pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Set-equivariant Functions with SWARM Mappings
Authors: Roland Vollgraf
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00

In this work we propose a new neural network architecture that efficiently implements and learns general purpose set-equivariant functions. Such a function f maps a set of entities x = {x1, . . . , xn} from one domain to a set of same cardinality y = f (x) = {y1, . . . , yn} in another domain regardless of the ordering of the entities. The architecture is based on a gated recurrent network which is iteratively applied to all entities individually and at the same time syncs with the progression of the whole population. In reminiscence to this pattern, which can be frequently observed in nature, we call our approach SWARM mapping. Set-equivariant and generally permutation invariant functions are important building blocks for many state of the art machine learning approaches. Even in applications where the permutation invariance is not of primary interest, as to be seen in the recent success of attention based transformer models (Vaswani et. al. 2017). Accordingly, we demonstrate the power and usefulness of SWARM mappings in different applications. We compare the performance of our approach with another recently proposed set-equivariant function, the Set Transformer (Lee et.al. 2018) and we demonstrate that models solely based on SWARM layers gives state of the art results.
Model Bridging: Connection between Simulation Model and Neural Network
Authors: Keiichi Kisamori, Keisuke Yamazaki, Yuto Komori, Hiroshi Tokieda
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Interpretable Machine Learning, model

The interpretability of machine learning, particularly for deep neural networks, is crucial for decision making in real-world applications. One approach is replacing the un-interpretable machine learning model with a surrogate model, which has a simple structure for interpretation. Another approach is understanding the target system by using a simulation modeled by human knowledge with interpretable simulation parameters. Recently, simulator calibration has been developed based on kernel mean embedding to estimate the simulation parameters as posterior distributions. Our idea is to use a simulation model as an interpretable surrogate model. However, the computational cost of simulator calibration is high owing to the complexity of the simulation model. Thus, we propose a ''model-bridging'' framework to bridge machine learning models with simulation models by a series of kernel mean embeddings to address these difficulties. The proposed framework enables us to obtain predictions and interpretable simulation parameters simultaneously without the computationally expensive calculations of the simulations. In this study, we apply the proposed framework to essential simulations in the manufacturing industry, such as production simulation and fluid dynamics simulation.
A Bandit Approach to Posterior Dialog Orchestration Under a Budget
Authors: Sohini Upadhyay, Mayank Agarwal, Djallel Bounneffouf, Yasaman Khazaeni
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00

Building multi-domain AI agents is a challenging task and an open problem in the area of AI. Within the domain of dialog, the ability to orchestrate multiple independently trained dialog agents, or skills, to create a unified system is of particular significance. In this work, we study the task of online posterior dialog orchestration, where we define posterior orchestration as the task of selecting a subset of skills which most appropriately answer a user input using features extracted from both the user input and the individual skills. To account for the various costs associated with extracting skill features, we consider online posterior orchestration under a skill execution budget. We formalize this setting as Context Attentive Bandit with Observations (CABO), a variant of context attentive bandits, and evaluate it on simulated non-conversational and proprietary conversational datasets.
Baidu-UTS Submission to the EPIC-Kitchens Action Recognition Challenge 2019
Authors: Xiaohan Wang, Yu Wu, Linchao Zhu, Yi Yang
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In this report, we present the Baidu-UTS submission to the EPIC-Kitchens Action Recognition Challenge in CVPR 2019. This is the winning solution to this challenge. In this task, the goal is to predict verbs, nouns, and actions from the vocabulary for each video segment. The EPIC-Kitchens dataset contains various small objects, intense motion blur, and occlusions. It is challenging to locate and recognize the object that an actor interacts with. To address these problems, we utilize object detection features to guide the training of 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), which can significantly improve the accuracy of noun prediction. Specifically, we introduce a Gated Feature Aggregator module to learn from the clip feature and the object feature. This module can strengthen the interaction between the two kinds of activations and avoid gradient exploding. Experimental results demonstrate our approach outperforms other methods on both seen and unseen test set.
A Halo Merger Tree Generation and Evaluation Framework
Authors: Sandra Robles, Jonathan S. Gómez, Adín Ramírez Rivera, Jenny A. González, Nelson D. Padilla, Diego Dujovne
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Semi-analytic models are best suited to compare galaxy formation and evolution theories with observations. These models rely heavily on halo merger trees, and their realistic features (i.e., no drastic changes on halo mass or jumps on physical locations). Our aim is to provide a new framework for halo merger tree generation that takes advantage of the results of large volume simulations, with a modest computational cost. We treat halo merger tree construction as a matrix generation problem, and propose a Generative Adversarial Network that learns to generate realistic halo merger trees. We evaluate our proposal on merger trees from the EAGLE simulation suite, and show the quality of the generated trees.
A Retrospective Recount of Computer Architecture Research with a Data-Driven Study of Over Four Decades of ISCA Publications
Authors: Omer Anjum, Wen-mei Hwu, JinJun Xiong
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: document understanding, Natural Language Understanding

