pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Searching for Winograd-aware Quantized Networks
Authors: Javier Fernandez-Marques, Paul N. Whatmough, Andrew Mundy, Matthew Mattina
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, Quantization

Lightweight architectural designs of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) together with quantization have paved the way for the deployment of demanding computer vision applications on mobile devices. Parallel to this, alternative formulations to the convolution operation such as FFT, Strassen and Winograd, have been adapted for use in CNNs offering further speedups. Winograd convolutions are the fastest known algorithm for spatially small convolutions, but exploiting their full potential comes with the burden of numerical error, rendering them unusable in quantized contexts. In this work we propose a Winograd-aware formulation of convolution layers which exposes the numerical inaccuracies introduced by the Winograd transformations to the learning of the model parameters, enabling the design of competitive quantized models without impacting model size. We also address the source of the numerical error and propose a relaxation on the form of the transformation matrices, resulting in up to 10% higher classification accuracy on CIFAR-10. Finally, we propose wiNAS, a neural architecture search (NAS) framework that jointly optimizes a given macro-architecture for accuracy and latency leveraging Winograd-aware layers. A Winograd-aware ResNet-18 optimized with wiNAS for CIFAR-10 results in 2.66x speedup compared to im2row, one of the most widely used optimized convolution implementations, with no loss in accuracy.
End-to-end Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction via Learning to Link
Authors: Haolin Song, Chen Zhang, Qiuchi Li, Dawei Song
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Emotion Cause Extraction, Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction, Link Prediction, Multi-Task Learning

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE), as an emergent natural language processing task, aims at jointly investigating emotions and their underlying causes in documents. It extends the previous emotion cause extraction (ECE) task, yet without requiring a set of pre-given emotion clauses as in ECE. Existing approaches to ECPE generally adopt a two-stage method, i.e., (1) emotion and cause detection, and then (2) pairing the detected emotions and causes. Such pipeline method, while intuitive, suffers from two critical issues, including error propagation across stages that may hinder the effectiveness, and high computational cost that would limit the practical application of the method. To tackle these issues, we propose a multi-task learning model that can extract emotions, causes and emotion-cause pairs simultaneously in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, our model regards pair extraction as a link prediction task, and learns to link from emotion clauses to cause clauses, i.e., the links are directional. Emotion extraction and cause extraction are incorporated into the model as auxiliary tasks, which further boost the pair extraction. Experiments are conducted on an ECPE benchmarking dataset. The results show that our proposed model outperforms a range of state-of-the-art approaches.
Missing Data Imputation for Classification Problems
Authors: Arkopal Choudhury, Michael R. Kosorok
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Imputation

Imputation of missing data is a common application in various classification problems where the feature training matrix has missingness. A widely used solution to this imputation problem is based on the lazy learning technique, $k$-nearest neighbor (kNN) approach. However, most of the previous work on missing data does not take into account the presence of the class label in the classification problem. Also, existing kNN imputation methods use variants of Minkowski distance as a measure of distance, which does not work well with heterogeneous data. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative kNN imputation technique based on class weighted grey distance between the missing datum and all the training data. Grey distance works well in heterogeneous data with missing instances. The distance is weighted by Mutual Information (MI) which is a measure of feature relevance between the features and the class label. This ensures that the imputation of the training data is directed towards improving classification performance. This class weighted grey kNN imputation algorithm demonstrates improved performance when compared to other kNN imputation algorithms, as well as standard imputation algorithms such as MICE and missForest, in imputation and classification problems. These problems are based on simulated scenarios and UCI datasets with various rates of missingness.
Gödel's Sentence Is An Adversarial Example But Unsolvable
Authors: Xiaodong Qi, Lansheng Han
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

In recent years, different types of adversarial examples from different fields have emerged endlessly, including purely natural ones without perturbations. A variety of defenses are proposed and then broken quickly. Two fundamental questions need to be asked: What's the reason for the existence of adversarial examples and are adversarial examples unsolvable? In this paper, we will show the reason for the existence of adversarial examples is there are non-isomorphic natural explanations that can all explain data set. Specifically, for two natural explanations of being true and provable, G\"odel's sentence is an adversarial example but ineliminable. It can't be solved by the re-accumulation of data set or the re-improvement of learning algorithm. Finally, from the perspective of computability, we will prove the incomputability for adversarial examples, which are unrecognizable.
FPConv: Learning Local Flattening for Point Convolution
Authors: Yiqun Lin, Zizheng Yan, Haibin Huang, Dong Du, Ligang Liu, Shuguang Cui, Xiaoguang Han
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: 3D Object Classification, Scene Segmentation

