pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring Temporal Information for Improved Video Understanding
Authors: Yi Zhu
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Optical Flow Estimation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Classification, Video Prediction, Video Understanding

In this dissertation, I present my work towards exploring temporal information for better video understanding. Specifically, I have worked on two problems: action recognition and semantic segmentation. For action recognition, I have proposed a framework, termed hidden two-stream networks, to learn an optimal motion representation that does not require the computation of optical flow. My framework alleviates several challenges faced in video classification, such as learning motion representations, real-time inference, multi-framerate handling, generalizability to unseen actions, etc. For semantic segmentation, I have introduced a general framework that uses video prediction models to synthesize new training samples. By scaling up the training dataset, my trained models are more accurate and robust than previous models even without modifications to the network architectures or objective functions. I believe videos have much more potential to be mined, and temporal information is one of the most important cues for machines to perceive the visual world better.
Asymptotic Distributions and Rates of Convergence for Random Forests via Generalized U-statistics
Authors: Wei Peng, Tim Coleman, Lucas Mentch
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00

Random forests remain among the most popular off-the-shelf supervised learning algorithms. Despite their well-documented empirical success, however, until recently, few theoretical results were available to describe their performance and behavior. In this work we push beyond recent work on consistency and asymptotic normality by establishing rates of convergence for random forests and other supervised learning ensembles. We develop the notion of generalized U-statistics and show that within this framework, random forest predictions can potentially remain asymptotically normal for larger subsample sizes than previously established. We also provide Berry-Esseen bounds in order to quantify the rate at which this convergence occurs, making explicit the roles of the subsample size and the number of trees in determining the distribution of random forest predictions.
Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One?
Authors: Paul Michel, Omer Levy, Graham Neubig
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving force behind many recent state-of-the-art NLP models such as Transformer-based MT models and BERT. These models apply multiple attention mechanisms in parallel, with each attention "head" potentially focusing on different parts of the input, which makes it possible to express sophisticated functions beyond the simple weighted average. In this paper we make the surprising observation that even if models have been trained using multiple heads, in practice, a large percentage of attention heads can be removed at test time without significantly impacting performance. In fact, some layers can even be reduced to a single head. We further examine greedy algorithms for pruning down models, and the potential speed, memory efficiency, and accuracy improvements obtainable therefrom. Finally, we analyze the results with respect to which parts of the model are more reliant on having multiple heads, and provide precursory evidence that training dynamics play a role in the gains provided by multi-head attention.
Large Scale Markov Decision Processes with Changing Rewards
Authors: Adrian Rivera Cardoso, He Wang, Huan Xu
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

We consider Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) where the rewards are unknown and may change in an adversarial manner. We provide an algorithm that achieves state-of-the-art regret bound of $O( \sqrt{\tau (\ln|S|+\ln|A|)T}\ln(T))$, where $S$ is the state space, $A$ is the action space, $\tau$ is the mixing time of the MDP, and $T$ is the number of periods. The algorithm's computational complexity is polynomial in $|S|$ and $|A|$ per period. We then consider a setting often encountered in practice, where the state space of the MDP is too large to allow for exact solutions. By approximating the state-action occupancy measures with a linear architecture of dimension $d\ll|S|$, we propose a modified algorithm with computational complexity polynomial in $d$. We also prove a regret bound for this modified algorithm, which to the best of our knowledge this is the first $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret bound for large scale MDPs with changing rewards.
Adaptive, Distribution-Free Prediction Intervals for Deep Networks
Authors: Danijel Kivaranovic, Kory D. Johnson, Hannes Leeb
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Prediction Intervals, quantile regression, valid

The machine learning literature contains several constructions for prediction intervals that are intuitively reasonable but ultimately ad-hoc in that they do not come with provable performance guarantees. We present methods from the statistics literature that can be used efficiently with neural networks under minimal assumptions with guaranteed performance. We propose a neural network that outputs three values instead of a single point estimate and optimizes a loss function motivated by the standard quantile regression loss. We provide two prediction interval methods with finite sample coverage guarantees solely under the assumption that the observations are independent and identically distributed. The first method leverages the conformal inference framework and provides average coverage. The second method provides a new, stronger guarantee by conditioning on the observed data. Lastly, our loss function does not compromise the predictive accuracy of the network like other prediction interval methods. We demonstrate the ease of use of our procedures as well as its improvements over other methods on both simulated and real data. As most deep networks can easily be modified by our method to output predictions with valid prediction intervals, its use should become standard practice, much like reporting standard errors along with mean estimates.
Stochastic Shared Embeddings: Data-driven Regularization of Embedding Layers
Authors: Liwei Wu, Shuqing Li, Cho-Jui Hsieh, James Sharpnack
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Recommendation Systems

