pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Deep Learning for Ultra-reliable and Low-latency Communications
Authors: Chengjian Sun, Chenyang Yang
Date: 2019-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In this paper, we study how to solve resource allocation problems in ultra-reliable and low-latency communications by unsupervised deep learning, which often yield functional optimization problems with quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. We take a joint power and bandwidth allocation problem as an example, which minimizes the total bandwidth required to guarantee the QoS of each user in terms of the delay bound and overall packet loss probability. The global optimal solution is found in a symmetric scenario. A neural network was introduced to find an approximated optimal solution in general scenarios, where the QoS is ensured by using the property that the optimal solution should satisfy as the "supervision signal". Simulation results show that the learning-based solution performs the same as the optimal solution in the symmetric scenario, and can save around 40% bandwidth with respect to the state-of-the-art policy.
Visualization of AE's Training on Credit Card Transactions with Persistent Homology
Authors: Jeremy Charlier, Francois Petit, Gaston Ormazabal, Radu State, Jean Hilger
Date: 2019-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Dimensionality Reduction

Auto-encoders are among the most popular neural network architecture for dimension reduction. They are composed of two parts: the encoder which maps the model distribution to a latent manifold and the decoder which maps the latent manifold to a reconstructed distribution. However, auto-encoders are known to provoke chaotically scattered data distribution in the latent manifold resulting in an incomplete reconstructed distribution. Current distance measures fail to detect this problem because they are not able to acknowledge the shape of the data manifolds, i.e. their topological features, and the scale at which the manifolds should be analyzed. We propose Persistent Homology for Wasserstein Auto-Encoders, called PHom-WAE, a new methodology to assess and measure the data distribution of a generative model. PHom-WAE minimizes the Wasserstein distance between the true distribution and the reconstructed distribution and uses persistent homology, the study of the topological features of a space at different spatial resolutions, to compare the nature of the latent manifold and the reconstructed distribution. Our experiments underline the potential of persistent homology for Wasserstein Auto-Encoders in comparison to Variational Auto-Encoders, another type of generative model. The experiments are conducted on a real-world data set particularly challenging for traditional distance measures and auto-encoders. PHom-WAE is the first methodology to propose a topological distance measure, the bottleneck distance, for Wasserstein Auto-Encoders used to compare decoded samples of high quality in the context of credit card transactions.
Seeker: Real-Time Interactive Search
Authors: Ari Biswas, Thai T. Pham, Michael Vogelsong, Benjamin Snyder, Houssam Nassif
Date: 2019-05-17 00:00:00

This paper introduces Seeker, a system that allows users to interactively refine search rankings in real time, through feedback in the form of likes and dislikes. When searching online, users may not know how to accurately describe their product of choice in words. An alternative approach is to search an embedding space, allowing the user to query using a representation of the item (like a tune for a song, or a picture for an object). However, this approach requires the user to possess an example representation of their desired item. Additionally, most current search systems do not allow the user to dynamically adapt the results with further feedback. On the other hand, users often have a mental picture of the desired item and are able to answer ordinal questions of the form: "Is this item similar to what you have in mind?" With this assumption, our algorithm allows for users to provide sequential feedback on search results to adapt the search feed. We show that our proposed approach works well both qualitatively and quantitatively. Unlike most previous representation-based search systems, we can quantify the quality of our algorithm by evaluating humans-in-the-loop experiments.
Automatic Evaluation of Local Topic Quality
Authors: Jeffrey Lund, Piper Armstrong, Wilson Fearn, Stephen Cowley, Courtni Byun, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Kevin Seppi
Date: 2019-05-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Topic Models

