pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Air Learning: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Gym for Autonomous Aerial Robot Visual Navigation
Authors: Srivatsan Krishnan, Behzad Boroujerdian, William Fu, Aleksandra Faust, Vijay Janapa Reddi
Date: 2019-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Visual Navigation

We introduce Air Learning, an open-source simulator, and a gym environment for deep reinforcement learning research on resource-constrained aerial robots. Equipped with domain randomization, Air Learning exposes a UAV agent to a diverse set of challenging scenarios. We seed the toolset with point-to-point obstacle avoidance tasks in three different environments and Deep Q Networks (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) trainers. Air Learning assesses the policies' performance under various quality-of-flight (QoF) metrics, such as the energy consumed, endurance, and the average trajectory length, on resource-constrained embedded platforms like a Raspberry Pi. We find that the trajectories on an embedded Ras-Pi are vastly different from those predicted on a high-end desktop system, resulting in up to 40% longer trajectories in one of the environments. To understand the source of such discrepancies, we use Air Learning to artificially degrade high-end desktop performance to mimic what happens on a low-end embedded system. We then propose a mitigation technique that uses the hardware-in-the-loop to determine the latency distribution of running the policy on the target platform (onboard compute on the aerial robot). A randomly sampled latency from the latency distribution is then added as an artificial delay within the training loop. Training the policy with artificial delays allows us to minimize the hardware gap (discrepancy in the flight time metric reduced from 37.73% to 0.5%). Thus, Air Learning with hardware-in-the-loop characterizes those differences and exposes how the onboard compute's choice affects the aerial robot's performance. We also conduct reliability studies to assess the effect of sensor failures on the learned policies. All put together, Air Learning enables a broad class of deep RL research on UAVs. The source code is available at:http://bit.ly/2JNAVb6.
Generalized Momentum-Based Methods: A Hamiltonian Perspective
Authors: Jelena Diakonikolas, Michael. I. Jordan
Date: 2019-06-02 00:00:00

We take a Hamiltonian-based perspective to generalize Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent and Polyak's heavy ball method to a broad class of momentum methods in the setting of (possibly) constrained minimization in Euclidean and non-Euclidean normed vector spaces. Our perspective leads to a generic and unifying nonasymptotic analysis of convergence of these methods in both the function value (in the setting of convex optimization) and in norm of the gradient (in the setting of unconstrained, possibly nonconvex, optimization). Our approach relies upon a time-varying Hamiltonian that produces generalized momentum methods as its equations of motion. The convergence analysis for these methods is intuitive and is based on the conserved quantities of the time-dependent Hamiltonian.
An Evaluation Toolkit to Guide Model Selection and Cohort Definition in Causal Inference
Authors: Yishai Shimoni, Ehud Karavani, Sivan Ravid, Peter Bak, Tan Hung Ng, Sharon Hensley Alford, Denise Meade, Yaara Goldschmidt
Date: 2019-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Causal Inference, Model Selection

Real world observational data, together with causal inference, allow the estimation of causal effects when randomized controlled trials are not available. To be accepted into practice, such predictive models must be validated for the dataset at hand, and thus require a comprehensive evaluation toolkit, as introduced here. Since effect estimation cannot be evaluated directly, we turn to evaluating the various observable properties of causal inference, namely the observed outcome and treatment assignment. We developed a toolkit that expands established machine learning evaluation methods and adds several causal-specific ones. Evaluations can be applied in cross-validation, in a train-test scheme, or on the training data. Multiple causal inference methods are implemented within the toolkit in a way that allows modular use of the underlying machine learning models. Thus, the toolkit is agnostic to the machine learning model that is used. We showcase our approach using a rheumatoid arthritis cohort (consisting of about 120K patients) extracted from the IBM MarketScan(R) Research Database. We introduce an iterative pipeline of data definition, model definition, and model evaluation. Using this pipeline, we demonstrate how each of the evaluation components helps drive model selection and refinement of data extraction criteria in a way that provides more reproducible results and ensures that the causal question is answerable with available data. Furthermore, we show how the evaluation toolkit can be used to ensure that performance is maintained when applied to subsets of the data, thus allowing exploration of questions that move towards personalized medicine.
Graphon Estimation from Partially Observed Network Data
Authors: Soumendu Sundar Mukherjee, Sayak Chakrabarti
Date: 2019-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Graphon Estimation, Matrix Completion

