pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Experiment-based detection of service disruption attacks in optical networks using data analytics and unsupervised learning
Authors: Marija Furdek, Carlos Natalino, Marco Schiano and Andrea Di Giglio
Date: 2019-02-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: SPIE OPTO 2019 2
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Clustering

The paper addresses the detection of malicious attacks targeting service disruption at the optical layer as a key prerequisite for fast and effective attack response and network recovery. We experimentally demonstrate the effects of signal insertion attacks with varying intensity in a real-life scenario. By applying data analytics tools, we analyze the properties of the obtained dataset to determine how the relationships among different optical performance monitoring (OPM) parameters of the signal change in the presence of an attack as opposed to the normal operating conditions. In addition, we evaluate the performance of an unsupervised learning technique, i.e., a clustering algorithm for anomaly detection, which can detect attacks as anomalies without prior knowledge of the attacks. We demonstrate the potential and the challenges of unsupervised learning for attack detection, propose guidelines for attack signature identification needed for the detection of the considered attack methods, and discuss remaining challenges related to optical network security.
When to Trust Your Model: Model-Based Policy Optimization
Authors: Michael Janner, Justin Fu, Marvin Zhang, Sergey Levine
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: model, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Designing effective model-based reinforcement learning algorithms is difficult because the ease of data generation must be weighed against the bias of model-generated data. In this paper, we study the role of model usage in policy optimization both theoretically and empirically. We first formulate and analyze a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm with a guarantee of monotonic improvement at each step. In practice, this analysis is overly pessimistic and suggests that real off-policy data is always preferable to model-generated on-policy data, but we show that an empirical estimate of model generalization can be incorporated into such analysis to justify model usage. Motivated by this analysis, we then demonstrate that a simple procedure of using short model-generated rollouts branched from real data has the benefits of more complicated model-based algorithms without the usual pitfalls. In particular, this approach surpasses the sample efficiency of prior model-based methods, matches the asymptotic performance of the best model-free algorithms, and scales to horizons that cause other model-based methods to fail entirely.
Provable Gradient Variance Guarantees for Black-Box Variational Inference
Authors: Justin Domke
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Variational Inference

Recent variational inference methods use stochastic gradient estimators whose variance is not well understood. Theoretical guarantees for these estimators are important to understand when these methods will or will not work. This paper gives bounds for the common "reparameterization" estimators when the target is smooth and the variational family is a location-scale distribution. These bounds are unimprovable and thus provide the best possible guarantees under the stated assumptions.
Neural Point-Based Graphics
Authors: Kara-Ali Aliev, Artem Sevastopolsky, Maria Kolos, Dmitry Ulyanov, Victor Lempitsky
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8

We present a new point-based approach for modeling the appearance of real scenes. The approach uses a raw point cloud as the geometric representation of a scene, and augments each point with a learnable neural descriptor that encodes local geometry and appearance. A deep rendering network is learned in parallel with the descriptors, so that new views of the scene can be obtained by passing the rasterizations of a point cloud from new viewpoints through this network. The input rasterizations use the learned descriptors as point pseudo-colors. We show that the proposed approach can be used for modeling complex scenes and obtaining their photorealistic views, while avoiding explicit surface estimation and meshing. In particular, compelling results are obtained for scene scanned using hand-held commodity RGB-D sensors as well as standard RGB cameras even in the presence of objects that are challenging for standard mesh-based modeling.
XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding
Authors: Zhilin Yang, Zihang Dai, Yiming Yang, Jaime Carbonell, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Quoc V. Le
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Audio Question Answering, Chinese Reading Comprehension, Document Ranking, Humor Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Inference, Paraphrase Identification, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentiment Analysis, Text Classification

With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order and (2) overcomes the limitations of BERT thanks to its autoregressive formulation. Furthermore, XLNet integrates ideas from Transformer-XL, the state-of-the-art autoregressive model, into pretraining. Empirically, under comparable experiment settings, XLNet outperforms BERT on 20 tasks, often by a large margin, including question answering, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and document ranking.
PyRobot: An Open-source Robotics Framework for Research and Benchmarking
Authors: Adithyavairavan Murali, Tao Chen, Kalyan Vasudev Alwala, Dhiraj Gandhi, Lerrel Pinto, Saurabh Gupta, Abhinav Gupta
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Robotic Grasping, Robot Navigation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

