pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Algebraic Approach to Directed Rough Sets
Authors: Mani A, Sandor Radeleczki
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In relational approach to general rough sets, ideas of directed relations are supplemented with additional conditions for multiple algebraic approaches in this research paper. The relations are also specialized to representations of general parthood that are upper-directed, reflexive and antisymmetric for a better behaved groupoidal semantics over the set of roughly equivalent objects by the first author. Another distinct algebraic semantics over the set of approximations, and a new knowledge interpretation are also invented in this research by her. Because of minimal conditions imposed on the relations, neighborhood granulations are used in the construction of all approximations (granular and pointwise). Necessary and sufficient conditions for the lattice of local upper approximations to be completely distributive are proved by the second author. These results are related to formal concept analysis. Applications to student centered learning and decision making are also outlined.
Revisiting Sequence-to-Sequence Video Object Segmentation with Multi-Task Loss and Skip-Memory
Authors: Fatemeh Azimi, Benjamin Bischke, Sebastian Palacio, Federico Raue, Joern Hees, Andreas Dengel
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Object, One-Shot Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Video Object Segmentation (VOS) is an active research area of the visual domain. One of its fundamental sub-tasks is semi-supervised / one-shot learning: given only the segmentation mask for the first frame, the task is to provide pixel-accurate masks for the object over the rest of the sequence. Despite much progress in the last years, we noticed that many of the existing approaches lose objects in longer sequences, especially when the object is small or briefly occluded. In this work, we build upon a sequence-to-sequence approach that employs an encoder-decoder architecture together with a memory module for exploiting the sequential data. We further improve this approach by proposing a model that manipulates multi-scale spatio-temporal information using memory-equipped skip connections. Furthermore, we incorporate an auxiliary task based on distance classification which greatly enhances the quality of edges in segmentation masks. We compare our approach to the state of the art and show considerable improvement in the contour accuracy metric and the overall segmentation accuracy.
Learning to Update Natural Language Comments Based on Code Changes
Authors: Sheena Panthaplackel, Pengyu Nie, Milos Gligoric, Junyi Jessy Li, Raymond J. Mooney
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6

We formulate the novel task of automatically updating an existing natural language comment based on changes in the body of code it accompanies. We propose an approach that learns to correlate changes across two distinct language representations, to generate a sequence of edits that are applied to the existing comment to reflect the source code modifications. We train and evaluate our model using a dataset that we collected from commit histories of open-source software projects, with each example consisting of a concurrent update to a method and its corresponding comment. We compare our approach against multiple baselines using both automatic metrics and human evaluation. Results reflect the challenge of this task and that our model outperforms baselines with respect to making edits.
CNN based Road User Detection using the 3D Radar Cube
Authors: Andras Palffy, Jiaao Dong, Julian F. P. Kooij, Dariu M. Gavrila
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Object

This letter presents a novel radar based, single-frame, multi-class detection method for moving road users (pedestrian, cyclist, car), which utilizes low-level radar cube data. The method provides class information both on the radar target- and object-level. Radar targets are classified individually after extending the target features with a cropped block of the 3D radar cube around their positions, thereby capturing the motion of moving parts in the local velocity distribution. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed for this classification step. Afterwards, object proposals are generated with a clustering step, which not only considers the radar targets' positions and velocities, but their calculated class scores as well. In experiments on a real-life dataset we demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both target- and object-wise by reaching an average of 0.70 (baseline: 0.68) target-wise and 0.56 (baseline: 0.48) object-wise F1 score. Furthermore, we examine the importance of the used features in an ablation study.
Randomized spectral co-clustering for large-scale directed networks
Authors: Xiao Guo, Yixuan Qiu, Hai Zhang, Xiangyu Chang
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Directed networks are broadly used to represent asymmetric relationships among units. Co-clustering aims to cluster the senders and receivers of directed networks simultaneously. In particular, the well-known spectral clustering algorithm could be modified as the spectral co-clustering to co-cluster directed networks. However, large-scale networks pose great computational challenges to it. In this paper, we leverage sketching techniques and derive two randomized spectral co-clustering algorithms, one \emph{random-projection-based} and the other \emph{random-sampling-based}, to accelerate the co-clustering of large-scale directed networks. We theoretically analyze the resulting algorithms under two generative models -- the stochastic co-block model and the degree-corrected stochastic co-block model, and establish their approximation error rates and misclustering error rates, indicating better bounds than the state-of-the-art results of co-clustering literature. Numerically, we design and conduct simulations to support our theoretical results and test the efficiency of the algorithms on real networks with up to millions of nodes. A publicly available R package \textsf{RandClust} is developed for better usability and reproducibility of the proposed methods.
DAN-SNR: A Deep Attentive Network for Social-Aware Next Point-of-Interest Recommendation
Authors: Liwei Huang, Yutao Ma, Yanbo Liu, Keqing He
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00