Topic models are typically evaluated with respect to the global topic distributions that they generate, using metrics such as coherence, but without regard to local (token-level) topic assignments. Token-level assignments are important for downstream tasks such as classification. Even recent models, which aim to improve the quality of these token-level topic assignments, have been evaluated only with respect to global metrics. We propose a task designed to elicit human judgments of token-level topic assignments. We use a variety of topic model types and parameters and discover that global metrics agree poorly with human assignments. Since human evaluation is expensive we propose a variety of automated metrics to evaluate topic models at a local level. Finally, we correlate our proposed metrics with human judgments from the task on several datasets. We show that an evaluation based on the percent of topic switches correlates most strongly with human judgment of local topic quality. We suggest that this new metric, which we call consistency, be adopted alongside global metrics such as topic coherence when evaluating new topic models.
Topic-Enhanced Memory Networks for Personalised Point-of-Interest Recommendation
Authors: Xiao Zhou, Cecilia Mascolo, Zhongxiang Zhao
Date: 2019-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommender systems play a vital role in people's lives by recommending unexplored POIs to users and have drawn extensive attention from both academia and industry. Despite their value, however, they still suffer from the challenges of capturing complicated user preferences and fine-grained user-POI relationship for spatio-temporal sensitive POI recommendation. Existing recommendation algorithms, including both shallow and deep approaches, usually embed the visiting records of a user into a single latent vector to model user preferences: this has limited power of representation and interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel topic-enhanced memory network (TEMN), a deep architecture to integrate the topic model and memory network capitalising on the strengths of both the global structure of latent patterns and local neighbourhood-based features in a nonlinear fashion. We further incorporate a geographical module to exploit user-specific spatial preference and POI-specific spatial influence to enhance recommendations. The proposed unified hybrid model is widely applicable to various POI recommendation scenarios. Extensive experiments on real-world WeChat datasets demonstrate its effectiveness (improvement ratio of 3.25% and 29.95% for context-aware and sequential recommendation, respectively). Also, qualitative analysis of the attention weights and topic modeling provides insight into the model's recommendation process and results.
Recommendation from Raw Data with Adaptive Compound Poisson Factorization
Authors: Olivier Gouvert, Thomas Oberlin, Cédric Févotte
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Recommendation Systems

Count data are often used in recommender systems: they are widespread (song play counts, product purchases, clicks on web pages) and can reveal user preference without any explicit rating from the user. Such data are known to be sparse, over-dispersed and bursty, which makes their direct use in recommender systems challenging, often leading to pre-processing steps such as binarization. The aim of this paper is to build recommender systems from these raw data, by means of the recently proposed compound Poisson Factorization (cPF). The paper contributions are three-fold: we present a unified framework for discrete data (dcPF), leading to an adaptive and scalable algorithm; we show that our framework achieves a trade-off between Poisson Factorization (PF) applied to raw and binarized data; we study four specific instances that are relevant to recommendation and exhibit new links with combinatorics. Experiments with three different datasets show that dcPF is able to effectively adjust to over-dispersion, leading to better recommendation scores when compared with PF on either raw or binarized data.
Content based News Recommendation via Shortest Entity Distance over Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Kevin Joseph, Hui Jiang
Date: 2019-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Knowledge Graphs, News Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Content-based news recommendation systems need to recommend news articles based on the topics and content of articles without using user specific information. Many news articles describe the occurrence of specific events and named entities including people, places or objects. In this paper, we propose a graph traversal algorithm as well as a novel weighting scheme for cold-start content based news recommendation utilizing these named entities. Seeking to create a higher degree of user-specific relevance, our algorithm computes the shortest distance between named entities, across news articles, over a large knowledge graph. Moreover, we have created a new human annotated data set for evaluating content based news recommendation systems. Experimental results show our method is suitable to tackle the hard cold-start problem and it produces stronger Pearson correlation to human similarity scores than other cold-start methods. Our method is also complementary and a combination with the conventional cold-start recommendation methods may yield significant performance gains. The dataset, CNRec, is available at: https://github.com/kevinj22/CNRec
The Art of Food: Meal Image Synthesis from Ingredients
Authors: Fangda Han, Ricardo Guerrero, Vladimir Pavlovic
Date: 2019-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

In this work we propose a new computational framework, based on generative deep models, for synthesis of photo-realistic food meal images from textual descriptions of its ingredients. Previous works on synthesis of images from text typically rely on pre-trained text models to extract text features, followed by a generative neural networks (GANs) aimed to generate realistic images conditioned on the text features. These works mainly focus on generating spatially compact and well-defined categories of objects, such as birds or flowers. In contrast, meal images are significantly more complex, consisting of multiple ingredients whose appearance and spatial qualities are further modified by cooking methods. We propose a method that first builds an attention-based ingredients-image association model, which is then used to condition a generative neural network tasked with synthesizing meal images. Furthermore, a cycle-consistent constraint is added to further improve image quality and control appearance. Extensive experiments show our model is able to generate meal image corresponding to the ingredients, which could be used to augment existing dataset for solving other computational food analysis problems.
NLSC: Unrestricted Natural Language-based Service Composition through Sentence Embeddings
Authors: Oscar J. Romero, Ankit Dangi, Sushma A. Akoju
Date: 2019-01-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Service Composition, Translation