We consider estimating the edge-probability matrix of a network generated from a graphon model when the full network is not observed---only some overlapping subgraphs are. We extend the neighbourhood smoothing (NBS) algorithm of Zhang et al. (2017) to this missing-data set-up and show experimentally that, for a wide range of graphons, the extended NBS algorithm achieves significantly smaller error rates than standard graphon estimation algorithms such as vanilla neighbourhood smoothing (NBS), universal singular value thresholding (USVT), blockmodel approximation, matrix completion, etc. We also show that the extended NBS algorithm is much more robust to missing data.
Sentiment Tagging with Partial Labels using Modular Architectures
Authors: Xiao Zhang, Dan Goldwasser
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Many NLP learning tasks can be decomposed into several distinct sub-tasks, each associated with a partial label. In this paper we focus on a popular class of learning problems, sequence prediction applied to several sentiment analysis tasks, and suggest a modular learning approach in which different sub-tasks are learned using separate functional modules, combined to perform the final task while sharing information. Our experiments show this approach helps constrain the learning process and can alleviate some of the supervision efforts.
Incorporating Biological Knowledge with Factor Graph Neural Network for Interpretable Deep Learning
Authors: Tianle Ma, Aidong Zhang
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Graph Neural Network

While deep learning has achieved great success in many fields, one common criticism about deep learning is its lack of interpretability. In most cases, the hidden units in a deep neural network do not have a clear semantic meaning or correspond to any physical entities. However, model interpretability and explainability are crucial in many biomedical applications. To address this challenge, we developed the Factor Graph Neural Network model that is interpretable and predictable by combining probabilistic graphical models with deep learning. We directly encode biological knowledge such as Gene Ontology as a factor graph into the model architecture, making the model transparent and interpretable. Furthermore, we devised an attention mechanism that can capture multi-scale hierarchical interactions among biological entities such as genes and Gene Ontology terms. With parameter sharing mechanism, the unrolled Factor Graph Neural Network model can be trained with stochastic depth and generalize well. We applied our model to two cancer genomic datasets to predict target clinical variables and achieved better results than other traditional machine learning and deep learning models. Our model can also be used for gene set enrichment analysis and selecting Gene Ontology terms that are important to target clinical variables.
MaxGap Bandit: Adaptive Algorithms for Approximate Ranking
Authors: Sumeet Katariya, Ardhendu Tripathy, Robert Nowak
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Outlier Detection

This paper studies the problem of adaptively sampling from K distributions (arms) in order to identify the largest gap between any two adjacent means. We call this the MaxGap-bandit problem. This problem arises naturally in approximate ranking, noisy sorting, outlier detection, and top-arm identification in bandits. The key novelty of the MaxGap-bandit problem is that it aims to adaptively determine the natural partitioning of the distributions into a subset with larger means and a subset with smaller means, where the split is determined by the largest gap rather than a pre-specified rank or threshold. Estimating an arm's gap requires sampling its neighboring arms in addition to itself, and this dependence results in a novel hardness parameter that characterizes the sample complexity of the problem. We propose elimination and UCB-style algorithms and show that they are minimax optimal. Our experiments show that the UCB-style algorithms require 6-8x fewer samples than non-adaptive sampling to achieve the same error.
Revisiting Flow Information for Traffic Prediction
Authors: Xian Zhou, Yanyan Shen, Linpeng Huang
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Traffic Prediction

Traffic prediction is a fundamental task in many real applications, which aims to predict the future traffic volume in any region of a city. In essence, traffic volume in a region is the aggregation of traffic flows from/to the region. However, existing traffic prediction methods focus on modeling complex spatiotemporal traffic correlations and seldomly study the influence of the original traffic flows among regions. In this paper, we revisit the traffic flow information and exploit the direct flow correlations among regions towards more accurate traffic prediction. We introduce a novel flow-aware graph convolution to model dynamic flow correlations among regions. We further introduce an integrated Gated Recurrent Unit network to incorporate flow correlations with spatiotemporal modeling. The experimental results on real-world traffic datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, especially on the traffic conditions with a great change on flows.
Learning to Self-Train for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Classification
Authors: Xinzhe Li, Qianru Sun, Yaoyao Liu, Shibao Zheng, Qin Zhou, Tat-Seng Chua, Bernt Schiele
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Meta-Learning

Few-shot classification (FSC) is challenging due to the scarcity of labeled training data (e.g. only one labeled data point per class). Meta-learning has shown to achieve promising results by learning to initialize a classification model for FSC. In this paper we propose a novel semi-supervised meta-learning method called learning to self-train (LST) that leverages unlabeled data and specifically meta-learns how to cherry-pick and label such unsupervised data to further improve performance. To this end, we train the LST model through a large number of semi-supervised few-shot tasks. On each task, we train a few-shot model to predict pseudo labels for unlabeled data, and then iterate the self-training steps on labeled and pseudo-labeled data with each step followed by fine-tuning. We additionally learn a soft weighting network (SWN) to optimize the self-training weights of pseudo labels so that better ones can contribute more to gradient descent optimization. We evaluate our LST method on two ImageNet benchmarks for semi-supervised few-shot classification and achieve large improvements over the state-of-the-art method. Code is at https://github.com/xinzheli1217/learning-to-self-train.
Generative Adversarial Networks for Distributed Intrusion Detection in the Internet of Things
Authors: Aidin Ferdowsi, Walid Saad
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Intrusion Detection