We introduce FPConv, a novel surface-style convolution operator designed for 3D point cloud analysis. Unlike previous methods, FPConv doesn't require transforming to intermediate representation like 3D grid or graph and directly works on surface geometry of point cloud. To be more specific, for each point, FPConv performs a local flattening by automatically learning a weight map to softly project surrounding points onto a 2D grid. Regular 2D convolution can thus be applied for efficient feature learning. FPConv can be easily integrated into various network architectures for tasks like 3D object classification and 3D scene segmentation, and achieve comparable performance with existing volumetric-type convolutions. More importantly, our experiments also show that FPConv can be a complementary of volumetric convolutions and jointly training them can further boost overall performance into state-of-the-art results.
Hierarchical Conditional Relation Networks for Video Question Answering
Authors: Thao Minh Le, Vuong Le, Svetha Venkatesh, Truyen Tran
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA), Question Answering, Relation, Relation Network, Video Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Video question answering (VideoQA) is challenging as it requires modeling capacity to distill dynamic visual artifacts and distant relations and to associate them with linguistic concepts. We introduce a general-purpose reusable neural unit called Conditional Relation Network (CRN) that serves as a building block to construct more sophisticated structures for representation and reasoning over video. CRN takes as input an array of tensorial objects and a conditioning feature, and computes an array of encoded output objects. Model building becomes a simple exercise of replication, rearrangement and stacking of these reusable units for diverse modalities and contextual information. This design thus supports high-order relational and multi-step reasoning. The resulting architecture for VideoQA is a CRN hierarchy whose branches represent sub-videos or clips, all sharing the same question as the contextual condition. Our evaluations on well-known datasets achieved new SoTA results, demonstrating the impact of building a general-purpose reasoning unit on complex domains such as VideoQA.
Forming Diverse Teams from Sequentially Arriving People
Authors: Faez Ahmed, John Dickerson, Mark Fuge
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Collaborative work often benefits from having teams or organizations with heterogeneous members. In this paper, we present a method to form such diverse teams from people arriving sequentially over time. We define a monotone submodular objective function that combines the diversity and quality of a team and propose an algorithm to maximize the objective while satisfying multiple constraints. This allows us to balance both how diverse the team is and how well it can perform the task at hand. Using crowd experiments, we show that, in practice, the algorithm leads to large gains in team diversity. Using simulations, we show how to quantify the additional cost of forming diverse teams and how to address the problem of simultaneously maximizing diversity for several attributes (e.g., country of origin, gender). Our method has applications in collaborative work ranging from team formation, the assignment of workers to teams in crowdsourcing, and reviewer allocation to journal papers arriving sequentially. Our code is publicly accessible for further research.
Multimodal Transformer with Pointer Network for the DSTC8 AVSD Challenge
Authors: Hung Le, Nancy F. Chen
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Video Question Answering

Audio-Visual Scene-Aware Dialog (AVSD) is an extension from Video Question Answering (QA) whereby the dialogue agent is required to generate natural language responses to address user queries and carry on conversations. This is a challenging task as it consists of video features of multiple modalities, including text, visual, and audio features. The agent also needs to learn semantic dependencies among user utterances and system responses to make coherent conversations with humans. In this work, we describe our submission to the AVSD track of the 8th Dialogue System Technology Challenge. We adopt dot-product attention to combine text and non-text features of input video. We further enhance the generation capability of the dialogue agent by adopting pointer networks to point to tokens from multiple source sequences in each generation step. Our systems achieve high performance in automatic metrics and obtain 5th and 6th place in human evaluation among all submissions.
A Theory of Usable Information Under Computational Constraints
Authors: Yilun Xu, Shengjia Zhao, Jiaming Song, Russell Stewart, Stefano Ermon
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Informativeness, Representation Learning

We propose a new framework for reasoning about information in complex systems. Our foundation is based on a variational extension of Shannon's information theory that takes into account the modeling power and computational constraints of the observer. The resulting \emph{predictive $\mathcal{V}$-information} encompasses mutual information and other notions of informativeness such as the coefficient of determination. Unlike Shannon's mutual information and in violation of the data processing inequality, $\mathcal{V}$-information can be created through computation. This is consistent with deep neural networks extracting hierarchies of progressively more informative features in representation learning. Additionally, we show that by incorporating computational constraints, $\mathcal{V}$-information can be reliably estimated from data even in high dimensions with PAC-style guarantees. Empirically, we demonstrate predictive $\mathcal{V}$-information is more effective than mutual information for structure learning and fair representation learning.
Globally Optimal Contrast Maximisation for Event-based Motion Estimation
Authors: Daqi Liu, Álvaro Parra, Tat-Jun Chin
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Event-based Motion Estimation, Motion Estimation