Current approaches for service composition (assemblies of atomic services) require developers to use: (a) domain-specific semantics to formalize services that restrict the vocabulary for their descriptions, and (b) translation mechanisms for service retrieval to convert unstructured user requests to strongly-typed semantic representations. In our work, we argue that effort to developing service descriptions, request translations, and matching mechanisms could be reduced using unrestricted natural language; allowing both: (1) end-users to intuitively express their needs using natural language, and (2) service developers to develop services without relying on syntactic/semantic description languages. Although there are some natural language-based service composition approaches, they restrict service retrieval to syntactic/semantic matching. With recent developments in Machine learning and Natural Language Processing, we motivate the use of Sentence Embeddings by leveraging richer semantic representations of sentences for service description, matching and retrieval. Experimental results show that service composition development effort may be reduced by more than 44\% while keeping a high precision/recall when matching high-level user requests with low-level service method invocations.
A Deep Framework for Bone Age Assessment based on Finger Joint Localization
Authors: Xiaoman Zhang, Ziyuan Zhao, Cen Chen, Songyou Peng, Min Wu, Zhongyao Cheng, Singee Teo, Le Zhang, Zeng Zeng
Date: 2019-05-07 00:00:00

Bone age assessment is an important clinical trial to measure skeletal child maturity and diagnose of growth disorders. Conventional approaches such as the Tanner-Whitehouse (TW) and Greulich and Pyle (GP) may not perform well due to their large inter-observer and intra-observer variations. In this paper, we propose a finger joint localization strategy to filter out most non-informative parts of images. When combining with the conventional full image-based deep network, we observe a much-improved performance. % Our approach utilizes full hand and specific joints images for skeletal maturity prediction. In this study, we applied powerful deep neural network and explored a process in the forecast of skeletal bone age with the specifically combine joints images to increase the performance accuracy compared with the whole hand images.
Gaze-in-wild: A dataset for studying eye and head coordination in everyday activities
Authors: Rakshit Kothari, Zhizhuo Yang, Christopher Kanan, Reynold Bailey, Jeff Pelz, Gabriel Diaz
Date: 2019-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

The interaction between the vestibular and ocular system has primarily been studied in controlled environments. Consequently, off-the shelf tools for categorization of gaze events (e.g. fixations, pursuits, saccade) fail when head movements are allowed. Our approach was to collect a novel, naturalistic, and multimodal dataset of eye+head movements when subjects performed everyday tasks while wearing a mobile eye tracker equipped with an inertial measurement unit and a 3D stereo camera. This Gaze-in-the-Wild dataset (GW) includes eye+head rotational velocities (deg/s), infrared eye images and scene imagery (RGB+D). A portion was labelled by coders into gaze motion events with a mutual agreement of 0.72 sample based Cohen's $\kappa$. This labelled data was used to train and evaluate two machine learning algorithms, Random Forest and a Recurrent Neural Network model, for gaze event classification. Assessment involved the application of established and novel event based performance metrics. Classifiers achieve $\sim$90$\%$ human performance in detecting fixations and saccades but fall short (60$\%$) on detecting pursuit movements. Moreover, pursuit classification is far worse in the absence of head movement information. A subsequent analysis of feature significance in our best-performing model revealed a reliance upon absolute eye and head velocity, indicating that classification does not require spatial alignment of the head and eye tracking coordinate systems. The GW dataset, trained classifiers and evaluation metrics will be made publicly available with the intention of facilitating growth in the emerging area of head-free gaze event classification.
Anomaly Detection in Images
Authors: Manpreet Singh Minhas, John Zelek
Date: 2019-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Supervised Anomaly Detection, Transfer Learning

Visual defect assessment is a form of anomaly detection. This is very relevant in finding faults such as cracks and markings in various surface inspection tasks like pavement and automotive parts. The task involves detection of deviation/divergence of anomalous samples from the normal ones. Two of the major challenges in supervised anomaly detection are the lack of labelled training data and the low availability of anomaly instances. Semi-supervised methods which learn the underlying distribution of the normal samples and then measure the deviation/divergence from the estimated model as the anomaly score have limitations in their overall ability to detect anomalies. This paper proposes the application of network-based deep transfer learning using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the task of anomaly detection. Single class SVMs have been used in the past with some success, however we hypothesize that deeper networks for single class classification should perform better. Results obtained on established anomaly detection benchmarks as well as on a real-world dataset, show that the proposed method clearly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods, by achieving a staggering average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve value of 0.99 for the tested data-sets which is an average improvement of 41% on the CIFAR10, 20% on MNIST and 16% on Cement Crack data-sets.
Moving Target Defense for Deep Visual Sensing against Adversarial Examples
Authors: Qun Song, Zhenyu Yan, Rui Tan
Date: 2019-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Deep learning based visual sensing has achieved attractive accuracy but is shown vulnerable to adversarial example attacks. Specifically, once the attackers obtain the deep model, they can construct adversarial examples to mislead the model to yield wrong classification results. Deployable adversarial examples such as small stickers pasted on the road signs and lanes have been shown effective in misleading advanced driver-assistance systems. Many existing countermeasures against adversarial examples build their security on the attackers' ignorance of the defense mechanisms. Thus, they fall short of following Kerckhoffs's principle and can be subverted once the attackers know the details of the defense. This paper applies the strategy of moving target defense (MTD) to generate multiple new deep models after system deployment, that will collaboratively detect and thwart adversarial examples. Our MTD design is based on the adversarial examples' minor transferability to models differing from the one (e.g., the factory-designed model) used for attack construction. The post-deployment quasi-secret deep models significantly increase the bar for the attackers to construct effective adversarial examples. We also apply the technique of serial data fusion with early stopping to reduce the inference time by a factor of up to 5 while maintaining the sensing and defense performance. Extensive evaluation based on three datasets including a road sign image database and a GPU-equipped Jetson embedded computing board shows the effectiveness of our approach.
Personalized Purchase Prediction of Market Baskets with Wasserstein-Based Sequence Matching
Authors: Mathias Kraus, Stefan Feuerriegel
Date: 2019-05-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, Marketing, Transfer Learning