This paper introduces PyRobot, an open-source robotics framework for research and benchmarking. PyRobot is a light-weight, high-level interface on top of ROS that provides a consistent set of hardware independent mid-level APIs to control different robots. PyRobot abstracts away details about low-level controllers and inter-process communication, and allows non-robotics researchers (ML, CV researchers) to focus on building high-level AI applications. PyRobot aims to provide a research ecosystem with convenient access to robotics datasets, algorithm implementations and models that can be used to quickly create a state-of-the-art baseline. We believe PyRobot, when paired up with low-cost robot platforms such as LoCoBot, will reduce the entry barrier into robotics, and democratize robotics. PyRobot is open-source, and can be accessed via https://pyrobot.org.
Evaluating Protein Transfer Learning with TAPE
Authors: Roshan Rao, Nicholas Bhattacharya, Neil Thomas, Yan Duan, Xi Chen, John Canny, Pieter Abbeel, Yun S. Song
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Representation Learning, Transfer Learning

Protein modeling is an increasingly popular area of machine learning research. Semi-supervised learning has emerged as an important paradigm in protein modeling due to the high cost of acquiring supervised protein labels, but the current literature is fragmented when it comes to datasets and standardized evaluation techniques. To facilitate progress in this field, we introduce the Tasks Assessing Protein Embeddings (TAPE), a set of five biologically relevant semi-supervised learning tasks spread across different domains of protein biology. We curate tasks into specific training, validation, and test splits to ensure that each task tests biologically relevant generalization that transfers to real-life scenarios. We benchmark a range of approaches to semi-supervised protein representation learning, which span recent work as well as canonical sequence learning techniques. We find that self-supervised pretraining is helpful for almost all models on all tasks, more than doubling performance in some cases. Despite this increase, in several cases features learned by self-supervised pretraining still lag behind features extracted by state-of-the-art non-neural techniques. This gap in performance suggests a huge opportunity for innovative architecture design and improved modeling paradigms that better capture the signal in biological sequences. TAPE will help the machine learning community focus effort on scientifically relevant problems. Toward this end, all data and code used to run these experiments are available at https://github.com/songlab-cal/tape.
Local Bures-Wasserstein Transport: A Practical and Fast Mapping Approximation
Authors: Andrés Hoyos-Idrobo
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00

Optimal transport (OT)-based methods have a wide range of applications and have attracted a tremendous amount of attention in recent years. However, most of the computational approaches of OT do not learn the underlying transport map. Although some algorithms have been proposed to learn this map, they rely on kernel-based methods, which makes them prohibitively slow when the number of samples increases. Here, we propose a way to learn an approximate transport map and a parametric approximation of the Wasserstein barycenter. We build an approximated transport mapping by leveraging the closed-form of Gaussian (Bures-Wasserstein) transport; we compute local transport plans between matched pairs of the Gaussian components of each density. The learned map generalizes to out-of-sample examples. We provide experimental results on simulated and real data, comparing our proposed method with other mapping estimation algorithms. Preliminary experiments suggest that our proposed method is not only faster, with a factor 80 overall running time, but it also requires fewer components than state-of-the-art methods to recover the support of the barycenter. From a practical standpoint, it is straightforward to implement and can be used with a conventional machine learning pipeline.
Unsupervised State Representation Learning in Atari
Authors: Ankesh Anand, Evan Racah, Sherjil Ozair, Yoshua Bengio, Marc-Alexandre Côté, R. Devon Hjelm
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Atari Games, Representation Learning

State representation learning, or the ability to capture latent generative factors of an environment, is crucial for building intelligent agents that can perform a wide variety of tasks. Learning such representations without supervision from rewards is a challenging open problem. We introduce a method that learns state representations by maximizing mutual information across spatially and temporally distinct features of a neural encoder of the observations. We also introduce a new benchmark based on Atari 2600 games where we evaluate representations based on how well they capture the ground truth state variables. We believe this new framework for evaluating representation learning models will be crucial for future representation learning research. Finally, we compare our technique with other state-of-the-art generative and contrastive representation learning methods. The code associated with this work is available at https://github.com/mila-iqia/atari-representation-learning
Bayesian Learning from Sequential Data using Gaussian Processes with Signature Covariances
Authors: Csaba Toth, Harald Oberhauser
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, General Classification, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Classification

We develop a Bayesian approach to learning from sequential data by using Gaussian processes (GPs) with so-called signature kernels as covariance functions. This allows to make sequences of different length comparable and to rely on strong theoretical results from stochastic analysis. Signatures capture sequential structure with tensors that can scale unfavourably in sequence length and state space dimension. To deal with this, we introduce a sparse variational approach with inducing tensors. We then combine the resulting GP with LSTMs and GRUs to build larger models that leverage the strengths of each of these approaches and benchmark the resulting GPs on multivariate time series (TS) classification datasets. Code available at https://github.com/tgcsaba/GPSig.
Variational Fair Clustering
Authors: Imtiaz Masud Ziko, Eric Granger, Jing Yuan, Ismail Ben Ayed
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Fairness

