pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Electroencephalogram (EEG) for Delineating Objective Measure of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) (Extended Version)
Authors: Yasith Jayawardana, Mark Jaime, Sashi Thapaliya, Sampath Jayarathna
Date: 2019-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Electroencephalogram (EEG)

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that often impairs a child's normal development of the brain. According to CDC, it is estimated that 1 in 6 children in the US suffer from development disorders, and 1 in 68 children in the US suffer from ASD. This condition has a negative impact on a person's ability to hear, socialize and communicate. Overall, ASD has a broad range of symptoms and severity; hence the term spectrum is used. One of the main contributors to ASD is known to be genetics. Up to date, no suitable cure for ASD has been found. Early diagnosis is crucial for the long-term treatment of ASD, but this is challenging due to the lack of a proper objective measures. Subjective measures often take more time, resources, and have false positives or false negatives. There is a need for efficient objective measures that can help in diagnosing this disease early as possible with less effort. EEG measures the electric signals of the brain via electrodes placed on various places on the scalp. These signals can be used to study complex neuropsychiatric issues. Studies have shown that EEG has the potential to be used as a biomarker for various neurological conditions including ASD. This chapter will outline the usage of EEG measurement for the classification of ASD using machine learning algorithms.
Learning for Detection: MIMO-OFDM Symbol Detection through Downlink Pilots
Authors: Zhou Zhou, Lingjia Liu, Hao-Hsuan Chang
Date: 2019-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Reservoir computing (RC) is a special recurrent neural network which consists of a fixed high dimensional feature mapping and trained readout weights. In this paper, we introduce a new RC structure for multiple-input, multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) symbol detection, namely windowed echo state network (WESN). The theoretical analysis shows that adding buffers in input layers can bring an enhanced short-term memory (STM) to the underlying neural network. Furthermore, a unified training framework is developed for the WESN MIMO-OFDM symbol detector using both comb and scattered pilot patterns that are compatible with the structure adopted in 3GPP LTE/LTE-Advanced systems. Complexity analysis suggests the advantages of WESN based symbol detector over state-of-the-art symbol detectors such as the linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) detection and the sphere decoder, when the system is employed with a large number of OFDM sub-carriers. Numerical evaluations illustrate the advantage of the introduced WESN-based symbol detector and demonstrate that the improvement of STM can significantly improve symbol detection performance as well as effectively mitigate model mismatch effects compared to existing methods.
Method of diagnosing heart disease based on deep learning ECG signal
Authors: Jie Zhang, Bohao Li, Kexin Xiang, Xuegang Shi
Date: 2019-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Rhythm

The traditional method of diagnosing heart disease on ECG signal is artificial observation. Some have tried to combine expertise and signal processing to classify ECG signal by heart disease type. However, the currency is not so sufficient that it can be used in medical applications. We develop an algorithm that combines signal processing and deep learning to classify ECG signals into Normal AF other rhythm and noise, which help us solve this problem. It is demonstrated that we can obtain the time-frequency diagram of ECG signal by wavelet transform, and use DNN to classify the time-frequency diagram to find out the heart disease that the signal collector may have. Overall, an accuracy of 94 percent is achieved on the validation set. According to the evaluation criteria of PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology (CinC) in 2017, the F1 score of this method is 0.957, which is higher than the first place in the competition in 2017.
Digital Electronics and Analog Photonics for Convolutional Neural Networks (DEAP-CNNs)
Authors: Viraj Bangari, Bicky A. Marquez, Heidi B. Miller, Alexander N. Tait, Mitchell A. Nahmias, Thomas Ferreira de Lima, Hsuan-Tung Peng, Paul R. Prucnal, Bhavin J. Shastri
Date: 2019-04-23 00:00:00

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are powerful and highly ubiquitous tools for extracting features from large datasets for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, a convolution is a computationally expensive operation in digital electronics. In contrast, neuromorphic photonic systems, which have experienced a recent surge of interest over the last few years, propose higher bandwidth and energy efficiencies for neural network training and inference. Neuromorphic photonics exploits the advantages of optical electronics, including the ease of analog processing, and busing multiple signals on a single waveguide at the speed of light. Here, we propose a Digital Electronic and Analog Photonic (DEAP) CNN hardware architecture that has potential to be 2.8 to 14 times faster while maintaining the same power usage of current state-of-the-art GPUs.
Adaptive neural network based dynamic surface control for uncertain dual arm robots
Authors: Dung Tien Pham, Thai Van Nguyen, Hai Xuan Le, Linh Nguyen, Nguyen Huu Thai, Tuan Anh Phan, Hai Tuan Pham, Anh Hoai Duong
Date: 2019-05-08 00:00:00

