pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Highly Scalable and Flexible Model for Effective Aggregation of Context-based Data in Generic IIoT Scenarios
Authors: Simon Duque Anton, Daniel Fraunholz, Janis Zemitis, Frederic Pohl, Hans Dieter Schotten
Date: 2019-05-28 00:00:00

Interconnectivity of production machines is a key feature of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This feature allows for many advantages in producing. Configuration and maintenance gets easier, as access to the given production unit is not necessarily coupled to physical presence. Customized production of goods is easily possible, reducing production times and increasing throughput. There are, however, also dangers to the increasing talkativeness of industrial production machines. The more open a system is, the more points of entry for an attacker exist. Furthermore, the amount of data a production site also increases rapidly due to the integrated intelligence and interconnectivity. To keep track of this data in order to detect attacks and errors in the production site, it is necessary to smartly aggregate and evaluate the data. In this paper, we present a new approach for collecting, aggregating and analysing data from different sources and on three different levels of abstraction. Our model is event-centric, considering every occurrence of information inside the system as an event. In the lowest level of abstraction, singular packets are collected, correlated with log-entries and analysed. On the highest level of abstraction, networks are pictured as a connectivity graph, enriched with information about host-based activities. Furthermore, we describe our work in progress of evaluating our aggregation model on two different system settings. In the first scenario, we verify the usability of our model in a remote maintenance application. In the second scenario, we evaluate our model in the context of network sniffing and correlation with log-files. First results show that our model is a promising solution to cope with increasing amounts of data and to correlate information from different types of sources.
Exploring Diseases and Syndromes in Neurology Case Reports from 1955 to 2017 with Text Mining
Authors: Amir Karami, Mehdi Ghasemi, Souvik Sen, Marcos Moraes, Vishal Shah
Date: 2019-05-23 00:00:00

Background: A large number of neurology case reports have been published, but it is a challenging task for human medical experts to explore all of these publications. Text mining offers a computational approach to investigate neurology literature and capture meaningful patterns. The overarching goal of this study is to provide a new perspective on case reports of neurological disease and syndrome analysis over the last six decades using text mining. Methods: We extracted diseases and syndromes (DsSs) from more than 65,000 neurology case reports from 66 journals in PubMed over the last six decades from 1955 to 2017. Text mining was applied to reports on the detected DsSs to investigate high-frequency DsSs, categorize them, and explore the linear trends over the 63-year time frame. Results: The text mining methods explored high-frequency neurologic DsSs and their trends and the relationships between them from 1955 to 2017. We detected more than 18,000 unique DsSs and found 10 categories of neurologic DsSs. While the trend analysis showed the increasing trends in the case reports for top-10 high-frequency DsSs, the categories had mixed trends. Conclusion: Our study provided new insights into the application of text mining methods to investigate DsSs in a large number of medical case reports that occur over several decades. The proposed approach can be used to provide a macro level analysis of medical literature by discovering interesting patterns and tracking them over several years to help physicians explore these case reports more efficiently.
Self-Supervised Exploration via Disagreement
Authors: Deepak Pathak, Dhiraj Gandhi, Abhinav Gupta
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Efficient Exploration, MuJoCo, Reinforcement Learning, Unity, Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

Efficient exploration is a long-standing problem in sensorimotor learning. Major advances have been demonstrated in noise-free, non-stochastic domains such as video games and simulation. However, most of these formulations either get stuck in environments with stochastic dynamics or are too inefficient to be scalable to real robotics setups. In this paper, we propose a formulation for exploration inspired by the work in active learning literature. Specifically, we train an ensemble of dynamics models and incentivize the agent to explore such that the disagreement of those ensembles is maximized. This allows the agent to learn skills by exploring in a self-supervised manner without any external reward. Notably, we further leverage the disagreement objective to optimize the agent's policy in a differentiable manner, without using reinforcement learning, which results in a sample-efficient exploration. We demonstrate the efficacy of this formulation across a variety of benchmark environments including stochastic-Atari, Mujoco and Unity. Finally, we implement our differentiable exploration on a real robot which learns to interact with objects completely from scratch. Project videos and code are at https://pathak22.github.io/exploration-by-disagreement/
Learning Individual Styles of Conversational Gesture
Authors: Shiry Ginosar, Amir Bar, Gefen Kohavi, Caroline Chan, Andrew Owens, Jitendra Malik
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2019 6
Tasks: Gesture Generation, Speech-to-Gesture Translation, Translation