This study began with a research project, called DISCvR, conducted at the IBM-ILLINOIS Center for Cognitive Computing Systems Reseach. The goal of DISCvR was to build a practical NLP based AI pipeline for document understanding which will help us better understand the computation patterns and requirements of modern computing systems. While building such a prototype, an early use case came to us thanks to the 2017 IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO-50) Program Co-chairs, Drs. Hillery Hunter and Jaime Moreno. They asked us if we can perform some data-driven analysis of the past 50 years of MICRO papers and show some interesting historical perspectives on MICRO's 50 years of publication. We learned two important lessons from that experience: (1) building an AI solution to truly understand unstructured data is hard in spite of the many claimed successes in natural language understanding; and (2) providing a data-driven perspective on computer architecture research is a very interesting and fun project. Recently we decided to conduct a more thorough study based on all past papers of International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) from 1973 to 2018, which resulted this article. We recognize that we have just scratched the surface of natural language understanding of unstructured data, and there are many more aspects that we can improve. But even with our current study, we felt there were enough interesting findings that may be worthwhile to share with the community. Hence we decided to write this article to summarize our findings so far based only on ISCA publications. Our hope is to generate further interests from the community in this topic, and we welcome collaboration from the community to deepen our understanding both of the computer architecture research and of the challenges of NLP-based AI solutions.
Evaluating Computational Language Models with Scaling Properties of Natural Language
Authors: Shuntaro Takahashi, Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: CL 2019 9
Tasks: Text Generation

In this article, we evaluate computational models of natural language with respect to the universal statistical behaviors of natural language. Statistical mechanical analyses have revealed that natural language text is characterized by scaling properties, which quantify the global structure in the vocabulary population and the long memory of a text. We study whether five scaling properties (given by Zipf's law, Heaps' law, Ebeling's method, Taylor's law, and long-range correlation analysis) can serve for evaluation of computational models. Specifically, we test $n$-gram language models, a probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG), language models based on Simon/Pitman-Yor processes, neural language models, and generative adversarial networks (GANs) for text generation. Our analysis reveals that language models based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with a gating mechanism (i.e., long short-term memory, LSTM; a gated recurrent unit, GRU; and quasi-recurrent neural networks, QRNNs) are the only computational models that can reproduce the long memory behavior of natural language. Furthermore, through comparison with recently proposed model-based evaluation methods, we find that the exponent of Taylor's law is a good indicator of model quality.
Collective Mobile Sequential Recommendation: A Recommender System for Multiple Taxicabs
Authors: Tongwen Wu, Zizhen Zhang, Yanzhi Li, Jiahai Wang
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation

Mobile sequential recommendation was originally designed to find a promising route for a single taxicab. Directly applying it for multiple taxicabs may cause an excessive overlap of recommended routes. The multi-taxicab recommendation problem is challenging and has been less studied. In this paper, we first formalize a collective mobile sequential recommendation problem based on a classic mathematical model, which characterizes time-varying influence among competing taxicabs. Next, we propose a new evaluation metric for a collection of taxicab routes aimed to minimize the sum of potential travel time. We then develop an efficient algorithm to calculate the metric and design a greedy recommendation method to approximate the solution. Finally, numerical experiments show the superiority of our methods. In trace-driven simulation, the set of routes recommended by our method significantly outperforms those obtained by conventional methods.
Scalable Bayesian dynamic covariance modeling with variational Wishart and inverse Wishart processes
Authors: Creighton Heaukulani, Mark van der Wilk
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Variational Inference

We implement gradient-based variational inference routines for Wishart and inverse Wishart processes, which we apply as Bayesian models for the dynamic, heteroskedastic covariance matrix of a multivariate time series. The Wishart and inverse Wishart processes are constructed from i.i.d. Gaussian processes, existing variational inference algorithms for which form the basis of our approach. These methods are easy to implement as a black-box and scale favorably with the length of the time series, however, they fail in the case of the Wishart process, an issue we resolve with a simple modification into an additive white noise parameterization of the model. This modification is also key to implementing a factored variant of the construction, allowing inference to additionally scale to high-dimensional covariance matrices. Through experimentation, we demonstrate that some (but not all) model variants outperform multivariate GARCH when forecasting the covariances of returns on financial instruments.
Detection of Myocardial Infarction Based on Novel Deep Transfer Learning Methods for Urban Healthcare in Smart Cities
Authors: Ahmed Alghamdi, Mohamed Hammad, Hassan Ugail, Asmaa Abdel-Raheem, Khan Muhammad, Hany S. Khalifa, Ahmed A. Abd El-Latif
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diagnostic, Sensitivity, Specificity, Transfer Learning

