pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LibriVoxDeEn: A Corpus for German-to-English Speech Translation and German Speech Recognition
Authors: Benjamin Beilharz, Xin Sun, Sariya Karimova, Stefan Riezler
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Sentence, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Translation

We present a corpus of sentence-aligned triples of German audio, German text, and English translation, based on German audiobooks. The speech translation data consist of 110 hours of audio material aligned to over 50k parallel sentences. An even larger dataset comprising 547 hours of German speech aligned to German text is available for speech recognition. The audio data is read speech and thus low in disfluencies. The quality of audio and sentence alignments has been checked by a manual evaluation, showing that speech alignment quality is in general very high. The sentence alignment quality is comparable to well-used parallel translation data and can be adjusted by cutoffs on the automatic alignment score. To our knowledge, this corpus is to date the largest resource for German speech recognition and for end-to-end German-to-English speech translation.
H-VECTORS: Utterance-level Speaker Embedding Using A Hierarchical Attention Model
Authors: Yanpei Shi, Qiang Huang, Thomas Hain
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Identification

In this paper, a hierarchical attention network to generate utterance-level embeddings (H-vectors) for speaker identification is proposed. Since different parts of an utterance may have different contributions to speaker identities, the use of hierarchical structure aims to learn speaker related information locally and globally. In the proposed approach, frame-level encoder and attention are applied on segments of an input utterance and generate individual segment vectors. Then, segment level attention is applied on the segment vectors to construct an utterance representation. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, NIST SRE 2008 Part1 dataset is used for training, and two datasets, Switchboard Cellular part1 and CallHome American English Speech, are used to evaluate the quality of extracted utterance embeddings on speaker identification and verification tasks. In comparison with two baselines, X-vector, X-vector+Attention, the obtained results show that H-vectors can achieve a significantly better performance. Furthermore, the extracted utterance-level embeddings are more discriminative than the two baselines when mapped into a 2D space using t-SNE.
Keyphrase Extraction from Disaster-related Tweets
Authors: Jishnu Ray Chowdhury, Cornelia Caragea, Doina Caragea
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyphrase Extraction, POS, Word Embeddings

While keyphrase extraction has received considerable attention in recent years, relatively few studies exist on extracting keyphrases from social media platforms such as Twitter, and even fewer for extracting disaster-related keyphrases from such sources. During a disaster, keyphrases can be extremely useful for filtering relevant tweets that can enhance situational awareness. Previously, joint training of two different layers of a stacked Recurrent Neural Network for keyword discovery and keyphrase extraction had been shown to be effective in extracting keyphrases from general Twitter data. We improve the model's performance on both general Twitter data and disaster-related Twitter data by incorporating contextual word embeddings, POS-tags, phonetics, and phonological features. Moreover, we discuss the shortcomings of the often used F1-measure for evaluating the quality of predicted keyphrases with respect to the ground truth annotations. Instead of the F1-measure, we propose the use of embedding-based metrics to better capture the correctness of the predicted keyphrases. In addition, we also present a novel extension of an embedding-based metric. The extension allows one to better control the penalty for the difference in the number of ground-truth and predicted keyphrases
A New Three-stage Curriculum Learning Approach to Deep Network Based Liver Tumor Segmentation
Authors: Huiyu Li, Xiabi Liu, Said Boumaraf, Weihua Liu, Xiaopeng Gong, Xiaohong Ma
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Automatic segmentation of liver tumors in medical images is crucial for the computer-aided diagnosis and therapy. It is a challenging task, since the tumors are notoriously small against the background voxels. This paper proposes a new three-stage curriculum learning approach for training deep networks to tackle this small object segmentation problem. The learning in the first stage is performed on the whole input to obtain an initial deep network for tumor segmenta-tion. Then the second stage of learning focuses the strength-ening of tumor specific features by continuing training the network on the tumor patches. Finally, we retrain the net-work on the whole input in the third stage, in order that the tumor specific features and the global context can be inte-grated ideally under the segmentation objective. Benefitting from the proposed learning approach, we only need to em-ploy one single network to segment the tumors directly. We evaluated our approach on the 2017 MICCAI Liver Tumor Segmentation challenge dataset. In the experiments, our approach exhibits significant improvement compared with the commonly used cascaded counterpart.
WOTBoost: Weighted Oversampling Technique in Boosting for imbalanced learning
Authors: Wenhao Zhang, Ramin Ramezani, Arash Naeim
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, General Classification, Intrusion Detection, Network Intrusion Detection