We propose a general variational framework of fair clustering, which integrates an original Kullback-Leibler (KL) fairness term with a large class of clustering objectives, including prototype or graph based. Fundamentally different from the existing combinatorial and spectral solutions, our variational multi-term approach enables to control the trade-off levels between the fairness and clustering objectives. We derive a general tight upper bound based on a concave-convex decomposition of our fairness term, its Lipschitz-gradient property and the Pinsker's inequality. Our tight upper bound can be jointly optimized with various clustering objectives, while yielding a scalable solution, with convergence guarantee. Interestingly, at each iteration, it performs an independent update for each assignment variable. Therefore, it can be easily distributed for large-scale datasets. This scalability is important as it enables to explore different trade-off levels between the fairness and clustering objectives. Unlike spectral relaxation, our formulation does not require computing its eigenvalue decomposition. We report comprehensive evaluations and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods over various fair-clustering benchmarks, which show that our variational formulation can yield highly competitive solutions in terms of fairness and clustering objectives.
Automated Definition of Skeletal Disease Burden in Metastatic Prostate Carcinoma: a 3D analysis of SPECT/CT images
Authors: Francesco Fiz, Helmut Dittmann, Cristina Campi, Matthias Weissinger, Samine Sahbai, Matthias Reimold, Arnulf Stenzl, Michele Piana, Gianmario Sambuceti, Christian la Fougère
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00

To meet the current need for skeletal tumor-load estimation in prostate cancer (mCRPC), we developed a novel approach, based on adaptive bone segmentation. In this study, we compared the program output with existing estimates and with the radiological outcome. Seventy-six whole-body 99mTc-DPD-SPECT/CT from mCRPC patients were analyzed. The software identified the whole skeletal volume (SVol) and classified it voxels metastases (MVol) or normal bone (BVol). SVol was compared with the estimation of a commercial software. MVol was compared with manual assessment and with PSA-level. Counts/voxel were extracted from MVol and BVol. After six cycles of 223RaCl2-therapy every patient was re-evaluated as progressing (PD), stabilized (SD) or responsive (PR). SVol correlated with the one of the commercial software (R=0,99, p<0,001). MVol correlated with manually-counted lesions (R=0,61, p<0,001) and PSA (R=0,46, p<0.01). PD had a lower counts/voxel in MVol than PR/SD (715 \pm 190 Vs. 975 \pm 215 and 1058 \pm 255, p<0,05 and p<0,01) and in BVol (PD 275 \pm 60, PR 515 \pm 188 and SD 528 \pm 162 counts/voxel, p<0,001). Segmentation-based tumor load correlated with radiological/laboratory indices. Uptake was linked with the clinical outcome, suggesting that metastases in PD patients have a lower affinity for bone-seeking radionuclides and might benefit less from bone-targeted radioisotope therapies.
Control What You Can: Intrinsically Motivated Task-Planning Agent
Authors: Sebastian Blaes, Marin Vlastelica Pogančić, Jia-Jie Zhu, Georg Martius
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Task Planning

We present a novel intrinsically motivated agent that learns how to control the environment in the fastest possible manner by optimizing learning progress. It learns what can be controlled, how to allocate time and attention, and the relations between objects using surprise based motivation. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated in a synthetic as well as a robotic manipulation environment yielding considerably improved performance and smaller sample complexity. In a nutshell, our work combines several task-level planning agent structures (backtracking search on task graph, probabilistic road-maps, allocation of search efforts) with intrinsic motivation to achieve learning from scratch.
Reward Prediction Error as an Exploration Objective in Deep RL
Authors: Riley Simmons-Edler, Ben Eisner, Daniel Yang, Anthony Bisulco, Eric Mitchell, Sebastian Seung, Daniel Lee
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, MuJoCo, OpenAI Gym, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A major challenge in reinforcement learning is exploration, when local dithering methods such as epsilon-greedy sampling are insufficient to solve a given task. Many recent methods have proposed to intrinsically motivate an agent to seek novel states, driving the agent to discover improved reward. However, while state-novelty exploration methods are suitable for tasks where novel observations correlate well with improved reward, they may not explore more efficiently than epsilon-greedy approaches in environments where the two are not well-correlated. In this paper, we distinguish between exploration tasks in which seeking novel states aids in finding new reward, and those where it does not, such as goal-conditioned tasks and escaping local reward maxima. We propose a new exploration objective, maximizing the reward prediction error (RPE) of a value function trained to predict extrinsic reward. We then propose a deep reinforcement learning method, QXplore, which exploits the temporal difference error of a Q-function to solve hard exploration tasks in high-dimensional MDPs. We demonstrate the exploration behavior of QXplore on several OpenAI Gym MuJoCo tasks and Atari games and observe that QXplore is comparable to or better than a baseline state-novelty method in all cases, outperforming the baseline on tasks where state novelty is not well-correlated with improved reward.
Who is in Your Top Three? Optimizing Learning in Elections with Many Candidates
Authors: Nikhil Garg, Lodewijk Gelauff, Sukolsak Sakshuwong, Ashish Goel
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: scoring rule