To reap the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT), it is imperative to secure the system against cyber attacks in order to enable mission critical and real-time applications. To this end, intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have been widely used to detect anomalies caused by a cyber attacker in IoT systems. However, due to the large-scale nature of the IoT, an IDS must operate in a distributed manner with minimum dependence on a central controller. Moreover, in many scenarios such as health and financial applications, the datasets are private and IoTDs may not intend to share such data. To this end, in this paper, a distributed generative adversarial network (GAN) is proposed to provide a fully distributed IDS for the IoT so as to detect anomalous behavior without reliance on any centralized controller. In this architecture, every IoTD can monitor its own data as well as neighbor IoTDs to detect internal and external attacks. In addition, the proposed distributed IDS does not require sharing the datasets between the IoTDs, thus, it can be implemented in IoTs that preserve the privacy of user data such as health monitoring systems or financial applications. It is shown analytically that the proposed distributed GAN has higher accuracy of detecting intrusion compared to a standalone IDS that has access to only a single IoTD dataset. Simulation results show that, the proposed distributed GAN-based IDS has up to 20% higher accuracy, 25% higher precision, and 60% lower false positive rate compared to a standalone GAN-based IDS.
Deep Reinforcement Learning Architecture for Continuous Power Allocation in High Throughput Satellites
Authors: Juan Jose Garau Luis, Markus Guerster, Inigo del Portillo, Edward Crawley, Bruce Cameron
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In the coming years, the satellite broadband market will experience significant increases in the service demand, especially for the mobility sector, where demand is burstier. Many of the next generation of satellites will be equipped with numerous degrees of freedom in power and bandwidth allocation capabilities, making manual resource allocation impractical and inefficient. Therefore, it is desirable to automate the operation of these highly flexible satellites. This paper presents a novel power allocation approach based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that represents the problem as continuous state and action spaces. We make use of the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm to optimize the allocation policy for minimum Unmet System Demand (USD) and power consumption. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed through simulations of a multibeam satellite system, which show promising results for DRL to be used as a dynamic resource allocation algorithm.
Unified Acceleration of High-Order Algorithms under Hölder Continuity and Uniform Convexity
Authors: Chaobing Song, Yong Jiang, Yi Ma
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00

In this paper, through a very intuitive vanilla proximal method perspective, we derive accelerated high-order optimization algorithms for minimizing a convex function that has H\"{o}lder continuous derivatives. In this general convex setting, we propose a concise unified acceleration framework (UAF), which reconciles the two different high-order acceleration approaches, one by Nesterov and Baes [29, 3, 33] and one by Monteiro and Svaiter [25]. As result, the UAF unifies the high-order acceleration instances [29, 3, 33, 15, 16, 25, 19, 6, 14] of the two approaches by only two problem-related parameters and two additional parameters for framework design. Furthermore, the UAF (and its analysis) is the first approach to make high-order methods applicable for high-order smoothness conditions with respect to non-Euclidean norms. If the function is further uniformly convex, we propose a general restart scheme for the UAF. The iteration complexities of instances of both the UAF and the restarted UAF match existing lower bounds in most important cases [2, 16]. For practical implementation, we introduce a new and effective heuristic that significantly simplifies the binary search procedure required by the framework. We use experiments to verify the effectiveness of the heuristic and demonstrate clear and consistent advantages of high-order acceleration methods over first-order ones, in terms of run-time complexity. Finally, the UAF is proposed directly in the general composite convex setting, thus show that the existing high-order algorithms [29, 3, 33, 16, 6, 14] can be naturally extended to the general composite convex setting.
A Direct $\tilde{O}(1/ε)$ Iteration Parallel Algorithm for Optimal Transport
Authors: Arun Jambulapati, Aaron Sidford, Kevin Tian
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00

Optimal transportation, or computing the Wasserstein or ``earth mover's'' distance between two distributions, is a fundamental primitive which arises in many learning and statistical settings. We give an algorithm which solves this problem to additive $\epsilon$ with $\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon)$ parallel depth, and $\tilde{O}\left(n^2/\epsilon\right)$ work. Barring a breakthrough on a long-standing algorithmic open problem, this is optimal for first-order methods. Blanchet et. al. '18, Quanrud '19 obtained similar runtimes through reductions to positive linear programming and matrix scaling. However, these reduction-based algorithms use complicated subroutines which may be deemed impractical due to requiring solvers for second-order iterations (matrix scaling) or non-parallelizability (positive LP). The fastest practical algorithms run in time $\tilde{O}(\min(n^2 / \epsilon^2, n^{2.5} / \epsilon))$ (Dvurechensky et. al. '18, Lin et. al. '19). We bridge this gap by providing a parallel, first-order, $\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon)$ iteration algorithm without worse dependence on dimension, and provide preliminary experimental evidence that our algorithm may enjoy improved practical performance. We obtain this runtime via a primal-dual extragradient method, motivated by recent theoretical improvements to maximum flow (Sherman '17).
Decentralized Deep Reinforcement Learning for Delay-Power Tradeoff in Vehicular Communications
Authors: Xianfu Chen, Celimuge Wu, Honggang Zhang, Yan Zhang, Mehdi Bennis, Heli Vuojala
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Management, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