Machine learning classifiers often stumble over imbalanced datasets where classes are not equally represented. This inherent bias towards the majority class may result in low accuracy in labeling minority class. Imbalanced learning is prevalent in many real-world applications, such as medical research, network intrusion detection, and fraud detection in credit card transactions, etc. A good number of research works have been reported to tackle this challenging problem. For example, Synthetic Minority Over-sampling TEchnique (SMOTE) and ADAptive SYNthetic sampling approach (ADASYN) use oversampling techniques to balance the skewed datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel method that combines a Weighted Oversampling Technique and ensemble Boosting method (WOTBoost) to improve the classification accuracy of minority data without sacrificing the accuracy of the majority class. WOTBoost adjusts its oversampling strategy at each round of boosting to synthesize more targeted minority data samples. The adjustment is enforced using a weighted distribution. We compare WOTBoost with other four classification models (i.e., decision tree, SMOTE + decision tree, ADASYN + decision tree, SMOTEBoost) extensively on 18 public accessible imbalanced datasets. WOTBoost achieves the best G mean on 6 datasets and highest AUC score on 7 datasets.
Is There a Trade-Off Between Fairness and Accuracy? A Perspective Using Mismatched Hypothesis Testing
Authors: Sanghamitra Dutta, Dennis Wei, Hazar Yueksel, Pin-Yu Chen, Sijia Liu, Kush R. Varshney
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Fairness, Two-sample testing

A trade-off between accuracy and fairness is almost taken as a given in the existing literature on fairness in machine learning. Yet, it is not preordained that accuracy should decrease with increased fairness. Novel to this work, we examine fair classification through the lens of mismatched hypothesis testing: trying to find a classifier that distinguishes between two ideal distributions when given two mismatched distributions that are biased. Using Chernoff information, a tool in information theory, we theoretically demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, there always exist ideal distributions such that optimal fairness and accuracy (with respect to the ideal distributions) are achieved simultaneously: there is no trade-off. Moreover, the same classifier yields the lack of a trade-off with respect to ideal distributions while yielding a trade-off when accuracy is measured with respect to the given (possibly biased) dataset. To complement our main result, we formulate an optimization to find ideal distributions and derive fundamental limits to explain why a trade-off exists on the given biased dataset. We also derive conditions under which active data collection can alleviate the fairness-accuracy trade-off in the real world. Our results lead us to contend that it is problematic to measure accuracy with respect to data that reflects bias, and instead, we should be considering accuracy with respect to ideal, unbiased data.
Go with the Flow: Perception-refined Physics Simulation
Authors: Tom F. H. Runia, Kirill Gavrilyuk, Cees G. M. Snoek, Arnold W. M. Smeulders
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00

For many of the physical phenomena around us, we have developed sophisticated models explaining their behavior. Nevertheless, inferring specifics from visual observations is challenging due to the high number of causally underlying physical parameters -- including material properties and external forces. This paper addresses the problem of inferring such latent physical properties from observations. Our solution is an iterative refinement procedure with simulation at its core. The algorithm gradually updates the physical model parameters by running a simulation of the observed phenomenon and comparing the current simulation to a real-world observation. The physical similarity is computed using an embedding function that maps physically similar examples to nearby points. As a tangible example, we concentrate on flags curling in the wind -- a seemingly simple phenomenon but physically highly involved. Based on its underlying physical model and visual manifestation, we propose an instantiation of the embedding function. For this mapping, modeled as a deep network, we introduce a spectral decomposition layer that decomposes a video volume into its temporal spectral power and corresponding frequencies. In experiments, we demonstrate our method's ability to recover intrinsic and extrinsic physical parameters from both simulated and real-world video.
Can I teach a robot to replicate a line art
Authors: Raghav Brahmadesam Venkataramaiyer, Subham Kumar, Vinay P. Namboodiri
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00

Line art is arguably one of the fundamental and versatile modes of expression. We propose a pipeline for a robot to look at a grayscale line art and redraw it. The key novel elements of our pipeline are: a) we propose a novel task of mimicking line drawings, b) to solve the pipeline we modify the Quick-draw dataset to obtain supervised training for converting a line drawing into a series of strokes c) we propose a multi-stage segmentation and graph interpretation pipeline for solving the problem. The resultant method has also been deployed on a CNC plotter as well as a robotic arm. We have trained several variations of the proposed methods and evaluate these on a dataset obtained from Quick-draw. Through the best methods we observe an accuracy of around 98% for this task, which is a significant improvement over the baseline architecture we adapted from. This therefore allows for deployment of the method on robots for replicating line art in a reliable manner. We also show that while the rule-based vectorization methods do suffice for simple drawings, it fails for more complicated sketches, unlike our method which generalizes well to more complicated distributions.
Effect of Superpixel Aggregation on Explanations in LIME -- A Case Study with Biological Data
Authors: Ludwig Schallner, Johannes Rabold, Oliver Scholz, Ute Schmid
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Superpixels