Personalization in marketing aims at improving the shopping experience of customers by tailoring services to individuals. In order to achieve this, businesses must be able to make personalized predictions regarding the next purchase. That is, one must forecast the exact list of items that will comprise the next purchase, i.e., the so-called market basket. Despite its relevance to firm operations, this problem has received surprisingly little attention in prior research, largely due to its inherent complexity. In fact, state-of-the-art approaches are limited to intuitive decision rules for pattern extraction. However, the simplicity of the pre-coded rules impedes performance, since decision rules operate in an autoregressive fashion: the rules can only make inferences from past purchases of a single customer without taking into account the knowledge transfer that takes place between customers. In contrast, our research overcomes the limitations of pre-set rules by contributing a novel predictor of market baskets from sequential purchase histories: our predictions are based on similarity matching in order to identify similar purchase habits among the complete shopping histories of all customers. Our contributions are as follows: (1) We propose similarity matching based on subsequential dynamic time warping (SDTW) as a novel predictor of market baskets. Thereby, we can effectively identify cross-customer patterns. (2) We leverage the Wasserstein distance for measuring the similarity among embedded purchase histories. (3) We develop a fast approximation algorithm for computing a lower bound of the Wasserstein distance in our setting. An extensive series of computational experiments demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. The accuracy of identifying the exact market baskets based on state-of-the-art decision rules from the literature is outperformed by a factor of 4.0.
Stochastic Continuous Time Neurite Branching Models with Tree and Segment Dependent Rates
Authors: Ronald A. J. van Elburg
Date: 2010-10-04 00:00:00

In this paper we introduce a continuous time stochastic neurite branching
model closely related to the discrete time stochastic BES-model. The discrete
time BES-model is underlying current attempts to simulate cortical development,
but is difficult to analyze. The new continuous time formulation facilitates
analytical treatment thus allowing us to examine the structure of the model
more closely. We derive explicit expressions for the time dependent
probabilities p(\gamma, t) for finding a tree \gamma at time t, valid for
arbitrary continuous time branching models with tree and segment dependent
branching rates. We show, for the specific case of the continuous time
BES-model, that as expected from our model formulation, the sums needed to
evaluate expectation values of functions of the terminal segment number
\mu(f(n),t) do not depend on the distribution of the total branching
probability over the terminal segments. In addition, we derive a system of
differential equations for the probabilities p(n,t) of finding n terminal
segments at time t. For the continuous BES-model, this system of differential
equations gives direct numerical access to functions only depending on the
number of terminal segments, and we use this to evaluate the development of the
mean and standard deviation of the number of terminal segments at a time t. For
comparison we discuss two cases where mean and variance of the number of
terminal segments are exactly solvable. Then we discuss the numerical
evaluation of the S-dependence of the solutions for the continuous time
BES-model. The numerical results show clearly that higher S values, i.e. values
such that more proximal terminal segments have higher branching rates than more
distal terminal segments, lead to more symmetrical trees as measured by three
tree symmetry indicators.
LSTM Neural Network for Textual Ngrams
Authors: Shaun C. D'Souza
Date: 2018-11-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: Preprints 2018 11
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Learning

Cognitive neuroscience is the study of how the human brain functions on tasks like decision making, language, perception and reasoning. Deep learning is a class of machine learning algorithms that use neural networks. They are designed to model the responses of neurons in the human brain. Learning can be supervised or unsupervised. Ngram token models are used extensively in language prediction. Ngrams are probabilistic models that are used in predicting the next word or token. They are a statistical model of word sequences or tokens and are called Language Models or Lms. Ngrams are essential in creating language prediction models. We are exploring a broader sandbox ecosystems enabling for AI. Specifically, around Deep learning applications on unstructured content form on the web.