pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Differentially Private Federated Variational Inference
Authors: Mrinank Sharma, Michael Hutchinson, Siddharth Swaroop, Antti Honkela, Richard E. Turner
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Federated Learning, Variational Inference

In many real-world applications of machine learning, data are distributed across many clients and cannot leave the devices they are stored on. Furthermore, each client's data, computational resources and communication constraints may be very different. This setting is known as federated learning, in which privacy is a key concern. Differential privacy is commonly used to provide mathematical privacy guarantees. This work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to consider federated, differentially private, Bayesian learning. We build on Partitioned Variational Inference (PVI) which was recently developed to support approximate Bayesian inference in the federated setting. We modify the client-side optimisation of PVI to provide an (${\epsilon}$, ${\delta}$)-DP guarantee. We show that it is possible to learn moderately private logistic regression models in the federated setting that achieve similar performance to models trained non-privately on centralised data.
Fast Polynomial Kernel Classification for Massive Data
Authors: Jinshan Zeng, Minrun Wu, Shao-Bo Lin, Ding-Xuan Zhou
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

In the era of big data, it is desired to develop efficient machine learning algorithms to tackle massive data challenges such as storage bottleneck, algorithmic scalability, and interpretability. In this paper, we develop a novel efficient classification algorithm, called fast polynomial kernel classification (FPC), to conquer the scalability and storage challenges. Our main tools are a suitable selected feature mapping based on polynomial kernels and an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm for a related non-smooth convex optimization problem. Fast learning rates as well as feasibility verifications including the efficiency of an ADMM solver with convergence guarantees and the selection of center points are established to justify theoretical behaviors of FPC. Our theoretical assertions are verified by a series of simulations and real data applications. Numerical results demonstrate that FPC significantly reduces the computational burden and storage memory of existing learning schemes such as support vector machines, Nystr\"{o}m and random feature methods, without sacrificing their generalization abilities much.
AttKGCN: Attribute Knowledge Graph Convolutional Network for Person Re-identification
Authors: Bo Jiang, Xixi Wang, Jin Tang
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Person Re-Identification, Prediction

Discriminative feature representation of person image is important for person re-identification (Re-ID) task. Recently, attributes have been demonstrated beneficially in guiding for learning more discriminative feature representations for Re-ID. As attributes normally co-occur in person images, it is desirable to model the attribute dependencies to improve the attribute prediction and thus Re-ID results. In this paper, we propose to model these attribute dependencies via a novel attribute knowledge graph (AttKG), and propose a novel Attribute Knowledge Graph Convolutional Network (AttKGCN) to solve Re-ID problem. AttKGCN integrates both attribute prediction and Re-ID learning together in a unified end-to-end framework which can boost their performances, respectively. AttKGCN first builds a directed attribute KG whose nodes denote attributes and edges encode the co-occurrence relationships of different attributes. Then, AttKGCN learns a set of inter-dependent attribute classifiers which are combined with person visual descriptors for attribute prediction. Finally, AttKGCN integrates attribute description and deeply visual representation together to construct a more discriminative feature representation for Re-ID task. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AttKGCN on attribute prediction and Re-ID tasks.
PAC learning with stable and private predictions
Authors: Yuval Dagan, Vitaly Feldman
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, PAC learning, Prediction

We study binary classification algorithms for which the prediction on any point is not too sensitive to individual examples in the dataset. Specifically, we consider the notions of uniform stability (Bousquet and Elisseeff, 2001) and prediction privacy (Dwork and Feldman, 2018). Previous work on these notions shows how they can be achieved in the standard PAC model via simple aggregation of models trained on disjoint subsets of data. Unfortunately, this approach leads to a significant overhead in terms of sample complexity. Here we demonstrate several general approaches to stable and private prediction that either eliminate or significantly reduce the overhead. Specifically, we demonstrate that for any class $C$ of VC dimension $d$ there exists a $\gamma$-uniformly stable algorithm for learning $C$ with excess error $\alpha$ using $\tilde O(d/(\alpha\gamma) + d/\alpha^2)$ samples. We also show that this bound is nearly tight. For $\epsilon$-differentially private prediction we give two new algorithms: one using $\tilde O(d/(\alpha^2\epsilon))$ samples and another one using $\tilde O(d^2/(\alpha\epsilon) + d/\alpha^2)$ samples. The best previously known bounds for these problems are $O(d/(\alpha^2\gamma))$ and $O(d/(\alpha^3\epsilon))$, respectively.
Breaking the cycle -- Colleagues are all you need
Authors: Ori Nizan, Ayellet Tal
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Image-to-Image Translation, Multimodal Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation, Translation, Unsupervised Image-To-Image Translation

