pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Visualizing and Measuring the Geometry of BERT
Authors: Andy Coenen, Emily Reif, Ann Yuan, Been Kim, Adam Pearce, Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Word Embeddings

Transformer architectures show significant promise for natural language processing. Given that a single pretrained model can be fine-tuned to perform well on many different tasks, these networks appear to extract generally useful linguistic features. A natural question is how such networks represent this information internally. This paper describes qualitative and quantitative investigations of one particularly effective model, BERT. At a high level, linguistic features seem to be represented in separate semantic and syntactic subspaces. We find evidence of a fine-grained geometric representation of word senses. We also present empirical descriptions of syntactic representations in both attention matrices and individual word embeddings, as well as a mathematical argument to explain the geometry of these representations.
Unsupervised Co-Learning on $\mathcal{G}$-Manifolds Across Irreducible Representations
Authors: Yifeng Fan, Tingran Gao, Zhizhen Zhao
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection

We introduce a novel co-learning paradigm for manifolds naturally equipped with a group action, motivated by recent developments on learning a manifold from attached fibre bundle structures. We utilize a representation theoretic mechanism that canonically associates multiple independent vector bundles over a common base manifold, which provides multiple views for the geometry of the underlying manifold. The consistency across these fibre bundles provide a common base for performing unsupervised manifold co-learning through the redundancy created artificially across irreducible representations of the transformation group. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithmic paradigm through drastically improved robust nearest neighbor search and community detection on rotation-invariant cryo-electron microscopy image analysis.
A Non-Asymptotic Analysis of Network Independence for Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent
Authors: Shi Pu, Alex Olshevsky, Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00

This paper is concerned with minimizing the average of $n$ cost functions over a network, in which agents may communicate and exchange information with their peers in the network. Specifically, we consider the setting where only noisy gradient information is available. To solve the problem, we study the standard distributed stochastic gradient descent (DSGD) method and perform a non-asymptotic convergence analysis. For strongly convex and smooth objective functions, we not only show that DSGD asymptotically achieves the optimal network independent convergence rate compared to centralized stochastic gradient descent (SGD), but also explicitly identify the non-asymptotic convergence rate as a function of characteristics of the objective functions and the network. Furthermore, we derive the time needed for DSGD to approach the asymptotic convergence rate, which behaves as $K_T=\mathcal{O}(\frac{n}{(1-\rho_w)^2})$, where $(1-\rho_w)$ denotes the spectral gap of the mixing matrix of communicating agents. Finally, we construct a "hard" optimization problem for which we show the transient time needed for DSGD to approach the asymptotic convergence rate is lower bounded by $\Omega(\frac{n}{(1-\rho_w)^2})$, implying the sharpness of the obtained result.
Training large-scale ANNs on simulated resistive crossbar arrays
Authors: Malte J. Rasch, Tayfun Gokmen, Wilfried Haensch
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00

Accelerating training of artificial neural networks (ANN) with analog resistive crossbar arrays is a promising idea. While the concept has been verified on very small ANNs and toy data sets (such as MNIST), more realistically sized ANNs and datasets have not yet been tackled. However, it is to be expected that device materials and hardware design constraints, such as noisy computations, finite number of resistive states of the device materials, saturating weight and activation ranges, and limited precision of analog-to-digital converters, will cause significant challenges to the successful training of state-of-the-art ANNs. By using analog hardware aware ANN training simulations, we here explore a number of simple algorithmic compensatory measures to cope with analog noise and limited weight and output ranges and resolutions, that dramatically improve the simulated training performances on RPU arrays on intermediately to large-scale ANNs.
Deep Semi-Supervised Anomaly Detection
Authors: Lukas Ruff, Robert A. Vandermeulen, Nico Görnitz, Alexander Binder, Emmanuel Müller, Klaus-Robert Müller, Marius Kloft
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Outlier Detection, Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection, Supervised Anomaly Detection

