pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Implementation of a modified Nesterov's Accelerated quasi-Newton Method on Tensorflow
Authors: S. Indrapriyadarsini, Shahrzad Mahboubi, Hiroshi Ninomiya, Hideki Asai
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Second-order methods

Recent studies incorporate Nesterov's accelerated gradient method for the acceleration of gradient based training. The Nesterov's Accelerated Quasi-Newton (NAQ) method has shown to drastically improve the convergence speed compared to the conventional quasi-Newton method. This paper implements NAQ for non-convex optimization on Tensorflow. Two modifications have been proposed to the original NAQ algorithm to ensure global convergence and eliminate linesearch. The performance of the proposed algorithm - mNAQ is evaluated on standard non-convex function approximation benchmark problems and microwave circuit modelling problems. The results show that the improved algorithm converges better and faster compared to first order optimizers such as AdaGrad, RMSProp, Adam, and the second order methods such as the quasi-Newton method.
Entropic Dynamic Time Warping Kernels for Co-evolving Financial Time Series Analysis
Authors: Lu Bai, Lixin Cui, Lixiang Xu, Yue Wang, Zhihong Zhang, Edwin R. Hancock
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In this work, we develop a novel framework to measure the similarity between dynamic financial networks, i.e., time-varying financial networks. Particularly, we explore whether the proposed similarity measure can be employed to understand the structural evolution of the financial networks with time. For a set of time-varying financial networks with each vertex representing the individual time series of a different stock and each edge between a pair of time series representing the absolute value of their Pearson correlation, our start point is to compute the commute time matrix associated with the weighted adjacency matrix of the network structures, where each element of the matrix can be seen as the enhanced correlation value between pairwise stocks. For each network, we show how the commute time matrix allows us to identify a reliable set of dominant correlated time series as well as an associated dominant probability distribution of the stock belonging to this set. Furthermore, we represent each original network as a discrete dominant Shannon entropy time series computed from the dominant probability distribution. With the dominant entropy time series for each pair of financial networks to hand, we develop a similarity measure based on the classical dynamic time warping framework, for analyzing the financial time-varying networks. We show that the proposed similarity measure is positive definite and thus corresponds to a kernel measure on graphs. The proposed kernel bridges the gap between graph kernels and the classical dynamic time warping framework for multiple financial time series analysis. Experiments on time-varying networks extracted through New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) database demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
A New Framework for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning -- Centralized Training and Exploration with Decentralized Execution via Policy Distillation
Authors: Gang Chen
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a booming area of artificial intelligence. Many practical applications of DRL naturally involve more than one collaborative learners, making it important to study DRL in a multi-agent context. Previous research showed that effective learning in complex multi-agent systems demands for highly coordinated environment exploration among all the participating agents. Many researchers attempted to cope with this challenge through learning centralized value functions. However, the common strategy for every agent to learn their local policies directly often fail to nurture strong inter-agent collaboration and can be sample inefficient whenever agents alter their communication channels. To address these issues, we propose a new framework known as centralized training and exploration with decentralized execution via policy distillation. Guided by this framework and the maximum-entropy learning technique, we will first train agents' policies with shared global component to foster coordinated and effective learning. Locally executable policies will be derived subsequently from the trained global policies via policy distillation. Experiments show that our new framework and algorithm can achieve significantly better performance and higher sample efficiency than a cutting-edge baseline on several multi-agent DRL benchmarks.
Dynamic Subgoal-based Exploration via Bayesian Optimization
Authors: Yijia Wang, Matthias Poloczek, Daniel R. Jiang
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Efficient Exploration, Meta-Learning, Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning in sparse-reward navigation environments with expensive and limited interactions is challenging and poses a need for effective exploration. Motivated by complex navigation tasks that require real-world training (when cheap simulators are not available), we consider an agent that faces an unknown distribution of environments and must decide on an exploration strategy. It may leverage a series of training environments to improve its policy before it is evaluated in a test environment drawn from the same environment distribution. Most existing approaches focus on fixed exploration strategies, while the few that view exploration as a meta-optimization problem tend to ignore the need for cost-efficient exploration. We propose a cost-aware Bayesian optimization approach that efficiently searches over a class of dynamic subgoal-based exploration strategies. The algorithm adjusts a variety of levers -- the locations of the subgoals, the length of each episode, and the number of replications per trial -- in order to overcome the challenges of sparse rewards, expensive interactions, and noise. An experimental evaluation demonstrates that the new approach outperforms existing baselines across a number of problem domains. We also provide a theoretical foundation and prove that the method asymptotically identifies a near-optimal subgoal design.
DwNet: Dense warp-based network for pose-guided human video generation
Authors: Polina Zablotskaia, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Bo Zhao, Leonid Sigal
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

