pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Domain Adaptation via Teacher-Student Learning for End-to-End Speech Recognition
Authors: Zhong Meng, Jinyu Li, Yashesh Gaur, Yifan Gong
Date: 2020-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Domain Adaptation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Teacher-student (T/S) has shown to be effective for domain adaptation of deep neural network acoustic models in hybrid speech recognition systems. In this work, we extend the T/S learning to large-scale unsupervised domain adaptation of an attention-based end-to-end (E2E) model through two levels of knowledge transfer: teacher's token posteriors as soft labels and one-best predictions as decoder guidance. To further improve T/S learning with the help of ground-truth labels, we propose adaptive T/S (AT/S) learning. Instead of conditionally choosing from either the teacher's soft token posteriors or the one-hot ground-truth label, in AT/S, the student always learns from both the teacher and the ground truth with a pair of adaptive weights assigned to the soft and one-hot labels quantifying the confidence on each of the knowledge sources. The confidence scores are dynamically estimated at each decoder step as a function of the soft and one-hot labels. With 3400 hours parallel close-talk and far-field Microsoft Cortana data for domain adaptation, T/S and AT/S achieve 6.3% and 10.3% relative word error rate improvement over a strong E2E model trained with the same amount of far-field data.
Cybernetical Concepts for Cellular Automaton and Artificial Neural Network Modelling and Implementation
Authors: Patrik Christen, Olivier Del Fabbro
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy

As a discipline cybernetics has a long and rich history. In its first generation it not only had a worldwide span, in the area of computer modelling, for example, its proponents such as John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, also came up with models and methods such as cellular automata and artificial neural networks, which are still the foundation of most modern modelling approaches. At the same time, cybernetics also got the attention of philosophers, such as the Frenchman Gilbert Simondon, who made use of cybernetical concepts in order to establish a metaphysics and a natural philosophy of individuation, giving cybernetics thereby a philosophical interpretation, which he baptised allagmatic. In this paper, we emphasise this allagmatic theory by showing how Simondon's philosophical concepts can be used to formulate a generic computer model or metamodel for complex systems modelling and its implementation in program code, according to generic programming. We also present how the developed allagmatic metamodel is capable of building simple cellular automata and artificial neural networks.
Generalizing Emergent Communication
Authors: Thomas A. Unger, Elia Bruni
Date: 2020-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Transfer Learning

We converted the recently developed BabyAI grid world platform to a sender/receiver setup in order to test the hypothesis that established deep reinforcement learning techniques are sufficient to incentivize the emergence of a grounded discrete communication protocol between generalized agents. This is in contrast to previous experiments that employed straight-through estimation or specialized inductive biases. Our results show that these can indeed be avoided, by instead providing proper environmental incentives. Moreover, they show that a longer interval between communications incentivized more abstract semantics. In some cases, the communicating agents adapted to new environments more quickly than a monolithic agent, showcasing the potential of emergent communication for transfer learning and generalization in general.
Modeling Uncertainty and Imprecision in Nonmonotonic Reasoning using Fuzzy Numbers
Authors: Sandip Paul, Kumar Sankar Ray, Diganta Saha
Date: 2020-01-03 00:00:00

To deal with uncertainty in reasoning, interval-valued logic has been developed. But uniform intervals cannot capture the difference in degrees of belief for different values in the interval. To salvage the problem triangular and trapezoidal fuzzy numbers are used as the set of truth values along with traditional intervals. Preorder-based truth and knowledge ordering are defined over the set of fuzzy numbers defined over $[0,1]$. Based on this enhanced set of epistemic states, an answer set framework is developed, with properly defined logical connectives. This type of framework is efficient in knowledge representation and reasoning with vague and uncertain information under nonmonotonic environment where rules may posses exceptions.
The Pedestrian Patterns Dataset
Authors: Kasra Mokhtari, Alan R. Wagner
Date: 2020-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Pedestrian Detection

We present the pedestrian patterns dataset for autonomous driving. The dataset was collected by repeatedly traversing the same three routes for one week starting at different specific timeslots. The purpose of the dataset is to capture the patterns of social and pedestrian behavior along the traversed routes at different times and to eventually use this information to make predictions about the risk associated with autonomously traveling along different routes. This dataset contains the Full HD videos and GPS data for each traversal. Fast R-CNN pedestrian detection method is applied to the captured videos to count the number of pedestrians at each video frame in order to assess the density of pedestrians along a route. By providing this large-scale dataset to researchers, we hope to accelerate autonomous driving research not only to estimate the risk, both to the public and to the autonomous vehicle but also accelerate research on long-term vision-based localization of mobile robots and autonomous vehicles of the future.
Listwise Learning to Rank by Exploring Unique Ratings
Authors: Xiaofeng Zhu, Diego Klabjan
Date: 2020-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning-To-Rank