This paper proposes a novel approach to performing image-to-image translation between unpaired domains. Rather than relying on a cycle constraint, our method takes advantage of collaboration between various GANs. This results in a multi-modal method, in which multiple optional and diverse images are produced for a given image. Our model addresses some of the shortcomings of classical GANs: (1) It is able to remove large objects, such as glasses. (2) Since it does not need to support the cycle constraint, no irrelevant traces of the input are left on the generated image. (3) It manages to translate between domains that require large shape modifications. Our results are shown to outperform those generated by state-of-the-art methods for several challenging applications on commonly-used datasets, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Using Panoramic Videos for Multi-person Localization and Tracking in a 3D Panoramic Coordinate
Authors: Fan Yang, Feiran Li, Yang Wu, Sakriani Sakti, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking

3D panoramic multi-person localization and tracking are prominent in many applications, however, conventional methods using LiDAR equipment could be economically expensive and also computationally inefficient due to the processing of point cloud data. In this work, we propose an effective and efficient approach at a low cost. First, we obtain panoramic videos with four normal cameras. Then, we transform human locations from a 2D panoramic image coordinate to a 3D panoramic camera coordinate using camera geometry and human bio-metric property (i.e., height). Finally, we generate 3D tracklets by associating human appearance and 3D trajectory. We verify the effectiveness of our method on three datasets including a new one built by us, in terms of 3D single-view multi-person localization, 3D single-view multi-person tracking, and 3D panoramic multi-person localization and tracking. Our code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/fandulu/MPLT}.
A Proposal-based Approach for Activity Image-to-Video Retrieval
Authors: Ruicong Xu, Li Niu, Jianfu Zhang, Liqing Zhang
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Retrieval, Triplet, Video Retrieval

Activity image-to-video retrieval task aims to retrieve videos containing the similar activity as the query image, which is a challenging task because videos generally have many background segments irrelevant to the activity. In this paper, we utilize R-C3D model to represent a video by a bag of activity proposals, which can filter out background segments to some extent. However, there are still noisy proposals in each bag. Thus, we propose an Activity Proposal-based Image-to-Video Retrieval (APIVR) approach, which incorporates multi-instance learning into cross-modal retrieval framework to address the proposal noise issue. Specifically, we propose a Graph Multi-Instance Learning (GMIL) module with graph convolutional layer, and integrate this module with classification loss, adversarial loss, and triplet loss in our cross-modal retrieval framework. Moreover, we propose geometry-aware triplet loss based on point-to-subspace distance to preserve the structural information of activity proposals. Extensive experiments on three widely-used datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach.
Simple Pose: Rethinking and Improving a Bottom-up Approach for Multi-Person Pose Estimation
Authors: Jia Li, Wen Su, Zengfu Wang
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Human Pose Estimation, Keypoint Detection, Multi-Person Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

We rethink a well-know bottom-up approach for multi-person pose estimation and propose an improved one. The improved approach surpasses the baseline significantly thanks to (1) an intuitional yet more sensible representation, which we refer to as body parts to encode the connection information between keypoints, (2) an improved stacked hourglass network with attention mechanisms, (3) a novel focal L2 loss which is dedicated to hard keypoint and keypoint association (body part) mining, and (4) a robust greedy keypoint assignment algorithm for grouping the detected keypoints into individual poses. Our approach not only works straightforwardly but also outperforms the baseline by about 15% in average precision and is comparable to the state of the art on the MS-COCO test-dev dataset. The code and pre-trained models are publicly available online.
Merging Deterministic Policy Gradient Estimations with Varied Bias-Variance Tradeoff for Effective Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Gang Chen
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) on Markov decision processes (MDPs) with continuous action spaces is often approached by directly training parametric policies along the direction of estimated policy gradients (PGs). Previous research revealed that the performance of these PG algorithms depends heavily on the bias-variance tradeoffs involved in estimating and using PGs. A notable approach towards balancing this tradeoff is to merge both on-policy and off-policy gradient estimations. However existing PG merging methods can be sample inefficient and are not suitable to train deterministic policies directly. To address these issues, this paper introduces elite PGs and strengthens their variance reduction effect by adopting elitism and policy consolidation techniques to regularize policy training based on policy behavioral knowledge extracted from elite trajectories. Meanwhile, we propose a two-step method to merge elite PGs and conventional PGs as a new extension of the conventional interpolation merging method. At both the theoretical and experimental levels, we show that both two-step merging and interpolation merging can induce varied bias-variance tradeoffs during policy training. They enable us to effectively use elite PGs and mitigate their performance impact on trained policies. Our experiments also show that two-step merging can outperform interpolation merging and several state-of-the-art algorithms on six benchmark control tasks.
Causally Denoise Word Embeddings Using Half-Sibling Regression
Authors: Zekun Yang, Tianlin Liu
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, regression, Sentiment Analysis, Word Embeddings

