pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Predicting Landslides Using Contour Aligning Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Ainaz Hajimoradlou, Gioachino Roberti, David Poole
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00

Landslides, movement of soil and rock under the influence of gravity, are common phenomena that cause significant human and economic losses every year. Experts use heterogeneous features such as slope, elevation, land cover, lithology, rock age, and rock family to predict landslides. To work with such features, we adapted convolutional neural networks to consider relative spatial information for the prediction task. Traditional filters in these networks either have a fixed orientation or are rotationally invariant. Intuitively, the filters should orient uphill, but there is not enough data to learn the concept of uphill; instead, it can be provided as prior knowledge. We propose a model called Locally Aligned Convolutional Neural Network, LACNN, that follows the ground surface at multiple scales to predict possible landslide occurrence for a single point. To validate our method, we created a standardized dataset of georeferenced images consisting of the heterogeneous features as inputs, and compared our method to several baselines, including linear regression, a neural network, and a convolutional network, using log-likelihood error and Receiver Operating Characteristic curves on the test set. We show that our model performs better than the other proposed baselines.
Throughput Prediction of Asynchronous SGD in TensorFlow
Authors: Zhuojin Li, Wumo Yan, Marco Paolieri, Leana Golubchik
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Prediction, Scheduling

Modern machine learning frameworks can train neural networks using multiple nodes in parallel, each computing parameter updates with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and sharing them asynchronously through a central parameter server. Due to communication overhead and bottlenecks, the total throughput of SGD updates in a cluster scales sublinearly, saturating as the number of nodes increases. In this paper, we present a solution to predicting training throughput from profiling traces collected from a single-node configuration. Our approach is able to model the interaction of multiple nodes and the scheduling of concurrent transmissions between the parameter server and each node. By accounting for the dependencies between received parts and pending computations, we predict overlaps between computation and communication and generate synthetic execution traces for configurations with multiple nodes. We validate our approach on TensorFlow training jobs for popular image classification neural networks, on AWS and on our in-house cluster, using nodes equipped with GPUs or only with CPUs. We also investigate the effects of data transmission policies used in TensorFlow and the accuracy of our approach when combined with optimizations of the transmission schedule.
LAC-Nav: Collision-Free Mutiagent Navigation Based on The Local Action Cells
Authors: Li Ning, Yong Zhang
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance, Navigate

Collision avoidance is one of the most primary requirement in the decentralized multiagent navigations: while the agents are moving towards their own targets, attentions should be paid to avoid the collisions with the others. In this paper, we introduce the concept of local action cell, which provides for each agent a set of velocities that are safe to perform. Based on the realtime updated local action cells, we propose the LAC-Nav approach to navigate the agent with the properly selected velocity; and furthermore, we coupled the local action cell with an adaptive learning framework, in which the effect of selections are evaluated and used as the references for making decisions in the following updates. Through the experiments for three commonly considered scenarios, we demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed approaches, with the comparison to several widely studied strategies.
Connecting First and Second Order Recurrent Networks with Deterministic Finite Automata
Authors: Qinglong Wang, Kaixuan Zhang, Xue Liu, C. Lee Giles
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: All

We propose an approach that connects recurrent networks with different orders of hidden interaction with regular grammars of different levels of complexity. We argue that the correspondence between recurrent networks and formal computational models gives understanding to the analysis of the complicated behaviors of recurrent networks. We introduce an entropy value that categorizes all regular grammars into three classes with different levels of complexity, and show that several existing recurrent networks match grammars from either all or partial classes. As such, the differences between regular grammars reveal the different properties of these models. We also provide a unification of all investigated recurrent networks. Our evaluation shows that the unified recurrent network has improved performance in learning grammars, and demonstrates comparable performance on a real-world dataset with more complicated models.
A Syntax-aware Multi-task Learning Framework for Chinese Semantic Role Labeling
Authors: Qingrong Xia, Zhenghua Li, Min Zhang
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Chinese Semantic Role Labeling, Multi-Task Learning, Semantic Role Labeling, Sentence

