pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Decoding Spiking Mechanism with Dynamic Learning on Neuron Population
Authors: Zhijie Chen, Junchi Yan, Longyuan Li, Xiaokang Yang
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00

A main concern in cognitive neuroscience is to decode the overt neural spike train observations and infer latent representations under neural circuits. However, traditional methods entail strong prior on network structure and hardly meet the demand for real spike data. Here we propose a novel neural network approach called Neuron Activation Network that extracts neural information explicitly from single trial neuron population spike trains. Our proposed method consists of a spatiotemporal learning procedure on sensory environment and a message passing mechanism on population graph, followed by a neuron activation process in a recursive fashion. Our model is aimed to reconstruct neuron information while inferring representations of neuron spiking states. We apply our model to retinal ganglion cells and the experimental results suggest that our model holds a more potent capability in generating neural spike sequences with high fidelity than the state-of-the-art methods, as well as being more expressive and having potential to disclose latent spiking mechanism. The source code will be released with the final paper.
Patch-level Neighborhood Interpolation: A General and Effective Graph-based Regularization Strategy
Authors: Ke Sun, Bing Yu, Zhouchen Lin, Zhanxing Zhu
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Regularization plays a crucial role in machine learning models, especially for deep neural networks. The existing regularization techniques mainly rely on the i.i.d. assumption and only consider the knowledge from the current sample, without the leverage of the neighboring relationship between samples. In this work, we propose a general regularizer called \textbf{Patch-level Neighborhood Interpolation~(Pani)} that conducts a non-local representation in the computation of networks. Our proposal explicitly constructs patch-level graphs in different layers and then linearly interpolates neighborhood patch features, serving as a general and effective regularization strategy. Further, we customize our approach into two kinds of popular regularization methods, namely Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT) and MixUp as well as its variants. The first derived \textbf{Pani VAT} presents a novel way to construct non-local adversarial smoothness by employing patch-level interpolated perturbations. The second derived \textbf{Pani MixUp} method extends the MixUp, and achieves superiority over MixUp and competitive performance over state-of-the-art variants of MixUp method with a significant advantage in computational efficiency. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our Pani approach in both supervised and semi-supervised settings.
Automatic Text-based Personality Recognition on Monologues and Multiparty Dialogues Using Attentive Networks and Contextual Embeddings
Authors: Hang Jiang, Xianzhe Zhang, Jinho D. Choi
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Previous works related to automatic personality recognition focus on using traditional classification models with linguistic features. However, attentive neural networks with contextual embeddings, which have achieved huge success in text classification, are rarely explored for this task. In this project, we have two major contributions. First, we create the first dialogue-based personality dataset, FriendsPersona, by annotating 5 personality traits of speakers from Friends TV Show through crowdsourcing. Second, we present a novel approach to automatic personality recognition using pre-trained contextual embeddings (BERT and RoBERTa) and attentive neural networks. Our models largely improve the state-of-art results on the monologue Essays dataset by 2.49%, and establish a solid benchmark on our FriendsPersona. By comparing results in two datasets, we demonstrate the challenges of modeling personality in multi-party dialogue.
Image Aesthetics Assessment using Multi Channel Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Nishi Doshi, Gitam Shikhenawis, Suman K Mitra
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00

Image Aesthetics Assessment is one of the emerging domains in research. The domain deals with classification of images into categories depending on the basis of how pleasant they are for the users to watch. In this article, the focus is on categorizing the images in high quality and low quality image. Deep convolutional neural networks are used to classify the images. Instead of using just the raw image as input, different crops and saliency maps of the images are also used, as input to the proposed multi channel CNN architecture. The experiments reported on widely used AVA database show improvement in the aesthetic assessment performance over existing approaches.
Furnishing Your Room by What You See: An End-to-End Furniture Set Retrieval Framework with Rich Annotated Benchmark Dataset
Authors: Bingyuan Liu, Jiantao Zhang, Xiaoting Zhang, Wei zhang, Chuanhui Yu, Yuan Zhou
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Understanding interior scenes has attracted enormous interest in computer vision community. However, few works focus on the understanding of furniture within the scenes and a large-scale dataset is also lacked to advance the field. In this paper, we first fill the gap by presenting DeepFurniture, a richly annotated large indoor scene dataset, including 24k indoor images, 170k furniture instances and 20k unique furniture identities. On the dataset, we introduce a new benchmark, named furniture set retrieval. Given an indoor photo as input, the task requires to detect all the furniture instances and search a matched set of furniture identities. To address this challenging task, we propose a feature and context embedding based framework. It contains 3 major contributions: (1) An improved Mask-RCNN model with an additional mask-based classifier is introduced for better utilizing the mask information to relieve the occlusion problems in furniture detection context. (2) A multi-task style Siamese network is proposed to train the feature embedding model for retrieval, which is composed of a classification subnet supervised by self-clustered pseudo attributes and a verification subnet to estimate whether the input pair is matched. (3) In order to model the relationship of the furniture entities in an interior design, a context embedding model is employed to re-rank the retrieval results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of each module and the overall system.
Robust Conditional GAN from Uncertainty-Aware Pairwise Comparisons
Authors: Ligong Han, Ruijiang Gao, Mun Kim, Xin Tao, Bo Liu, Dimitris Metaxas
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Generative Adversarial Network

