pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Node Weight Dependent Traveling Salesperson Problem: Approximation Algorithms and Randomized Search Heuristics
Authors: Jakob Bossek, Katrin Casel, Pascal Kerschke, Frank Neumann
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00

Several important optimization problems in the area of vehicle routing can be seen as a variant of the classical Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP). In the area of evolutionary computation, the traveling thief problem (TTP) has gained increasing interest over the last 5 years. In this paper, we investigate the effect of weights on such problems, in the sense that the cost of traveling increases with respect to the weights of nodes already visited during a tour. This provides abstractions of important TSP variants such as the Traveling Thief Problem and time dependent TSP variants, and allows to study precisely the increase in difficulty caused by weight dependence. We provide a 3.59-approximation for this weight dependent version of TSP with metric distances and bounded positive weights. Furthermore, we conduct experimental investigations for simple randomized local search with classical mutation operators and two variants of the state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithm EAX adapted to the weighted TSP. Our results show the impact of the node weights on the position of the nodes in the resulting tour.
Policy Gradient based Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm
Authors: Jiahao Yao, Marin Bukov, Lin Lin
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA), as a hybrid quantum/classical algorithm, has received much interest recently. QAOA can also be viewed as a variational ansatz for quantum control. However, its direct application to emergent quantum technology encounters additional physical constraints: (i) the states of the quantum system are not observable; (ii) obtaining the derivatives of the objective function can be computationally expensive or even inaccessible in experiments, and (iii) the values of the objective function may be sensitive to various sources of uncertainty, as is the case for noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Taking such constraints into account, we show that policy-gradient-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are well suited for optimizing the variational parameters of QAOA in a noise-robust fashion, opening up the way for developing RL techniques for continuous quantum control. This is advantageous to help mitigate and monitor the potentially unknown sources of errors in modern quantum simulators. We analyze the performance of the algorithm for quantum state transfer problems in single- and multi-qubit systems, subject to various sources of noise such as error terms in the Hamiltonian, or quantum uncertainty in the measurement process. We show that, in noisy setups, it is capable of outperforming state-of-the-art existing optimization algorithms.
On the Sample Complexity and Optimization Landscape for Quadratic Feasibility Problems
Authors: Parth Thaker, Gautam Dasarathy, Angelia Nedić
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, State Estimation

We consider the problem of recovering a complex vector $\mathbf{x}\in \mathbb{C}^n$ from $m$ quadratic measurements $\{\langle A_i\mathbf{x}, \mathbf{x}\rangle\}_{i=1}^m$. This problem, known as quadratic feasibility, encompasses the well known phase retrieval problem and has applications in a wide range of important areas including power system state estimation and x-ray crystallography. In general, not only is the the quadratic feasibility problem NP-hard to solve, but it may in fact be unidentifiable. In this paper, we establish conditions under which this problem becomes {identifiable}, and further prove isometry properties in the case when the matrices $\{A_i\}_{i=1}^m$ are Hermitian matrices sampled from a complex Gaussian distribution. Moreover, we explore a nonconvex {optimization} formulation of this problem, and establish salient features of the associated optimization landscape that enables gradient algorithms with an arbitrary initialization to converge to a \emph{globally optimal} point with a high probability. Our results also reveal sample complexity requirements for successfully identifying a feasible solution in these contexts.
Fake News Detection by means of Uncertainty Weighted Causal Graphs
Authors: Eduardo C. Garrido-Merchán, Cristina Puente, Rafael Palacios
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection

Society is experimenting changes in information consumption, as new information channels such as social networks let people share news that do not necessarily be trust worthy. Sometimes, these sources of information produce fake news deliberately with doubtful purposes and the consumers of that information share it to other users thinking that the information is accurate. This transmission of information represents an issue in our society, as can influence negatively the opinion of people about certain figures, groups or ideas. Hence, it is desirable to design a system that is able to detect and classify information as fake and categorize a source of information as trust worthy or not. Current systems experiment difficulties performing this task, as it is complicated to design an automatic procedure that can classify this information independent on the context. In this work, we propose a mechanism to detect fake news through a classifier based on weighted causal graphs. These graphs are specific hybrid models that are built through causal relations retrieved from texts and consider the uncertainty of causal relations. We take advantage of this representation to use the probability distributions of this graph and built a fake news classifier based on the entropy and KL divergence of learned and new information. We believe that the problem of fake news is accurately tackled by this model due to its hybrid nature between a symbolic and quantitative methodology. We describe the methodology of this classifier and add empirical evidence of the usefulness of our proposed approach in the form of synthetic experiments and a real experiment involving lung cancer.
Transfer Learning for HVAC System Fault Detection
Authors: Chase P. Dowling, Baosen Zhang
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection, Transfer Learning

