pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Robustness from Simple Classifiers
Authors: Sharon Qian, Dimitris Kalimeris, Gal Kaplun, Yaron Singer
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00

Despite the vast success of Deep Neural Networks in numerous application domains, it has been shown that such models are not robust i.e., they are vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations of the input. While extensive work has been done on why such perturbations occur or how to successfully defend against them, we still do not have a complete understanding of robustness. In this work, we investigate the connection between robustness and simplicity. We find that simpler classifiers, formed by reducing the number of output classes, are less susceptible to adversarial perturbations. Consequently, we demonstrate that decomposing a complex multiclass model into an aggregation of binary models enhances robustness. This behavior is consistent across different datasets and model architectures and can be combined with known defense techniques such as adversarial training. Moreover, we provide further evidence of a disconnect between standard and robust learning regimes. In particular, we show that elaborate label information can help standard accuracy but harm robustness.
A Multiclass Classification Approach to Label Ranking
Authors: Stephan Clémençon, Robin Vogel
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, regression

In multiclass classification, the goal is to learn how to predict a random label $Y$, valued in $\mathcal{Y}=\{1,\; \ldots,\; K \}$ with $K\geq 3$, based upon observing a r.v. $X$, taking its values in $\mathbb{R}^q$ with $q\geq 1$ say, by means of a classification rule $g:\mathbb{R}^q\to \mathcal{Y}$ with minimum probability of error $\mathbb{P}\{Y\neq g(X) \}$. However, in a wide variety of situations, the task targeted may be more ambitious, consisting in sorting all the possible label values $y$ that may be assigned to $X$ by decreasing order of the posterior probability $\eta_y(X)=\mathbb{P}\{Y=y \mid X \}$. This article is devoted to the analysis of this statistical learning problem, halfway between multiclass classification and posterior probability estimation (regression) and referred to as label ranking here. We highlight the fact that it can be viewed as a specific variant of ranking median regression (RMR), where, rather than observing a random permutation $\Sigma$ assigned to the input vector $X$ and drawn from a Bradley-Terry-Luce-Plackett model with conditional preference vector $(\eta_1(X),\; \ldots,\; \eta_K(X))$, the sole information available for training a label ranking rule is the label $Y$ ranked on top, namely $\Sigma^{-1}(1)$. Inspired by recent results in RMR, we prove that under appropriate noise conditions, the One-Versus-One (OVO) approach to multiclassification yields, as a by-product, an optimal ranking of the labels with overwhelming probability. Beyond theoretical guarantees, the relevance of the approach to label ranking promoted in this article is supported by experimental results.
Guider l'attention dans les modeles de sequence a sequence pour la prediction des actes de dialogue
Authors: Pierre Colombo, Emile Chapuis, Matteo Manica, Emmanuel Vignon, Giovanna Varni, Chloe Clavel
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, TAG, Translation

The task of predicting dialog acts (DA) based on conversational dialog is a key component in the development of conversational agents. Accurately predicting DAs requires a precise modeling of both the conversation and the global tag dependencies. We leverage seq2seq approaches widely adopted in Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to improve the modelling of tag sequentiality. Seq2seq models are known to learn complex global dependencies while currently proposed approaches using linear conditional random fields (CRF) only model local tag dependencies. In this work, we introduce a seq2seq model tailored for DA classification using: a hierarchical encoder, a novel guided attention mechanism and beam search applied to both training and inference. Compared to the state of the art our model does not require handcrafted features and is trained end-to-end. Furthermore, the proposed approach achieves an unmatched accuracy score of 85% on SwDA, and state-of-the-art accuracy score of 91.6% on MRDA.
The Automated Inspection of Opaque Liquid Vaccines
Authors: Gregory Palmer, Benjamin Schnieders, Rahul Savani, Karl Tuyls, Joscha-David Fossel, Harry Flore
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00