The paper discusses an adaptive strategy to effectively control nonlinear manipulation motions of a dual arm robot (DAR) under system uncertainties including parameter variations, actuator nonlinearities and external disturbances. It is proposed that the control scheme is first derived from the dynamic surface control (DSC) method, which allows the robot's end-effectors to robustly track the desired trajectories. Moreover, since exactly determining the DAR system's dynamics is impractical due to the system uncertainties, the uncertain system parameters are then proposed to be adaptively estimated by the use of the radial basis function network (RBFN). The adaptation mechanism is derived from the Lyapunov theory, which theoretically guarantees stability of the closed-loop control system. The effectiveness of the proposed RBFN-DSC approach is demonstrated by implementing the algorithm in a synthetic environment with realistic parameters, where the obtained results are highly promising.
A Simulation Study of Social-Networking-Driven Smart Recommendations for Internet of Vehicles
Authors: Kashif Zia, Arshad Muhammad, Dinesh Kumar Saini
Date: 2019-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Social aspects of connectivity and information dispersion are often ignored while weighing the potential of Internet of Things (IoT). In the specialized domain of Internet of Vehicles (IoV), Social IoV (SIoV) is introduced realization its importance. Assuming a more commonly acceptable standardization of Big Data generated by IoV, the social dimensions enabling its fruitful usage remains a challenge. In this paper, an agent-based model of information sharing between vehicles for context-aware recommendations is presented. The model adheres to social dimensions as that of human society. Some important hypotheses are tested under reasonable connectivity and data constraints. The simulation results reveal that closure of social ties and its timing impacts dispersion of novel information (necessary for a recommender system) substantially. It was also observed that as the network evolves as a result of incremental interactions, recommendations guaranteeing a fair distribution of vehicles across equally good competitors is not possible.
Novel evaluation of surgical activity recognition models using task-based efficiency metrics
Authors: Aneeq Zia, Liheng Guo, Linlin Zhou, Irfan Essa, Anthony Jarc
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition

Purpose: Surgical task-based metrics (rather than entire procedure metrics) can be used to improve surgeon training and, ultimately, patient care through focused training interventions. Machine learning models to automatically recognize individual tasks or activities are needed to overcome the otherwise manual effort of video review. Traditionally, these models have been evaluated using frame-level accuracy. Here, we propose evaluating surgical activity recognition models by their effect on task-based efficiency metrics. In this way, we can determine when models have achieved adequate performance for providing surgeon feedback via metrics from individual tasks. Methods: We propose a new CNN-LSTM model, RP-Net-V2, to recognize the 12 steps of robotic-assisted radical prostatectomies (RARP). We evaluated our model both in terms of conventional methods (e.g. Jaccard Index, task boundary accuracy) as well as novel ways, such as the accuracy of efficiency metrics computed from instrument movements and system events. Results: Our proposed model achieves a Jaccard Index of 0.85 thereby outperforming previous models on robotic-assisted radical prostatectomies. Additionally, we show that metrics computed from tasks automatically identified using RP-Net-V2 correlate well with metrics from tasks labeled by clinical experts. Conclusions: We demonstrate that metrics-based evaluation of surgical activity recognition models is a viable approach to determine when models can be used to quantify surgical efficiencies. We believe this approach and our results illustrate the potential for fully automated, post-operative efficiency reports.
Benchmarking Model-Based Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Tingwu Wang, Xuchan Bao, Ignasi Clavera, Jerrick Hoang, Yeming Wen, Eric Langlois, Shunshi Zhang, Guodong Zhang, Pieter Abbeel, Jimmy Ba
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, model, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Open-Ended Question Answering, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is widely seen as having the potential to be significantly more sample efficient than model-free RL. However, research in model-based RL has not been very standardized. It is fairly common for authors to experiment with self-designed environments, and there are several separate lines of research, which are sometimes closed-sourced or not reproducible. Accordingly, it is an open question how these various existing MBRL algorithms perform relative to each other. To facilitate research in MBRL, in this paper we gather a wide collection of MBRL algorithms and propose over 18 benchmarking environments specially designed for MBRL. We benchmark these algorithms with unified problem settings, including noisy environments. Beyond cataloguing performance, we explore and unify the underlying algorithmic differences across MBRL algorithms. We characterize three key research challenges for future MBRL research: the dynamics bottleneck, the planning horizon dilemma, and the early-termination dilemma. Finally, to maximally facilitate future research on MBRL, we open-source our benchmark in http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~tingwuwang/mbrl.html.
Variance Reduction for Matrix Games
Authors: Yair Carmon, Yujia Jin, Aaron Sidford, Kevin Tian
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

