pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient feature embedding of 3D brain MRI images for content-based image retrieval with deep metric learning
Authors: Yuto Onga, Shingo Fujiyama, Hayato Arai, Yusuke Chayama, Hitoshi Iyatomi, Kenichi Oishi
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Content-Based Image Retrieval, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Retrieval, Medical Image Classification, Metric Learning, Retrieval

Increasing numbers of MRI brain scans, improvements in image resolution, and advancements in MRI acquisition technology are causing significant increases in the demand for and burden on radiologists' efforts in terms of reading and interpreting brain MRIs. Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is an emerging technology for reducing this burden by supporting the reading of medical images. High dimensionality is a major challenge in developing a CBIR system that is applicable for 3D brain MRIs. In this study, we propose a system called disease-oriented data concentration with metric learning (DDCML). In DDCML, we introduce deep metric learning to a 3D convolutional autoencoder (CAE). Our proposed DDCML scheme achieves a high dimensional compression rate (4096:1) while preserving the disease-related anatomical features that are important for medical image classification. The low-dimensional representation obtained by DDCML improved the clustering performance by 29.1\% compared to plain 3D-CAE in terms of discriminating Alzheimer's disease patients from healthy subjects, and successfully reproduced the relationships of the severity of disease categories that were not included in the training.
Domain-independent Dominance of Adaptive Methods
Authors: Pedro Savarese, David Mcallester, Sudarshan Babu, Michael Maire
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2021 1
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modelling, Stochastic Optimization

From a simplified analysis of adaptive methods, we derive AvaGrad, a new optimizer which outperforms SGD on vision tasks when its adaptability is properly tuned. We observe that the power of our method is partially explained by a decoupling of learning rate and adaptability, greatly simplifying hyperparameter search. In light of this observation, we demonstrate that, against conventional wisdom, Adam can also outperform SGD on vision tasks, as long as the coupling between its learning rate and adaptability is taken into account. In practice, AvaGrad matches the best results, as measured by generalization accuracy, delivered by any existing optimizer (SGD or adaptive) across image classification (CIFAR, ImageNet) and character-level language modelling (Penn Treebank) tasks.
Counterfactual Explanation Algorithms for Behavioral and Textual Data
Authors: Yanou Ramon, David Martens, Foster Provost, Theodoros Evgeniou
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation, Heuristic Search

We study the interpretability of predictive systems that use high-dimensonal behavioral and textual data. Examples include predicting product interest based on online browsing data and detecting spam emails or objectionable web content. Recently, counterfactual explanations have been proposed for generating insight into model predictions, which focus on what is relevant to a particular instance. Conducting a complete search to compute counterfactuals is very time-consuming because of the huge dimensionality. To our knowledge, for behavioral and text data, only one model-agnostic heuristic algorithm (SEDC) for finding counterfactual explanations has been proposed in the literature. However, there may be better algorithms for finding counterfactuals quickly. This study aligns the recently proposed Linear Interpretable Model-agnostic Explainer (LIME) and Shapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) with the notion of counterfactual explanations, and empirically benchmarks their effectiveness and efficiency against SEDC using a collection of 13 data sets. Results show that LIME-Counterfactual (LIME-C) and SHAP-Counterfactual (SHAP-C) have low and stable computation times, but mostly, they are less efficient than SEDC. However, for certain instances on certain data sets, SEDC's run time is comparably large. With regard to effectiveness, LIME-C and SHAP-C find reasonable, if not always optimal, counterfactual explanations. SHAP-C, however, seems to have difficulties with highly unbalanced data. Because of its good overall performance, LIME-C seems to be a favorable alternative to SEDC, which failed for some nonlinear models to find counterfactuals because of the particular heuristic search algorithm it uses. A main upshot of this paper is that there is a good deal of room for further research. For example, we propose algorithmic adjustments that are direct upshots of the paper's findings.
Handwriting-Based Gender Classification Using End-to-End Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Evyatar Illouz, Eli David, Nathan S. Netanyahu
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Classification, Deep Learning, Gender Classification, General Classification

Handwriting-based gender classification is a well-researched problem that has been approached mainly by traditional machine learning techniques. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning-based approach for this task. Specifically, we present a convolutional neural network (CNN), which performs automatic feature extraction from a given handwritten image, followed by classification of the writer's gender. Also, we introduce a new dataset of labeled handwritten samples, in Hebrew and English, of 405 participants. Comparing the gender classification accuracy on this dataset against human examiners, our results show that the proposed deep learning-based approach is substantially more accurate than that of humans.
Drone-based Joint Density Map Estimation, Localization and Tracking with Space-Time Multi-Scale Attention Network
Authors: Longyin Wen, Dawei Du, Pengfei Zhu, QinGhua Hu, Qilong Wang, Liefeng Bo, Siwei Lyu
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

