optimization of those two stages simultaneously. The proposed approaches are evaluated on two challenging multilingual datasets: Spoken Web Search 2013 and Query by Example Search on Speech Task 2014, demonstrating in each case significant improvements.
Knowledge Graph Entity Alignment with Graph Convolutional Networks: Lessons Learned
Authors: Max Berrendorf, Evgeniy Faerman, Valentyn Melnychuk, Volker Tresp, Thomas Seidl
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Alignment, Knowledge Graphs

In this work, we focus on the problem of entity alignment in Knowledge Graphs (KG) and we report on our experiences when applying a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) based model for this task. Variants of GCN are used in multiple state-of-the-art approaches and therefore it is important to understand the specifics and limitations of GCN-based models. Despite serious efforts, we were not able to fully reproduce the results from the original paper and after a thorough audit of the code provided by authors, we concluded, that their implementation is different from the architecture described in the paper. In addition, several tricks are required to make the model work and some of them are not very intuitive. We provide an extensive ablation study to quantify the effects these tricks and changes of architecture have on final performance. Furthermore, we examine current evaluation approaches and systematize available benchmark datasets. We believe that people interested in KG matching might profit from our work, as well as novices entering the field
Live Face De-Identification in Video
Authors: Oran Gafni, Lior Wolf, Yaniv Taigman
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Decoder, De-identification

We propose a method for face de-identification that enables fully automatic video modification at high frame rates. The goal is to maximally decorrelate the identity, while having the perception (pose, illumination and expression) fixed. We achieve this by a novel feed-forward encoder-decoder network architecture that is conditioned on the high-level representation of a person's facial image. The network is global, in the sense that it does not need to be retrained for a given video or for a given identity, and it creates natural looking image sequences with little distortion in time.
Energy Usage Reports: Environmental awareness as part of algorithmic accountability
Authors: Kadan Lottick, Silvia Susai, Sorelle A. Friedler, Jonathan P. Wilson
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00

The carbon footprint of algorithms must be measured and transparently reported so computer scientists can take an honest and active role in environmental sustainability. In this paper, we take analyses usually applied at the industrial level and make them accessible for individual computer science researchers with an easy-to-use Python package. Localizing to the energy mixture of the electrical power grid, we make the conversion from energy usage to CO2 emissions, in addition to contextualizing these results with more human-understandable benchmarks such as automobile miles driven. We also include comparisons with energy mixtures employed in electrical grids around the world. We propose including these automatically-generated Energy Usage Reports as part of standard algorithmic accountability practices, and demonstrate the use of these reports as part of model-choice in a machine learning context.
Predicting overweight and obesity in later life from childhood data: A review of predictive modeling approaches
Authors: Ilkka Rautiainen, Sami Äyrämö
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Background: Overweight and obesity are an increasing phenomenon worldwide. Predicting future overweight or obesity early in the childhood reliably could enable a successful intervention by experts. While a lot of research has been done using explanatory modeling methods, capability of machine learning, and predictive modeling, in particular, remain mainly unexplored. In predictive modeling models are validated with previously unseen examples, giving a more accurate estimate of their performance and generalization ability in real-life scenarios. Objective: To find and review existing overweight or obesity research from the perspective of employing childhood data and predictive modeling methods. Methods: The initial phase included bibliographic searches using relevant search terms in PubMed, IEEE database and Google Scholar. The second phase consisted of iteratively searching references of potential studies and recent research that cite the potential studies. Results: Eight research articles and three review articles were identified as relevant for this review. Conclusions: Prediction models with high performance either have a relatively short time period to predict or/and are based on late childhood data. Logistic regression is currently the most often used method in forming the prediction models. In addition to child's own weight and height information, maternal weight status or body mass index was often used as predictors in the models.
PRINCE: Provider-side Interpretability with Counterfactual Explanations in Recommender Systems
Authors: Azin Ghazimatin, Oana Balalau, Rishiraj Saha Roy, Gerhard Weikum
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Recommendation Systems

Interpretable explanations for recommender systems and other machine learning models are crucial to gain user trust. Prior works that have focused on paths connecting users and items in a heterogeneous network have several limitations, such as discovering relationships rather than true explanations, or disregarding other users' privacy. In this work, we take a fresh perspective, and present PRINCE: a provider-side mechanism to produce tangible explanations for end-users, where an explanation is defined to be a set of minimal actions performed by the user that, if removed, changes the recommendation to a different item. Given a recommendation, PRINCE uses a polynomial-time optimal algorithm for finding this minimal set of a user's actions from an exponential search space, based on random walks over dynamic graphs. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that PRINCE provides more compact explanations than intuitive baselines, and insights from a crowdsourced user-study demonstrate the viability of such action-based explanations. We thus posit that PRINCE produces scrutable, actionable, and concise explanations, owing to its use of counterfactual evidence, a user's own actions, and minimal sets, respectively.
A model for predicting price polarity of real estate properties using information of real estate market websites
Authors: Vladimir Vargas-Calderón, Jorge E. Camargo
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00

