pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Scalable Multi-Agent Coordination by Spatial Differentiation for Traffic Signal Control
Authors: Junjia Liu, Huimin Zhang, Zhuang Fu, Yao Wang
Date: 2020-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Graph Attention, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Traffic Signal Control

The intelligent control of the traffic signal is critical to the optimization of transportation systems. To achieve global optimal traffic efficiency in large-scale road networks, recent works have focused on coordination among intersections, which have shown promising results. However, existing studies paid more attention to observations sharing among intersections (both explicit and implicit) and did not care about the consequences after decisions. In this paper, we design a multiagent coordination framework based on Deep Reinforcement Learning methods for traffic signal control, defined as {\gamma}-Reward that includes both original {\gamma}-Reward and {\gamma}-Attention-Reward. Specifically, we propose the Spatial Differentiation method for coordination which uses the temporal-spatial information in the replay buffer to amend the reward of each action. A concise theoretical analysis that proves the proposed model can converge to Nash equilibrium is given. By extending the idea of Markov Chain to the dimension of space-time, this truly decentralized coordination mechanism replaces the graph attention method and realizes the decoupling of the road network, which is more scalable and more in line with practice. The simulation results show that the proposed model remains a state-of-the-art performance even not use a centralized setting. Code is available in https://github.com/Skylark0924/Gamma Reward.
Controllable Level Blending between Games using Variational Autoencoders
Authors: Anurag Sarkar, Zhihan Yang, Seth Cooper
Date: 2020-02-27 00:00:00

Previous work explored blending levels from existing games to create levels for a new game that mixes properties of the original games. In this paper, we use Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) for improving upon such techniques. VAEs are artificial neural networks that learn and use latent representations of datasets to generate novel outputs. We train a VAE on level data from Super Mario Bros. and Kid Icarus, enabling it to capture the latent space spanning both games. We then use this space to generate level segments that combine properties of levels from both games. Moreover, by applying evolutionary search in the latent space, we evolve level segments satisfying specific constraints. We argue that these affordances make the VAE-based approach especially suitable for co-creative level design and compare its performance with similar generative models like the GAN and the VAE-GAN.
Bridging the Gap between Spatial and Spectral Domains: A Survey on Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Zhiqian Chen, Fanglan Chen, Lei Zhang, Taoran Ji, Kaiqun Fu, Liang Zhao, Feng Chen, Lingfei Wu, Charu Aggarwal, Chang-Tien Lu
Date: 2020-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Natural Language Understanding, Speech Recognition

Deep learning's success has been widely recognized in a variety of machine learning tasks, including image classification, audio recognition, and natural language processing. As an extension of deep learning beyond these domains, graph neural networks (GNNs) are designed to handle the non-Euclidean graph-structure which is intractable to previous deep learning techniques. Existing GNNs are presented using various techniques, making direct comparison and cross-reference more complex. Although existing studies categorize GNNs into spatial-based and spectral-based techniques, there hasn't been a thorough examination of their relationship. To close this gap, this study presents a single framework that systematically incorporates most GNNs. We organize existing GNNs into spatial and spectral domains, as well as expose the connections within each domain. A review of spectral graph theory and approximation theory builds a strong relationship across the spatial and spectral domains in further investigation.
GATCluster: Self-Supervised Gaussian-Attention Network for Image Clustering
Authors: Chuang Niu, Jun Zhang, Ge Wang, Jimin Liang
Date: 2020-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2020 8
Tasks: Clustering, Image Clustering, Representation Learning, Self-Learning

We propose a self-supervised Gaussian ATtention network for image Clustering (GATCluster). Rather than extracting intermediate features first and then performing the traditional clustering algorithm, GATCluster directly outputs semantic cluster labels without further post-processing. Theoretically, we give a Label Feature Theorem to guarantee the learned features are one-hot encoded vectors, and the trivial solutions are avoided. To train the GATCluster in a completely unsupervised manner, we design four self-learning tasks with the constraints of transformation invariance, separability maximization, entropy analysis, and attention mapping. Specifically, the transformation invariance and separability maximization tasks learn the relationships between sample pairs. The entropy analysis task aims to avoid trivial solutions. To capture the object-oriented semantics, we design a self-supervised attention mechanism that includes a parameterized attention module and a soft-attention loss. All the guiding signals for clustering are self-generated during the training process. Moreover, we develop a two-step learning algorithm that is memory-efficient for clustering large-size images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in comparison with the state-of-the-art image clustering benchmarks. Our code has been made publicly available at https://github.com/niuchuangnn/GATCluster.
Stochastic Frank-Wolfe for Constrained Finite-Sum Minimization
Authors: Geoffrey Négiar, Gideon Dresdner, Alicia Tsai, Laurent El Ghaoui, Francesco Locatello, Robert M. Freund, Fabian Pedregosa
Date: 2020-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