This paper proposes a space-time multi-scale attention network (STANet) to solve density map estimation, localization and tracking in dense crowds of video clips captured by drones with arbitrary crowd density, perspective, and flight altitude. Our STANet method aggregates multi-scale feature maps in sequential frames to exploit the temporal coherency, and then predict the density maps, localize the targets, and associate them in crowds simultaneously. A coarse-to-fine process is designed to gradually apply the attention module on the aggregated multi-scale feature maps to enforce the network to exploit the discriminative space-time features for better performance. The whole network is trained in an end-to-end manner with the multi-task loss, formed by three terms, i.e., the density map loss, localization loss and association loss. The non-maximal suppression followed by the min-cost flow framework is used to generate the trajectories of targets' in scenarios. Since existing crowd counting datasets merely focus on crowd counting in static cameras rather than density map estimation, counting and tracking in crowds on drones, we have collected a new large-scale drone-based dataset, DroneCrowd, formed by 112 video clips with 33,600 high resolution frames (i.e., 1920x1080) captured in 70 different scenarios. With intensive amount of effort, our dataset provides 20,800 people trajectories with 4.8 million head annotations and several video-level attributes in sequences. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging public datasets, i.e., Shanghaitech and UCF-QNRF, and our DroneCrowd, to demonstrate that STANet achieves favorable performance against the state-of-the-arts. The datasets and codes can be found at https://github.com/VisDrone.
Learning with Multiplicative Perturbations
Authors: Xiulong Yang, Shihao Ji
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00

Adversarial Training (AT) and Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT) are the regularization techniques that train Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with adversarial examples generated by adding small but worst-case perturbations to input examples. In this paper, we propose xAT and xVAT, new adversarial training algorithms, that generate \textbf{multiplicative} perturbations to input examples for robust training of DNNs. Such perturbations are much more perceptible and interpretable than their \textbf{additive} counterparts exploited by AT and VAT. Furthermore, the multiplicative perturbations can be generated transductively or inductively while the standard AT and VAT only support a transductive implementation. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the multiplicative perturbations and demonstrate that xAT and xVAT match or outperform state-of-the-art classification accuracies across multiple established benchmarks while being about 30\% faster than their additive counterparts. Furthermore, the resulting DNNs also demonstrate distinct weight distributions.
Deep Fictitious Play for Finding Markovian Nash Equilibrium in Multi-Agent Games
Authors: Jiequn Han, Ruimeng Hu
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00

We propose a deep neural network-based algorithm to identify the Markovian Nash equilibrium of general large $N$-player stochastic differential games. Following the idea of fictitious play, we recast the $N$-player game into $N$ decoupled decision problems (one for each player) and solve them iteratively. The individual decision problem is characterized by a semilinear Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, to solve which we employ the recently developed deep BSDE method. The resulted algorithm can solve large $N$-player games for which conventional numerical methods would suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Multiple numerical examples involving identical or heterogeneous agents, with risk-neutral or risk-sensitive objectives, are tested to validate the accuracy of the proposed algorithm in large group games. Even for a fifty-player game with the presence of common noise, the proposed algorithm still finds the approximate Nash equilibrium accurately, which, to our best knowledge, is difficult to achieve by other numerical algorithms.
Reluctant generalized additive modeling
Authors: J. Kenneth Tay, Robert Tibshirani
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Additive models