Elections and opinion polls often have many candidates, with the aim to either rank the candidates or identify a small set of winners according to voters' preferences. In practice, voters do not provide a full ranking; instead, each voter provides their favorite K candidates, potentially in ranked order. The election organizer must choose K and an aggregation rule. We provide a theoretical framework to make these choices. Each K-Approval or K-partial ranking mechanism (with a corresponding positional scoring rule) induces a learning rate for the speed at which the election correctly recovers the asymptotic outcome. Given the voter choice distribution, the election planner can thus identify the rate optimal mechanism. Earlier work in this area provides coarse order-of-magnitude guaranties which are not sufficient to make such choices. Our framework further resolves questions of when randomizing between multiple mechanisms may improve learning, for arbitrary voter noise models. Finally, we use data from 5 large participatory budgeting elections that we organized across several US cities, along with other ranking data, to demonstrate the utility of our methods. In particular, we find that historically such elections have set K too low and that picking the right mechanism can be the difference between identifying the ultimate winner with only a 80% probability or a 99.9% probability after 400 voters.
BatchBALD: Efficient and Diverse Batch Acquisition for Deep Bayesian Active Learning
Authors: Andreas Kirsch, Joost van Amersfoort, Yarin Gal
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Active Learning

We develop BatchBALD, a tractable approximation to the mutual information between a batch of points and model parameters, which we use as an acquisition function to select multiple informative points jointly for the task of deep Bayesian active learning. BatchBALD is a greedy linear-time $1 - \frac{1}{e}$-approximate algorithm amenable to dynamic programming and efficient caching. We compare BatchBALD to the commonly used approach for batch data acquisition and find that the current approach acquires similar and redundant points, sometimes performing worse than randomly acquiring data. We finish by showing that, using BatchBALD to consider dependencies within an acquisition batch, we achieve new state of the art performance on standard benchmarks, providing substantial data efficiency improvements in batch acquisition.
Solving Multiagent Planning Problems with Concurrent Conditional Effects
Authors: Daniel Furelos-Blanco, Anders Jonsson
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00

In this work we present a novel approach to solving concurrent multiagent planning problems in which several agents act in parallel. Our approach relies on a compilation from concurrent multiagent planning to classical planning, allowing us to use an off-the-shelf classical planner to solve the original multiagent problem. The solution can be directly interpreted as a concurrent plan that satisfies a given set of concurrency constraints, while avoiding the exponential blowup associated with concurrent actions. Our planner is the first to handle action effects that are conditional on what other agents are doing. Theoretically, we show that the compilation is sound and complete. Empirically, we show that our compilation can solve challenging multiagent planning problems that require concurrent actions.
Learning Disentangled Representations of Timbre and Pitch for Musical Instrument Sounds Using Gaussian Mixture Variational Autoencoders
Authors: Yin-Jyun Luo, Kat Agres, Dorien Herremans
Date: 2019-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

In this paper, we learn disentangled representations of timbre and pitch for musical instrument sounds. We adapt a framework based on variational autoencoders with Gaussian mixture latent distributions. Specifically, we use two separate encoders to learn distinct latent spaces for timbre and pitch, which form Gaussian mixture components representing instrument identity and pitch, respectively. For reconstruction, latent variables of timbre and pitch are sampled from corresponding mixture components, and are concatenated as the input to a decoder. We show the model efficacy by latent space visualization, and a quantitative analysis indicates the discriminability of these spaces, even with a limited number of instrument labels for training. The model allows for controllable synthesis of selected instrument sounds by sampling from the latent spaces. To evaluate this, we trained instrument and pitch classifiers using original labeled data. These classifiers achieve high accuracy when tested on our synthesized sounds, which verifies the model performance of controllable realistic timbre and pitch synthesis. Our model also enables timbre transfer between multiple instruments, with a single autoencoder architecture, which is evaluated by measuring the shift in posterior of instrument classification. Our in depth evaluation confirms the model ability to successfully disentangle timbre and pitch.