Conditional generative adversarial networks have shown exceptional generation performance over the past few years. However, they require large numbers of annotations. To address this problem, we propose a novel generative adversarial network utilizing weak supervision in the form of pairwise comparisons (PC-GAN) for image attribute editing. In the light of Bayesian uncertainty estimation and noise-tolerant adversarial training, PC-GAN can estimate attribute rating efficiently and demonstrate robust performance in noise resistance. Through extensive experiments, we show both qualitatively and quantitatively that PC-GAN performs comparably with fully-supervised methods and outperforms unsupervised baselines.
xBD: A Dataset for Assessing Building Damage from Satellite Imagery
Authors: Ritwik Gupta, Richard Hosfelt, Sandra Sajeev, Nirav Patel, Bryce Goodman, Jigar Doshi, Eric Heim, Howie Choset, Matthew Gaston
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Semantic Segmentation, Building Damage Assessment, Change Detection, Disaster Response, Humanitarian

We present xBD, a new, large-scale dataset for the advancement of change detection and building damage assessment for humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery research. Natural disaster response requires an accurate understanding of damaged buildings in an affected region. Current response strategies require in-person damage assessments within 24-48 hours of a disaster. Massive potential exists for using aerial imagery combined with computer vision algorithms to assess damage and reduce the potential danger to human life. In collaboration with multiple disaster response agencies, xBD provides pre- and post-event satellite imagery across a variety of disaster events with building polygons, ordinal labels of damage level, and corresponding satellite metadata. Furthermore, the dataset contains bounding boxes and labels for environmental factors such as fire, water, and smoke. xBD is the largest building damage assessment dataset to date, containing 850,736 building annotations across 45,362 km\textsuperscript{2} of imagery.
Machine Learning based detection of multiple Wi-Fi BSSs for LTE-U CSAT
Authors: Vanlin Sathya, Adam Dziedzic, Monisha Ghosh, Sanjay Krishnan
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

According to the LTE-U Forum specification, a LTE-U base-station (BS) reduces its duty cycle from 50% to 33% when it senses an increase in the number of co-channel Wi-Fi basic service sets (BSSs) from one to two. The detection of the number of Wi-Fi BSSs that are operating on the channel in real-time, without decoding the Wi-Fi packets, still remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a novel machine learning (ML) approach that solves the problem by using energy values observed during LTE-U OFF duration. Observing the energy values (at LTE-U BS OFF time) is a much simpler operation than decoding the entire Wi-Fi packets. In this work, we implement and validate the proposed ML based approach in real-time experiments, and demonstrate that there are two distinct patterns between one and two Wi-Fi APs. This approach delivers an accuracy close to 100% compared to auto-correlation (AC) and energy detection (ED) approaches.
Scalable methods for computing state similarity in deterministic Markov Decision Processes
Authors: Pablo Samuel Castro
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00

We present new algorithms for computing and approximating bisimulation metrics in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Bisimulation metrics are an elegant formalism that capture behavioral equivalence between states and provide strong theoretical guarantees on differences in optimal behaviour. Unfortunately, their computation is expensive and requires a tabular representation of the states, which has thus far rendered them impractical for large problems. In this paper we present a new version of the metric that is tied to a behavior policy in an MDP, along with an analysis of its theoretical properties. We then present two new algorithms for approximating bisimulation metrics in large, deterministic MDPs. The first does so via sampling and is guaranteed to converge to the true metric. The second is a differentiable loss which allows us to learn an approximation even for continuous state MDPs, which prior to this work had not been possible.
Large-scale Multi-view Subspace Clustering in Linear Time
Authors: Zhao Kang, Wangtao Zhou, Zhitong Zhao, Junming Shao, Meng Han, Zenglin Xu
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Multi-view Subspace Clustering