In the pharmaceutical industry the screening of opaque vaccines containing suspensions is currently a manual task carried out by trained human visual inspectors. We show that deep learning can be used to effectively automate this process. A moving contrast is required to distinguish anomalies from other particles, reflections and dust resting on a vial's surface. We train 3D-ConvNets to predict the likelihood of 20-frame video samples containing anomalies. Our unaugmented dataset consists of hand-labelled samples, recorded using vials provided by the HAL Allergy Group, a pharmaceutical company. We trained ten randomly initialized 3D-ConvNets to provide a benchmark, observing mean AUROC scores of 0.94 and 0.93 for positive samples (containing anomalies) and negative (anomaly-free) samples, respectively. Using Frame-Completion Generative Adversarial Networks we: (i) introduce an algorithm for computing saliency maps, which we use to verify that the 3D-ConvNets are indeed identifying anomalies; (ii) propose a novel self-training approach using the saliency maps to determine if multiple networks agree on the location of anomalies. Our self-training approach allows us to augment our data set by labelling 217,888 additional samples. 3D-ConvNets trained with our augmented dataset improve on the results we get when we train only on the unaugmented dataset.
Learning to Simulate Complex Physics with Graph Networks
Authors: Alvaro Sanchez-Gonzalez, Jonathan Godwin, Tobias Pfaff, Rex Ying, Jure Leskovec, Peter W. Battaglia
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

Here we present a machine learning framework and model implementation that can learn to simulate a wide variety of challenging physical domains, involving fluids, rigid solids, and deformable materials interacting with one another. Our framework---which we term "Graph Network-based Simulators" (GNS)---represents the state of a physical system with particles, expressed as nodes in a graph, and computes dynamics via learned message-passing. Our results show that our model can generalize from single-timestep predictions with thousands of particles during training, to different initial conditions, thousands of timesteps, and at least an order of magnitude more particles at test time. Our model was robust to hyperparameter choices across various evaluation metrics: the main determinants of long-term performance were the number of message-passing steps, and mitigating the accumulation of error by corrupting the training data with noise. Our GNS framework advances the state-of-the-art in learned physical simulation, and holds promise for solving a wide range of complex forward and inverse problems.
Addressing Some Limitations of Transformers with Feedback Memory
Authors: Angela Fan, Thibaut Lavril, Edouard Grave, Armand Joulin, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Reinforcement Learning, Translation

Transformers have been successfully applied to sequential, auto-regressive tasks despite being feedforward networks. Unlike recurrent neural networks, Transformers use attention to capture temporal relations while processing input tokens in parallel. While this parallelization makes them computationally efficient, it restricts the model from fully exploiting the sequential nature of the input. The representation at a given layer can only access representations from lower layers, rather than the higher level representations already available. In this work, we propose the Feedback Transformer architecture that exposes all previous representations to all future representations, meaning the lowest representation of the current timestep is formed from the highest-level abstract representation of the past. We demonstrate on a variety of benchmarks in language modeling, machine translation, and reinforcement learning that the increased representation capacity can create small, shallow models with much stronger performance than comparable Transformers.
It's Not What Machines Can Learn, It's What We Cannot Teach
Authors: Gal Yehuda, Moshe Gabel, Assaf Schuster
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Traveling Salesman Problem

Can deep neural networks learn to solve any task, and in particular problems of high complexity? This question attracts a lot of interest, with recent works tackling computationally hard tasks such as the traveling salesman problem and satisfiability. In this work we offer a different perspective on this question. Given the common assumption that $\textit{NP} \neq \textit{coNP}$ we prove that any polynomial-time sample generator for an $\textit{NP}$-hard problem samples, in fact, from an easier sub-problem. We empirically explore a case study, Conjunctive Query Containment, and show how common data generation techniques generate biased datasets that lead practitioners to over-estimate model accuracy. Our results suggest that machine learning approaches that require training on a dense uniform sampling from the target distribution cannot be used to solve computationally hard problems, the reason being the difficulty of generating sufficiently large and unbiased training sets.
A Hybrid Algorithm Based Robust Big Data Clustering for Solving Unhealthy Initialization, Dynamic Centroid Selection and Empty clustering Problems with Analysis
Authors: Y. A. Joarder, Mosabbir Ahmed
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Big Data is a massive volume of both structured and unstructured data that is too large and it also difficult to process using traditional techniques. Clustering algorithms have developed as a powerful learning tool that can exactly analyze the volume of data that produced by modern applications. Clustering in data mining is the grouping of a particular set of objects based on their characteristics. The main aim of clustering is to classified data into clusters such that objects are grouped in the same clusters when they are corresponding according to similarities and features mainly. Till now, K-MEANS is the best utilized calculation connected in a wide scope of zones to recognize gatherings where cluster separations are a lot than between gathering separations. Our developed algorithm works with K-MEANS for high quality clustering during clustering from big data. Our proposed algorithm EG K-MEANS : Extended Generation K-MEANS solves mainly three issues of K-MEANS: unhealthy initialization, dynamic centroid selection and empty clustering. It ensures the best way of preventing unhealthy initialization, dynamic centroid selection and empty clustering problems for getting high quality clustering.
Misspecification-robust likelihood-free inference in high dimensions
Authors: Owen Thomas, Raquel Sá-Leão, Hermínia de Lencastre, Samuel Kaski, Jukka Corander, Henri Pesonen
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimisation, Efficient Exploration, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Likelihood-free inference for simulator-based statistical models has developed rapidly from its infancy to a useful tool for practitioners. However, models with more than a handful of parameters still generally remain a challenge for the Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) based inference. To advance the possibilities for performing likelihood-free inference in higher dimensional parameter spaces, we introduce an extension of the popular Bayesian optimisation based approach to approximate discrepancy functions in a probabilistic manner which lends itself to an efficient exploration of the parameter space. Our approach achieves computational scalability for higher dimensional parameter spaces by using separate acquisition functions and discrepancies for each parameter. The efficient additive acquisition structure is combined with exponentiated loss -likelihood to provide a misspecification-robust characterisation of the marginal posterior distribution for all model parameters. The method successfully performs computationally efficient inference in a 100-dimensional space on canonical examples and compares favourably to existing modularised ABC methods. We further illustrate the potential of this approach by fitting a bacterial transmission dynamics model to a real data set, which provides biologically coherent results on strain competition in a 30-dimensional parameter space.
Adversarial Detection and Correction by Matching Prediction Distributions
Authors: Giovanni Vacanti, Arnaud Van Looveren
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