Faults in HVAC systems degrade thermal comfort and energy efficiency in buildings and have received significant attention from the research community, with data driven methods gaining in popularity. Yet the lack of labeled data, such as normal versus faulty operational status, has slowed the application of machine learning to HVAC systems. In addition, for any particular building, there may be an insufficient number of observed faults over a reasonable amount of time for training. To overcome these challenges, we present a transfer methodology for a novel Bayesian classifier designed to distinguish between normal operations and faulty operations. The key is to train this classifier on a building with a large amount of sensor and fault data (for example, via simulation or standard test data) then transfer the classifier to a new building using a small amount of normal operations data from the new building. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept for transferring a classifier between architecturally similar buildings in different climates and show few samples are required to maintain classification precision and recall.
Deep-URL: A Model-Aware Approach To Blind Deconvolution Based On Deep Unfolded Richardson-Lucy Network
Authors: Chirag Agarwal, Shahin Khobahi, Arindam Bose, Mojtaba Soltanalian, Dan Schonfeld
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

The lack of interpretability in current deep learning models causes serious concerns as they are extensively used for various life-critical applications. Hence, it is of paramount importance to develop interpretable deep learning models. In this paper, we consider the problem of blind deconvolution and propose a novel model-aware deep architecture that allows for the recovery of both the blur kernel and the sharp image from the blurred image. In particular, we propose the Deep Unfolded Richardson-Lucy (Deep-URL) framework -- an interpretable deep-learning architecture that can be seen as an amalgamation of classical estimation technique and deep neural network, and consequently leads to improved performance. Our numerical investigations demonstrate significant improvement compared to state-of-the-art algorithms.
Multi-Channel Attention Selection GANs for Guided Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Hao Tang, Philip H. S. Torr, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: channel selection, Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

We propose a novel model named Multi-Channel Attention Selection Generative Adversarial Network (SelectionGAN) for guided image-to-image translation, where we translate an input image into another while respecting an external semantic guidance. The proposed SelectionGAN explicitly utilizes the semantic guidance information and consists of two stages. In the first stage, the input image and the conditional semantic guidance are fed into a cycled semantic-guided generation network to produce initial coarse results. In the second stage, we refine the initial results by using the proposed multi-scale spatial pooling & channel selection module and the multi-channel attention selection module. Moreover, uncertainty maps automatically learned from attention maps are used to guide the pixel loss for better network optimization. Exhaustive experiments on four challenging guided image-to-image translation tasks (face, hand, body, and street view) demonstrate that our SelectionGAN is able to generate significantly better results than the state-of-the-art methods. Meanwhile, the proposed framework and modules are unified solutions and can be applied to solve other generation tasks such as semantic image synthesis. The code is available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/SelectionGAN.
Optimal Confidence Regions for the Multinomial Parameter
Authors: Matthew L. Malloy, Ardhendu Tripathy, Robert D. Nowak
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Construction of tight confidence regions and intervals is central to statistical inference and decision making. This paper develops new theory showing minimum average volume confidence regions for categorical data. More precisely, consider an empirical distribution $\widehat{\boldsymbol{p}}$ generated from $n$ iid realizations of a random variable that takes one of $k$ possible values according to an unknown distribution $\boldsymbol{p}$. This is analogous to a single draw from a multinomial distribution. A confidence region is a subset of the probability simplex that depends on $\widehat{\boldsymbol{p}}$ and contains the unknown $\boldsymbol{p}$ with a specified confidence. This paper shows how one can construct minimum average volume confidence regions, answering a long standing question. We also show the optimality of the regions directly translates to optimal confidence intervals of linear functionals such as the mean, implying sample complexity and regret improvements for adaptive machine learning algorithms.
Differentially Private k-Means Clustering with Guaranteed Convergence
Authors: Zhigang Lu, Hong Shen
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Inference Attack