In this paper, we propose new listwise learning-to-rank models that mitigate the shortcomings of existing ones. Existing listwise learning-to-rank models are generally derived from the classical Plackett-Luce model, which has three major limitations. (1) Its permutation probabilities overlook ties, i.e., a situation when more than one document has the same rating with respect to a query. This can lead to imprecise permutation probabilities and inefficient training because of selecting documents one by one. (2) It does not favor documents having high relevance. (3) It has a loose assumption that sampling documents at different steps is independent. To overcome the first two limitations, we model ranking as selecting documents from a candidate set based on unique rating levels in decreasing order. The number of steps in training is determined by the number of unique rating levels. We propose a new loss function and associated four models for the entire sequence of weighted classification tasks by assigning high weights to the selected documents with high ratings for optimizing Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG). To overcome the final limitation, we further propose a novel and efficient way of refining prediction scores by combining an adapted Vanilla Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model with pooling given selected documents at previous steps. We encode all of the documents already selected by an RNN model. In a single step, we rank all of the documents with the same ratings using the last cell of the RNN multiple times. We have implemented our models using three settings: neural networks, neural networks with gradient boosting, and regression trees with gradient boosting. We have conducted experiments on four public datasets. The experiments demonstrate that the models notably outperform state-of-the-art learning-to-rank models.
Frosting Weights for Better Continual Training
Authors: Xiaofeng Zhu, Feng Liu, Goce Trajcevski, Dingding Wang
Date: 2020-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning, Meta-Learning

Training a neural network model can be a lifelong learning process and is a computationally intensive one. A severe adverse effect that may occur in deep neural network models is that they can suffer from catastrophic forgetting during retraining on new data. To avoid such disruptions in the continuous learning, one appealing property is the additive nature of ensemble models. In this paper, we propose two generic ensemble approaches, gradient boosting and meta-learning, to solve the catastrophic forgetting problem in tuning pre-trained neural network models.
Understanding the QuickXPlain Algorithm: Simple Explanation and Formal Proof
Authors: Patrick Rodler
Date: 2020-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

In his seminal paper of 2004, Ulrich Junker proposed the QuickXPlain algorithm, which provides a divide-and-conquer computation strategy to find within a given set an irreducible subset with a particular (monotone) property. Beside its original application in the domain of constraint satisfaction problems, the algorithm has since then found widespread adoption in areas as different as model-based diagnosis, recommender systems, verification, or the Semantic Web. This popularity is due to the frequent occurrence of the problem of finding irreducible subsets on the one hand, and to QuickXPlain's general applicability and favorable computational complexity on the other hand. However, although (we regularly experience) people are having a hard time understanding QuickXPlain and seeing why it works correctly, a proof of correctness of the algorithm has never been published. This is what we account for in this work, by explaining QuickXPlain in a novel tried and tested way and by presenting an intelligible formal proof of it. Apart from showing the correctness of the algorithm and excluding the later detection of errors (proof and trust effect), the added value of the availability of a formal proof is, e.g., (i) that the workings of the algorithm often become completely clear only after studying, verifying and comprehending the proof (didactic effect), (ii) the shown proof methodology can be used as a guidance for proving other recursive algorithms (transfer effect), and (iii) the possibility of providing "gapless" correctness proofs of systems that rely on (results computed by) QuickXPlain, such as numerous model-based debuggers (completeness effect).
An adaptive data-driven approach to solve real-world vehicle routing problems in logistics
Authors: Emir Zunic, Dzenana Donko, Emir Buza
Date: 2020-01-05 00:00:00

Transportation occupies one-third of the amount in the logistics costs, and accordingly transportation systems largely influence the performance of the logistics system. This work presents an adaptive data-driven innovative modular approach for solving the real-world Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP) in the field of logistics. The work consists of two basic units: (i) an innovative multi-step algorithm for successful and entirely feasible solving of the VRP problems in logistics, (ii) an adaptive approach for adjusting and setting up parameters and constants of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm combines several data transformation approaches, heuristics and Tabu search. Moreover, as the performance of the algorithm depends on the set of control parameters and constants, a predictive model that adaptively adjusts these parameters and constants according to historical data is proposed. A comparison of the acquired results has been made using the Decision Support System with predictive models: Generalized Linear Models (GLM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The algorithm, along with the control parameters, which using the prediction method were acquired, was incorporated into a web-based enterprise system, which is in use in several big distribution companies in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The results of the proposed algorithm were compared with a set of benchmark instances and validated over real benchmark instances as well. The successful feasibility of the given routes, in a real environment, is also presented.
Data Curves Clustering Using Common Patterns Detection
Authors: Konstantinos F. Xylogiannopoulos
Date: 2020-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