In deep neural nets, lower level embedding layers account for a large portion of the total number of parameters. Tikhonov regularization, graph-based regularization, and hard parameter sharing are approaches that introduce explicit biases into training in a hope to reduce statistical complexity. Alternatively, we propose stochastically shared embeddings (SSE), a data-driven approach to regularizing embedding layers, which stochastically transitions between embeddings during stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Because SSE integrates seamlessly with existing SGD algorithms, it can be used with only minor modifications when training large scale neural networks. We develop two versions of SSE: SSE-Graph using knowledge graphs of embeddings; SSE-SE using no prior information. We provide theoretical guarantees for our method and show its empirical effectiveness on 6 distinct tasks, from simple neural networks with one hidden layer in recommender systems, to the transformer and BERT in natural languages. We find that when used along with widely-used regularization methods such as weight decay and dropout, our proposed SSE can further reduce overfitting, which often leads to more favorable generalization results.
Flexibly Regularized Mixture Models and Application to Image Segmentation
Authors: Jonathan Vacher, Claire Launay, Ruben Coen-Cagli
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Image Segmentation

Probabilistic finite mixture models are widely used for unsupervised clustering. These models can often be improved by adapting them to the topology of the data. For instance, in order to classify spatially adjacent data points similarly, it is common to introduce a Laplacian constraint on the posterior probability that each data point belongs to a class. Alternatively, the mixing probabilities can be treated as free parameters, while assuming Gauss-Markov or more complex priors to regularize those mixing probabilities. However, these approaches are constrained by the shape of the prior and often lead to complicated or intractable inference. Here, we propose a new parametrization of the Dirichlet distribution to flexibly regularize the mixing probabilities of over-parametrized mixture distributions. Using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm, we show that our approach allows us to define any linear update rule for the mixing probabilities, including spatial smoothing regularization as a special case. We then show that this flexible design can be extended to share class information between multiple mixture models. We apply our algorithm to artificial and natural image segmentation tasks, and we provide quantitative and qualitative comparison of the performance of Gaussian and Student-t mixtures on the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset. We also demonstrate how to propagate class information across the layers of deep convolutional neural networks in a probabilistically optimal way, suggesting a new interpretation for feedback signals in biological visual systems. Our flexible approach can be easily generalized to adapt probabilistic mixture models to arbitrary data topologies.
Hyperparameter-Free Out-of-Distribution Detection Using Softmax of Scaled Cosine Similarity
Authors: Engkarat Techapanurak, Masanori Suganuma, Takayuki Okatani
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Out-of-Distribution Detection

The ability to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is vital to secure the reliability of deep neural networks in real-world applications. Considering the nature of OOD samples, detection methods should not have hyperparameters that need to be tuned depending on incoming OOD samples. However, most of the recently proposed methods do not meet this requirement, leading to compromised performance in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a simple, hyperparameter-free method based on softmax of scaled cosine similarity. It resembles the approach employed by modern metric learning methods, but it differs in details; the differences are essential to achieve high detection performance. We show through experiments that our method outperforms the existing methods on the evaluation test recently proposed by Shafaei et al., which takes the above issue of hyperparameter dependency into account. We also show that it achieves at least comparable performance to other methods on the conventional test, where their hyperparameters are chosen using explicit OOD samples. Furthermore, it is computationally more efficient than most of the previous methods, since it needs only a single forward pass.
Rethinking Softmax Cross-Entropy Loss for Adversarial Robustness
Authors: Tianyu Pang, Kun Xu, Yinpeng Dong, Chao Du, Ning Chen, Jun Zhu
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Previous work shows that adversarially robust generalization requires larger sample complexity, and the same dataset, e.g., CIFAR-10, which enables good standard accuracy may not suffice to train robust models. Since collecting new training data could be costly, we focus on better utilizing the given data by inducing the regions with high sample density in the feature space, which could lead to locally sufficient samples for robust learning. We first formally show that the softmax cross-entropy (SCE) loss and its variants convey inappropriate supervisory signals, which encourage the learned feature points to spread over the space sparsely in training. This inspires us to propose the Max-Mahalanobis center (MMC) loss to explicitly induce dense feature regions in order to benefit robustness. Namely, the MMC loss encourages the model to concentrate on learning ordered and compact representations, which gather around the preset optimal centers for different classes. We empirically demonstrate that applying the MMC loss can significantly improve robustness even under strong adaptive attacks, while keeping state-of-the-art accuracy on clean inputs with little extra computation compared to the SCE loss.
ESA: Entity Summarization with Attention
Authors: Dongjun Wei, Yaxin Liu, Fuqing Zhu, Liangjun Zang, Wei Zhou, Jizhong Han, Songlin Hu
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Knowledge Graphs