Distributional representations of words, also known as word vectors, have become crucial for modern natural language processing tasks due to their wide applications. Recently, a growing body of word vector postprocessing algorithm has emerged, aiming to render off-the-shelf word vectors even stronger. In line with these investigations, we introduce a novel word vector postprocessing scheme under a causal inference framework. Concretely, the postprocessing pipeline is realized by Half-Sibling Regression (HSR), which allows us to identify and remove confounding noise contained in word vectors. Compared to previous work, our proposed method has the advantages of interpretability and transparency due to its causal inference grounding. Evaluated on a battery of standard lexical-level evaluation tasks and downstream sentiment analysis tasks, our method reaches state-of-the-art performance.
On the Robustness of Deep Learning-predicted Contention Models for Network Calculus
Authors: Fabien Geyer, Steffen Bondorf
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00

The network calculus (NC) analysis takes a simple model consisting of a network of schedulers and data flows crossing them. A number of analysis "building blocks" can then be applied to capture the model without imposing pessimistic assumptions like self-contention on tandems of servers. Yet, adding pessimism cannot always be avoided. To compute the best bound on a single flow's end-to-end delay thus boils down to finding the least pessimistic contention models for all tandems of schedulers in the network - and an exhaustive search can easily become a very resource intensive task. The literature proposes a promising solution to this dilemma: a heuristic making use of machine learning (ML) predictions inside the NC analysis. While results of this work were promising in terms of delay bound quality and computational effort, there is little to no insight on when a prediction is made or if the trained algorithm can achieve similarly striking results in networks vastly differing from its training data. In this paper, we address these pending questions. We evaluate the influence of the training data and its features on accuracy, impact and scalability. Additionally, we contribute an extension of the method by predicting the best $n$ contention model alternatives in order to achieve increased robustness for its application outside the training data. Our numerical evaluation shows that good accuracy can still be achieved on large networks although we restrict the training to networks that are two orders of magnitude smaller.
Which Channel to Ask My Question? Personalized Customer Service RequestStream Routing using DeepReinforcement Learning
Authors: Zining Liu, Chong Long, Xiaolu Lu, Zehong Hu, Jie Zhang, Yafang Wang
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Customer services are critical to all companies, as they may directly connect to the brand reputation. Due to a great number of customers, e-commerce companies often employ multiple communication channels to answer customers' questions, for example, chatbot and hotline. On one hand, each channel has limited capacity to respond to customers' requests, on the other hand, customers have different preferences over these channels. The current production systems are mainly built based on business rules, which merely considers tradeoffs between resources and customers' satisfaction. To achieve the optimal tradeoff between resources and customers' satisfaction, we propose a new framework based on deep reinforcement learning, which directly takes both resources and user model into account. In addition to the framework, we also propose a new deep-reinforcement-learning based routing method-double dueling deep Q-learning with prioritized experience replay (PER-DoDDQN). We evaluate our proposed framework and method using both synthetic and a real customer service log data from a large financial technology company. We show that our proposed deep-reinforcement-learning based framework is superior to the existing production system. Moreover, we also show our proposed PER-DoDDQN is better than all other deep Q-learning variants in practice, which provides a more optimal routing plan. These observations suggest that our proposed method can seek the trade-off where both channel resources and customers' satisfaction are optimal.
EDIT: Exemplar-Domain Aware Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Yuanbin Fu, Jiayi Ma, Lin Ma, Xiaojie Guo
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Image-to-image translation is to convert an image of the certain style to another of the target style with the content preserved. A desired translator should be capable to generate diverse results in a controllable (many-to-many) fashion. To this end, we design a novel generative adversarial network, namely exemplar-domain aware image-to-image translator (EDIT for short). The principle behind is that, for images from multiple domains, the content features can be obtained by a uniform extractor, while (re-)stylization is achieved by mapping the extracted features specifically to different purposes (domains and exemplars). The generator of our EDIT comprises of a part of blocks configured by shared parameters, and the rest by varied parameters exported by an exemplar-domain aware parameter network. In addition, a discriminator is equipped during the training phase to guarantee the output satisfying the distribution of the target domain. Our EDIT can flexibly and effectively work on multiple domains and arbitrary exemplars in a unified neat model. We conduct experiments to show the efficacy of our design, and reveal its advances over other state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Three Dimensional Route Planning for Multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles using Salp Swarm Algorithm
Authors: Priyansh Saxena, Ram Kishan Dewangan
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Navigation, Translation