Iterative clustering algorithms help us to learn the insights behind the data. Unfortunately, this may allow adversaries to infer the privacy of individuals with some background knowledge. In the worst case, the adversaries know the centroids of an arbitrary iteration and the information of n-1 out of n items. To protect individual privacy against such an inference attack, preserving differential privacy (DP) for the iterative clustering algorithms has been extensively studied in the interactive settings. However, existing interactive differentially private clustering algorithms suffer from a non-convergence problem, i.e., these algorithms may not terminate without a predefined number of iterations. This problem severely impacts the clustering quality and the efficiency of a differentially private algorithm. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a novel differentially private clustering framework in the interactive settings which controls the orientation of the movement of the centroids over the iterations to ensure the convergence by injecting DP noise in a selected area. We prove that, in the expected case, algorithm under our framework converges in at most twice the iterations of Lloyd's algorithm. We perform experimental evaluations on real-world datasets to show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art of the interactive differentially private clustering algorithms with guaranteed convergence and better clustering quality to meet the same DP requirement.
Gated Graph Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Luana Ruiz, Fernando Gama, Alejandro Ribeiro
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00

Graph processes exhibit a temporal structure determined by the sequence index and and a spatial structure determined by the graph support. To learn from graph processes, an information processing architecture must then be able to exploit both underlying structures. We introduce Graph Recurrent Neural Networks (GRNNs) as a general learning framework that achieves this goal by leveraging the notion of a recurrent hidden state together with graph signal processing (GSP). In the GRNN, the number of learnable parameters is independent of the length of the sequence and of the size of the graph, guaranteeing scalability. We prove that GRNNs are permutation equivariant and that they are stable to perturbations of the underlying graph support. To address the problem of vanishing gradients, we also put forward gated GRNNs with three different gating mechanisms: time, node and edge gates. In numerical experiments involving both synthetic and real datasets, time-gated GRNNs are shown to improve upon GRNNs in problems with long term dependencies, while node and edge gates help encode long range dependencies present in the graph. The numerical results also show that GRNNs outperform GNNs and RNNs, highlighting the importance of taking both the temporal and graph structures of a graph process into account.
Efficient 2D neuron boundary segmentation with local topological constraints
Authors: Thanuja D. Ambegoda, Matthew Cook
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We present a method for segmenting neuron membranes in 2D electron microscopy imagery. This segmentation task has been a bottleneck to reconstruction efforts of the brain's synaptic circuits. One common problem is the misclassification of blurry membrane fragments as cell interior, which leads to merging of two adjacent neuron sections into one via the blurry membrane region. Human annotators can easily avoid such errors by implicitly performing gap completion, taking into account the continuity of membranes. Drawing inspiration from these human strategies, we formulate the segmentation task as an edge labeling problem on a graph with local topological constraints. We derive an integer linear program (ILP) that enforces membrane continuity, i.e. the absence of gaps. The cost function of the ILP is the pixel-wise deviation of the segmentation from a priori membrane probabilities derived from the data. Based on membrane probability maps obtained using random forest classifiers and convolutional neural networks, our method improves the neuron boundary segmentation accuracy compared to a variety of standard segmentation approaches. Our method successfully performs gap completion and leads to fewer topological errors. The method could potentially also be incorporated into other image segmentation pipelines with known topological constraints.
Stan: Small tumor-aware network for breast ultrasound image segmentation
Authors: Bryar Shareef, Min Xian, Aleksandar Vakanski
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Breast tumor segmentation provides accurate tumor boundary, and serves as a key step toward further cancer quantification. Although deep learning-based approaches have been proposed and achieved promising results, existing approaches have difficulty in detecting small breast tumors. The capacity to detecting small tumors is particularly important in finding early stage cancers using computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture called Small Tumor-Aware Network (STAN), to improve the performance of segmenting tumors with different size. The new architecture integrates both rich context information and high-resolution image features. We validate the proposed approach using seven quantitative metrics on two public breast ultrasound datasets. The proposed approach outperformed the state-of-the-art approaches in segmenting small breast tumors. Index
SuperDTI: Ultrafast diffusion tensor imaging and fiber tractography with deep learning
Authors: Hongyu Li, Zifei Liang, Chaoyi Zhang, Ruiying Liu, Jing Li, Weihong Zhang, Dong Liang, Bowen Shen, Xiaoliang Zhang, Yulin Ge, Jiangyang Zhang, Leslie Ying
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Purpose: To propose a deep learning-based reconstruction framework for ultrafast and robust diffusion tensor imaging and fiber tractography. Methods: We propose SuperDTI to learn the nonlinear relationship between diffusion-weighted images (DWIs) and the corresponding tensor-derived quantitative maps as well as the fiber tractography. Super DTI bypasses the tensor fitting procedure, which is well known to be highly susceptible to noise and motion in DWIs. The network is trained and tested using datasets from Human Connectome Project and patients with ischemic stroke. SuperDTI is compared against the state-of-the-art methods for diffusion map reconstruction and fiber tracking. Results: Using training and testing data both from the same protocol and scanner, SuperDTI is shown to generate fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity maps, as well as fiber tractography, from as few as six raw DWIs. The method achieves a quantification error of less than 5% in all regions of interest in white matter and gray matter structures. We also demonstrate that the trained neural network is robust to noise and motion in the testing data, and the network trained using healthy volunteer data can be directly applied to stroke patient data without compromising the lesion detectability. Conclusion: This paper demonstrates the feasibility of superfast diffusion tensor imaging and fiber tractography using deep learning with as few as six DWIs directly, bypassing tensor fitting. Such a significant reduction in scan time may allow the inclusion of DTI into the clinical routine for many potential applications.
Detecting Fake News with Capsule Neural Networks
Authors: Mohammad Hadi Goldani, Saeedeh Momtazi, Reza Safabakhsh
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection, Word Embeddings