Semantic role labeling (SRL) aims to identify the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. Inspired by the strong correlation between syntax and semantics, previous works pay much attention to improve SRL performance on exploiting syntactic knowledge, achieving significant results. Pipeline methods based on automatic syntactic trees and multi-task learning (MTL) approaches using standard syntactic trees are two common research orientations. In this paper, we adopt a simple unified span-based model for both span-based and word-based Chinese SRL as a strong baseline. Besides, we present a MTL framework that includes the basic SRL module and a dependency parser module. Different from the commonly used hard parameter sharing strategy in MTL, the main idea is to extract implicit syntactic representations from the dependency parser as external inputs for the basic SRL model. Experiments on the benchmarks of Chinese Proposition Bank 1.0 and CoNLL-2009 Chinese datasets show that our proposed framework can effectively improve the performance over the strong baselines. With the external BERT representations, our framework achieves new state-of-the-art 87.54 and 88.5 F1 scores on the two test data of the two benchmarks, respectively. In-depth analysis are conducted to gain more insights on the proposed framework and the effectiveness of syntax.
Robust Design of Deep Neural Networks against Adversarial Attacks based on Lyapunov Theory
Authors: Arash Rahnama, Andre T. Nguyen, Edward Raff
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Robust Design

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to subtle adversarial perturbations applied to the input. These adversarial perturbations, though imperceptible, can easily mislead the DNN. In this work, we take a control theoretic approach to the problem of robustness in DNNs. We treat each individual layer of the DNN as a nonlinear dynamical system and use Lyapunov theory to prove stability and robustness locally. We then proceed to prove stability and robustness globally for the entire DNN. We develop empirically tight bounds on the response of the output layer, or any hidden layer, to adversarial perturbations added to the input, or the input of hidden layers. Recent works have proposed spectral norm regularization as a solution for improving robustness against l2 adversarial attacks. Our results give new insights into how spectral norm regularization can mitigate the adversarial effects. Finally, we evaluate the power of our approach on a variety of data sets and network architectures and against some of the well-known adversarial attacks.
Model-Augmented Estimation of Conditional Mutual Information for Feature Selection
Authors: Alan Yang, AmirEmad Ghassami, Maxim Raginsky, Negar Kiyavash, Elyse Rosenbaum
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Markov blanket feature selection, while theoretically optimal, is generally challenging to implement. This is due to the shortcomings of existing approaches to conditional independence (CI) testing, which tend to struggle either with the curse of dimensionality or computational complexity. We propose a novel two-step approach which facilitates Markov blanket feature selection in high dimensions. First, neural networks are used to map features to low-dimensional representations. In the second step, CI testing is performed by applying the $k$-NN conditional mutual information estimator to the learned feature maps. The mappings are designed to ensure that mapped samples both preserve information and share similar information about the target variable if and only if they are close in Euclidean distance. We show that these properties boost the performance of the $k$-NN estimator in the second step. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated on both synthetic and real data.
SimpleShot: Revisiting Nearest-Neighbor Classification for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Yan Wang, Wei-Lun Chao, Kilian Q. Weinberger, Laurens van der Maaten
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, Few-Shot Learning, General Classification, Meta-Learning

Few-shot learners aim to recognize new object classes based on a small number of labeled training examples. To prevent overfitting, state-of-the-art few-shot learners use meta-learning on convolutional-network features and perform classification using a nearest-neighbor classifier. This paper studies the accuracy of nearest-neighbor baselines without meta-learning. Surprisingly, we find simple feature transformations suffice to obtain competitive few-shot learning accuracies. For example, we find that a nearest-neighbor classifier used in combination with mean-subtraction and L2-normalization outperforms prior results in three out of five settings on the miniImageNet dataset.
Identifying Hidden Buyers in Darknet Markets via Dirichlet Hawkes Process
Authors: Panpan Zheng, Shuhan Yuan, Xintao Wu, Yubao Wu
Date: 2019-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

The darknet markets are notorious black markets in cyberspace, which involve selling or brokering drugs, weapons, stolen credit cards, and other illicit goods. To combat illicit transactions in the cyberspace, it is important to analyze the behaviors of participants in darknet markets. Currently, many studies focus on studying the behavior of vendors. However, there is no much work on analyzing buyers. The key challenge is that the buyers are anonymized in darknet markets. For most of the darknet markets, We only observe the first and last digits of a buyer's ID, such as ``a**b''. To tackle this challenge, we propose a hidden buyer identification model, called UNMIX, which can group the transactions from one hidden buyer into one cluster given a transaction sequence from an anonymized ID. UNMIX is able to model the temporal dynamics information as well as the product, comment, and vendor information associated with each transaction. As a result, the transactions with similar patterns in terms of time and content group together as the subsequence from one hidden buyer. Experiments on the data collected from three real-world darknet markets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach measured by various clustering metrics. Case studies on real transaction sequences explicitly show that our approach can group transactions with similar patterns into the same clusters.
Item Response Theory based Ensemble in Machine Learning
Authors: Ziheng Chen, Hongshik Ahn
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