For the past decades we have experienced an enormous expansion of the accumulated data that humanity produces. Daily a numerous number of smart devices, usually interconnected over internet, produce vast, real-values datasets. Time series representing datasets from completely irrelevant domains such as finance, weather, medical applications, traffic control etc. become more and more crucial in human day life. Analyzing and clustering these time series, or in general any kind of curves, could be critical for several human activities. In the current paper, the new Curves Clustering Using Common Patterns (3CP) methodology is introduced, which applies a repeated pattern detection algorithm in order to cluster sequences according to their shape and the similarities of common patterns between time series, data curves and eventually any kind of discrete sequences. For this purpose, the Longest Expected Repeated Pattern Reduced Suffix Array (LERP-RSA) data structure has been used in combination with the All Repeated Patterns Detection (ARPaD) algorithm in order to perform highly accurate and efficient detection of similarities among data curves that can be used for clustering purposes and which also provides additional flexibility and features.
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning as a Model of Human Task Interleaving
Authors: Christoph Gebhardt, Antti Oulasvirta, Otmar Hilliges
Date: 2020-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

How do people decide how long to continue in a task, when to switch, and to which other task? Understanding the mechanisms that underpin task interleaving is a long-standing goal in the cognitive sciences. Prior work suggests greedy heuristics and a policy maximizing the marginal rate of return. However, it is unclear how such a strategy would allow for adaptation to everyday environments that offer multiple tasks with complex switch costs and delayed rewards. Here we develop a hierarchical model of supervisory control driven by reinforcement learning (RL). The supervisory level learns to switch using task-specific approximate utility estimates, which are computed on the lower level. A hierarchically optimal value function decomposition can be learned from experience, even in conditions with multiple tasks and arbitrary and uncertain reward and cost structures. The model reproduces known empirical effects of task interleaving. It yields better predictions of individual-level data than a myopic baseline in a six-task problem (N=211). The results support hierarchical RL as a plausible model of task interleaving.
Plug-and-Play Rescaling Based Crowd Counting in Static Images
Authors: Usman Sajid, Guanghui Wang
Date: 2020-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Diversity

Crowd counting is a challenging problem especially in the presence of huge crowd diversity across images and complex cluttered crowd-like background regions, where most previous approaches do not generalize well and consequently produce either huge crowd underestimation or overestimation. To address these challenges, we propose a new image patch rescaling module (PRM) and three independent PRM employed crowd counting methods. The proposed frameworks use the PRM module to rescale the image regions (patches) that require special treatment, whereas the classification process helps in recognizing and discarding any cluttered crowd-like background regions which may result in overestimation. Experiments on three standard benchmarks and cross-dataset evaluation show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models in the RMSE evaluation metric with an improvement up to 10.4%, and possesses superior generalization ability to new datasets.
Artificial Intelligence for Social Good: A Survey
Authors: Zheyuan Ryan Shi, Claire Wang, Fei Fang
Date: 2020-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Artificial intelligence for social good (AI4SG) is a research theme that aims to use and advance artificial intelligence to address societal issues and improve the well-being of the world. AI4SG has received lots of attention from the research community in the past decade with several successful applications. Building on the most comprehensive collection of the AI4SG literature to date with over 1000 contributed papers, we provide a detailed account and analysis of the work under the theme in the following ways. (1) We quantitatively analyze the distribution and trend of the AI4SG literature in terms of application domains and AI techniques used. (2) We propose three conceptual methods to systematically group the existing literature and analyze the eight AI4SG application domains in a unified framework. (3) We distill five research topics that represent the common challenges in AI4SG across various application domains. (4) We discuss five issues that, we hope, can shed light on the future development of the AI4SG research.
RECAST: Interactive Auditing of Automatic Toxicity Detection Models
Authors: Austin P. Wright, Omar Shaikh, Haekyu Park, Will Epperson, Muhammed Ahmed, Stephane Pinel, Diyi Yang, Duen Horng Chau
Date: 2020-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Fairness

As toxic language becomes nearly pervasive online, there has been increasing interest in leveraging the advancements in natural language processing (NLP), from very large transformer models to automatically detecting and removing toxic comments. Despite the fairness concerns, lack of adversarial robustness, and limited prediction explainability for deep learning systems, there is currently little work for auditing these systems and understanding how they work for both developers and users. We present our ongoing work, RECAST, an interactive tool for examining toxicity detection models by visualizing explanations for predictions and providing alternative wordings for detected toxic speech.
MW-GAN: Multi-Warping GAN for Caricature Generation with Multi-Style Geometric Exaggeration
Authors: Haodi Hou, Jing Huo, Jing Wu, Yu-Kun Lai, Yang Gao
Date: 2020-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Caricature, Diversity, Style Transfer