We present a novel adversarial detection and correction method for machine learning classifiers.The detector consists of an autoencoder trained with a custom loss function based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the classifier predictions on the original and reconstructed instances.The method is unsupervised, easy to train and does not require any knowledge about the underlying attack. The detector almost completely neutralises powerful attacks like Carlini-Wagner or SLIDE on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, and remains very effective on CIFAR-10 when the attack is granted full access to the classification model but not the defence. We show that our method is still able to detect the adversarial examples in the case of a white-box attack where the attacker has full knowledge of both the model and the defence and investigate the robustness of the attack. The method is very flexible and can also be used to detect common data corruptions and perturbations which negatively impact the model performance. We illustrate this capability on the CIFAR-10-C dataset.
Crowdsourced Collective Entity Resolution with Relational Match Propagation
Authors: Jiacheng Huang, Wei Hu, Zhifeng Bao, Yuzhong Qu
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Entity Resolution, Question Selection

Knowledge bases (KBs) store rich yet heterogeneous entities and facts. Entity resolution (ER) aims to identify entities in KBs which refer to the same real-world object. Recent studies have shown significant benefits of involving humans in the loop of ER. They often resolve entities with pairwise similarity measures over attribute values and resort to the crowds to label uncertain ones. However, existing methods still suffer from high labor costs and insufficient labeling to some extent. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called crowdsourced collective ER, which leverages the relationships between entities to infer matches jointly rather than independently. Specifically, it iteratively asks human workers to label picked entity pairs and propagates the labeling information to their neighbors in distance. During this process, we address the problems of candidate entity pruning, probabilistic propagation, optimal question selection and error-tolerant truth inference. Our experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that, compared with state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves superior accuracy with much less labeling.
Estimation of conditional mixture Weibull distribution with right-censored data using neural network for time-to-event analysis
Authors: Achraf Bennis, Sandrine Mouysset, Mathieu Serrurier
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Survival Analysis

In this paper, we consider survival analysis with right-censored data which is a common situation in predictive maintenance and health field. We propose a model based on the estimation of two-parameter Weibull distribution conditionally to the features. To achieve this result, we describe a neural network architecture and the associated loss functions that takes into account the right-censored data. We extend the approach to a finite mixture of two-parameter Weibull distributions. We first validate that our model is able to precisely estimate the right parameters of the conditional Weibull distribution on synthetic datasets. In numerical experiments on two real-word datasets (METABRIC and SEER), our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. We also demonstrate that our approach can consider any survival time horizon.
Robust Optimization for Fairness with Noisy Protected Groups
Authors: Serena Wang, Wenshuo Guo, Harikrishna Narasimhan, Andrew Cotter, Maya Gupta, Michael. I. Jordan
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Fairness