Deep approaches to anomaly detection have recently shown promising results over shallow methods on large and complex datasets. Typically anomaly detection is treated as an unsupervised learning problem. In practice however, one may have---in addition to a large set of unlabeled samples---access to a small pool of labeled samples, e.g. a subset verified by some domain expert as being normal or anomalous. Semi-supervised approaches to anomaly detection aim to utilize such labeled samples, but most proposed methods are limited to merely including labeled normal samples. Only a few methods take advantage of labeled anomalies, with existing deep approaches being domain-specific. In this work we present Deep SAD, an end-to-end deep methodology for general semi-supervised anomaly detection. We further introduce an information-theoretic framework for deep anomaly detection based on the idea that the entropy of the latent distribution for normal data should be lower than the entropy of the anomalous distribution, which can serve as a theoretical interpretation for our method. In extensive experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10, along with other anomaly detection benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that our method is on par or outperforms shallow, hybrid, and deep competitors, yielding appreciable performance improvements even when provided with only little labeled data.
An Introduction to Variational Autoencoders
Authors: Diederik P. Kingma, Max Welling
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00

Variational autoencoders provide a principled framework for learning deep latent-variable models and corresponding inference models. In this work, we provide an introduction to variational autoencoders and some important extensions.
Stochastic Bandits with Context Distributions
Authors: Johannes Kirschner, Andreas Krause
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

We introduce a stochastic contextual bandit model where at each time step the environment chooses a distribution over a context set and samples the context from this distribution. The learner observes only the context distribution while the exact context realization remains hidden. This allows for a broad range of applications where the context is stochastic or when the learner needs to predict the context. We leverage the UCB algorithm to this setting and show that it achieves an order-optimal high-probability bound on the cumulative regret for linear and kernelized reward functions. Our results strictly generalize previous work in the sense that both our model and the algorithm reduce to the standard setting when the environment chooses only Dirac delta distributions and therefore provides the exact context to the learner. We further analyze a variant where the learner observes the realized context after choosing the action. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed method on synthetic and real-world datasets.
A Method for Evaluating Chimeric Synchronization of Coupled Oscillators and Its Application for Creating a Neural Network Information Converter
Authors: Andrei Velichko
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

This paper presents a new method for evaluating the synchronization of quasi-periodic oscillations of two oscillators, termed "chimeric synchronization". The family of metrics is proposed to create a neural network information converter based on a network of pulsed oscillators. In addition to transforming input information from digital to analogue, the converter can perform information processing after training the network by selecting control parameters. In the proposed neural network scheme, the data arrives at the input layer in the form of current levels of the oscillators and is converted into a set of non-repeating states of the chimeric synchronization of the output oscillator. By modelling a thermally coupled VO2-oscillator circuit, the network setup is demonstrated through the selection of coupling strength, power supply levels, and the synchronization efficiency parameter. The distribution of solutions depending on the operating mode of the oscillators, sub-threshold mode, or generation mode are revealed. Technological approaches for the implementation of a neural network information converter are proposed, and examples of its application for image filtering are demonstrated. The proposed method helps to significantly expand the capabilities of neuromorphic and logical devices based on synchronization effects.
Application of Machine Learning to accidents detection at directional drilling
Authors: Ekaterina Gurina, Nikita Klyuchnikov, Alexey Zaytsev, Evgenya Romanenkova, Ksenia Antipova, Igor Simon, Victor Makarov, Dmitry Koroteev
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, General Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

We present a data-driven algorithm and mathematical model for anomaly alarming at directional drilling. The algorithm is based on machine learning. It compares the real-time drilling telemetry with one corresponding to past accidents and analyses the level of similarity. The model performs a time-series comparison using aggregated statistics and Gradient Boosting classification. It is trained on historical data containing the drilling telemetry of $80$ wells drilled within $19$ oilfields. The model can detect an anomaly and identify its type by comparing the real-time measurements while drilling with the ones from the database of past accidents. Validation tests show that our algorithm identifies half of the anomalies with about $0.53$ false alarms per day on average. The model performance ensures sufficient time and cost savings as it enables partial prevention of the failures and accidents at the well construction.
Machine Learning and Visualization in Clinical Decision Support: Current State and Future Directions
Authors: Gal Levy-Fix, Gilad J. Kuperman, Noémie Elhadad
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making