This paper presents a model that uses the information that sellers publish in real estate market websites to predict whether a property has higher or lower price than the average price of its similar properties. The model learns the correlation between price and information (text descriptions and features) of real estate properties through automatic identification of latent semantic content given by a machine learning model based on doc2vec and xgboost. The proposed model was evaluated with a data set of 57,516 publications of real estate properties collected from 2016 to 2018 of Bogot\'a city. Results show that the accuracy of a classifier that involves text descriptions is slightly higher than a classifier that only uses features of the real estate properties, as text descriptions tends to contain detailed information about the property.
Towards non-toxic landscapes: Automatic toxic comment detection using DNN
Authors: Ashwin Geet D'Sa, Irina Illina, Dominique Fohr
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Binary Classification

The spectacular expansion of the Internet has led to the development of a new research problem in the field of natural language processing: automatic toxic comment detection, since many countries prohibit hate speech in public media. There is no clear and formal definition of hate, offensive, toxic and abusive speeches. In this article, we put all these terms under the umbrella of "toxic" speech. The contribution of this paper is the design of binary classification and regression-based approaches aiming to predict whether a comment is toxic or not. We compare different unsupervised word representations and different DNN based classifiers. Moreover, we study the robustness of the proposed approaches to adversarial attacks by adding one (healthy or toxic) word. We evaluate the proposed methodology on the English Wikipedia Detox corpus. Our experiments show that using BERT fine-tuning outperforms feature-based BERT, Mikolov's and fastText representations with different DNN classifiers.
Mixed-curvature Variational Autoencoders
Authors: Ondrej Skopek, Octavian-Eugen Ganea, Gary Bécigneul
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1

Euclidean geometry has historically been the typical "workhorse" for machine learning applications due to its power and simplicity. However, it has recently been shown that geometric spaces with constant non-zero curvature improve representations and performance on a variety of data types and downstream tasks. Consequently, generative models like Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have been successfully generalized to elliptical and hyperbolic latent spaces. While these approaches work well on data with particular kinds of biases e.g. tree-like data for a hyperbolic VAE, there exists no generic approach unifying and leveraging all three models. We develop a Mixed-curvature Variational Autoencoder, an efficient way to train a VAE whose latent space is a product of constant curvature Riemannian manifolds, where the per-component curvature is fixed or learnable. This generalizes the Euclidean VAE to curved latent spaces and recovers it when curvatures of all latent space components go to 0.
Comparison of Deep learning models on time series forecasting : a case study of Dissolved Oxygen Prediction
Authors: Hongqian Qin
Date: 2019-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Small Data Image Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Forecasting

Deep learning has achieved impressive prediction performance in the field of sequence learning recently. Dissolved oxygen prediction, as a kind of time-series forecasting, is suitable for this technique. Although many researchers have developed hybrid models or variant models based on deep learning techniques, there is no comprehensive and sound comparison among the deep learning models in this field currently. Plus, most previous studies focused on one-step forecasting by using a small data set. As the convenient access to high-frequency data, this paper compares multi-step deep learning forecasting by using walk-forward validation. Specifically, we test Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network (BiRNN) based on the real-time data recorded automatically at a fixed observation point in the Yangtze River from 2012 to 2016. By comparing the average accumulated statistical metrics of root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and coefficient of determination in each time step, We find for multi-step time series forecasting, the average performance of each time step does not decrease linearly. GRU outperforms other models with significant advantages.
A Study on various state of the art of the Art Face Recognition System using Deep Learning Techniques
Authors: Sukhada Chokkadi, Sannidhan M S, Sudeepa K B, Abhir Bhandary
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Sketch Recognition

Considering the existence of very large amount of available data repositories and reach to the very advanced system of hardware, systems meant for facial identification ave evolved enormously over the past few decades. Sketch recognition is one of the most important areas that have evolved as an integral component adopted by the agencies of law administration in current trends of forensic science. Matching of derived sketches to photo images of face is also a difficult assignment as the considered sketches are produced upon the verbal explanation depicted by the eye witness of the crime scene and may have scarcity of sensitive elements that exist in the photograph as one can accurately depict due to the natural human error. Substantial amount of the novel research work carried out in this area up late used recognition system through traditional extraction and classification models. But very recently, few researches work focused on using deep learning techniques to take an advantage of learning models for the feature extraction and classification to rule out potential domain challenges. The first part of this review paper basically focuses on deep learning techniques used in face recognition and matching which as improved the accuracy of face recognition technique with training of huge sets of data. This paper also includes a survey on different techniques used to match composite sketches to human images which includes component-based representation approach, automatic composite sketch recognition technique etc.
Towards unstructured mortality prediction with free-text clinical notes
Authors: Mohammad Hashir, Rapinder Sawhney
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Mortality Prediction, Prediction