Contrast maximisation estimates the motion captured in an event stream by maximising the sharpness of the motion compensated event image. To carry out contrast maximisation, many previous works employ iterative optimisation algorithms, such as conjugate gradient, which require good initialisation to avoid converging to bad local minima. To alleviate this weakness, we propose a new globally optimal event-based motion estimation algorithm. Based on branch-and-bound (BnB), our method solves rotational (3DoF) motion estimation on event streams, which supports practical applications such as video stabilisation and attitude estimation. Underpinning our method are novel bounding functions for contrast maximisation, whose theoretical validity is rigorously established. We show concrete examples from public datasets where globally optimal solutions are vital to the success of contrast maximisation. Despite its exact nature, our algorithm is currently able to process a 50,000 event input in 300 seconds (a locally optimal solver takes 30 seconds on the same input), and has the potential to be further speeded-up using GPUs.
Novel Change of Measure Inequalities with Applications to PAC-Bayesian Bounds and Monte Carlo Estimation
Authors: Yuki Ohnishi, Jean Honorio
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00

We introduce several novel change of measure inequalities for two families of divergences: $f$-divergences and $\alpha$-divergences. We show how the variational representation for $f$-divergences leads to novel change of measure inequalities. We also present a multiplicative change of measure inequality for $\alpha$-divergences and a generalized version of Hammersley-Chapman-Robbins inequality. Finally, we present several applications of our change of measure inequalities, including PAC-Bayesian bounds for various classes of losses and non-asymptotic intervals for Monte Carlo estimates.
Towards Better Surgical Instrument Segmentation in Endoscopic Vision: Multi-Angle Feature Aggregation and Contour Supervision
Authors: Fangbo Qin, Shan Lin, Yangming Li, Randall A. Bly, Kris S. Moe, Blake Hannaford
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Accurate and real-time surgical instrument segmentation is important in the endoscopic vision of robot-assisted surgery, and significant challenges are posed by frequent instrument-tissue contacts and continuous change of observation perspective. For these challenging tasks more and more deep neural networks (DNN) models are designed in recent years. We are motivated to propose a general embeddable approach to improve these current DNN segmentation models without increasing the model parameter number. Firstly, observing the limited rotation-invariance performance of DNN, we proposed the Multi-Angle Feature Aggregation (MAFA) method, leveraging active image rotation to gain richer visual cues and make the prediction more robust to instrument orientation changes. Secondly, in the end-to-end training stage, the auxiliary contour supervision is utilized to guide the model to learn the boundary awareness, so that the contour shape of segmentation mask is more precise. The proposed method is validated with ablation experiments on the novel Sinus-Surgery datasets collected from surgeons' operations, and is compared to the existing methods on a public dataset collected with a da Vinci Xi Robot.
Separating the Effects of Batch Normalization on CNN Training Speed and Stability Using Classical Adaptive Filter Theory
Authors: Elaina Chai, Mert Pilanci, Boris Murmann
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00

Batch Normalization (BatchNorm) is commonly used in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to improve training speed and stability. However, there is still limited consensus on why this technique is effective. This paper uses concepts from the traditional adaptive filter domain to provide insight into the dynamics and inner workings of BatchNorm. First, we show that the convolution weight updates have natural modes whose stability and convergence speed are tied to the eigenvalues of the input autocorrelation matrices, which are controlled by BatchNorm through the convolution layers' channel-wise structure. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that the speed and stability benefits are distinct effects. At low learning rates, it is BatchNorm's amplification of the smallest eigenvalues that improves convergence speed, while at high learning rates, it is BatchNorm's suppression of the largest eigenvalues that ensures stability. Lastly, we prove that in the first training step, when normalization is needed most, BatchNorm satisfies the same optimization as Normalized Least Mean Square (NLMS), while it continues to approximate this condition in subsequent steps. The analyses provided in this paper lay the groundwork for gaining further insight into the operation of modern neural network structures using adaptive filter theory.
On the simplicity and conditioning of low rank semidefinite programs
Authors: Lijun Ding, Madeleine Udell
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Matrix Completion, Stochastic Block Model