Many existing fairness criteria for machine learning involve equalizing some metric across protected groups such as race or gender. However, practitioners trying to audit or enforce such group-based criteria can easily face the problem of noisy or biased protected group information. First, we study the consequences of naively relying on noisy protected group labels: we provide an upper bound on the fairness violations on the true groups G when the fairness criteria are satisfied on noisy groups $\hat{G}$. Second, we introduce two new approaches using robust optimization that, unlike the naive approach of only relying on $\hat{G}$, are guaranteed to satisfy fairness criteria on the true protected groups G while minimizing a training objective. We provide theoretical guarantees that one such approach converges to an optimal feasible solution. Using two case studies, we show empirically that the robust approaches achieve better true group fairness guarantees than the naive approach.
Generalisation error in learning with random features and the hidden manifold model
Authors: Federica Gerace, Bruno Loureiro, Florent Krzakala, Marc Mézard, Lenka Zdeborová
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: regression, valid

We study generalised linear regression and classification for a synthetically generated dataset encompassing different problems of interest, such as learning with random features, neural networks in the lazy training regime, and the hidden manifold model. We consider the high-dimensional regime and using the replica method from statistical physics, we provide a closed-form expression for the asymptotic generalisation performance in these problems, valid in both the under- and over-parametrised regimes and for a broad choice of generalised linear model loss functions. In particular, we show how to obtain analytically the so-called double descent behaviour for logistic regression with a peak at the interpolation threshold, we illustrate the superiority of orthogonal against random Gaussian projections in learning with random features, and discuss the role played by correlations in the data generated by the hidden manifold model. Beyond the interest in these particular problems, the theoretical formalism introduced in this manuscript provides a path to further extensions to more complex tasks.
Deep Learning System to Screen Coronavirus Disease 2019 Pneumonia
Authors: Xiaowei Xu, Xiangao Jiang, Chunlian Ma, Peng Du, Xukun Li, Shuangzhi Lv, Liang Yu, Yanfei Chen, Junwei Su, Guanjing Lang, Yongtao Li, Hong Zhao, Kaijin Xu, Lingxiang Ruan, Wei Wu
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), COVID-19 Diagnosis, Deep Learning, Diagnostic

We found that the real time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) detection of viral RNA from sputum or nasopharyngeal swab has a relatively low positive rate in the early stage to determine COVID-19 (named by the World Health Organization). The manifestations of computed tomography (CT) imaging of COVID-19 had their own characteristics, which are different from other types of viral pneumonia, such as Influenza-A viral pneumonia. Therefore, clinical doctors call for another early diagnostic criteria for this new type of pneumonia as soon as possible.This study aimed to establish an early screening model to distinguish COVID-19 pneumonia from Influenza-A viral pneumonia and healthy cases with pulmonary CT images using deep learning techniques. The candidate infection regions were first segmented out using a 3-dimensional deep learning model from pulmonary CT image set. These separated images were then categorized into COVID-19, Influenza-A viral pneumonia and irrelevant to infection groups, together with the corresponding confidence scores using a location-attention classification model. Finally the infection type and total confidence score of this CT case were calculated with Noisy-or Bayesian function.The experiments result of benchmark dataset showed that the overall accuracy was 86.7 % from the perspective of CT cases as a whole.The deep learning models established in this study were effective for the early screening of COVID-19 patients and demonstrated to be a promising supplementary diagnostic method for frontline clinical doctors.
An Advance on Variable Elimination with Applications to Tensor-Based Computation
Authors: Adnan Darwiche
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00

We present new results on the classical algorithm of variable elimination, which underlies many algorithms including for probabilistic inference. The results relate to exploiting functional dependencies, allowing one to perform inference and learning efficiently on models that have very large treewidth. The highlight of the advance is that it works with standard (dense) factors, without the need for sparse factors or techniques based on knowledge compilation that are commonly utilized. This is significant as it permits a direct implementation of the improved variable elimination algorithm using tensors and their operations, leading to extremely efficient implementations especially when learning model parameters. Moreover, the proposed technique does not require knowledge of the specific functional dependencies, only that they exist, so can be used when learning these dependencies. We illustrate the efficacy of our proposed algorithm by compiling Bayesian network queries into tensor graphs and then learning their parameters from labeled data using a standard tool for tensor computation.
3D U-Net for Segmentation of Plant Root MRI Images in Super-Resolution
Authors: Yi Zhao, Nils Wandel, Magdalena Landl, Andrea Schnepf, Sven Behnke
Date: 2020-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) enables plant scientists to non-invasively study root system development and root-soil interaction. Challenging recording conditions, such as low resolution and a high level of noise hamper the performance of traditional root extraction algorithms, though. We propose to increase signal-to-noise ratio and resolution by segmenting the scanned volumes into root and soil in super-resolution using a 3D U-Net. Tests on real data show that the trained network is capable to detect most roots successfully and even finds roots that were missed by human annotators. Our experiments show that the segmentation performance can be further improved with modifications of the loss function.