We present a randomized primal-dual algorithm that solves the problem $\min_{x} \max_{y} y^\top A x$ to additive error $\epsilon$ in time $\mathrm{nnz}(A) + \sqrt{\mathrm{nnz}(A)n}/\epsilon$, for matrix $A$ with larger dimension $n$ and $\mathrm{nnz}(A)$ nonzero entries. This improves the best known exact gradient methods by a factor of $\sqrt{\mathrm{nnz}(A)/n}$ and is faster than fully stochastic gradient methods in the accurate and/or sparse regime $\epsilon \le \sqrt{n/\mathrm{nnz}(A)}$. Our results hold for $x,y$ in the simplex (matrix games, linear programming) and for $x$ in an $\ell_2$ ball and $y$ in the simplex (perceptron / SVM, minimum enclosing ball). Our algorithm combines Nemirovski's "conceptual prox-method" and a novel reduced-variance gradient estimator based on "sampling from the difference" between the current iterate and a reference point.
Self-supervised Learning of Interpretable Keypoints from Unlabelled Videos
Authors: Tomas Jakab, Ankush Gupta, Hakan Bilen, Andrea Vedaldi
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Facial Landmark Detection, Image-to-Image Translation, Keypoint Detection, Self-Supervised Learning, Translation, Unsupervised Landmark Detection

We propose KeypointGAN, a new method for recognizing the pose of objects from a single image that for learning uses only unlabelled videos and a weak empirical prior on the object poses. Video frames differ primarily in the pose of the objects they contain, so our method distils the pose information by analyzing the differences between frames. The distillation uses a new dual representation of the geometry of objects as a set of 2D keypoints, and as a pictorial representation, i.e. a skeleton image. This has three benefits: (1) it provides a tight `geometric bottleneck' which disentangles pose from appearance, (2) it can leverage powerful image-to-image translation networks to map between photometry and geometry, and (3) it allows to incorporate empirical pose priors in the learning process. The pose priors are obtained from unpaired data, such as from a different dataset or modality such as mocap, such that no annotated image is ever used in learning the pose recognition network. In standard benchmarks for pose recognition for humans and faces, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods that do not require any labelled images for training.
Spatially-Coupled Neural Network Architectures
Authors: Arman Hasanzadeh, Nagaraj T. Janakiraman, Vamsi K. Amalladinne, Krishna R. Narayanan
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Importance

In this work, we leverage advances in sparse coding techniques to reduce the number of trainable parameters in a fully connected neural network. While most of the works in literature impose $\ell_1$ regularization, DropOut or DropConnect techniques to induce sparsity, our scheme considers feature importance as a criterion to allocate the trainable parameters (resources) efficiently in the network. Even though sparsity is ensured, $\ell_1$ regularization requires training on all the resources in a deep neural network. The DropOut/DropConnect techniques reduce the number of trainable parameters in the training stage by dropping a random collection of neurons/edges in the hidden layers. However, both these techniques do not pay heed to the underlying structure in the data when dropping the neurons/edges. Moreover, these frameworks require a storage space equivalent to the number of parameters in a fully connected neural network. We address the above issues with a more structured architecture inspired from spatially-coupled sparse constructions. The proposed architecture is shown to have a performance akin to a conventional fully connected neural network with dropouts, and yet achieving a $94\%$ reduction in the training parameters. Extensive simulations are presented and the performance of the proposed scheme is compared against traditional neural network architectures.
Reasoning and Generalization in RL: A Tool Use Perspective
Authors: Sam Wenke, Dan Saunders, Mike Qiu, Jim Fleming
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Learning to use tools to solve a variety of tasks is an innate ability of humans and has been observed of animals in the wild. However, the underlying mechanisms that are required to learn to use tools are abstract and widely contested in the literature. In this paper, we study tool use in the context of reinforcement learning and propose a framework for analyzing generalization inspired by a classic study of tool using behavior, the trap-tube task. Recently, it has become common in reinforcement learning to measure generalization performance on a single test set of environments. We instead propose transfers that produce multiple test sets that are used to measure specified types of generalization, inspired by abilities demonstrated by animal and human tool users. The source code to reproduce our experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/fomorians/gym_tool_use.
Deep neural network-based classification model for Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Donghang Pan, Jingling Yuan, Lin Li, Deming Sheng
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