In this article, we propose a novel probabilistic framework to improve the accuracy of a weighted majority voting algorithm. In order to assign higher weights to the classifiers which can correctly classify hard-to-classify instances, we introduce the Item Response Theory (IRT) framework to evaluate the samples' difficulty and classifiers' ability simultaneously. Three models are created with different assumptions suitable for different cases. When making an inference, we keep a balance between the accuracy and complexity. In our experiment, all the base models are constructed by single trees via bootstrap. To explain the models, we illustrate how the IRT ensemble model constructs the classifying boundary. We also compare their performance with other widely used methods and show that our model performs well on 19 datasets.
Adaptive Probabilistic Vehicle Trajectory Prediction Through Physically Feasible Bayesian Recurrent Neural Network
Authors: Chen Tang, Jianyu Chen, Masayoshi Tomizuka
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Probabilistic vehicle trajectory prediction is essential for robust safety of autonomous driving. Current methods for long-term trajectory prediction cannot guarantee the physical feasibility of predicted distribution. Moreover, their models cannot adapt to the driving policy of the predicted target human driver. In this work, we propose to overcome these two shortcomings by a Bayesian recurrent neural network model consisting of Bayesian-neural-network-based policy model and known physical model of the scenario. Bayesian neural network can ensemble complicated output distribution, enabling rich family of trajectory distribution. The embedded physical model ensures feasibility of the distribution. Moreover, the adopted gradient-based training method allows direct optimization for better performance in long prediction horizon. Furthermore, a particle-filter-based parameter adaptation algorithm is designed to adapt the policy Bayesian neural network to the predicted target online. Effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified with a toy example with multi-modal stochastic feedback gain and naturalistic car following data.
Rate-Regularization and Generalization in VAEs
Authors: Alican Bozkurt, Babak Esmaeili, Jean-Baptiste Tristan, Dana H. Brooks, Jennifer G. Dy, Jan-Willem van de Meent
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

Variational autoencoders optimize an objective that combines a reconstruction loss (the distortion) and a KL term (the rate). The rate is an upper bound on the mutual information, which is often interpreted as a regularizer that controls the degree of compression. We here examine whether inclusion of the rate also acts as an inductive bias that improves generalization. We perform rate-distortion analyses that control the strength of the rate term, the network capacity, and the difficulty of the generalization problem. Decreasing the strength of the rate paradoxically improves generalization in most settings, and reducing the mutual information typically leads to underfitting. Moreover, we show that generalization continues to improve even after the mutual information saturates, indicating that the gap on the bound (i.e. the KL divergence relative to the inference marginal) affects generalization. This suggests that the standard Gaussian prior is not an inductive bias that typically aids generalization, prompting work to understand what choices of priors improve generalization in VAEs.
Achieving Differential Privacy in Vertically Partitioned Multiparty Learning
Authors: Depeng Xu, Shuhan Yuan, Xintao Wu
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Preserving differential privacy has been well studied under centralized setting. However, it's very challenging to preserve differential privacy under multiparty setting, especially for the vertically partitioned case. In this work, we propose a new framework for differential privacy preserving multiparty learning in the vertically partitioned setting. Our core idea is based on the functional mechanism that achieves differential privacy of the released model by adding noise to the objective function. We show the server can simply dissect the objective function into single-party and cross-party sub-functions, and allocate computation and perturbation of their polynomial coefficients to local parties. Our method needs only one round of noise addition and secure aggregation. The released model in our framework achieves the same utility as applying the functional mechanism in the centralized setting. Evaluation on real-world and synthetic datasets for linear and logistic regressions shows the effectiveness of our proposed method.
ContamiNet: Detecting Contamination in Municipal Solid Waste
Authors: Khoury Ibrahim, Danielle A. Savage, Addie Schnirel, Paul Intrevado, Yannet Interian
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00