Deep learning, an area of machine learning, is set to revolutionize patient care. But it is not yet part of standard of care, especially when it comes to individual patient care. In fact, it is unclear to what extent data-driven techniques are being used to support clinical decision making (CDS). Heretofore, there has not been a review of ways in which research in machine learning and other types of data-driven techniques can contribute effectively to clinical care and the types of support they can bring to clinicians. In this paper, we consider ways in which two data driven domains - machine learning and data visualizations - can contribute to the next generation of clinical decision support systems. We review the literature regarding the ways heuristic knowledge, machine learning, and visualization are - and can be - applied to three types of CDS. There has been substantial research into the use of predictive modeling for alerts, however current CDS systems are not utilizing these methods. Approaches that leverage interactive visualizations and machine-learning inferences to organize and review patient data are gaining popularity but are still at the prototype stage and are not yet in use. CDS systems that could benefit from prescriptive machine learning (e.g., treatment recommendations for specific patients) have not yet been developed. We discuss potential reasons for the lack of deployment of data-driven methods in CDS and directions for future research.
Does Object Recognition Work for Everyone?
Authors: Terrance DeVries, Ishan Misra, Changhan Wang, Laurens van der Maaten
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Recognition

The paper analyzes the accuracy of publicly available object-recognition systems on a geographically diverse dataset. This dataset contains household items and was designed to have a more representative geographical coverage than commonly used image datasets in object recognition. We find that the systems perform relatively poorly on household items that commonly occur in countries with a low household income. Qualitative analyses suggest the drop in performance is primarily due to appearance differences within an object class (e.g., dish soap) and due to items appearing in a different context (e.g., toothbrushes appearing outside of bathrooms). The results of our study suggest that further work is needed to make object-recognition systems work equally well for people across different countries and income levels.
Cross-Lingual Syntactic Transfer through Unsupervised Adaptation of Invertible Projections
Authors: Junxian He, Zhisong Zhang, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Graham Neubig
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Dependency Parsing, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, POS Tagging

Cross-lingual transfer is an effective way to build syntactic analysis tools in low-resource languages. However, transfer is difficult when transferring to typologically distant languages, especially when neither annotated target data nor parallel corpora are available. In this paper, we focus on methods for cross-lingual transfer to distant languages and propose to learn a generative model with a structured prior that utilizes labeled source data and unlabeled target data jointly. The parameters of source model and target model are softly shared through a regularized log likelihood objective. An invertible projection is employed to learn a new interlingual latent embedding space that compensates for imperfect cross-lingual word embedding input. We evaluate our method on two syntactic tasks: part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. On the Universal Dependency Treebanks, we use English as the only source corpus and transfer to a wide range of target languages. On the 10 languages in this dataset that are distant from English, our method yields an average of 5.2% absolute improvement on POS tagging and 8.3% absolute improvement on dependency parsing over a direct transfer method using state-of-the-art discriminative models.
Toward a Characterization of Loss Functions for Distribution Learning
Authors: Nika Haghtalab, Cameron Musco, Bo Waggoner
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Density Estimation

In this work we study loss functions for learning and evaluating probability distributions over large discrete domains. Unlike classification or regression where a wide variety of loss functions are used, in the distribution learning and density estimation literature, very few losses outside the dominant $log\ loss$ are applied. We aim to understand this fact, taking an axiomatic approach to the design of loss functions for learning distributions. We start by proposing a set of desirable criteria that any good loss function should satisfy. Intuitively, these criteria require that the loss function faithfully evaluates a candidate distribution, both in expectation and when estimated on a few samples. Interestingly, we observe that \emph{no loss function} possesses all of these criteria. However, one can circumvent this issue by introducing a natural restriction on the set of candidate distributions. Specifically, we require that candidates are $calibrated$ with respect to the target distribution, i.e., they may contain less information than the target but otherwise do not significantly distort the truth. We show that, after restricting to this set of distributions, the log loss, along with a large variety of other losses satisfy the desired criteria. These results pave the way for future investigations of distribution learning that look beyond the log loss, choosing a loss function based on application or domain need.
Energy Predictive Models with Limited Data using Transfer Learning
Authors: Ali Hooshmand, Ratnesh Sharma
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Transfer Learning