Generation of realistic high-resolution videos of human subjects is a challenging and important task in computer vision. In this paper, we focus on human motion transfer - generation of a video depicting a particular subject, observed in a single image, performing a series of motions exemplified by an auxiliary (driving) video. Our GAN-based architecture, DwNet, leverages dense intermediate pose-guided representation and refinement process to warp the required subject appearance, in the form of the texture, from a source image into a desired pose. Temporal consistency is maintained by further conditioning the decoding process within a GAN on the previously generated frame. In this way a video is generated in an iterative and recurrent fashion. We illustrate the efficacy of our approach by showing state-of-the-art quantitative and qualitative performance on two benchmark datasets: TaiChi and Fashion Modeling. The latter is collected by us and will be made publicly available to the community.
Two Case Studies of Experience Prototyping Machine Learning Systems in the Wild
Authors: Qian Yang
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Sentence

Throughout the course of my Ph.D., I have been designing the user experience (UX) of various machine learning (ML) systems. In this workshop, I share two projects as case studies in which people engage with ML in much more complicated and nuanced ways than the technical HCML work might assume. The first case study describes how cardiology teams in three hospitals used a clinical decision-support system that helps them decide whether and when to implant an artificial heart to a heart failure patient. I demonstrate that physicians cannot draw on their decision-making experience by seeing only patient data on paper. They are also confused by some fundamental premises upon which ML operates. For example, physicians asked: Are ML predictions made based on clinicians' best efforts? Is it ethical to make decisions based on previous patients' collective outcomes? In the second case study, my collaborators and I designed an intelligent text editor, with the goal of improving authors' writing experience with NLP (Natural Language Processing) technologies. We prototyped a number of generative functionalities where the system provides phrase-or-sentence-level writing suggestions upon user request. When writing with the prototype, however, authors shared that they need to "see where the sentence is going two paragraphs later" in order to decide whether the suggestion aligns with their writing; Some even considered adopting machine suggestions as plagiarism, therefore "is simply wrong". By sharing these unexpected and intriguing responses from these real-world ML users, I hope to start a discussion about such previously-unknown complexities and nuances of -- as the workshop proposal states -- "putting ML at the service of people in a way that is accessible, useful, and trustworthy to all".
Good, Better, Best: Textual Distractors Generation for Multiple-Choice Visual Question Answering via Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jiaying Lu, Xin Ye, Yi Ren, Yezhou Yang
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decision Making, Distractor Generation, Multiple-choice, Question Answering, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Multiple-choice VQA has drawn increasing attention from researchers and end-users recently. As the demand for automatically constructing large-scale multiple-choice VQA data grows, we introduce a novel task called textual Distractors Generation for VQA (DG-VQA) focusing on generating challenging yet meaningful distractors given the context image, question, and correct answer. The DG-VQA task aims at generating distractors without ground-truth training samples since such resources are rarely available. To tackle the DG-VQA unsupervisedly, we propose Gobbet, a reinforcement learning(RL) based framework that utilizes pre-trained VQA models as an alternative knowledge base to guide the distractor generation process. In Gobbet, a pre-trained VQA model serves as the environment in RL setting to provide feedback for the input multi-modal query, while a neural distractor generator serves as the agent to take actions accordingly. We propose to use existing VQA models' performance degradation as indicators of the quality of generated distractors. On the other hand, we show the utility of generated distractors through data augmentation experiments, since robustness is more and more important when AI models apply to unpredictable open-domain scenarios or security-sensitive applications. We further conduct a manual case study on the factors why distractors generated by Gobbet can fool existing models.
Adaptive Learned Bloom Filter (Ada-BF): Efficient Utilization of the Classifier
Authors: Zhenwei Dai, Anshumali Shrivastava
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Recent work suggests improving the performance of Bloom filter by incorporating a machine learning model as a binary classifier. However, such learned Bloom filter does not take full advantage of the predicted probability scores. We proposed new algorithms that generalize the learned Bloom filter by using the complete spectrum of the scores regions. We proved our algorithms have lower False Positive Rate (FPR) and memory usage compared with the existing approaches to learned Bloom filter. We also demonstrated the improved performance of our algorithms on real-world datasets.
A Comparison of Semantic Similarity Methods for Maximum Human Interpretability
Authors: Pinky Sitikhu, Kritish Pahi, Pujan Thapa, Subarna Shakya
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