Route planning for multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a series of translation and rotational steps from a given start location to the destination goal location. The goal of the route planning problem is to determine the most optimal route avoiding any collisions with the obstacles present in the environment. Route planning is an NP-hard optimization problem. In this paper, a newly proposed Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) is used, and its performance is compared with deterministic and other Nature-Inspired Algorithms (NIAs). The results illustrate that SSA outperforms all the other meta-heuristic algorithms in route planning for multiple UAVs in a 3D environment. The proposed approach improves the average cost and overall time by 1.25% and 6.035% respectively when compared to recently reported data. Route planning is involved in many real-life applications like robot navigation, self-driving car, autonomous UAV for search and rescue operations in dangerous ground-zero situations, civilian surveillance, military combat and even commercial services like package delivery by drones.
Semi-Supervised Hierarchical Recurrent Graph Neural Network for City-Wide Parking Availability Prediction
Authors: Weijia Zhang, Hao liu, Yanchi Liu, Jingbo Zhou, Hui Xiong
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Neural Network

The ability to predict city-wide parking availability is crucial for the successful development of Parking Guidance and Information (PGI) systems. Indeed, the effective prediction of city-wide parking availability can improve parking efficiency, help urban planning, and ultimately alleviate city congestion. However, it is a non-trivial task for predicting citywide parking availability because of three major challenges: 1) the non-Euclidean spatial autocorrelation among parking lots, 2) the dynamic temporal autocorrelation inside of and between parking lots, and 3) the scarcity of information about real-time parking availability obtained from real-time sensors (e.g., camera, ultrasonic sensor, and GPS). To this end, we propose Semi-supervised Hierarchical Recurrent Graph Neural Network (SHARE) for predicting city-wide parking availability. Specifically, we first propose a hierarchical graph convolution structure to model non-Euclidean spatial autocorrelation among parking lots. Along this line, a contextual graph convolution block and a soft clustering graph convolution block are respectively proposed to capture local and global spatial dependencies between parking lots. Additionally, we adopt a recurrent neural network to incorporate dynamic temporal dependencies of parking lots. Moreover, we propose a parking availability approximation module to estimate missing real-time parking availabilities from both spatial and temporal domain. Finally, experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the prediction performance of SHARE outperforms seven state-of-the-art baselines.
Exploiting Operation Importance for Differentiable Neural Architecture Search
Authors: Xukai Xie, Yuan Zhou, Sun-Yuan Kung
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Recently, differentiable neural architecture search methods significantly reduce the search cost by constructing a super network and relax the architecture representation by assigning architecture weights to the candidate operations. All the existing methods determine the importance of each operation directly by architecture weights. However, architecture weights cannot accurately reflect the importance of each operation; that is, the operation with the highest weight might not related to the best performance. To alleviate this deficiency, we propose a simple yet effective solution to neural architecture search, termed as exploiting operation importance for effective neural architecture search (EoiNAS), in which a new indicator is proposed to fully exploit the operation importance and guide the model search. Based on this new indicator, we propose a gradual operation pruning strategy to further improve the search efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method. Specifically, we achieve an error rate of 2.50\% on CIFAR-10, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. When transferred to ImageNet, it achieves the top-1 error of 25.6\%, comparable to the state-of-the-art performance under the mobile setting.
dpVAEs: Fixing Sample Generation for Regularized VAEs
Authors: Riddhish Bhalodia, Iain Lee, Shireen Elhabian
Date: 2019-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Unsupervised representation learning via generative modeling is a staple to many computer vision applications in the absence of labeled data. Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are powerful generative models that learn representations useful for data generation. However, due to inherent challenges in the training objective, VAEs fail to learn useful representations amenable for downstream tasks. Regularization-based methods that attempt to improve the representation learning aspect of VAEs come at a price: poor sample generation. In this paper, we explore this representation-generation trade-off for regularized VAEs and introduce a new family of priors, namely decoupled priors, or dpVAEs, that decouple the representation space from the generation space. This decoupling enables the use of VAE regularizers on the representation space without impacting the distribution used for sample generation, and thereby reaping the representation learning benefits of the regularizations without sacrificing the sample generation. dpVAE leverages invertible networks to learn a bijective mapping from an arbitrarily complex representation distribution to a simple, tractable, generative distribution. Decoupled priors can be adapted to the state-of-the-art VAE regularizers without additional hyperparameter tuning. We showcase the use of dpVAEs with different regularizers. Experiments on MNIST, SVHN, and CelebA demonstrate, quantitatively and qualitatively, that dpVAE fixes sample generation for regularized VAEs.