pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient Amortised Bayesian Inference for Hierarchical and Nonlinear Dynamical Systems
Authors: Geoffrey Roeder, Paul K. Grant, Andrew Phillips, Neil Dalchau, Edward Meeds
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Zero-Shot Learning

We introduce a flexible, scalable Bayesian inference framework for nonlinear dynamical systems characterised by distinct and hierarchical variability at the individual, group, and population levels. Our model class is a generalisation of nonlinear mixed-effects (NLME) dynamical systems, the statistical workhorse for many experimental sciences. We cast parameter inference as stochastic optimisation of an end-to-end differentiable, block-conditional variational autoencoder. We specify the dynamics of the data-generating process as an ordinary differential equation (ODE) such that both the ODE and its solver are fully differentiable. This model class is highly flexible: the ODE right-hand sides can be a mixture of user-prescribed or "white-box" sub-components and neural network or "black-box" sub-components. Using stochastic optimisation, our amortised inference algorithm could seamlessly scale up to massive data collection pipelines (common in labs with robotic automation). Finally, our framework supports interpretability with respect to the underlying dynamics, as well as predictive generalization to unseen combinations of group components (also called "zero-shot" learning). We empirically validate our method by predicting the dynamic behaviour of bacteria that were genetically engineered to function as biosensors. Our implementation of the framework, the dataset, and all code to reproduce the experimental results is available at https://www.github.com/Microsoft/vi-hds .
Memory Integrity of CNNs for Cross-Dataset Facial Expression Recognition
Authors: Dylan C. Tannugi, Alceu S. Britto Jr., Alessandro L. Koerich
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Facial expression recognition is a major problem in the domain of artificial intelligence. One of the best ways to solve this problem is the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, a large amount of data is required to train properly these networks but most of the datasets available for facial expression recognition are relatively small. A common way to circumvent the lack of data is to use CNNs trained on large datasets of different domains and fine-tuning the layers of such networks to the target domain. However, the fine-tuning process does not preserve the memory integrity as CNNs have the tendency to forget patterns they have learned. In this paper, we evaluate different strategies of fine-tuning a CNN with the aim of assessing the memory integrity of such strategies in a cross-dataset scenario. A CNN pre-trained on a source dataset is used as the baseline and four adaptation strategies have been evaluated: fine-tuning its fully connected layers; fine-tuning its last convolutional layer and its fully connected layers; retraining the CNN on a target dataset; and the fusion of the source and target datasets and retraining the CNN. Experimental results on four datasets have shown that the fusion of the source and the target datasets provides the best trade-off between accuracy and memory integrity.
Semi-Supervised Learning, Causality and the Conditional Cluster Assumption
Authors: Julius von Kügelgen, Alexander Mey, Marco Loog, Bernhard Schölkopf
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00

While the success of semi-supervised learning (SSL) is still not fully understood, Sch\"olkopf et al. (2012) have established a link to the principle of independent causal mechanisms. They conclude that SSL should be impossible when predicting a target variable from its causes, but possible when predicting it from its effects. Since both these cases are somewhat restrictive, we extend their work by considering classification using cause and effect features at the same time, such as predicting disease from both risk factors and symptoms. While standard SSL exploits information contained in the marginal distribution of all inputs (to improve the estimate of the conditional distribution of the target given inputs), we argue that in our more general setting we should use information in the conditional distribution of effect features given causal features. We explore how this insight generalises the previous understanding, and how it relates to and can be exploited algorithmically for SSL.
Non-normal Recurrent Neural Network (nnRNN): learning long time dependencies while improving expressivity with transient dynamics
Authors: Giancarlo Kerg, Kyle Goyette, Maximilian Puelma Touzel, Gauthier Gidel, Eugene Vorontsov, Yoshua Bengio, Guillaume Lajoie
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

A recent strategy to circumvent the exploding and vanishing gradient problem in RNNs, and to allow the stable propagation of signals over long time scales, is to constrain recurrent connectivity matrices to be orthogonal or unitary. This ensures eigenvalues with unit norm and thus stable dynamics and training. However this comes at the cost of reduced expressivity due to the limited variety of orthogonal transformations. We propose a novel connectivity structure based on the Schur decomposition and a splitting of the Schur form into normal and non-normal parts. This allows to parametrize matrices with unit-norm eigenspectra without orthogonality constraints on eigenbases. The resulting architecture ensures access to a larger space of spectrally constrained matrices, of which orthogonal matrices are a subset. This crucial difference retains the stability advantages and training speed of orthogonal RNNs while enhancing expressivity, especially on tasks that require computations over ongoing input sequences.
Probabilistic Category-Level Pose Estimation via Segmentation and Predicted-Shape Priors
Authors: Benjamin Burchfiel, George Konidaris
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Pose Estimation, Segmentation