We propose a novel Stochastic Frank-Wolfe (a.k.a. conditional gradient) algorithm for constrained smooth finite-sum minimization with a generalized linear prediction/structure. This class of problems includes empirical risk minimization with sparse, low-rank, or other structured constraints. The proposed method is simple to implement, does not require step-size tuning, and has a constant per-iteration cost that is independent of the dataset size. Furthermore, as a byproduct of the method we obtain a stochastic estimator of the Frank-Wolfe gap that can be used as a stopping criterion. Depending on the setting, the proposed method matches or improves on the best computational guarantees for Stochastic Frank-Wolfe algorithms. Benchmarks on several datasets highlight different regimes in which the proposed method exhibits a faster empirical convergence than related methods. Finally, we provide an implementation of all considered methods in an open-source package.
Comparison of Multi-Class and Binary Classification Machine Learning Models in Identifying Strong Gravitational Lenses
Authors: Hossen Teimoorinia, Robert D. Toyonaga, Sebastien Fabbro, Connor Bottrell
Date: 2020-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Binary Classification, General Classification, Multi-class Classification

Typically, binary classification lens-finding schemes are used to discriminate between lens candidates and non-lenses. However, these models often suffer from substantial false-positive classifications. Such false positives frequently occur due to images containing objects such as crowded sources, galaxies with arms, and also images with a central source and smaller surrounding sources. Therefore, a model might confuse the stated circumstances with an Einstein ring. It has been proposed that by allowing such commonly misclassified image types to constitute their own classes, machine learning models will more easily be able to learn the difference between images that contain real lenses, and images that contain lens imposters. Using Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images, in the F814W filter, we compare the usage of binary and multi-class classification models applied to the lens finding task. From our findings, we conclude there is not a significant benefit to using the multi-class model over a binary model. We will also present the results of a simple lens search using a multi-class machine learning model, and potential new lens candidates.
Analysis of diversity-accuracy tradeoff in image captioning
Authors: Ruotian Luo, Gregory Shakhnarovich
Date: 2020-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Captioning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We investigate the effect of different model architectures, training objectives, hyperparameter settings and decoding procedures on the diversity of automatically generated image captions. Our results show that 1) simple decoding by naive sampling, coupled with low temperature is a competitive and fast method to produce diverse and accurate caption sets; 2) training with CIDEr-based reward using Reinforcement learning harms the diversity properties of the resulting generator, which cannot be mitigated by manipulating decoding parameters. In addition, we propose a new metric AllSPICE for evaluating both accuracy and diversity of a set of captions by a single value.
Echo State Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Ankush Garg, Yuan Cao, Qi Ge
Date: 2020-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

We present neural machine translation (NMT) models inspired by echo state network (ESN), named Echo State NMT (ESNMT), in which the encoder and decoder layer weights are randomly generated then fixed throughout training. We show that even with this extremely simple model construction and training procedure, ESNMT can already reach 70-80% quality of fully trainable baselines. We examine how spectral radius of the reservoir, a key quantity that characterizes the model, determines the model behavior. Our findings indicate that randomized networks can work well even for complicated sequence-to-sequence prediction NLP tasks.
The hypergeometric test performs comparably to TF-IDF on standard text analysis tasks
Authors: Paul Sheridan, Mikael Onsjö
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Two-sample testing

Term frequency-inverse document frequency, or TF-IDF for short, and its many variants form a class of term weighting functions the members of which are widely used in text analysis applications. While TF-IDF was originally proposed as a heuristic, theoretical justifications grounded in information theory, probability, and the divergence from randomness paradigm have been advanced. In this work, we present an empirical study showing that TF-IDF corresponds very nearly with the hypergeometric test of statistical significance on selected real-data document retrieval, summarization, and classification tasks. These findings suggest that a fundamental mathematical connection between TF-IDF and the negative logarithm of the hypergeometric test P-value (i.e., a hypergeometric distribution tail probability) remains to be elucidated. We advance the empirical analyses herein as a first step toward explaining the long-standing effectiveness of TF-IDF from a statistical significance testing lens. It is our aspiration that these results will open the door to the systematic evaluation of significance testing derived term weighting functions in text analysis applications.
A Deep Unsupervised Feature Learning Spiking Neural Network with Binarized Classification Layers for EMNIST Classification using SpykeFlow
Authors: Ruthvik Vaila, John Chiasson, Vishal Saxena
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