Next (or successive) point-of-interest (POI) recommendation has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Most of the previous studies attempted to incorporate the spatiotemporal information and sequential patterns of user check-ins into recommendation models to predict the target user's next move. However, none of these approaches utilized the social influence of each user's friends. In this study, we discuss a new topic of next POI recommendation and present a deep attentive network for social-aware next POI recommendation called DAN-SNR. In particular, the DAN-SNR makes use of the self-attention mechanism instead of the architecture of recurrent neural networks to model sequential influence and social influence in a unified manner. Moreover, we design and implement two parallel channels to capture short-term user preference and long-term user preference as well as social influence, respectively. By leveraging multi-head self-attention, the DAN-SNR can model long-range dependencies between any two historical check-ins efficiently and weigh their contributions to the next destination adaptively. Also, we carried out a comprehensive evaluation using large-scale real-world datasets collected from two popular location-based social networks, namely Gowalla and Brightkite. Experimental results indicate that the DAN-SNR outperforms seven competitive baseline approaches regarding recommendation performance and is of high efficiency among six neural-network- and attention-based methods.
How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Haoxi Zhong, Chaojun Xiao, Cunchao Tu, Tianyang Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6

Legal Artificial Intelligence (LegalAI) focuses on applying the technology of artificial intelligence, especially natural language processing, to benefit tasks in the legal domain. In recent years, LegalAI has drawn increasing attention rapidly from both AI researchers and legal professionals, as LegalAI is beneficial to the legal system for liberating legal professionals from a maze of paperwork. Legal professionals often think about how to solve tasks from rule-based and symbol-based methods, while NLP researchers concentrate more on data-driven and embedding methods. In this paper, we introduce the history, the current state, and the future directions of research in LegalAI. We illustrate the tasks from the perspectives of legal professionals and NLP researchers and show several representative applications in LegalAI. We conduct experiments and provide an in-depth analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of existing works to explore possible future directions. You can find the implementation of our work from https://github.com/thunlp/CLAIM.
A Bayesian machine scientist to aid in the solution of challenging scientific problems
Authors: Roger Guimera, Ignasi Reichardt, Antoni Aguilar-Mogas, Francesco A Massucci, Manuel Miranda, Jordi Pallares, Marta Sales-Pardo
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Closed-form, interpretable mathematical models have been instrumental for advancing our understanding of the world; with the data revolution, we may now be in a position to uncover new such models for many systems from physics to the social sciences. However, to deal with increasing amounts of data, we need "machine scientists" that are able to extract these models automatically from data. Here, we introduce a Bayesian machine scientist, which establishes the plausibility of models using explicit approximations to the exact marginal posterior over models and establishes its prior expectations about models by learning from a large empirical corpus of mathematical expressions. It explores the space of models using Markov chain Monte Carlo. We show that this approach uncovers accurate models for synthetic and real data and provides out-of-sample predictions that are more accurate than those of existing approaches and of other nonparametric methods.
Semi-Lexical Languages -- A Formal Basis for Unifying Machine Learning and Symbolic Reasoning in Computer Vision
Authors: Briti Gangopadhyay, Somnath Hazra, Pallab Dasgupta
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Human vision is able to compensate imperfections in sensory inputs from the real world by reasoning based on prior knowledge about the world. Machine learning has had a significant impact on computer vision due to its inherent ability in handling imprecision, but the absence of a reasoning framework based on domain knowledge limits its ability to interpret complex scenarios. We propose semi-lexical languages as a formal basis for dealing with imperfect tokens provided by the real world. The power of machine learning is used to map the imperfect tokens into the alphabet of the language and symbolic reasoning is used to determine the membership of input in the language. Semi-lexical languages also have bindings that prevent the variations in which a semi-lexical token is interpreted in different parts of the input, thereby leaning on deduction to enhance the quality of recognition of individual tokens. We present case studies that demonstrate the advantage of using such a framework over pure machine learning and pure symbolic methods.
A Survey on Incorporating Domain Knowledge into Deep Learning for Medical Image Analysis
Authors: Xiaozheng Xie, Jianwei Niu, Xuefeng Liu, Zhengsu Chen, Shaojie Tang, Shui Yu
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Diagnostic, Medical Image Analysis, Organ Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Although deep learning models like CNNs have achieved great success in medical image analysis, the small size of medical datasets remains a major bottleneck in this area. To address this problem, researchers have started looking for external information beyond current available medical datasets. Traditional approaches generally leverage the information from natural images via transfer learning. More recent works utilize the domain knowledge from medical doctors, to create networks that resemble how medical doctors are trained, mimic their diagnostic patterns, or focus on the features or areas they pay particular attention to. In this survey, we summarize the current progress on integrating medical domain knowledge into deep learning models for various tasks, such as disease diagnosis, lesion, organ and abnormality detection, lesion and organ segmentation. For each task, we systematically categorize different kinds of medical domain knowledge that have been utilized and their corresponding integrating methods. We also provide current challenges and directions for future research.
Numerical Solution of the Parametric Diffusion Equation by Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Moritz Geist, Philipp Petersen, Mones Raslan, Reinhold Schneider, Gitta Kutyniok
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00