Human speech is often accompanied by hand and arm gestures. Given audio speech input, we generate plausible gestures to go along with the sound. Specifically, we perform cross-modal translation from "in-the-wild'' monologue speech of a single speaker to their hand and arm motion. We train on unlabeled videos for which we only have noisy pseudo ground truth from an automatic pose detection system. Our proposed model significantly outperforms baseline methods in a quantitative comparison. To support research toward obtaining a computational understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech, we release a large video dataset of person-specific gestures. The project website with video, code and data can be found at http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~shiry/speech2gesture .
Inference and Uncertainty Quantification for Noisy Matrix Completion
Authors: Yuxin Chen, Jianqing Fan, Cong Ma, Yuling Yan
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Matrix Completion, Uncertainty Quantification, valid

Noisy matrix completion aims at estimating a low-rank matrix given only partial and corrupted entries. Despite substantial progress in designing efficient estimation algorithms, it remains largely unclear how to assess the uncertainty of the obtained estimates and how to perform statistical inference on the unknown matrix (e.g.~constructing a valid and short confidence interval for an unseen entry). This paper takes a step towards inference and uncertainty quantification for noisy matrix completion. We develop a simple procedure to compensate for the bias of the widely used convex and nonconvex estimators. The resulting de-biased estimators admit nearly precise non-asymptotic distributional characterizations, which in turn enable optimal construction of confidence intervals\,/\,regions for, say, the missing entries and the low-rank factors. Our inferential procedures do not rely on sample splitting, thus avoiding unnecessary loss of data efficiency. As a byproduct, we obtain a sharp characterization of the estimation accuracy of our de-biased estimators, which, to the best of our knowledge, are the first tractable algorithms that provably achieve full statistical efficiency (including the preconstant). The analysis herein is built upon the intimate link between convex and nonconvex optimization --- an appealing feature recently discovered by \cite{chen2019noisy}.
Towards Social Artificial Intelligence: Nonverbal Social Signal Prediction in A Triadic Interaction
Authors: Hanbyul Joo, Tomas Simon, Mina Cikara, Yaser Sheikh
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2019 6

We present a new research task and a dataset to understand human social interactions via computational methods, to ultimately endow machines with the ability to encode and decode a broad channel of social signals humans use. This research direction is essential to make a machine that genuinely communicates with humans, which we call Social Artificial Intelligence. We first formulate the "social signal prediction" problem as a way to model the dynamics of social signals exchanged among interacting individuals in a data-driven way. We then present a new 3D motion capture dataset to explore this problem, where the broad spectrum of social signals (3D body, face, and hand motions) are captured in a triadic social interaction scenario. Baseline approaches to predict speaking status, social formation, and body gestures of interacting individuals are presented in the defined social prediction framework.
Patch Transformer for Multi-tagging Whole Slide Histopathology Images
Authors: Weijian Li, Viet-Duy Nguyen, Haofu Liao, Matt Wilder, Ke Cheng, Jiebo Luo
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, TAG

Automated whole slide image (WSI) tagging has become a growing demand due to the increasing volume and diversity of WSIs collected nowadays in histopathology. Various methods have been studied to classify WSIs with single tags but none of them focuses on labeling WSIs with multiple tags. To this end, we propose a novel end-to-end trainable deep neural network named Patch Transformer which can effectively predict multiple slide-level tags from WSI patches based on both the correlations and the uniqueness between the tags. Specifically, the proposed method learns patch characteristics considering 1) patch-wise relations through a patch transformation module and 2) tag-wise uniqueness for each tagging task through a multi-tag attention module. Extensive experiments on a large and diverse dataset consisting of 4,920 WSIs prove the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Named Entity Recognition on Code-Switched Data: Overview of the CALCS 2018 Shared Task
Authors: Gustavo Aguilar, Fahad AlGhamdi, Victor Soto, Mona Diab, Julia Hirschberg, Thamar Solorio
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2018 7
Tasks: Diversity, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Single Particle Analysis

In the third shared task of the Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching (CALCS) workshop, we focus on Named Entity Recognition (NER) on code-switched social-media data. We divide the shared task into two competitions based on the English-Spanish (ENG-SPA) and Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian (MSA-EGY) language pairs. We use Twitter data and 9 entity types to establish a new dataset for code-switched NER benchmarks. In addition to the CS phenomenon, the diversity of the entities and the social media challenges make the task considerably hard to process. As a result, the best scores of the competitions are 63.76% and 71.61% for ENG-SPA and MSA-EGY, respectively. We present the scores of 9 participants and discuss the most common challenges among submissions.
A Multi-task Approach for Named Entity Recognition in Social Media Data
Authors: Gustavo Aguilar, Suraj Maharjan, Adrian Pastor López-Monroy, Thamar Solorio
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2017 9
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), Position