We introduce a new method for category-level pose estimation which produces a distribution over predicted poses by integrating 3D shape estimates from a generative object model with segmentation information. Given an input depth-image of an object, our variable-time method uses a mixture density network architecture to produce a multi-modal distribution over 3DOF poses; this distribution is then combined with a prior probability encouraging silhouette agreement between the observed input and predicted object pose. Our approach significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art in category-level 3DOF pose estimation---which outputs a point estimate and does not explicitly incorporate shape and segmentation information---as measured on the Pix3D and ShapeNet datasets.
Guarantees for Sound Abstractions for Generalized Planning (Extended Paper)
Authors: Blai Bonet, Raquel Fuentetaja, Yolanda E-Martin, Daniel Borrajo
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00

Generalized planning is about finding plans that solve collections of planning instances, often infinite collections, rather than single instances. Recently it has been shown how to reduce the planning problem for generalized planning to the planning problem for a qualitative numerical problem; the latter being a reformulation that simultaneously captures all the instances in the collection. An important thread of research thus consists in finding such reformulations, or abstractions, automatically. A recent proposal learns the abstractions inductively from a finite and small sample of transitions from instances in the collection. However, as in all inductive processes, the learned abstraction is not guaranteed to be correct for the whole collection. In this work we address this limitation by performing an analysis of the abstraction with respect to the collection, and show how to obtain formal guarantees for generalization. These guarantees, in the form of first-order formulas, may be used to 1) define subcollections of instances on which the abstraction is guaranteed to be sound, 2) obtain necessary conditions for generalization under certain assumptions, and 3) do automated synthesis of complex invariants for planning problems. Our framework is general, it can be extended or combined with other approaches, and it has applications that go beyond generalized planning.
SEMA: an Extended Semantic Evaluation Metric for AMR
Authors: Rafael T. Anchieta, Marco A. S. Cabezudo, Thiago A. S. Pardo
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstract Meaning Representation, Sentence

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a recently designed semantic representation language intended to capture the meaning of a sentence, which may be represented as a single-rooted directed acyclic graph with labeled nodes and edges. The automatic evaluation of this structure plays an important role in the development of better systems, as well as for semantic annotation. Despite there is one available metric, smatch, it has some drawbacks. For instance, smatch creates a self-relation on the root of the graph, has weights for different error types, and does not take into account the dependence of the elements in the AMR structure. With these drawbacks, smatch masks several problems of the AMR parsers and distorts the evaluation of the AMRs. In view of this, in this paper, we introduce an extended metric to evaluate AMR parsers, which deals with the drawbacks of the smatch metric. Finally, we compare both metrics, using four well-known AMR parsers, and we argue that our metric is more refined, robust, fairer, and faster than smatch.
Automatic Ambiguity Detection
Authors: Richard Sproat, Jan van Santen
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00

Most work on sense disambiguation presumes that one knows beforehand -- e.g. from a thesaurus -- a set of polysemous terms. But published lists invariably give only partial coverage. For example, the English word tan has several obvious senses, but one may overlook the abbreviation for tangent. In this paper, we present an algorithm for identifying interesting polysemous terms and measuring their degree of polysemy, given an unlabeled corpus. The algorithm involves: (i) collecting all terms within a k-term window of the target term; (ii) computing the inter-term distances of the contextual terms, and reducing the multi-dimensional distance space to two dimensions using standard methods; (iii) converting the two-dimensional representation into radial coordinates and using isotonic/antitonic regression to compute the degree to which the distribution deviates from a single-peak model. The amount of deviation is the proposed polysemy index
Information-Theoretic Registration with Explicit Reorientation of Diffusion-Weighted Images
Authors: Henrik Grønholt Jensen, François Lauze, Sune Darkner
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00

We present an information-theoretic approach to the registration of images with directional information, and especially for diffusion-Weighted Images (DWI), with explicit optimization over the directional scale. We call it Locally Orderless Registration with Directions (LORD). We focus on normalized mutual information as a robust information-theoretic similarity measure for DWI. The framework is an extension of the LOR-DWI density-based hierarchical scale-space model that varies and optimizes the integration, spatial, directional, and intensity scales. As affine transformations are insufficient for inter-subject registration, we extend the model to non-rigid deformations. We illustrate that the proposed model deforms orientation distribution functions (ODFs) correctly and is capable of handling the classic complex challenges in DWI-registrations, such as the registration of fiber-crossings along with kissing, fanning, and interleaving fibers. Our experimental results clearly illustrate a novel promising regularizing effect, that comes from the nonlinear orientation-based cost function. We show the properties of the different image scales and, we show that including orientational information in our model makes the model better at retrieving deformations in contrast to standard scalar-based registration.
A New Distribution on the Simplex with Auto-Encoding Applications
Authors: Andrew Stirn, Tony Jebara, David A. Knowles
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