Healthcare data continues to flourish yet a relatively small portion, mostly structured, is being utilized effectively for predicting clinical outcomes. The rich subjective information available in unstructured clinical notes can possibly facilitate higher discrimination but tends to be under-utilized in mortality prediction. This work attempts to assess the gain in performance when multiple notes that have been minimally preprocessed are used as an input for prediction. A hierarchical architecture consisting of both convolutional and recurrent layers is used to concurrently model the different notes compiled in an individual hospital stay. This approach is evaluated on predicting in-hospital mortality on the MIMIC-III dataset. On comparison to approaches utilizing structured data, it achieved higher metrics despite requiring less cleaning and preprocessing. This demonstrates the potential of unstructured data in enhancing mortality prediction and signifies the need to incorporate more raw unstructured data into current clinical prediction methods.
MANGA: Method Agnostic Neural-policy Generalization and Adaptation
Authors: Homanga Bharadhwaj, Shoichiro Yamaguchi, Shin-ichi Maeda
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In this paper we target the problem of transferring policies across multiple environments with different dynamics parameters and motor noise variations, by introducing a framework that decouples the processes of policy learning and system identification. Efficiently transferring learned policies to an unknown environment with changes in dynamics configurations in the presence of motor noise is very important for operating robots in the real world, and our work is a novel attempt in that direction. We introduce MANGA: Method Agnostic Neural-policy Generalization and Adaptation, that trains dynamics conditioned policies and efficiently learns to estimate the dynamics parameters of the environment given off-policy state-transition rollouts in the environment. Our scheme is agnostic to the type of training method used - both reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL) strategies can be used. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by experimenting with four different MuJoCo agents and comparing against previously proposed transfer baselines.
Planning with Goal-Conditioned Policies
Authors: Soroush Nasiriany, Vitchyr H. Pong, Steven Lin, Sergey Levine
Date: 2019-11-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Robot Navigation, Sequential Decision Making, valid

Planning methods can solve temporally extended sequential decision making problems by composing simple behaviors. However, planning requires suitable abstractions for the states and transitions, which typically need to be designed by hand. In contrast, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) can acquire behaviors from low-level inputs directly, but often struggles with temporally extended tasks. Can we utilize reinforcement learning to automatically form the abstractions needed for planning, thus obtaining the best of both approaches? We show that goal-conditioned policies learned with RL can be incorporated into planning, so that a planner can focus on which states to reach, rather than how those states are reached. However, with complex state observations such as images, not all inputs represent valid states. We therefore also propose using a latent variable model to compactly represent the set of valid states for the planner, so that the policies provide an abstraction of actions, and the latent variable model provides an abstraction of states. We compare our method with planning-based and model-free methods and find that our method significantly outperforms prior work when evaluated on image-based robot navigation and manipulation tasks that require non-greedy, multi-staged behavior.
Tigris: Architecture and Algorithms for 3D Perception in Point Clouds
Authors: Tiancheng Xu, Boyuan Tian, Yuhao Zhu
Date: 2019-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, GPU, Point Cloud Registration, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Machine perception applications are increasingly moving toward manipulating and processing 3D point cloud. This paper focuses on point cloud registration, a key primitive of 3D data processing widely used in high-level tasks such as odometry, simultaneous localization and mapping, and 3D reconstruction. As these applications are routinely deployed in energy-constrained environments, real-time and energy-efficient point cloud registration is critical. We present Tigris, an algorithm-architecture co-designed system specialized for point cloud registration. Through an extensive exploration of the registration pipeline design space, we find that, while different design points make vastly different trade-offs between accuracy and performance, KD-tree search is a common performance bottleneck, and thus is an ideal candidate for architectural specialization. While KD-tree search is inherently sequential, we propose an acceleration-amenable data structure and search algorithm that exposes different forms of parallelism of KD-tree search in the context of point cloud registration. The co-designed accelerator systematically exploits the parallelism while incorporating a set of architectural techniques that further improve the accelerator efficiency. Overall, Tigris achieves 77.2$\times$ speedup and 7.4$\times$ power reduction in KD-tree search over an RTX 2080 Ti GPU, which translates to a 41.7% registration performance improvements and 3.0$\times$ power reduction.