Fake news is dramatically increased in social media in recent years. This has prompted the need for effective fake news detection algorithms. Capsule neural networks have been successful in computer vision and are receiving attention for use in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This paper aims to use capsule neural networks in the fake news detection task. We use different embedding models for news items of different lengths. Static word embedding is used for short news items, whereas non-static word embeddings that allow incremental up-training and updating in the training phase are used for medium length or large news statements. Moreover, we apply different levels of n-grams for feature extraction. Our proposed architectures are evaluated on two recent well-known datasets in the field, namely ISOT and LIAR. The results show encouraging performance, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by 7.8% on ISOT and 3.1% on the validation set, and 1% on the test set of the LIAR dataset.
PDE-NetGen 1.0: from symbolic PDE representations of physical processes to trainable neural network representations
Authors: Olivier Pannekoucke, Ronan Fablet
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

Bridging physics and deep learning is a topical challenge. While deep learning frameworks open avenues in physical science, the design of physically-consistent deep neural network architectures is an open issue. In the spirit of physics-informed NNs, PDE-NetGen package provides new means to automatically translate physical equations, given as PDEs, into neural network architectures. PDE-NetGen combines symbolic calculus and a neural network generator. The later exploits NN-based implementations of PDE solvers using Keras. With some knowledge of a problem, PDE-NetGen is a plug-and-play tool to generate physics-informed NN architectures. They provide computationally-efficient yet compact representations to address a variety of issues, including among others adjoint derivation, model calibration, forecasting, data assimilation as well as uncertainty quantification. As an illustration, the workflow is first presented for the 2D diffusion equation, then applied to the data-driven and physics-informed identification of uncertainty dynamics for the Burgers equation.
Bending Loss Regularized Network for Nuclei Segmentation in Histopathology Images
Authors: Haotian Wang, Min Xian, Aleksandar Vakanski
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00

Separating overlapped nuclei is a major challenge in histopathology image analysis. Recently published approaches have achieved promising overall performance on public datasets; however, their performance in segmenting overlapped nuclei are limited. To address the issue, we propose the bending loss regularized network for nuclei segmentation. The proposed bending loss defines high penalties to contour points with large curvatures, and applies small penalties to contour points with small curvature. Minimizing the bending loss can avoid generating contours that encompass multiple nuclei. The proposed approach is validated on the MoNuSeg dataset using five quantitative metrics. It outperforms six state-of-the-art approaches on the following metrics: Aggregate Jaccard Index, Dice, Recognition Quality, and Pan-optic Quality.
Four Principles of Explainable AI as Applied to Biometrics and Facial Forensic Algorithms
Authors: P. Jonathon Phillips, Mark Przybocki
Date: 2020-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Traditionally, researchers in automatic face recognition and biometric technologies have focused on developing accurate algorithms. With this technology being integrated into operational systems, engineers and scientists are being asked, do these systems meet societal norms? The origin of this line of inquiry is `trust' of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. In this paper, we concentrate on adapting explainable AI to face recognition and biometrics, and we present four principles of explainable AI to face recognition and biometrics. The principles are illustrated by $\it{four}$ case studies, which show the challenges and issues in developing algorithms that can produce explanations.