Leveraging over 30,000 images each with up to 89 labels collected by Recology---an integrated resource recovery company with both residential and commercial trash, recycling and composting services---the authors develop ContamiNet, a convolutional neural network, to identify contaminating material in residential recycling and compost bins. When training the model on a subset of labels that meet a minimum frequency threshold, ContamiNet preforms almost as well human experts in detecting contamination (0.86 versus 0.88 AUC). Recology is actively piloting ContamiNet in their daily municipal solid waste (MSW) collection to identify contaminants in recycling and compost bins to subsequently inform and educate customers about best sorting practices.
Supervised Initialization of LSTM Networks for Fundamental Frequency Detection in Noisy Speech Signals
Authors: Marvin Coto-Jimenez
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Identification

Fundamental frequency is one of the most important parameters of human speech, of importance for the classification of accent, gender, speaking styles, speaker identification, age, among others. The proper detection of this parameter remains as an important challenge for severely degraded signals. In previous references for detecting fundamental frequency in noisy speech using deep learning, the networks, such as Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) has been initialized with random weights, and then trained following a back-propagation through time algorithm. In this work, a proposal for a more efficient initialization, based on a supervised training using an Auto-associative network, is presented. This initialization is a better starting point for the detection of fundamental frequency in noisy speech. The advantages of this initialization are noticeable using objective measures for the accuracy of the detection and for the training of the networks, under the presence of additive white noise at different signal-to-noise levels.
Online Replanning in Belief Space for Partially Observable Task and Motion Problems
Authors: Caelan Reed Garrett, Chris Paxton, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Dieter Fox
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control

To solve multi-step manipulation tasks in the real world, an autonomous robot must take actions to observe its environment and react to unexpected observations. This may require opening a drawer to observe its contents or moving an object out of the way to examine the space behind it. Upon receiving a new observation, the robot must update its belief about the world and compute a new plan of action. In this work, we present an online planning and execution system for robots faced with these challenges. We perform deterministic cost-sensitive planning in the space of hybrid belief states to select likely-to-succeed observation actions and continuous control actions. After execution and observation, we replan using our new state estimate. We initially enforce that planner reuses the structure of the unexecuted tail of the last plan. This both improves planning efficiency and ensures that the overall policy does not undo its progress towards achieving the goal. Our approach is able to efficiently solve partially observable problems both in simulation and in a real-world kitchen.
Reinforcement-Learning-Based Variational Quantum Circuits Optimization for Combinatorial Problems
Authors: Sami Khairy, Ruslan Shaydulin, Lukasz Cincio, Yuri Alexeev, Prasanna Balaprakash
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Quantum computing exploits basic quantum phenomena such as state superposition and entanglement to perform computations. The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) is arguably one of the leading quantum algorithms that can outperform classical state-of-the-art methods in the near term. QAOA is a hybrid quantum-classical algorithm that combines a parameterized quantum state evolution with a classical optimization routine to approximately solve combinatorial problems. The quality of the solution obtained by QAOA within a fixed budget of calls to the quantum computer depends on the performance of the classical optimization routine used to optimize the variational parameters. In this work, we propose an approach based on reinforcement learning (RL) to train a policy network that can be used to quickly find high-quality variational parameters for unseen combinatorial problem instances. The RL agent is trained on small problem instances which can be simulated on a classical computer, yet the learned RL policy is generalizable and can be used to efficiently solve larger instances. Extensive simulations using the IBM Qiskit Aer quantum circuit simulator demonstrate that our trained RL policy can reduce the optimality gap by a factor up to 8.61 compared with other off-the-shelf optimizers tested.
Long-span language modeling for speech recognition
Authors: Sarangarajan Parthasarathy, William Gale, Xie Chen, George Polovets, Shuangyu Chang
Date: 2019-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Re-Ranking, Sentence, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We explore neural language modeling for speech recognition where the context spans multiple sentences. Rather than encode history beyond the current sentence using a cache of words or document-level features, we focus our study on the ability of LSTM and Transformer language models to implicitly learn to carry over context across sentence boundaries. We introduce a new architecture that incorporates an attention mechanism into LSTM to combine the benefits of recurrent and attention architectures. We conduct language modeling and speech recognition experiments on the publicly available LibriSpeech corpus. We show that conventional training on a paragraph-level corpus results in significant reductions in perplexity compared to training on a sentence-level corpus. We also describe speech recognition experiments using long-span language models in second-pass re-ranking, and provide insights into the ability of such models to take advantage of context beyond the current sentence.