Named Entity Recognition for social media data is challenging because of its inherent noisiness. In addition to improper grammatical structures, it contains spelling inconsistencies and numerous informal abbreviations. We propose a novel multi-task approach by employing a more general secondary task of Named Entity (NE) segmentation together with the primary task of fine-grained NE categorization. The multi-task neural network architecture learns higher order feature representations from word and character sequences along with basic Part-of-Speech tags and gazetteer information. This neural network acts as a feature extractor to feed a Conditional Random Fields classifier. We were able to obtain the first position in the 3rd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (WNUT-2017) with a 41.86% entity F1-score and a 40.24% surface F1-score.
Bayesian experimental design using regularized determinantal point processes
Authors: Michał Dereziński, Feynman Liang, Michael W. Mahoney
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design, Point Processes

In experimental design, we are given $n$ vectors in $d$ dimensions, and our goal is to select $k\ll n$ of them to perform expensive measurements, e.g., to obtain labels/responses, for a linear regression task. Many statistical criteria have been proposed for choosing the optimal design, with popular choices including A- and D-optimality. If prior knowledge is given, typically in the form of a $d\times d$ precision matrix $\mathbf A$, then all of the criteria can be extended to incorporate that information via a Bayesian framework. In this paper, we demonstrate a new fundamental connection between Bayesian experimental design and determinantal point processes, the latter being widely used for sampling diverse subsets of data. We use this connection to develop new efficient algorithms for finding $(1+\epsilon)$-approximations of optimal designs under four optimality criteria: A, C, D and V. Our algorithms can achieve this when the desired subset size $k$ is $\Omega(\frac{d_{\mathbf A}}{\epsilon} + \frac{\log 1/\epsilon}{\epsilon^2})$, where $d_{\mathbf A}\leq d$ is the $\mathbf A$-effective dimension, which can often be much smaller than $d$. Our results offer direct improvements over a number of prior works, for both Bayesian and classical experimental design, in terms of algorithm efficiency, approximation quality, and range of applicable criteria.
Modeling Noisiness to Recognize Named Entities using Multitask Neural Networks on Social Media
Authors: Gustavo Aguilar, A. Pastor López-Monroy, Fabio A. González, Thamar Solorio
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NAACL 2018 6
Tasks: Named Entity Recognition (NER), Word Embeddings

Recognizing named entities in a document is a key task in many NLP applications. Although current state-of-the-art approaches to this task reach a high performance on clean text (e.g. newswire genres), those algorithms dramatically degrade when they are moved to noisy environments such as social media domains. We present two systems that address the challenges of processing social media data using character-level phonetics and phonology, word embeddings, and Part-of-Speech tags as features. The first model is a multitask end-to-end Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM)-Conditional Random Field (CRF) network whose output layer contains two CRF classifiers. The second model uses a multitask BLSTM network as feature extractor that transfers the learning to a CRF classifier for the final prediction. Our systems outperform the current F1 scores of the state of the art on the Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text 2017 dataset by 2.45% and 3.69%, establishing a more suitable approach for social media environments.
Confidence intervals for class prevalences under prior probability shift
Authors: Dirk Tasche
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction Intervals

Point estimation of class prevalences in the presence of data set shift has been a popular research topic for more than two decades. Less attention has been paid to the construction of confidence and prediction intervals for estimates of class prevalences. One little considered question is whether or not it is necessary for practical purposes to distinguish confidence and prediction intervals. Another question so far not yet conclusively answered is whether or not the discriminatory power of the classifier or score at the basis of an estimation method matters for the accuracy of the estimates of the class prevalences. This paper presents a simulation study aimed at shedding some light on these and other related questions.
Fast Hierarchical Neural Network for Feature Learning on Point Cloud
Authors: Can Chen, Luca Zanotti Fragonara, Antonios Tsourdos
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00

The analyses relying on 3D point clouds are an utterly complex task, often involving million of points, but also requiring computationally efficient algorithms because of many real-time applications; e.g. autonomous vehicle. However, point clouds are intrinsically irregular and the points are sparsely distributed in a non-Euclidean space, which normally requires point-wise processing to achieve high performances. Although shared filter matrices and pooling layers in convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are capable of reducing the dimensionality of the problem and extracting high-level information simultaneously, grids and highly regular data format are required as input. In order to balance model performance and complexity, we introduce a novel neural network architecture exploiting local features from a manually subsampled point set. In our network, a recursive farthest point sampling method is firstly applied to efficiently cover the entire point set. Successively, we employ the k-nearest neighbours (knn) algorithm to gather local neighbourhood for each group of the subsampled points. Finally, a multiple layer perceptron (MLP) is applied on the subsampled points and edges that connect corresponding point and neighbours to extract local features. The architecture has been tested for both shape classification and segmentation using the ModelNet40 and ShapeNet part datasets, in order to show that the network achieves the best trade-off in terms of competitive performance when compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms.
Robust Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion: An Adversarial Approach
Authors: Siddharth Roheda, Hamid Krim, Benjamin S. Riggan
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensor Fusion