The growing prosperity of social networks has brought great challenges to the sentimental tendency mining of users. As more and more researchers pay attention to the sentimental tendency of online users, rich research results have been obtained based on the sentiment classification of explicit texts. However, research on the implicit sentiment of users is still in its infancy. Aiming at the difficulty of implicit sentiment classification, a research on implicit sentiment classification model based on deep neural network is carried out. Classification models based on DNN, LSTM, Bi-LSTM and CNN were established to judge the tendency of the user's implicit sentiment text. Based on the Bi-LSTM model, the classification model of word-level attention mechanism is studied. The experimental results on the public dataset show that the established LSTM series classification model and CNN classification model can achieve good sentiment classification effect, and the classification effect is significantly better than the DNN model. The Bi-LSTM based attention mechanism classification model obtained the optimal R value in the positive category identification.
Minimally distorted Adversarial Examples with a Fast Adaptive Boundary Attack
Authors: Francesco Croce, Matthias Hein
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

The evaluation of robustness against adversarial manipulation of neural networks-based classifiers is mainly tested with empirical attacks as methods for the exact computation, even when available, do not scale to large networks. We propose in this paper a new white-box adversarial attack wrt the $l_p$-norms for $p \in \{1,2,\infty\}$ aiming at finding the minimal perturbation necessary to change the class of a given input. It has an intuitive geometric meaning, yields quickly high quality results, minimizes the size of the perturbation (so that it returns the robust accuracy at every threshold with a single run). It performs better or similar to state-of-the-art attacks which are partially specialized to one $l_p$-norm, and is robust to the phenomenon of gradient masking.
Using Deep Learning to Count Albatrosses from Space
Authors: Ellen Bowler, Peter T. Fretwell, Geoffrey French, Michal Mackiewicz
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper we test the use of a deep learning approach to automatically count Wandering Albatrosses in Very High Resolution (VHR) satellite imagery. We use a dataset of manually labelled imagery provided by the British Antarctic Survey to train and develop our methods. We employ a U-Net architecture, designed for image segmentation, to simultaneously classify and localise potential albatrosses. We aid training with the use of the Focal Loss criterion, to deal with extreme class imbalance in the dataset. Initial results achieve peak precision and recall values of approximately 80%. Finally we assess the model's performance in relation to inter-observer variation, by comparing errors against an image labelled by multiple observers. We conclude model accuracy falls within the range of human counters. We hope that the methods will streamline the analysis of VHR satellite images, enabling more frequent monitoring of a species which is of high conservation concern.
Combining Q&A Pair Quality and Question Relevance Features on Community-based Question Retrieval
Authors: Dong Li, Lin Li
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Translation

The Q&A community has become an important way for people to access knowledge and information from the Internet. However, the existing translation based on models does not consider the query specific semantics when assigning weights to query terms in question retrieval. So we improve the term weighting model based on the traditional topic translation model and further considering the quality characteristics of question and answer pairs, this paper proposes a communitybased question retrieval method that combines question and answer on quality and question relevance (T2LM+). We have also proposed a question retrieval method based on convolutional neural networks. The results show that Compared with the relatively advanced methods, the two methods proposed in this paper increase MAP by 4.91% and 6.31%.
Real-time Claim Detection from News Articles and Retrieval of Semantically-Similar Factchecks
Authors: Ben Adler, Giacomo Bosciani-Gilroy
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Retrieval

Factchecking has always been a part of the journalistic process. However with newsroom budgets shrinking it is coming under increasing pressure just as the amount of false information circulating is on the rise. We therefore propose a method to increase the efficiency of the factchecking process, using the latest developments in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This method allows us to compare incoming claims to an existing corpus and return similar, factchecked, claims in a live system-allowing factcheckers to work simultaneously without duplicating their work.
Chasing Ghosts: Instruction Following as Bayesian State Tracking
Authors: Peter Anderson, Ayush Shrivastava, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, Stefan Lee
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Instruction Following, Vision and Language Navigation

A visually-grounded navigation instruction can be interpreted as a sequence of expected observations and actions an agent following the correct trajectory would encounter and perform. Based on this intuition, we formulate the problem of finding the goal location in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) within the framework of Bayesian state tracking - learning observation and motion models conditioned on these expectable events. Together with a mapper that constructs a semantic spatial map on-the-fly during navigation, we formulate an end-to-end differentiable Bayes filter and train it to identify the goal by predicting the most likely trajectory through the map according to the instructions. The resulting navigation policy constitutes a new approach to instruction following that explicitly models a probability distribution over states, encoding strong geometric and algorithmic priors while enabling greater explainability. Our experiments show that our approach outperforms a strong LingUNet baseline when predicting the goal location on the map. On the full VLN task, i.e. navigating to the goal location, our approach achieves promising results with less reliance on navigation constraints.
libconform v0.1.0: a Python library for conformal prediction
Authors: Jonas Fassbender
Date: 2019-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Prediction

This paper introduces libconform v0.1.0, a Python library for the conformal prediction framework, licensed under the MIT-license. libconform is not yet stable. This paper describes the main algorithms implemented and documents the API of libconform. Also some details about the implementation and changes in future versions are described.