. In this paper, an effective computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system is presented to detect MI signals using the convolution neural network (CNN) for urban healthcare in smart cities. Two types of transfer learning techniques are employed to retrain the pre-trained VGG-Net (Fine-tuning and VGG-Net as fixed feature extractor) and obtained two new networks VGG-MI1 and VGG-MI2. In the VGG-MI1 model, the last layer of the VGG-Net model is replaced with a specific layer according to our requirements and various functions are optimized to reduce overfitting. In the VGG-MI2 model, one layer of the VGG-Net model is selected as a feature descriptor of the ECG images to describe it with informative features. Considering the limited availability of dataset, ECG data is augmented which has increased the classification performance. Physikalisch-technische bundesanstalt (PTB) Diagnostic ECG database is used for experimentation, which has been widely employed in MI detection studies. In case of using VGG-MI1, we achieved an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 99.02%, 98.76%, and 99.17%, respectively and we achieved an accuracy of 99.22%, a sensitivity of 99.15%, and a specificity of 99.49% with VGG-MI2 model. Experimental results validate the efficiency of the proposed system in terms of accuracy sensitivity, and specificity.
Unsupervised Ensemble Classification with Sequential and Networked Data
Authors: Panagiotis A. Traganitis, Georgios B. Giannakis
Date: 2019-06-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Ensemble Learning, General Classification

Ensemble learning, the machine learning paradigm where multiple algorithms are combined, has exhibited promising perfomance in a variety of tasks. The present work focuses on unsupervised ensemble classification. The term unsupervised refers to the ensemble combiner who has no knowledge of the ground-truth labels that each classifier has been trained on. While most prior works on unsupervised ensemble classification are designed for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) data, the present work introduces an unsupervised scheme for learning from ensembles of classifiers in the presence of data dependencies. Two types of data dependencies are considered: sequential data and networked data whose dependencies are captured by a graph. Moment matching and Expectation Maximization algorithms are developed for the aforementioned cases, and their performance is evaluated on synthetic and real datasets.
Boosting the rule-out accuracy of deep disease detection using class weight modifiers
Authors: Alexandros Karargyris, Ken C. L. Wong, Joy T. Wu, Mehdi Moradi, Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00

In many screening applications, the primary goal of a radiologist or assisting artificial intelligence is to rule out certain findings. The classifiers built for such applications are often trained on large datasets that derive labels from clinical notes written for patients. While the quality of the positive findings described in these notes is often reliable, lack of the mention of a finding does not always rule out the presence of it. This happens because radiologists comment on the patient in the context of the exam, for example focusing on trauma as opposed to chronic disease at emergency rooms. However, this disease finding ambiguity can affect the performance of algorithms. Hence it is critical to model the ambiguity during training. We propose a scheme to apply reasonable class weight modifiers to our loss function for the no mention cases during training. We experiment with two different deep neural network architectures and show that the proposed method results in a large improvement in the performance of the classifiers, specially on negated findings. The baseline performance of a custom-made dilated block network proposed in this paper shows an improvement in comparison with baseline DenseNet-201, while both architectures benefit from the new proposed loss function weighting scheme. Over 200,000 chest X-ray images and three highly common diseases, along with their negated counterparts, are included in this study.
Leveraging Reinforcement Learning Techniques for Effective Policy Adoption and Validation
Authors: Nikki Lijing Kuang, Clement H. C. Leung
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Rewards and punishments in different forms are pervasive and present in a wide variety of decision-making scenarios. By observing the outcome of a sufficient number of repeated trials, one would gradually learn the value and usefulness of a particular policy or strategy. However, in a given environment, the outcomes resulting from different trials are subject to chance influence and variations. In learning about the usefulness of a given policy, significant costs are involved in systematically undertaking the sequential trials; therefore, in most learning episodes, one would wish to keep the cost within bounds by adopting learning stopping rules. In this paper, we examine the deployment of different stopping strategies in given learning environments which vary from highly stringent for mission critical operations to highly tolerant for non-mission critical operations, and emphasis is placed on the former with particular application to aviation safety. In policy evaluation, two sequential phases of learning are identified, and we describe the outcomes variations using a probabilistic model, with closedform expressions obtained for the key measures of performance. Decision rules that map the trial observations to policy choices are also formulated. In addition, simulation experiments are performed, which corroborate the validity of the theoretical results.
G-PATE: Scalable Differentially Private Data Generator via Private Aggregation of Teacher Discriminators
Authors: Yunhui Long, Boxin Wang, Zhuolin Yang, Bhavya Kailkhura, Aston Zhang, Carl A. Gunter, Bo Li
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Privacy Preserving