In this paper, we consider the problem of developing predictive models with limited data for energy assets such as electricity loads, PV power generations, etc. We specifically investigate the cases where the amount of historical data is not sufficient to effectively train the prediction model. We first develop an energy predictive model based on convolutional neural network (CNN) which is well suited to capture the interaday, daily, and weekly cyclostationary patterns, trends and seasonalities in energy assets time series. A transfer learning strategy is then proposed to address the challenge of limited training data. We demonstrate our approach on a usecase of daily electricity demand forecasting. we show practicing the transfer learning strategy on the CNN model results in significant improvement to existing forecasting methods.
An Extensible Interactive Interface for Agent Design
Authors: Matthew Rahtz, James Fang, Anca D. Dragan, Dylan Hadfield-Menell
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In artificial intelligence, we often specify tasks through a reward function. While this works well in some settings, many tasks are hard to specify this way. In deep reinforcement learning, for example, directly specifying a reward as a function of a high-dimensional observation is challenging. Instead, we present an interface for specifying tasks interactively using demonstrations. Our approach defines a set of increasingly complex policies. The interface allows the user to switch between these policies at fixed intervals to generate demonstrations of novel, more complex, tasks. We train new policies based on these demonstrations and repeat the process. We present a case study of our approach in the Lunar Lander domain, and show that this simple approach can quickly learn a successful landing policy and outperforms an existing comparison-based deep RL method.
Near Neighbor: Who is the Fairest of Them All?
Authors: Sariel Har-Peled, Sepideh Mahabadi
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: All

$\newcommand{\ball}{\mathbb{B}}\newcommand{\dsQ}{{\mathcal{Q}}}\newcommand{\dsS}{{\mathcal{S}}}$In this work we study a fair variant of the near neighbor problem. Namely, given a set of $n$ points $P$ and a parameter $r$, the goal is to preprocess the points, such that given a query point $q$, any point in the $r$-neighborhood of the query, i.e., $\ball(q,r)$, have the same probability of being reported as the near neighbor. We show that LSH based algorithms can be made fair, without a significant loss in efficiency. Specifically, we show an algorithm that reports a point in the $r$-neighborhood of a query $q$ with almost uniform probability. The query time is proportional to $O\bigl( \mathrm{dns}(q.r) \dsQ(n,c) \bigr)$, and its space is $O(\dsS(n,c))$, where $\dsQ(n,c)$ and $\dsS(n,c)$ are the query time and space of an LSH algorithm for $c$-approximate near neighbor, and $\mathrm{dns}(q,r)$ is a function of the local density around $q$. Our approach works more generally for sampling uniformly from a sub-collection of sets of a given collection and can be used in a few other applications. Finally, we run experiments to show performance of our approach on real data.
Counterfactual Inference for Consumer Choice Across Many Product Categories
Authors: Rob Donnelly, Francisco R. Ruiz, David Blei, Susan Athey
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Inference

This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer's utility is additive in the different categories. Her preferences about product attributes as well as her price sensitivity vary across products and are in general correlated across products. We build on techniques from the machine learning literature on probabilistic models of matrix factorization, extending the methods to account for time-varying product attributes and products going out of stock. We evaluate the performance of the model using held-out data from weeks with price changes or out of stock products. We show that our model improves over traditional modeling approaches that consider each category in isolation. One source of the improvement is the ability of the model to accurately estimate heterogeneity in preferences (by pooling information across categories); another source of improvement is its ability to estimate the preferences of consumers who have rarely or never made a purchase in a given category in the training data. Using held-out data, we show that our model can accurately distinguish which consumers are most price sensitive to a given product. We consider counterfactuals such as personally targeted price discounts, showing that using a richer model such as the one we propose substantially increases the benefits of personalization in discounts.
Scaling Autoregressive Video Models
Authors: Dirk Weissenborn, Oscar Täckström, Jakob Uszkoreit
Date: 2019-06-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Action Recognition, Video Generation, Video Prediction

Due to the statistical complexity of video, the high degree of inherent stochasticity, and the sheer amount of data, generating natural video remains a challenging task. State-of-the-art video generation models often attempt to address these issues by combining sometimes complex, usually video-specific neural network architectures, latent variable models, adversarial training and a range of other methods. Despite their often high complexity, these approaches still fall short of generating high quality video continuations outside of narrow domains and often struggle with fidelity. In contrast, we show that conceptually simple autoregressive video generation models based on a three-dimensional self-attention mechanism achieve competitive results across multiple metrics on popular benchmark datasets, for which they produce continuations of high fidelity and realism. We also present results from training our models on Kinetics, a large scale action recognition dataset comprised of YouTube videos exhibiting phenomena such as camera movement, complex object interactions and diverse human movement. While modeling these phenomena consistently remains elusive, we hope that our results, which include occasional realistic continuations encourage further research on comparatively complex, large scale datasets such as Kinetics.