Low rank matrix recovery problems appear widely in statistics, combinatorics, and imaging. One celebrated method for solving these problems is to formulate and solve a semidefinite program (SDP). It is often known that the exact solution to the SDP with perfect data recovers the solution to the original low rank matrix recovery problem. It is more challenging to show that an approximate solution to the SDP formulated with noisy problem data acceptably solves the original problem; arguments are usually ad hoc for each problem setting, and can be complex. In this note, we identify a set of conditions that we call simplicity that limit the error due to noisy problem data or incomplete convergence. In this sense, simple SDPs are robust: simple SDPs can be (approximately) solved efficiently at scale; and the resulting approximate solutions, even with noisy data, can be trusted. Moreover, we show that simplicity holds generically, and also for many structured low rank matrix recovery problems, including the stochastic block model, $\mathbb{Z}_2$ synchronization, and matrix completion. Formally, we call an SDP simple if it has a surjective constraint map, admits a unique primal and dual solution pair, and satisfies strong duality and strict complementarity. However, simplicity is not a panacea: we show the Burer-Monteiro formulation of the SDP may have spurious second-order critical points, even for a simple SDP with a rank 1 solution.
Personalized Federated Learning for Intelligent IoT Applications: A Cloud-Edge based Framework
Authors: Qiong Wu, Kaiwen He, Xu Chen
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Edge-computing, Federated Learning, Human Activity Recognition, Personalized Federated Learning

Internet of Things (IoT) have widely penetrated in different aspects of modern life and many intelligent IoT services and applications are emerging. Recently, federated learning is proposed to train a globally shared model by exploiting a massive amount of user-generated data samples on IoT devices while preventing data leakage. However, the device, statistical and model heterogeneities inherent in the complex IoT environments pose great challenges to traditional federated learning, making it unsuitable to be directly deployed. In this article we advocate a personalized federated learning framework in a cloud-edge architecture for intelligent IoT applications. To cope with the heterogeneity issues in IoT environments, we investigate emerging personalized federated learning methods which are able to mitigate the negative effects caused by heterogeneity in different aspects. With the power of edge computing, the requirements for fast-processing capacity and low latency in intelligent IoT applications can also be achieved. We finally provide a case study of IoT based human activity recognition to demonstrate the effectiveness of personalized federated learning for intelligent IoT applications.
Exploring BERT Parameter Efficiency on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset v2.0
Authors: Eric Hulburd
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

In this paper we explore the parameter efficiency of BERT arXiv:1810.04805 on version 2.0 of the Stanford Question Answering dataset (SQuAD2.0). We evaluate the parameter efficiency of BERT while freezing a varying number of final transformer layers as well as including the adapter layers proposed in arXiv:1902.00751. Additionally, we experiment with the use of context-aware convolutional (CACNN) filters, as described in arXiv:1709.08294v3, as a final augmentation layer for the SQuAD2.0 tasks. This exploration is motivated in part by arXiv:1907.10597, which made a compelling case for broadening the evaluation criteria of artificial intelligence models to include various measures of resource efficiency. While we do not evaluate these models based on their floating point operation efficiency as proposed in arXiv:1907.10597, we examine efficiency with respect to training time, inference time, and total number of model parameters. Our results largely corroborate those of arXiv:1902.00751 for adapter modules, while also demonstrating that gains in F1 score from adding context-aware convolutional filters are not practical due to the increase in training and inference time.
Declarative Memory-based Structure for the Representation of Text Data
Authors: Sumant Pushp, Pragya Kashmira, Shyamanta M. Hazarika
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00

In the era of intelligent computing, computational progress in text processing is an essential consideration. Many systems have been developed to process text over different languages. Though, there is considerable development, they still lack in understanding of the text, i.e., instead of keeping text as knowledge, many treat text as a data. In this work we introduce a text representation scheme which is influenced by human memory infrastructure. Since texts are declarative in nature, a structural organization would foster efficient computation over text. We exploit long term episodic memory to keep text information observed over time. This not only keep fragments of text in an organized fashion but also reduces redundancy and stores the temporal relation among them. Wordnet has been used to imitate semantic memory, which works at word level to facilitate the understanding about individual words within text. Experimental results of various operation performed over episodic memory and growth of knowledge infrastructure over time is reported.
Coherent Gradients: An Approach to Understanding Generalization in Gradient Descent-based Optimization
Authors: Satrajit Chatterjee
Date: 2020-02-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Deep Learning, Descriptive, Open-Ended Question Answering

An open question in the Deep Learning community is why neural networks trained with Gradient Descent generalize well on real datasets even though they are capable of fitting random data. We propose an approach to answering this question based on a hypothesis about the dynamics of gradient descent that we call Coherent Gradients: Gradients from similar examples are similar and so the overall gradient is stronger in certain directions where these reinforce each other. Thus changes to the network parameters during training are biased towards those that (locally) simultaneously benefit many examples when such similarity exists. We support this hypothesis with heuristic arguments and perturbative experiments and outline how this can explain several common empirical observations about Deep Learning. Furthermore, our analysis is not just descriptive, but prescriptive. It suggests a natural modification to gradient descent that can greatly reduce overfitting.