End user AI is trained on large server farms with data collected from the users. With ever increasing demand for IOT devices, there is a need for deep learning approaches that can be implemented (at the edge) in an energy efficient manner. In this work we approach this using spiking neural networks. The unsupervised learning technique of spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) using binary activations are used to extract features from spiking input data. Gradient descent (backpropagation) is used only on the output layer to perform the training for classification. The accuracies obtained for the balanced EMNIST data set compare favorably with other approaches. The effect of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) approximations on learning capabilities of our network are also explored.
Towards Universal Representation Learning for Deep Face Recognition
Authors: Yichun Shi, Xiang Yu, Kihyuk Sohn, Manmohan Chandraker, Anil K. Jain
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Face Recognition, Representation Learning

Recognizing wild faces is extremely hard as they appear with all kinds of variations. Traditional methods either train with specifically annotated variation data from target domains, or by introducing unlabeled target variation data to adapt from the training data. Instead, we propose a universal representation learning framework that can deal with larger variation unseen in the given training data without leveraging target domain knowledge. We firstly synthesize training data alongside some semantically meaningful variations, such as low resolution, occlusion and head pose. However, directly feeding the augmented data for training will not converge well as the newly introduced samples are mostly hard examples. We propose to split the feature embedding into multiple sub-embeddings, and associate different confidence values for each sub-embedding to smooth the training procedure. The sub-embeddings are further decorrelated by regularizing variation classification loss and variation adversarial loss on different partitions of them. Experiments show that our method achieves top performance on general face recognition datasets such as LFW and MegaFace, while significantly better on extreme benchmarks such as TinyFace and IJB-S.
Tensor Decompositions in Deep Learning
Authors: Davide Bacciu, Danilo P. Mandic
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning

The paper surveys the topic of tensor decompositions in modern machine learning applications. It focuses on three active research topics of significant relevance for the community. After a brief review of consolidated works on multi-way data analysis, we consider the use of tensor decompositions in compressing the parameter space of deep learning models. Lastly, we discuss how tensor methods can be leveraged to yield richer adaptive representations of complex data, including structured information. The paper concludes with a discussion on interesting open research challenges.
Policy Evaluation Networks
Authors: Jean Harb, Tom Schaul, Doina Precup, Pierre-Luc Bacon
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning

Many reinforcement learning algorithms use value functions to guide the search for better policies. These methods estimate the value of a single policy while generalizing across many states. The core idea of this paper is to flip this convention and estimate the value of many policies, for a single set of states. This approach opens up the possibility of performing direct gradient ascent in policy space without seeing any new data. The main challenge for this approach is finding a way to represent complex policies that facilitates learning and generalization. To address this problem, we introduce a scalable, differentiable fingerprinting mechanism that retains essential policy information in a concise embedding. Our empirical results demonstrate that combining these three elements (learned Policy Evaluation Network, policy fingerprints, gradient ascent) can produce policies that outperform those that generated the training data, in zero-shot manner.
Representation Learning Through Latent Canonicalizations
Authors: Or Litany, Ari Morcos, Srinath Sridhar, Leonidas Guibas, Judy Hoffman
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Representation Learning

We seek to learn a representation on a large annotated data source that generalizes to a target domain using limited new supervision. Many prior approaches to this problem have focused on learning "disentangled" representations so that as individual factors vary in a new domain, only a portion of the representation need be updated. In this work, we seek the generalization power of disentangled representations, but relax the requirement of explicit latent disentanglement and instead encourage linearity of individual factors of variation by requiring them to be manipulable by learned linear transformations. We dub these transformations latent canonicalizers, as they aim to modify the value of a factor to a pre-determined (but arbitrary) canonical value (e.g., recoloring the image foreground to black). Assuming a source domain with access to meta-labels specifying the factors of variation within an image, we demonstrate experimentally that our method helps reduce the number of observations needed to generalize to a similar target domain when compared to a number of supervised baselines.
A Simple and Agile Cloud Infrastructure to Support Cybersecurity Oriented Machine Learning Workflows
Authors: Konstantin Berlin, Ajay Lakshminarayanarao
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Generating up to date, well labeled datasets for machine learning (ML) security models is a unique engineering challenge, as large data volumes, complexity of labeling, and constant concept drift makes it difficult to generate effective training datasets. Here we describe a simple, resilient cloud infrastructure for generating ML training and testing datasets, that has enhanced the speed at which our team is able to research and keep in production a multitude of security ML models.
Joint Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow and Egomotion with Bi-Level Optimization
Authors: Shihao Jiang, Dylan Campbell, Miaomiao Liu, Stephen Gould, Richard Hartley
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation

We address the problem of joint optical flow and camera motion estimation in rigid scenes by incorporating geometric constraints into an unsupervised deep learning framework. Unlike existing approaches which rely on brightness constancy and local smoothness for optical flow estimation, we exploit the global relationship between optical flow and camera motion using epipolar geometry. In particular, we formulate the prediction of optical flow and camera motion as a bi-level optimization problem, consisting of an upper-level problem to estimate the flow that conforms to the predicted camera motion, and a lower-level problem to estimate the camera motion given the predicted optical flow. We use implicit differentiation to enable back-propagation through the lower-level geometric optimization layer independent of its implementation, allowing end-to-end training of the network. With globally-enforced geometric constraints, we are able to improve the quality of the estimated optical flow in challenging scenarios and obtain better camera motion estimates compared to other unsupervised learning methods.
Improving Robustness of Deep-Learning-Based Image Reconstruction
Authors: Ankit Raj, Yoram Bresler, Bo Li
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: compressed sensing, Deep Learning, Image Reconstruction

Deep-learning-based methods for different applications have been shown vulnerable to adversarial examples. These examples make deployment of such models in safety-critical tasks questionable. Use of deep neural networks as inverse problem solvers has generated much excitement for medical imaging including CT and MRI, but recently a similar vulnerability has also been demonstrated for these tasks. We show that for such inverse problem solvers, one should analyze and study the effect of adversaries in the measurement-space, instead of the signal-space as in previous work. In this paper, we propose to modify the training strategy of end-to-end deep-learning-based inverse problem solvers to improve robustness. We introduce an auxiliary network to generate adversarial examples, which is used in a min-max formulation to build robust image reconstruction networks. Theoretically, we show for a linear reconstruction scheme the min-max formulation results in a singular-value(s) filter regularized solution, which suppresses the effect of adversarial examples occurring because of ill-conditioning in the measurement matrix. We find that a linear network using the proposed min-max learning scheme indeed converges to the same solution. In addition, for non-linear Compressed Sensing (CS) reconstruction using deep networks, we show significant improvement in robustness using the proposed approach over other methods. We complement the theory by experiments for CS on two different datasets and evaluate the effect of increasing perturbations on trained networks. We find the behavior for ill-conditioned and well-conditioned measurement matrices to be qualitatively different.
Streaming Active Deep Forest for Evolving Data Stream Classification
Authors: Anh Vu Luong, Tien Thanh Nguyen, Alan Wee-Chung Liew
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Classification, General Classification

In recent years, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have gained progressive momentum in many areas of machine learning. The layer-by-layer process of DNNs has inspired the development of many deep models, including deep ensembles. The most notable deep ensemble-based model is Deep Forest, which can achieve highly competitive performance while having much fewer hyper-parameters comparing to DNNs. In spite of its huge success in the batch learning setting, no effort has been made to adapt Deep Forest to the context of evolving data streams. In this work, we introduce the Streaming Deep Forest (SDF) algorithm, a high-performance deep ensemble method specially adapted to stream classification. We also present the Augmented Variable Uncertainty (AVU) active learning strategy to reduce the labeling cost in the streaming context. We compare the proposed methods to state-of-the-art streaming algorithms in a wide range of datasets. The results show that by following the AVU active learning strategy, SDF with only 70\% of labeling budget significantly outperforms other methods trained with all instances.
Uncertainty Quantification for Sparse Deep Learning
Authors: Yuexi Wang, Veronika Ročková
Date: 2020-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Uncertainty Quantification, valid

Deep learning methods continue to have a decided impact on machine learning, both in theory and in practice. Statistical theoretical developments have been mostly concerned with approximability or rates of estimation when recovering infinite dimensional objects (curves or densities). Despite the impressive array of available theoretical results, the literature has been largely silent about uncertainty quantification for deep learning. This paper takes a step forward in this important direction by taking a Bayesian point of view. We study Gaussian approximability of certain aspects of posterior distributions of sparse deep ReLU architectures in non-parametric regression. Building on tools from Bayesian non-parametrics, we provide semi-parametric Bernstein-von Mises theorems for linear and quadratic functionals, which guarantee that implied Bayesian credible regions have valid frequentist coverage. Our results provide new theoretical justifications for (Bayesian) deep learning with ReLU activation functions, highlighting their inferential potential.