A plethora of multi-view subspace clustering (MVSC) methods have been proposed over the past few years. Researchers manage to boost clustering accuracy from different points of view. However, many state-of-the-art MVSC algorithms, typically have a quadratic or even cubic complexity, are inefficient and inherently difficult to apply at large scales. In the era of big data, the computational issue becomes critical. To fill this gap, we propose a large-scale MVSC (LMVSC) algorithm with linear order complexity. Inspired by the idea of anchor graph, we first learn a smaller graph for each view. Then, a novel approach is designed to integrate those graphs so that we can implement spectral clustering on a smaller graph. Interestingly, it turns out that our model also applies to single-view scenario. Extensive experiments on various large-scale benchmark data sets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach with respect to state-of-the-art clustering methods.
Controversial stimuli: pitting neural networks against each other as models of human recognition
Authors: Tal Golan, Prashant C. Raju, Nikolaus Kriegeskorte
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Distinct scientific theories can make similar predictions. To adjudicate between theories, we must design experiments for which the theories make distinct predictions. Here we consider the problem of comparing deep neural networks as models of human visual recognition. To efficiently compare models' ability to predict human responses, we synthesize controversial stimuli: images for which different models produce distinct responses. We applied this approach to two visual recognition tasks, handwritten digits (MNIST) and objects in small natural images (CIFAR-10). For each task, we synthesized controversial stimuli to maximize the disagreement among models which employed different architectures and recognition algorithms. Human subjects viewed hundreds of these stimuli, as well as natural examples, and judged the probability of presence of each digit/object category in each image. We quantified how accurately each model predicted the human judgments. The best performing models were a generative Analysis-by-Synthesis model (based on variational autoencoders) for MNIST and a hybrid discriminative-generative Joint Energy Model for CIFAR-10. These DNNs, which model the distribution of images, performed better than purely discriminative DNNs, which learn only to map images to labels. None of the candidate models fully explained the human responses. Controversial stimuli generalize the concept of adversarial examples, obviating the need to assume a ground-truth model. Unlike natural images, controversial stimuli are not constrained to the stimulus distribution models are trained on, thus providing severe out-of-distribution tests that reveal the models' inductive biases. Controversial stimuli therefore provide powerful probes of discrepancies between models and human perception.
Band-limited Training and Inference for Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Adam Dziedzic, John Paparrizos, Sanjay Krishnan, Aaron Elmore, Michael Franklin
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

The convolutional layers are core building blocks of neural network architectures. In general, a convolutional filter applies to the entire frequency spectrum of the input data. We explore artificially constraining the frequency spectra of these filters and data, called band-limiting, during training. The frequency domain constraints apply to both the feed-forward and back-propagation steps. Experimentally, we observe that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are resilient to this compression scheme and results suggest that CNNs learn to leverage lower-frequency components. In particular, we found: (1) band-limited training can effectively control the resource usage (GPU and memory); (2) models trained with band-limited layers retain high prediction accuracy; and (3) requires no modification to existing training algorithms or neural network architectures to use unlike other compression schemes.
Event Detection in Noisy Streaming Data with Combination of Corroborative and Probabilistic Sources
Authors: Abhijit Suprem, Calton Pu
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection

Global physical event detection has traditionally relied on dense coverage of physical sensors around the world; while this is an expensive undertaking, there have not been alternatives until recently. The ubiquity of social networks and human sensors in the field provides a tremendous amount of real-time, live data about true physical events from around the world. However, while such human sensor data have been exploited for retrospective large-scale event detection, such as hurricanes or earthquakes, they has been limited to no success in exploiting this rich resource for general physical event detection. Prior implementation approaches have suffered from the concept drift phenomenon, where real-world data exhibits constant, unknown, unbounded changes in its data distribution, making static machine learning models ineffective in the long term. We propose and implement an end-to-end collaborative drift adaptive system that integrates corroborative and probabilistic sources to deliver real-time predictions. Furthermore, out system is adaptive to concept drift and performs automated continuous learning to maintain high performance. We demonstrate our approach in a real-time demo available online for landslide disaster detection, with extensibility to other real-world physical events such as flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, and earthquakes.
NaMemo: Enhancing Lecturers' Interpersonal Competence of Remembering Students' Names
Authors: Guang Jiang, Mengzhen Shi, Ying Su, Pengcheng An, Brian Y. Lim, Yunlong Wang
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Addressing students by their names helps a teacher to start building rapport with students and thus facilitates their classroom participation. However, this basic yet effective skill has become rather challenging for university lecturers, who have to handle large-sized (sometimes exceeding 100) groups in their daily teaching. To enhance lecturers' competence in delivering interpersonal interaction, we developed NaMemo, a real-time name-indicating system based on a dedicated face-recognition pipeline. This paper presents the system design, the pilot feasibility test, and our plan for the following study, which aims to evaluate NaMemo's impacts on learning and teaching, as well as to probe design implications including privacy considerations.
A Machine Learning-enhanced Robust P-Phase Picker for Real-time Seismic Monitoring
Authors: Dazhong Shen, Qi Zhang, Tong Xu, HengShu Zhu, Wenjia Zhao, Zikai Yin, Peilun Zhou, Lihua Fang, Enhong Chen, Hui Xiong
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Ensemble Learning