Entity summarization aims at creating brief but informative descriptions of entities from knowledge graphs. While previous work mostly focused on traditional techniques such as clustering algorithms and graph models, we ask how to apply deep learning methods into this task. In this paper we propose ESA, a neural network with supervised attention mechanisms for entity summarization. Specifically, we calculate attention weights for facts in each entity, and rank facts to generate reliable summaries. We explore techniques to solve difficult learning problems presented by the ESA, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in comparison with the state-of-the-art methods. Experimental results show that our model improves the quality of the entity summaries in both F-measure and MAP.
Beyond Visual Semantics: Exploring the Role of Scene Text in Image Understanding
Authors: Arka Ujjal Dey, Suman Kumar Ghosh, Ernest Valveny, Gaurav Harit
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Images with visual and scene text content are ubiquitous in everyday life. However, current image interpretation systems are mostly limited to using only the visual features, neglecting to leverage the scene text content. In this paper, we propose to jointly use scene text and visual channels for robust semantic interpretation of images. We do not only extract and encode visual and scene text cues, but also model their interplay to generate a contextual joint embedding with richer semantics. The contextual embedding thus generated is applied to retrieval and classification tasks on multimedia images, with scene text content, to demonstrate its effectiveness. In the retrieval framework, we augment our learned text-visual semantic representation with scene text cues, to mitigate vocabulary misses that may have occurred during the semantic embedding. To deal with irrelevant or erroneous recognition of scene text, we also apply query-based attention to our text channel. We show how the multi-channel approach, involving visual semantics and scene text, improves upon state of the art.
Dynamic Epistemic Logic with ASP Updates: Application to Conditional Planning
Authors: Pedro Cabalar, Jorge Fandinno, Luis Fariñas del Cerro
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Epistemic Reasoning

Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) is a family of multimodal logics that has proved to be very successful for epistemic reasoning in planning tasks. In this logic, the agent's knowledge is captured by modal epistemic operators whereas the system evolution is described in terms of (some subset of) dynamic logic modalities in which actions are usually represented as semantic objects called event models. In this paper, we study a variant of DEL, that wecall DEL[ASP], where actions are syntactically described by using an Answer Set Programming (ASP) representation instead of event models. This representation directly inherits high level expressive features like indirect effects, qualifications, state constraints, defaults, or recursive fluents that are common in ASP descriptions of action domains. Besides, we illustrate how this approach can be applied for obtaining conditional plans in single-agent, partially observable domains where knowledge acquisition may be represented as indirect effects of actions.
ShrinkTeaNet: Million-scale Lightweight Face Recognition via Shrinking Teacher-Student Networks
Authors: Chi Nhan Duong, Khoa Luu, Kha Gia Quach, Ngan Le
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, GPU, Lightweight Face Recognition

Large-scale face recognition in-the-wild has been recently achieved matured performance in many real work applications. However, such systems are built on GPU platforms and mostly deploy heavy deep network architectures. Given a high-performance heavy network as a teacher, this work presents a simple and elegant teacher-student learning paradigm, namely ShrinkTeaNet, to train a portable student network that has significantly fewer parameters and competitive accuracy against the teacher network. Far apart from prior teacher-student frameworks mainly focusing on accuracy and compression ratios in closed-set problems, our proposed teacher-student network is proved to be more robust against open-set problem, i.e. large-scale face recognition. In addition, this work introduces a novel Angular Distillation Loss for distilling the feature direction and the sample distributions of the teacher's hypersphere to its student. Then ShrinkTeaNet framework can efficiently guide the student's learning process with the teacher's knowledge presented in both intermediate and last stages of the feature embedding. Evaluations on LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB, IJB-B and IJB-C Janus, and MegaFace with one million distractors have demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed approach to learn robust student networks which have satisfying accuracy and compact sizes. Our ShrinkTeaNet is able to support the light-weight architecture achieving high performance with 99.77% on LFW and 95.64% on large-scale Megaface protocols.
Exposure Bias versus Self-Recovery: Are Distortions Really Incremental for Autoregressive Text Generation?
Authors: Tianxing He, Jingzhao Zhang, Zhiming Zhou, James Glass
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2021 11
Tasks: Machine Translation, Text Generation