End-to-end learning with deep neural networks, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has been demonstrated to be very successful for different tasks of image classification. To make decisions of black-box approaches transparent, different solutions have been proposed. LIME is an approach to explainable AI relying on segmenting images into superpixels based on the Quick-Shift algorithm. In this paper, we present an explorative study of how different superpixel methods, namely Felzenszwalb, SLIC and Compact-Watershed, impact the generated visual explanations. We compare the resulting relevance areas with the image parts marked by a human reference. Results show that image parts selected as relevant strongly vary depending on the applied method. Quick-Shift resulted in the least and Compact-Watershed in the highest correspondence with the reference relevance areas.
Topical Keyphrase Extraction with Hierarchical Semantic Networks
Authors: Yoo yeon Sung, Seoung Bum Kim
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyphrase Extraction

Topical keyphrase extraction is used to summarize large collections of text documents. However, traditional methods cannot properly reflect the intrinsic semantics and relationships of keyphrases because they rely on a simple term-frequency-based process. Consequently, these methods are not effective in obtaining significant contextual knowledge. To resolve this, we propose a topical keyphrase extraction method based on a hierarchical semantic network and multiple centrality network measures that together reflect the hierarchical semantics of keyphrases. We conduct experiments on real data to examine the practicality of the proposed method and to compare its performance with that of existing topical keyphrase extraction methods. The results confirm that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art topical keyphrase extraction methods in terms of the representativeness of the selected keyphrases for each topic. The proposed method can effectively reflect intrinsic keyphrase semantics and interrelationships.
Kernel density estimation based sampling for imbalanced class distribution
Authors: Firuz Kamalov
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Fraud Detection, Intrusion Detection

Imbalanced response variable distribution is a common occurrence in data science. In fields such as fraud detection, medical diagnostics, system intrusion detection and many others where abnormal behavior is rarely observed the data under study often features disproportionate target class distribution. One common way to combat class imbalance is through resampling the minority class to achieve a more balanced distribution. In this paper, we investigate the performance of the sampling method based on kernel density estimation (KDE). We believe that KDE offers a more natural way of generating new instances of minority class that is less prone to overfitting than other standard sampling techniques. It is based on a well established theory of nonparametric statistical estimation. Numerical experiments show that KDE can outperform other sampling techniques on a range of real life datasets as measured by F1-score and G-mean. The results remain consistent across a number of classification algorithms used in the experiments. Furthermore, the proposed method outperforms the benchmark methods irregardless of the class distribution ratio. We conclude, based on the solid theoretical foundation and strong experimental results, that the proposed method would be a valuable tool in problems involving imbalanced class distribution.
Using a KG-Copy Network for Non-Goal Oriented Dialogues
Authors: Debanjan Chaudhuri, Md Rashad Al Hasan Rony, Simon Jordan, Jens Lehmann
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Response Generation

Non-goal oriented, generative dialogue systems lack the ability to generate answers with grounded facts. A knowledge graph can be considered an abstraction of the real world consisting of well-grounded facts. This paper addresses the problem of generating well grounded responses by integrating knowledge graphs into the dialogue systems response generation process, in an end-to-end manner. A dataset for nongoal oriented dialogues is proposed in this paper in the domain of soccer, conversing on different clubs and national teams along with a knowledge graph for each of these teams. A novel neural network architecture is also proposed as a baseline on this dataset, which can integrate knowledge graphs into the response generation process, producing well articulated, knowledge grounded responses. Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed model performs better than other state-of-the-art models for knowledge graph integrated dialogue systems.
Sharper bounds for uniformly stable algorithms
Authors: Olivier Bousquet, Yegor Klochkov, Nikita Zhivotovskiy
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds, Learning Theory