Given an input face photo, the goal of caricature generation is to produce stylized, exaggerated caricatures that share the same identity as the photo. It requires simultaneous style transfer and shape exaggeration with rich diversity, and meanwhile preserving the identity of the input. To address this challenging problem, we propose a novel framework called Multi-Warping GAN (MW-GAN), including a style network and a geometric network that are designed to conduct style transfer and geometric exaggeration respectively. We bridge the gap between the style and landmarks of an image with corresponding latent code spaces by a dual way design, so as to generate caricatures with arbitrary styles and geometric exaggeration, which can be specified either through random sampling of latent code or from a given caricature sample. Besides, we apply identity preserving loss to both image space and landmark space, leading to a great improvement in quality of generated caricatures. Experiments show that caricatures generated by MW-GAN have better quality than existing methods.
Phase Transitions for the Information Bottleneck in Representation Learning
Authors: Tailin Wu, Ian Fischer
Date: 2020-01-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Representation Learning

In the Information Bottleneck (IB), when tuning the relative strength between compression and prediction terms, how do the two terms behave, and what's their relationship with the dataset and the learned representation? In this paper, we set out to answer these questions by studying multiple phase transitions in the IB objective: $\text{IB}_\beta[p(z|x)] = I(X; Z) - \beta I(Y; Z)$ defined on the encoding distribution p(z|x) for input $X$, target $Y$ and representation $Z$, where sudden jumps of $dI(Y; Z)/d \beta$ and prediction accuracy are observed with increasing $\beta$. We introduce a definition for IB phase transitions as a qualitative change of the IB loss landscape, and show that the transitions correspond to the onset of learning new classes. Using second-order calculus of variations, we derive a formula that provides a practical condition for IB phase transitions, and draw its connection with the Fisher information matrix for parameterized models. We provide two perspectives to understand the formula, revealing that each IB phase transition is finding a component of maximum (nonlinear) correlation between $X$ and $Y$ orthogonal to the learned representation, in close analogy with canonical-correlation analysis (CCA) in linear settings. Based on the theory, we present an algorithm for discovering phase transition points. Finally, we verify that our theory and algorithm accurately predict phase transitions in categorical datasets, predict the onset of learning new classes and class difficulty in MNIST, and predict prominent phase transitions in CIFAR10.
Investigation and Analysis of Hyper and Hypo neuron pruning to selectively update neurons during Unsupervised Adaptation
Authors: Vikramjit Mitra, Horacio Franco
Date: 2020-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Unseen or out-of-domain data can seriously degrade the performance of a neural network model, indicating the model's failure to generalize to unseen data. Neural net pruning can not only help to reduce a model's size but can improve the model's generalization capacity as well. Pruning approaches look for low-salient neurons that are less contributive to a model's decision and hence can be removed from the model. This work investigates if pruning approaches are successful in detecting neurons that are either high-salient (mostly active or hyper) or low-salient (barely active or hypo), and whether removal of such neurons can help to improve the model's generalization capacity. Traditional blind adaptation techniques update either the whole or a subset of layers, but have never explored selectively updating individual neurons across one or more layers. Focusing on the fully connected layers of a convolutional neural network (CNN), this work shows that it may be possible to selectively adapt certain neurons (consisting of the hyper and the hypo neurons) first, followed by a full-network fine tuning. Using the task of automatic speech recognition, this work demonstrates how the removal of hyper and hypo neurons from a model can improve the model's performance on out-of-domain speech data and how selective neuron adaptation can ensure improved performance when compared to traditional blind model adaptation.
Offline Contextual Bayesian Optimization for Nuclear Fusion
Authors: Youngseog Chung, Ian Char, Willie Neiswanger, Kirthevasan Kandasamy, Andrew Oakleigh Nelson, Mark D Boyer, Egemen Kolemen, Jeff Schneider
Date: 2020-01-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

Nuclear fusion is regarded as the energy of the future since it presents the possibility of unlimited clean energy. One obstacle in utilizing fusion as a feasible energy source is the stability of the reaction. Ideally, one would have a controller for the reactor that makes actions in response to the current state of the plasma in order to prolong the reaction as long as possible. In this work, we make preliminary steps to learning such a controller. Since learning on a real world reactor is infeasible, we tackle this problem by attempting to learn optimal controls offline via a simulator, where the state of the plasma can be explicitly set. In particular, we introduce a theoretically grounded Bayesian optimization algorithm that recommends a state and action pair to evaluate at every iteration and show that this results in more efficient use of the simulator.