Exposure bias has been regarded as a central problem for auto-regressive language models (LM). It claims that teacher forcing would cause the test-time generation to be incrementally distorted due to the training-generation discrepancy. Although a lot of algorithms have been proposed to avoid teacher forcing and therefore alleviate exposure bias, there is little work showing how serious the exposure bias problem actually is. In this work, we focus on the task of open-ended language generation, propose metrics to quantify the impact of exposure bias in the aspects of quality, diversity, and consistency. Our key intuition is that if we feed ground-truth data prefixes (instead of prefixes generated by the model itself) into the model and ask it to continue the generation, the performance should become much better because the training-generation discrepancy in the prefix is removed. Both automatic and human evaluations are conducted in our experiments. On the contrary to the popular belief in exposure bias, we find that the the distortion induced by the prefix discrepancy is limited, and does not seem to be incremental during the generation. Moreover, our analysis reveals an interesting self-recovery ability of the LM, which we hypothesize to be countering the harmful effects from exposure bias.
Adversarial Policies: Attacking Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Adam Gleave, Michael Dennis, Cody Wild, Neel Kant, Sergey Levine, Stuart Russell
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies are known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations to their observations, similar to adversarial examples for classifiers. However, an attacker is not usually able to directly modify another agent's observations. This might lead one to wonder: is it possible to attack an RL agent simply by choosing an adversarial policy acting in a multi-agent environment so as to create natural observations that are adversarial? We demonstrate the existence of adversarial policies in zero-sum games between simulated humanoid robots with proprioceptive observations, against state-of-the-art victims trained via self-play to be robust to opponents. The adversarial policies reliably win against the victims but generate seemingly random and uncoordinated behavior. We find that these policies are more successful in high-dimensional environments, and induce substantially different activations in the victim policy network than when the victim plays against a normal opponent. Videos are available at https://adversarialpolicies.github.io/.
Exploring Feature Representation and Training strategies in Temporal Action Localization
Authors: Ting-Ting Xie, Xiaoshan Yang, Tianzhu Zhang, Changsheng Xu, Ioannis Patras
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Temporal Action Localization

Temporal action localization has recently attracted significant interest in the Computer Vision community. However, despite the great progress, it is hard to identify which aspects of the proposed methods contribute most to the increase in localization performance. To address this issue, we conduct ablative experiments on feature extraction methods, fixed-size feature representation methods and training strategies, and report how each influences the overall performance. Based on our findings, we propose a two-stage detector that outperforms the state of the art in THUMOS14, achieving a mAP@tIoU=0.5 equal to 44.2%.
Average Individual Fairness: Algorithms, Generalization and Experiments
Authors: Michael Kearns, Aaron Roth, Saeed Sharifi-Malvajerdi
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Classification, Fairness, General Classification

We propose a new family of fairness definitions for classification problems that combine some of the best properties of both statistical and individual notions of fairness. We posit not only a distribution over individuals, but also a distribution over (or collection of) classification tasks. We then ask that standard statistics (such as error or false positive/negative rates) be (approximately) equalized across individuals, where the rate is defined as an expectation over the classification tasks. Because we are no longer averaging over coarse groups (such as race or gender), this is a semantically meaningful individual-level constraint. Given a sample of individuals and classification problems, we design an oracle-efficient algorithm (i.e. one that is given access to any standard, fairness-free learning heuristic) for the fair empirical risk minimization task. We also show that given sufficiently many samples, the ERM solution generalizes in two directions: both to new individuals, and to new classification tasks, drawn from their corresponding distributions. Finally we implement our algorithm and empirically verify its effectiveness.
Reconstructing faces from voices
Authors: Yandong Wen, Rita Singh, Bhiksha Raj
Date: 2019-05-25 00:00:00

Voice profiling aims at inferring various human parameters from their speech, e.g. gender, age, etc. In this paper, we address the challenge posed by a subtask of voice profiling - reconstructing someone's face from their voice. The task is designed to answer the question: given an audio clip spoken by an unseen person, can we picture a face that has as many common elements, or associations as possible with the speaker, in terms of identity? To address this problem, we propose a simple but effective computational framework based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). The network learns to generate faces from voices by matching the identities of generated faces to those of the speakers, on a training set. We evaluate the performance of the network by leveraging a closely related task - cross-modal matching. The results show that our model is able to generate faces that match several biometric characteristics of the speaker, and results in matching accuracies that are much better than chance.