The inclusion of semantic information in any similarity measures improves the efficiency of the similarity measure and provides human interpretable results for further analysis. The similarity calculation method that focuses on features related to the text's words only, will give less accurate results. This paper presents three different methods that not only focus on the text's words but also incorporates semantic information of texts in their feature vector and computes semantic similarities. These methods are based on corpus-based and knowledge-based methods, which are: cosine similarity using tf-idf vectors, cosine similarity using word embedding and soft cosine similarity using word embedding. Among these three, cosine similarity using tf-idf vectors performed best in finding similarities between short news texts. The similar texts given by the method are easy to interpret and can be used directly in other information retrieval applications.
Communication-Efficient Local Decentralized SGD Methods
Authors: Xiang Li, Wenhao Yang, Shusen Wang, Zhihua Zhang
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributed Computing

Recently, the technique of local updates is a powerful tool in centralized settings to improve communication efficiency via periodical communication. For decentralized settings, it is still unclear how to efficiently combine local updates and decentralized communication. In this work, we propose an algorithm named as LD-SGD, which incorporates arbitrary update schemes that alternate between multiple Local updates and multiple Decentralized SGDs, and provide an analytical framework for LD-SGD. Under the framework, we present a sufficient condition to guarantee the convergence. We show that LD-SGD converges to a critical point for a wide range of update schemes when the objective is non-convex and the training data are non-identically independent distributed. Moreover, our framework brings many insights into the design of update schemes for decentralized optimization. As examples, we specify two update schemes and show how they help improve communication efficiency. Specifically, the first scheme alternates the number of local and global update steps. From our analysis, the ratio of the number of local updates to that of decentralized SGD trades off communication and computation. The second scheme is to periodically shrink the length of local updates. We show that the decaying strategy helps improve communication efficiency both theoretically and empirically.
Perception-Distortion Trade-off with Restricted Boltzmann Machines
Authors: Chris Cannella, Jie Ding, Mohammadreza Soltani, Vahid Tarokh
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00

In this work, we introduce a new procedure for applying Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) to missing data inference tasks, based on linearization of the effective energy function governing the distribution of observations. We compare the performance of our proposed procedure with those obtained using existing reconstruction procedures trained on incomplete data. We place these performance comparisons within the context of the perception-distortion trade-off observed in other data reconstruction tasks, which has, until now, remained unexplored in tasks relying on incomplete training data.
Generative Hierarchical Models for Parts, Objects, and Scenes
Authors: Fei Deng, Zhuo Zhi, Sungjin Ahn
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00

Compositional structures between parts and objects are inherent in natural scenes. Modeling such compositional hierarchies via unsupervised learning can bring various benefits such as interpretability and transferability, which are important in many downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose the first deep latent variable model, called RICH, for learning Representation of Interpretable Compositional Hierarchies. At the core of RICH is a latent scene graph representation that organizes the entities of a scene into a tree structure according to their compositional relationships. During inference, taking top-down approach, RICH is able to use higher-level representation to guide lower-level decomposition. This avoids the difficult problem of routing between parts and objects that is faced by bottom-up approaches. In experiments on images containing multiple objects with different part compositions, we demonstrate that RICH is able to learn the latent compositional hierarchy and generate imaginary scenes.
Self-Supervised Physics-Based Deep Learning MRI Reconstruction Without Fully-Sampled Data
Authors: Burhaneddin Yaman, Seyed Amir Hossein Hosseini, Steen Moeller, Jutta Ellermann, Kâmil Uǧurbil, Mehmet Akçakaya
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI Reconstruction, Self-Supervised Learning

Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a tool for improving accelerated MRI reconstruction. A common strategy among DL methods is the physics-based approach, where a regularized iterative algorithm alternating between data consistency and a regularizer is unrolled for a finite number of iterations. This unrolled network is then trained end-to-end in a supervised manner, using fully-sampled data as ground truth for the network output. However, in a number of scenarios, it is difficult to obtain fully-sampled datasets, due to physiological constraints such as organ motion or physical constraints such as signal decay. In this work, we tackle this issue and propose a self-supervised learning strategy that enables physics-based DL reconstruction without fully-sampled data. Our approach is to divide the acquired sub-sampled points for each scan into training and validation subsets. During training, data consistency is enforced over the training subset, while the validation subset is used to define the loss function. Results show that the proposed self-supervised learning method successfully reconstructs images without fully-sampled data, performing similarly to the supervised approach that is trained with fully-sampled references. This has implications for physics-based inverse problem approaches for other settings, where fully-sampled data is not available or possible to acquire.
Unsupervised Out-of-Distribution Detection with Batch Normalization
Authors: Jiaming Song, Yang song, Stefano Ermon
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Likelihood from a generative model is a natural statistic for detecting out-of-distribution (OoD) samples. However, generative models have been shown to assign higher likelihood to OoD samples compared to ones from the training distribution, preventing simple threshold-based detection rules. We demonstrate that OoD detection fails even when using more sophisticated statistics based on the likelihoods of individual samples. To address these issues, we propose a new method that leverages batch normalization. We argue that batch normalization for generative models challenges the traditional i.i.d. data assumption and changes the corresponding maximum likelihood objective. Based on this insight, we propose to exploit in-batch dependencies for OoD detection. Empirical results suggest that this leads to more robust detection for high-dimensional images.
Using machine learning and information visualisation for discovering latent topics in Twitter news
Authors: Vladimir Vargas-Calderón, Marlon Steibeck Dominguez, N. Parra-A., Herbert Vinck-Posada, Jorge E. Camargo
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering, General Classification

We propose a method to discover latent topics and visualise large collections of tweets for easy identification and interpretation of topics, and exemplify its use with tweets from a Colombian mass media giant in the period 2014--2019. The latent topic analysis is performed in two ways: with the training of a Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, and with the combination of the FastText unsupervised model to represent tweets as vectors and the implementation of K-means clustering to group tweets into topics. Using a classification task, we found that people respond differently according to the various news topics. The classification tasks consists of the following: given a reply to a news tweet, we train a supervised algorithm to predict the topic of the news tweet solely from the reply. Furthermore, we show how the Colombian peace treaty has had a profound impact on the Colombian society, as it is the topic in which most people engage to show their opinions.
Discovering the Compositional Structure of Vector Representations with Role Learning Networks
Authors: Paul Soulos, Tom McCoy, Tal Linzen, Paul Smolensky
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP (BlackboxNLP) 2020 11
Tasks: Sentence Embedding

How can neural networks perform so well on compositional tasks even though they lack explicit compositional representations? We use a novel analysis technique called ROLE to show that recurrent neural networks perform well on such tasks by converging to solutions which implicitly represent symbolic structure. This method uncovers a symbolic structure which, when properly embedded in vector space, closely approximates the encodings of a standard seq2seq network trained to perform the compositional SCAN task. We verify the causal importance of the discovered symbolic structure by showing that, when we systematically manipulate hidden embeddings based on this symbolic structure, the model's output is changed in the way predicted by our analysis.
Boosting Mapping Functionality of Neural Networks via Latent Feature Generation based on Reversible Learning
Authors: Jongmin Yu
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Face Recognition, image-classification, Image Classification

This paper addresses a boosting method for mapping functionality of neural networks in visual recognition such as image classification and face recognition. We present reversible learning for generating and learning latent features using the network itself. By generating latent features corresponding to hard samples and applying the generated features in a training stage, reversible learning can improve a mapping functionality without additional data augmentation or handling the bias of dataset. We demonstrate an efficiency of the proposed method on the MNIST,Cifar-10/100, and Extremely Biased and poorly categorized dataset (EBPC dataset). The experimental results show that the proposed method can outperform existing state-of-the-art methods in visual recognition. Extensive analysis shows that our method can efficiently improve the mapping capability of a network.
Biologic and Prognostic Feature Scores from Whole-Slide Histology Images Using Deep Learning
Authors: Okyaz Eminaga, Mahmood Abbas, Yuri Tolkach, Rosalie Nolley, Christian Kunder, Axel Semjonow, Martin Boegemann
Date: 2019-10-21 00:00:00

Histopathology is a reflection of the molecular changes and provides prognostic phenotypes representing the disease progression. In this study, we introduced feature scores generated from hematoxylin and eosin histology images based on deep learning (DL) models developed for prostate pathology. We demonstrated that these feature scores were significantly prognostic for time to event endpoints (biochemical recurrence and cancer-specific survival) and had simultaneously molecular biologic associations to relevant genomic alterations and molecular subtypes using already trained DL models that were not previously exposed to the datasets of the current study. Further, we discussed the potential of such feature scores to improve the current tumor grading system and the challenges that are associated with tumor heterogeneity and the development of prognostic models from histology images. Our findings uncover the potential of feature scores from histology images as digital biomarkers in precision medicine and as an expanding utility for digital pathology.