We perform a comprehensive numerical study of the effect of approximation-theoretical results for neural networks on practical learning problems in the context of numerical analysis. As the underlying model, we study the machine-learning-based solution of parametric partial differential equations. Here, approximation theory predicts that the performance of the model should depend only very mildly on the dimension of the parameter space and is determined by the intrinsic dimension of the solution manifold of the parametric partial differential equation. We use various methods to establish comparability between test-cases by minimizing the effect of the choice of test-cases on the optimization and sampling aspects of the learning problem. We find strong support for the hypothesis that approximation-theoretical effects heavily influence the practical behavior of learning problems in numerical analysis.
An Epidemiological Modelling Approach for Covid19 via Data Assimilation
Authors: Philip Nadler, Shuo Wang, Rossella Arcucci, Xian Yang, Yike Guo
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00

The global pandemic of the 2019-nCov requires the evaluation of policy interventions to mitigate future social and economic costs of quarantine measures worldwide. We propose an epidemiological model for forecasting and policy evaluation which incorporates new data in real-time through variational data assimilation. We analyze and discuss infection rates in China, the US and Italy. In particular, we develop a custom compartmental SIR model fit to variables related to the epidemic in Chinese cities, named SITR model. We compare and discuss model results which conducts updates as new observations become available. A hybrid data assimilation approach is applied to make results robust to initial conditions. We use the model to do inference on infection numbers as well as parameters such as the disease transmissibility rate or the rate of recovery. The parameterisation of the model is parsimonious and extendable, allowing for the incorporation of additional data and parameters of interest. This allows for scalability and the extension of the model to other locations or the adaption of novel data sources.
A Rigorous Study on Named Entity Recognition: Can Fine-tuning Pretrained Model Lead to the Promised Land?
Authors: Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Jialong Tang, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Zhicheng Wei, Nicholas Jing Yuan
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Diversity, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Fine-tuning pretrained model has achieved promising performance on standard NER benchmarks. Generally, these benchmarks are blessed with strong name regularity, high mention coverage and sufficient context diversity. Unfortunately, when scaling NER to open situations, these advantages may no longer exist. And therefore it raises a critical question of whether previous creditable approaches can still work well when facing these challenges. As there is no currently available dataset to investigate this problem, this paper proposes to conduct randomization test on standard benchmarks. Specifically, we erase name regularity, mention coverage and context diversity respectively from the benchmarks, in order to explore their impact on the generalization ability of models. To further verify our conclusions, we also construct a new open NER dataset that focuses on entity types with weaker name regularity and lower mention coverage to verify our conclusion. From both randomization test and empirical experiments, we draw the conclusions that 1) name regularity is critical for the models to generalize to unseen mentions; 2) high mention coverage may undermine the model generalization ability and 3) context patterns may not require enormous data to capture when using pretrained encoders.
Inter-sequence Enhanced Framework for Personalized Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Feng Liu, Weiwen Liu, Xutao Li, Yunming Ye
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