Identifying the arrival times of seismic P-phases plays a significant role in real-time seismic monitoring, which provides critical guidance for emergency response activities. While considerable research has been conducted on this topic, efficiently capturing the arrival times of seismic P-phases hidden within intensively distributed and noisy seismic waves, such as those generated by the aftershocks of destructive earthquakes, remains a real challenge since most common existing methods in seismology rely on laborious expert supervision. To this end, in this paper, we present a machine learning-enhanced framework based on ensemble learning strategy, EL-Picker, for the automatic identification of seismic P-phase arrivals on continuous and massive waveforms. More specifically, EL-Picker consists of three modules, namely, Trigger, Classifier, and Refiner, and an ensemble learning strategy is exploited to integrate several machine learning classifiers. An evaluation of the aftershocks following the MS 8.0 Wenchuan earthquake demonstrates that EL-Picker can not only achieve the best identification performance but also identify 120% more seismic P-phase arrivals as complementary data. Meanwhile, experimental results also reveal both the applicability of different machine learning models for waveforms collected from different seismic stations and the regularities of seismic P-phase arrivals that might be neglected during manual inspection. These findings clearly validate the effectiveness, efficiency, flexibility and stability of EL-Picker.
Attention-Informed Mixed-Language Training for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Task-oriented Dialogue Systems
Authors: Zihan Liu, Genta Indra Winata, Zhaojiang Lin, Peng Xu, Pascale Fung
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue State Tracking, Intent Detection, Natural Language Understanding, slot-filling, Slot Filling, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Recently, data-driven task-oriented dialogue systems have achieved promising performance in English. However, developing dialogue systems that support low-resource languages remains a long-standing challenge due to the absence of high-quality data. In order to circumvent the expensive and time-consuming data collection, we introduce Attention-Informed Mixed-Language Training (MLT), a novel zero-shot adaptation method for cross-lingual task-oriented dialogue systems. It leverages very few task-related parallel word pairs to generate code-switching sentences for learning the inter-lingual semantics across languages. Instead of manually selecting the word pairs, we propose to extract source words based on the scores computed by the attention layer of a trained English task-related model and then generate word pairs using existing bilingual dictionaries. Furthermore, intensive experiments with different cross-lingual embeddings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Finally, with very few word pairs, our model achieves significant zero-shot adaptation performance improvements in both cross-lingual dialogue state tracking and natural language understanding (i.e., intent detection and slot filling) tasks compared to the current state-of-the-art approaches, which utilize a much larger amount of bilingual data.
Robustness Certificates for Sparse Adversarial Attacks by Randomized Ablation
Authors: Alexander Levine, Soheil Feizi
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Robust classification

Recently, techniques have been developed to provably guarantee the robustness of a classifier to adversarial perturbations of bounded L_1 and L_2 magnitudes by using randomized smoothing: the robust classification is a consensus of base classifications on randomly noised samples where the noise is additive. In this paper, we extend this technique to the L_0 threat model. We propose an efficient and certifiably robust defense against sparse adversarial attacks by randomly ablating input features, rather than using additive noise. Experimentally, on MNIST, we can certify the classifications of over 50% of images to be robust to any distortion of at most 8 pixels. This is comparable to the observed empirical robustness of unprotected classifiers on MNIST to modern L_0 attacks, demonstrating the tightness of the proposed robustness certificate. We also evaluate our certificate on ImageNet and CIFAR-10. Our certificates represent an improvement on those provided in a concurrent work (Lee et al. 2019) which uses random noise rather than ablation (median certificates of 8 pixels versus 4 pixels on MNIST; 16 pixels versus 1 pixel on ImageNet.) Additionally, we empirically demonstrate that our classifier is highly robust to modern sparse adversarial attacks on MNIST. Our classifications are robust, in median, to adversarial perturbations of up to 31 pixels, compared to 22 pixels reported as the state-of-the-art defense, at the cost of a slight decrease (around 2.3%) in the classification accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/alevine0/randomizedAblation/.
Cantonese Automatic Speech Recognition Using Transfer Learning from Mandarin
Authors: Bryan Li, Xinyue Wang, Homayoon Beigi
Date: 2019-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Transfer Learning

We propose a system to develop a basic automatic speech recognizer(ASR) for Cantonese, a low-resource language, through transfer learning of Mandarin, a high-resource language. We take a time-delayed neural network trained on Mandarin, and perform weight transfer of several layers to a newly initialized model for Cantonese. We experiment with the number of layers transferred, their learning rates, and pretraining i-vectors. Key findings are that this approach allows for quicker training time with less data. We find that for every epoch, log-probability is smaller for transfer learning models compared to a Cantonese-only model. The transfer learning models show slight improvement in CER.