Deriving generalization bounds for stable algorithms is a classical question in learning theory taking its roots in the early works by Vapnik and Chervonenkis (1974) and Rogers and Wagner (1978). In a series of recent breakthrough papers by Feldman and Vondrak (2018, 2019), it was shown that the best known high probability upper bounds for uniformly stable learning algorithms due to Bousquet and Elisseef (2002) are sub-optimal in some natural regimes. To do so, they proved two generalization bounds that significantly outperform the simple generalization bound of Bousquet and Elisseef (2002). Feldman and Vondrak also asked if it is possible to provide sharper bounds and prove corresponding high probability lower bounds. This paper is devoted to these questions: firstly, inspired by the original arguments of Feldman and Vondrak (2019), we provide a short proof of the moment bound that implies the generalization bound stronger than both recent results (Feldman and Vondrak, 2018, 2019). Secondly, we prove general lower bounds, showing that our moment bound is sharp (up to a logarithmic factor) unless some additional properties of the corresponding random variables are used. Our main probabilistic result is a general concentration inequality for weakly correlated random variables, which may be of independent interest.
Introducing Hann windows for reducing edge-effects in patch-based image segmentation
Authors: Nicolas Pielawski, Carolina Wählby
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, SSIM

There is a limitation in the size of an image that can be processed using computationally demanding methods such as e.g. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Some imaging modalities - notably biological and medical - can result in images up to a few gigapixels in size, meaning that they have to be divided into smaller parts, or patches, for processing. However, when performing image segmentation, this may lead to undesirable artefacts, such as edge effects in the final re-combined image. We introduce windowing methods from signal processing to effectively reduce such edge effects. With the assumption that the central part of an image patch often holds richer contextual information than its sides and corners, we reconstruct the prediction by overlapping patches that are being weighted depending on 2-dimensional windows. We compare the results of four different windows: Hann, Bartlett-Hann, Triangular and a recently proposed window by Cui et al., and show that the cosine-based Hann window achieves the best improvement as measured by the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The proposed windowing method can be used together with any CNN model for segmentation without any modification and significantly improves network predictions.
Calculating Optimistic Likelihoods Using (Geodesically) Convex Optimization
Authors: Viet Anh Nguyen, Soroosh Shafieezadeh-Abadeh, Man-Chung Yue, Daniel Kuhn, Wolfram Wiesemann
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

A fundamental problem arising in many areas of machine learning is the evaluation of the likelihood of a given observation under different nominal distributions. Frequently, these nominal distributions are themselves estimated from data, which makes them susceptible to estimation errors. We thus propose to replace each nominal distribution with an ambiguity set containing all distributions in its vicinity and to evaluate an \emph{optimistic likelihood}, that is, the maximum of the likelihood over all distributions in the ambiguity set. When the proximity of distributions is quantified by the Fisher-Rao distance or the Kullback-Leibler divergence, the emerging optimistic likelihoods can be computed efficiently using either geodesic or standard convex optimization techniques. We showcase the advantages of working with optimistic likelihoods on a classification problem using synthetic as well as empirical data.
From Dark Matter to Galaxies with Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Jacky H. T. Yip, Xinyue Zhang, Yanfang Wang, Wei zhang, Yueqiu Sun, Gabriella Contardo, Francisco Villaescusa-Navarro, Siyu He, Shy Genel, Shirley Ho
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

Cosmological simulations play an important role in the interpretation of astronomical data, in particular in comparing observed data to our theoretical expectations. However, to compare data with these simulations, the simulations in principle need to include gravity, magneto-hydrodyanmics, radiative transfer, etc. These ideal large-volume simulations (gravo-magneto-hydrodynamical) are incredibly computationally expensive which can cost tens of millions of CPU hours to run. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to map from the dark-matter-only simulation (computationally cheaper) to the galaxy distribution (from the much costlier cosmological simulation). The main challenge of this task is the high sparsity in the target galaxy distribution: space is mainly empty. We propose a cascade architecture composed of a classification filter followed by a regression procedure. We show that our result outperforms a state-of-the-art model used in the astronomical community, and provides a good trade-off between computational cost and prediction accuracy.
Organ At Risk Segmentation with Multiple Modality
Authors: Kuan-Lun Tseng, Winston Hsu, Chun-ting Wu, Ya-Fang Shih, Fan-Yun Sun
Date: 2019-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Computed Tomography (CT), Generative Adversarial Network, Image Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

With the development of image segmentation in computer vision, biomedical image segmentation have achieved remarkable progress on brain tumor segmentation and Organ At Risk (OAR) segmentation. However, most of the research only uses single modality such as Computed Tomography (CT) scans while in real world scenario doctors often use multiple modalities to get more accurate result. To better leverage different modalities, we have collected a large dataset consists of 136 cases with CT and MR images which diagnosed with nasopharyngeal cancer. In this paper, we propose to use Generative Adversarial Network to perform CT to MR transformation to synthesize MR images instead of aligning two modalities. The synthesized MR can be jointly trained with CT to achieve better performance. In addition, we use instance segmentation model to extend the OAR segmentation task to segment both organs and tumor region. The collected dataset will be made public soon.