We construct a new distribution for the simplex using the Kumaraswamy distribution and an ordered stick-breaking process. We explore and develop the theoretical properties of this new distribution and prove that it exhibits symmetry under the same conditions as the well-known Dirichlet. Like the Dirichlet, the new distribution is adept at capturing sparsity but, unlike the Dirichlet, has an exact and closed form reparameterization--making it well suited for deep variational Bayesian modeling. We demonstrate the distribution's utility in a variety of semi-supervised auto-encoding tasks. In all cases, the resulting models achieve competitive performance commensurate with their simplicity, use of explicit probability models, and abstinence from adversarial training.
Generation of Policy-Level Explanations for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Nicholay Topin, Manuela Veloso
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Though reinforcement learning has greatly benefited from the incorporation of neural networks, the inability to verify the correctness of such systems limits their use. Current work in explainable deep learning focuses on explaining only a single decision in terms of input features, making it unsuitable for explaining a sequence of decisions. To address this need, we introduce Abstracted Policy Graphs, which are Markov chains of abstract states. This representation concisely summarizes a policy so that individual decisions can be explained in the context of expected future transitions. Additionally, we propose a method to generate these Abstracted Policy Graphs for deterministic policies given a learned value function and a set of observed transitions, potentially off-policy transitions used during training. Since no restrictions are placed on how the value function is generated, our method is compatible with many existing reinforcement learning methods. We prove that the worst-case time complexity of our method is quadratic in the number of features and linear in the number of provided transitions, $O(|F|^2 |tr\_samples|)$. By applying our method to a family of domains, we show that our method scales well in practice and produces Abstracted Policy Graphs which reliably capture relationships within these domains.
Video-to-Video Translation for Visual Speech Synthesis
Authors: Michail C. Doukas, Viktoriia Sharmanska, Stefanos Zafeiriou
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Speech Synthesis, Translation

Despite remarkable success in image-to-image translation that celebrates the advancements of generative adversarial networks (GANs), very limited attempts are known for video domain translation. We study the task of video-to-video translation in the context of visual speech generation, where the goal is to transform an input video of any spoken word to an output video of a different word. This is a multi-domain translation, where each word forms a domain of videos uttering this word. Adaptation of the state-of-the-art image-to-image translation model (StarGAN) to this setting falls short with a large vocabulary size. Instead we propose to use character encodings of the words and design a novel character-based GANs architecture for video-to-video translation called Visual Speech GAN (ViSpGAN). We are the first to demonstrate video-to-video translation with a vocabulary of 500 words.
Blocksworld Revisited: Learning and Reasoning to Generate Event-Sequences from Image Pairs
Authors: Tejas Gokhale, Shailaja Sampat, Zhiyuan Fang, Yezhou Yang, Chitta Baral
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00

The process of identifying changes or transformations in a scene along with the ability of reasoning about their causes and effects, is a key aspect of intelligence. In this work we go beyond recent advances in computational perception, and introduce a more challenging task, Image-based Event-Sequencing (IES). In IES, the task is to predict a sequence of actions required to rearrange objects from the configuration in an input source image to the one in the target image. IES also requires systems to possess inductive generalizability. Motivated from evidence in cognitive development, we compile the first IES dataset, the Blocksworld Image Reasoning Dataset (BIRD) which contains images of wooden blocks in different configurations, and the sequence of moves to rearrange one configuration to the other. We first explore the use of existing deep learning architectures and show that these end-to-end methods under-perform in inferring temporal event-sequences and fail at inductive generalization. We then propose a modular two-step approach: Visual Perception followed by Event-Sequencing, and demonstrate improved performance by combining learning and reasoning. Finally, by showing an extension of our approach on natural images, we seek to pave the way for future research on event sequencing for real world scenes.
Exploring Interpretable LSTM Neural Networks over Multi-Variable Data
Authors: Tian Guo, Tao Lin, Nino Antulov-Fantulin
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