This paper targets at the problem of radio resource management for expected long-term delay-power tradeoff in vehicular communications. At each decision epoch, the road side unit observes the global network state, allocates channels and schedules data packets for all vehicle user equipment-pairs (VUE-pairs). The decision-making procedure is modelled as a discrete-time Markov decision process (MDP). The technical challenges in solving an optimal control policy originate from highly spatial mobility of vehicles and temporal variations in data traffic. To simplify the decision-making process, we first decompose the MDP into a series of per-VUE-pair MDPs. We then propose an online long short-term memory based deep reinforcement learning algorithm to break the curse of high dimensionality in state space faced by each per-VUE-pair MDP. With the proposed algorithm, the optimal channel allocation and packet scheduling decision at each epoch can be made in a decentralized way in accordance with the partial observations of the global network state at the VUE-pairs. Numerical simulations validate the theoretical analysis and show the effectiveness of the proposed online learning algorithm.
Computing Valid p-values for Image Segmentation by Selective Inference
Authors: Kosuke Tanizaki, Noriaki Hashimoto, Yu Inatsu, Hidekata Hontani, Ichiro Takeuchi
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, valid

Image segmentation is one of the most fundamental tasks of computer vision. In many practical applications, it is essential to properly evaluate the reliability of individual segmentation results. In this study, we propose a novel framework to provide the statistical significance of segmentation results in the form of p-values. Specifically, we consider a statistical hypothesis test for determining the difference between the object and the background regions. This problem is challenging because the difference can be deceptively large (called segmentation bias) due to the adaptation of the segmentation algorithm to the data. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce a statistical approach called selective inference, and develop a framework to compute valid p-values in which the segmentation bias is properly accounted for. Although the proposed framework is potentially applicable to various segmentation algorithms, we focus in this paper on graph cut-based and threshold-based segmentation algorithms, and develop two specific methods to compute valid p-values for the segmentation results obtained by these algorithms. We prove the theoretical validity of these two methods and demonstrate their practicality by applying them to segmentation problems for medical images.
BAYHENN: Combining Bayesian Deep Learning and Homomorphic Encryption for Secure DNN Inference
Authors: Peichen Xie, Bingzhe Wu, Guangyu Sun
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Recently, deep learning as a service (DLaaS) has emerged as a promising way to facilitate the employment of deep neural networks (DNNs) for various purposes. However, using DLaaS also causes potential privacy leakage from both clients and cloud servers. This privacy issue has fueled the research interests on the privacy-preserving inference of DNN models in the cloud service. In this paper, we present a practical solution named BAYHENN for secure DNN inference. It can protect both the client's privacy and server's privacy at the same time. The key strategy of our solution is to combine homomorphic encryption and Bayesian neural networks. Specifically, we use homomorphic encryption to protect a client's raw data and use Bayesian neural networks to protect the DNN weights in a cloud server. To verify the effectiveness of our solution, we conduct experiments on MNIST and a real-life clinical dataset. Our solution achieves consistent latency decreases on both tasks. In particular, our method can outperform the best existing method (GAZELLE) by about 5x, in terms of end-to-end latency.
Robust Sequence-to-Sequence Acoustic Modeling with Stepwise Monotonic Attention for Neural TTS
Authors: Mutian He, Yan Deng, Lei He
Date: 2019-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Hard Attention

Neural TTS has demonstrated strong capabilities to generate human-like speech with high quality and naturalness, while its generalization to out-of-domain texts is still a challenging task, with regard to the design of attention-based sequence-to-sequence acoustic modeling. Various errors occur in those inputs with unseen context, including attention collapse, skipping, repeating, etc., which limits the broader applications. In this paper, we propose a novel stepwise monotonic attention method in sequence-to-sequence acoustic modeling to improve the robustness on out-of-domain inputs. The method utilizes the strict monotonic property in TTS with constraints on monotonic hard attention that the alignments between inputs and outputs sequence must be not only monotonic but allowing no skipping on inputs. Soft attention could be used to evade mismatch between training and inference. The experimental results show that the proposed method could achieve significant improvements in robustness on out-of-domain scenarios for phoneme-based models, without any regression on the in-domain naturalness test.