In recent years, multi-modal fusion has attracted a lot of research interest, both in academia, and in industry. Multimodal fusion entails the combination of information from a set of different types of sensors. Exploiting complementary information from different sensors, we show that target detection and classification problems can greatly benefit from this fusion approach and result in a performance increase. To achieve this gain, the information fusion from various sensors is shown to require some principled strategy to ensure that additional information is constructively used, and has a positive impact on performance. We subsequently demonstrate the viability of the proposed fusion approach by weakening the strong dependence on the functionality of all sensors, hence introducing additional flexibility in our solution and lifting the severe limitation in unconstrained surveillance settings with potential environmental impact. Our proposed data driven approach to multimodal fusion, exploits selected optimal features from an estimated latent space of data across all modalities. This hidden space is learned via a generative network conditioned on individual sensor modalities. The hidden space, as an intrinsic structure, is then exploited in detecting damaged sensors, and in subsequently safeguarding the performance of the fused sensor system. Experimental results show that such an approach can achieve automatic system robustness against noisy/damaged sensors.
BlockSwap: Fisher-guided Block Substitution for Network Compression on a Budget
Authors: Jack Turner, Elliot J. Crowley, Michael O'Boyle, Amos Storkey, Gavin Gray
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: GPU

The desire to map neural networks to varying-capacity devices has led to the development of a wealth of compression techniques, many of which involve replacing standard convolutional blocks in a large network with cheap alternative blocks. However, not all blocks are created equally; for a required compute budget there may exist a potent combination of many different cheap blocks, though exhaustively searching for such a combination is prohibitively expensive. In this work, we develop BlockSwap: a fast algorithm for choosing networks with interleaved block types by passing a single minibatch of training data through randomly initialised networks and gauging their Fisher potential. These networks can then be used as students and distilled with the original large network as a teacher. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the chosen networks across CIFAR-10 and ImageNet for classification, and COCO for detection, and provide a comprehensive ablation study of our approach. BlockSwap quickly explores possible block configurations using a simple architecture ranking system, yielding highly competitive networks in orders of magnitude less time than most architecture search techniques (e.g. under 5 minutes on a single GPU for CIFAR-10). Code is available at https://github.com/BayesWatch/pytorch-blockswap.
A New Ratio Image Based CNN Algorithm For SAR Despeckling
Authors: Sergio Vitale, Giampaolo Ferraioli, Vito Pascazio
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Scene Understanding

In SAR domain many application like classification, detection and segmentation are impaired by speckle. Hence, despeckling of SAR images is the key for scene understanding. Usually despeckling filters face the trade-off of speckle suppression and information preservation. In the last years deep learning solutions for speckle reduction have been proposed. One the biggest issue for these methods is how to train a network given the lack of a reference. In this work we proposed a convolutional neural network based solution trained on simulated data. We propose the use of a cost function taking into account both spatial and statistical properties. The aim is two fold: overcome the trade-off between speckle suppression and details suppression; find a suitable cost function for despeckling in unsupervised learning. The algorithm is validated on both real and simulated data, showing interesting performances.
Quantification and Analysis of Layer-wise and Pixel-wise Information Discarding
Authors: Haotian Ma, Hao Zhang, Fan Zhou, Yinqing Zhang, Quanshi Zhang
Date: 2019-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

This paper presents a method to explain how the information of each input variable is gradually discarded during the forward propagation in a deep neural network (DNN), which provides new perspectives to explain DNNs. We define two types of entropy-based metrics, i.e. (1) the discarding of pixel-wise information used in the forward propagation, and (2) the uncertainty of the input reconstruction, to measure input information contained by a specific layer from two perspectives. Unlike previous attribution metrics, the proposed metrics ensure the fairness of comparisons between different layers of different DNNs. We can use these metrics to analyze the efficiency of information processing in DNNs, which exhibits strong connections to the performance of DNNs. We analyze information discarding in a pixel-wise manner, which is different from the information bottleneck theory measuring feature information w.r.t. the sample distribution. Experiments have shown the effectiveness of our metrics in analyzing classic DNNs and explaining existing deep-learning techniques.