For recurrent neural networks trained on time series with target and exogenous variables, in addition to accurate prediction, it is also desired to provide interpretable insights into the data. In this paper, we explore the structure of LSTM recurrent neural networks to learn variable-wise hidden states, with the aim to capture different dynamics in multi-variable time series and distinguish the contribution of variables to the prediction. With these variable-wise hidden states, a mixture attention mechanism is proposed to model the generative process of the target. Then we develop associated training methods to jointly learn network parameters, variable and temporal importance w.r.t the prediction of the target variable. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate enhanced prediction performance by capturing the dynamics of different variables. Meanwhile, we evaluate the interpretation results both qualitatively and quantitatively. It exhibits the prospect as an end-to-end framework for both forecasting and knowledge extraction over multi-variable data.
Leveraging binding-site structure for drug discovery with point-cloud methods
Authors: Vincent Mallet, Carlos G. Oliver, Nicolas Moitessier, Jerome Waldispuhl
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery

Computational drug discovery strategies can be broadly placed in two categories: ligand-based methods which identify novel molecules by similarity with known ligands, and structure-based methods which predict molecules with high-affinity to a given 3D structure (e.g. a protein). However, ligand-based methods do not leverage information about the binding site, and structure-based approaches rely on the knowledge of a finite set of ligands binding the target. In this work, we introduce TarLig, a novel approach that aims to bridge the gap between ligand and structure-based approaches. We use the 3D structure of the binding site as input to a model which predicts the ligand preferences of the binding site. The resulting predictions could then offer promising seeds and constraints in the chemical space search, based on the binding site structure. TarLig outperforms standard models by introducing a data-alignment and augmentation technique. The recent popularity of Volumetric 3DCNN pipelines in structural bioinformatics suggests that this extra step could help a wide range of methods to improve their results with minimal modifications.
Fault Sneaking Attack: a Stealthy Framework for Misleading Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Pu Zhao, Siyue Wang, Cheng Gongye, Yanzhi Wang, Yunsi Fei, Xue Lin
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Overall - Test

Despite the great achievements of deep neural networks (DNNs), the vulnerability of state-of-the-art DNNs raises security concerns of DNNs in many application domains requiring high reliability.We propose the fault sneaking attack on DNNs, where the adversary aims to misclassify certain input images into any target labels by modifying the DNN parameters. We apply ADMM (alternating direction method of multipliers) for solving the optimization problem of the fault sneaking attack with two constraints: 1) the classification of the other images should be unchanged and 2) the parameter modifications should be minimized. Specifically, the first constraint requires us not only to inject designated faults (misclassifications), but also to hide the faults for stealthy or sneaking considerations by maintaining model accuracy. The second constraint requires us to minimize the parameter modifications (using L0 norm to measure the number of modifications and L2 norm to measure the magnitude of modifications). Comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that the proposed framework can inject multiple sneaking faults without losing the overall test accuracy performance.
Image Alignment in Unseen Domains via Domain Deep Generalization
Authors: Thanh-Dat Truong, Khoa Luu, Chi Nhan Duong, Ngan Le, Minh-Triet Tran
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Domain Adaptation

Image alignment across domains has recently become one of the realistic and popular topics in the research community. In this problem, a deep learning-based image alignment method is usually trained on an available largescale database. During the testing steps, this trained model is deployed on unseen images collected under different camera conditions and modalities. The delivered deep network models are unable to be updated, adapted or fine-tuned in these scenarios. Thus, recent deep learning techniques, e.g. domain adaptation, feature transferring, and fine-tuning, are unable to be deployed. This paper presents a novel deep learning based approach to tackle the problem of across unseen modalities. The proposed network is then applied to image alignment as an illustration. The proposed approach is designed as an end-to-end deep convolutional neural network to optimize the deep models to improve the performance. The proposed network has been evaluated in digit recognition when the model is trained on MNIST and then tested on unseen domain MNIST-M. Finally, the proposed method is benchmarked in image alignment problem when training on RGB images and testing on Depth and X-Ray images.
Bayesian Nonparametric Federated Learning of Neural Networks
Authors: Mikhail Yurochkin, Mayank Agarwal, Soumya Ghosh, Kristjan Greenewald, Trong Nghia Hoang, Yasaman Khazaeni
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

In federated learning problems, data is scattered across different servers and exchanging or pooling it is often impractical or prohibited. We develop a Bayesian nonparametric framework for federated learning with neural networks. Each data server is assumed to provide local neural network weights, which are modeled through our framework. We then develop an inference approach that allows us to synthesize a more expressive global network without additional supervision, data pooling and with as few as a single communication round. We then demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on federated learning problems simulated from two popular image classification datasets.