Modeling the sequential correlation of users' historical interactions is essential in sequential recommendation. However, the majority of the approaches mainly focus on modeling the \emph{intra-sequence} item correlation within each individual sequence but neglect the \emph{inter-sequence} item correlation across different user interaction sequences. Though several studies have been aware of this issue, their method is either simple or implicit. To make better use of such information, we propose an inter-sequence enhanced framework for the Sequential Recommendation (ISSR). In ISSR, both inter-sequence and intra-sequence item correlation are considered. Firstly, we equip graph neural networks in the inter-sequence correlation encoder to capture the high-order item correlation from the user-item bipartite graph and the item-item graph. Then, based on the inter-sequence correlation encoder, we build GRU network and attention network in the intra-sequence correlation encoder to model the item sequential correlation within each individual sequence and temporal dynamics for predicting users' preferences over candidate items. Additionally, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of ISSR over many state-of-the-art methods and the effectiveness of the inter-sequence correlation encoder.
A State Aggregation Approach for Solving Knapsack Problem with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Reza Refaei Afshar, Yingqian Zhang, Murat Firat, Uzay Kaymak
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper proposes a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach for solving knapsack problem. The proposed method consists of a state aggregation step based on tabular reinforcement learning to extract features and construct states. The state aggregation policy is applied to each problem instance of the knapsack problem, which is used with Advantage Actor Critic (A2C) algorithm to train a policy through which the items are sequentially selected at each time step. The method is a constructive solution approach and the process of selecting items is repeated until the final solution is obtained. The experiments show that our approach provides close to optimal solutions for all tested instances, outperforms the greedy algorithm, and is able to handle larger instances and more flexible than an existing DRL approach. In addition, the results demonstrate that the proposed model with the state aggregation strategy not only gives better solutions but also learns in less timesteps, than the one without state aggregation.
Jointly Trained Transformers models for Spoken Language Translation
Authors: Hari Krishna Vydana, Martin Karafi'at, Katerina Zmolikova, Luk'as Burget, Honza Cernocky
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Modelling, Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Translation

Conventional spoken language translation (SLT) systems are pipeline based systems, where we have an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to convert the modality of source from speech to text and a Machine Translation (MT) systems to translate source text to text in target language. Recent progress in the sequence-sequence architectures have reduced the performance gap between the pipeline based SLT systems (cascaded ASR-MT) and End-to-End approaches. Though End-to-End and cascaded ASR-MT systems are reaching to the comparable levels of performances, we can see a large performance gap using the ASR hypothesis and oracle text w.r.t MT models. This performance gap indicates that the MT systems are prone to large performance degradation due to noisy ASR hypothesis as opposed to oracle text transcript. In this work this degradation in the performance is reduced by creating an end to-end differentiable pipeline between the ASR and MT systems. In this work, we train SLT systems with ASR objective as an auxiliary loss and both the networks are connected through the neural hidden representations. This train ing would have an End-to-End differentiable path w.r.t to the final objective function as well as utilize the ASR objective for better performance of the SLT systems. This architecture has improved from BLEU from 36.8 to 44.5. Due to the Multi-task training the model also generates the ASR hypothesis which are used by a pre-trained MT model. Combining the proposed systems with the MT model has increased the BLEU score by 1. All the experiments are reported on English-Portuguese speech translation task using How2 corpus. The final BLEU score is on-par with the best speech translation system on How2 dataset with no additional training data and language model and much less parameters.
Offline Signature Verification on Real-World Documents
Authors: Deniz Engin, Alperen Kantarcı, Seçil Arslan, Hazim Kemal Ekenel
Date: 2020-04-25 00:00:00

Research on offline signature verification has explored a large variety of methods on multiple signature datasets, which are collected under controlled conditions. However, these datasets may not fully reflect the characteristics of the signatures in some practical use cases. Real-world signatures extracted from the formal documents may contain different types of occlusions, for example, stamps, company seals, ruling lines, and signature boxes. Moreover, they may have very high intra-class variations, where even genuine signatures resemble forgeries. In this paper, we address a real-world writer independent offline signature verification problem, in which, a bank's customers' transaction request documents that contain their occluded signatures are compared with their clean reference signatures. Our proposed method consists of two main components, a stamp cleaning method based on CycleGAN and signature representation based on CNNs. We extensively evaluate different verification setups, fine-tuning strategies, and signature representation approaches to have a thorough analysis of the problem. Moreover, we conduct a human evaluation to show the challenging nature of the problem. We run experiments both on our custom dataset, as well as on the publicly available Tobacco-800 dataset. The experimental results validate the difficulty of offline signature verification on real-world documents. However, by employing the stamp cleaning process, we improve the signature verification performance significantly.