Recent advances in machine learning have largely benefited from the massive accessible training data. However, large-scale data sharing has raised great privacy concerns. In this work, we propose a novel privacy-preserving data Generative model based on the PATE framework (G-PATE), aiming to train a scalable differentially private data generator that preserves high generated data utility. Our approach leverages generative adversarial nets to generate data, combined with private aggregation among different discriminators to ensure strong privacy guarantees. Compared to existing approaches, G-PATE significantly improves the use of privacy budgets. In particular, we train a student data generator with an ensemble of teacher discriminators and propose a novel private gradient aggregation mechanism to ensure differential privacy on all information that flows from teacher discriminators to the student generator. In addition, with random projection and gradient discretization, the proposed gradient aggregation mechanism is able to effectively deal with high-dimensional gradient vectors. Theoretically, we prove that G-PATE ensures differential privacy for the data generator. Empirically, we demonstrate the superiority of G-PATE over prior work through extensive experiments. We show that G-PATE is the first work being able to generate high-dimensional image data with high data utility under limited privacy budgets ($\epsilon \le 1$). Our code is available at https://github.com/AI-secure/G-PATE.
Building a Benchmark Dataset and Classifiers for Sentence-Level Findings in AP Chest X-rays
Authors: Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood, Hassan M. Ahmad, Nadeem Ansari, Yaniv Gur, Satyananda Kashyap, Alexandros Karargyris, Mehdi Moradi, Anup Pillai, Karthik Sheshadri, Wei-Ting Wang, Ken C. L. Wong, Joy T. Wu
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Descriptive, Diagnostic, Sentence

Chest X-rays are the most common diagnostic exams in emergency rooms and hospitals. There has been a surge of work on automatic interpretation of chest X-rays using deep learning approaches after the availability of large open source chest X-ray dataset from NIH. However, the labels are not sufficiently rich and descriptive for training classification tools. Further, it does not adequately address the findings seen in Chest X-rays taken in anterior-posterior (AP) view which also depict the placement of devices such as central vascular lines and tubes. In this paper, we present a new chest X-ray benchmark database of 73 rich sentence-level descriptors of findings seen in AP chest X-rays. We describe our method of obtaining these findings through a semi-automated ground truth generation process from crowdsourcing of clinician annotations. We also present results of building classifiers for these findings that show that such higher granularity labels can also be learned through the framework of deep learning classifiers.
SeGMA: Semi-Supervised Gaussian Mixture Auto-Encoder
Authors: Marek Śmieja, Maciej Wołczyk, Jacek Tabor, Bernhard C. Geiger
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

We propose a semi-supervised generative model, SeGMA, which learns a joint probability distribution of data and their classes and which is implemented in a typical Wasserstein auto-encoder framework. We choose a mixture of Gaussians as a target distribution in latent space, which provides a natural splitting of data into clusters. To connect Gaussian components with correct classes, we use a small amount of labeled data and a Gaussian classifier induced by the target distribution. SeGMA is optimized efficiently due to the use of Cramer-Wold distance as a maximum mean discrepancy penalty, which yields a closed-form expression for a mixture of spherical Gaussian components and thus obviates the need of sampling. While SeGMA preserves all properties of its semi-supervised predecessors and achieves at least as good generative performance on standard benchmark data sets, it presents additional features: (a) interpolation between any pair of points in the latent space produces realistically-looking samples; (b) combining the interpolation property with disentangled class and style variables, SeGMA is able to perform a continuous style transfer from one class to another; (c) it is possible to change the intensity of class characteristics in a data point by moving the latent representation of the data point away from specific Gaussian components.
Reserve Pricing in Repeated Second-Price Auctions with Strategic Bidders
Authors: Alexey Drutsa
Date: 2019-06-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1

We study revenue optimization learning algorithms for repeated second-price auctions with reserve where a seller interacts with multiple strategic bidders each of which holds a fixed private valuation for a good and seeks to maximize his expected future cumulative discounted surplus. We propose a novel algorithm that has strategic regret upper bound of $O(\log\log T)$ for worst-case valuations. This pricing is based on our novel transformation that upgrades an algorithm designed for the setup with a single buyer to the multi-buyer case. We provide theoretical guarantees on the ability of a transformed algorithm to learn the valuation of a strategic buyer, which has uncertainty about the future due to the presence of rivals.