Sparse generalized additive models (GAMs) are an extension of sparse generalized linear models which allow a model's prediction to vary non-linearly with an input variable. This enables the data analyst build more accurate models, especially when the linearity assumption is known to be a poor approximation of reality. Motivated by reluctant interaction modeling (Yu et al. 2019), we propose a multi-stage algorithm, called $\textit{reluctant generalized additive modeling (RGAM)}$, that can fit sparse generalized additive models at scale. It is guided by the principle that, if all else is equal, one should prefer a linear feature over a non-linear feature. Unlike existing methods for sparse GAMs, RGAM can be extended easily to binary, count and survival data. We demonstrate the method's effectiveness on real and simulated examples.
Adversarial Domain Adaptation with Domain Mixup
Authors: Minghao Xu, Jian Zhang, Bingbing Ni, Teng Li, Chengjie Wang, Qi Tian, Wenjun Zhang
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Recent works on domain adaptation reveal the effectiveness of adversarial learning on filling the discrepancy between source and target domains. However, two common limitations exist in current adversarial-learning-based methods. First, samples from two domains alone are not sufficient to ensure domain-invariance at most part of latent space. Second, the domain discriminator involved in these methods can only judge real or fake with the guidance of hard label, while it is more reasonable to use soft scores to evaluate the generated images or features, i.e., to fully utilize the inter-domain information. In this paper, we present adversarial domain adaptation with domain mixup (DM-ADA), which guarantees domain-invariance in a more continuous latent space and guides the domain discriminator in judging samples' difference relative to source and target domains. Domain mixup is jointly conducted on pixel and feature level to improve the robustness of models. Extensive experiments prove that the proposed approach can achieve superior performance on tasks with various degrees of domain shift and data complexity.
Spectral-GANs for High-Resolution 3D Point-cloud Generation
Authors: Sameera Ramasinghe, Salman Khan, Nick Barnes, Stephen Gould
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Point Cloud Generation, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Point-clouds are a popular choice for vision and graphics tasks due to their accurate shape description and direct acquisition from range-scanners. This demands the ability to synthesize and reconstruct high-quality point-clouds. Current deep generative models for 3D data generally work on simplified representations (e.g., voxelized objects) and cannot deal with the inherent redundancy and irregularity in point-clouds. A few recent efforts on 3D point-cloud generation offer limited resolution and their complexity grows with the increase in output resolution. In this paper, we develop a principled approach to synthesize 3D point-clouds using a spectral-domain Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). Our spectral representation is highly structured and allows us to disentangle various frequency bands such that the learning task is simplified for a GAN model. As compared to spatial-domain generative approaches, our formulation allows us to generate arbitrary number of points high-resolution point-clouds with minimal computational overhead. Furthermore, we propose a fully differentiable block to transform from {the} spectral to the spatial domain and back, thereby allowing us to integrate knowledge from well-established spatial models. We demonstrate that Spectral-GAN performs well for point-cloud generation task. Additionally, it can learn {a} highly discriminative representation in an unsupervised fashion and can be used to accurately reconstruct 3D objects.
Addressing Marketing Bias in Product Recommendations
Authors: Mengting Wan, Jianmo Ni, Rishabh Misra, Julian McAuley
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Fairness, Marketing, Recommendation Systems

Modern collaborative filtering algorithms seek to provide personalized product recommendations by uncovering patterns in consumer-product interactions. However, these interactions can be biased by how the product is marketed, for example due to the selection of a particular human model in a product image. These correlations may result in the underrepresentation of particular niche markets in the interaction data; for example, a female user who would potentially like motorcycle products may be less likely to interact with them if they are promoted using stereotypically 'male' images. In this paper, we first investigate this correlation between users' interaction feedback and products' marketing images on two real-world e-commerce datasets. We further examine the response of several standard collaborative filtering algorithms to the distribution of consumer-product market segments in the input interaction data, revealing that marketing strategy can be a source of bias for modern recommender systems. In order to protect recommendation performance on underrepresented market segments, we develop a framework to address this potential marketing bias. Quantitative results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly improves the recommendation fairness across different market segments, with a negligible loss (or better) recommendation accuracy.
Towards Building a Multilingual Sememe Knowledge Base: Predicting Sememes for BabelNet Synsets
Authors: Fanchao Qi, Liang Chang, Maosong Sun, Sicong Ouyang, Zhiyuan Liu
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00

A sememe is defined as the minimum semantic unit of human languages. Sememe knowledge bases (KBs), which contain words annotated with sememes, have been successfully applied to many NLP tasks. However, existing sememe KBs are built on only a few languages, which hinders their widespread utilization. To address the issue, we propose to build a unified sememe KB for multiple languages based on BabelNet, a multilingual encyclopedic dictionary. We first build a dataset serving as the seed of the multilingual sememe KB. It manually annotates sememes for over $15$ thousand synsets (the entries of BabelNet). Then, we present a novel task of automatic sememe prediction for synsets, aiming to expand the seed dataset into a usable KB. We also propose two simple and effective models, which exploit different information of synsets. Finally, we conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore important factors and difficulties in the task. All the source code and data of this work can be obtained on https://github.com/thunlp/BabelNet-Sememe-Prediction.
Learn Electronic Health Records by Fully Decentralized Federated Learning
Authors: Songtao Lu, Yawen Zhang, Yunlong Wang, Christina Mack
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning opens a number of research opportunities due to its high communication efficiency in distributed training problems within a star network. In this paper, we focus on improving the communication efficiency for fully decentralized federated learning over a graph, where the algorithm performs local updates for several iterations and then enables communications among the nodes. In such a way, the communication rounds of exchanging the common interest of parameters can be saved significantly without loss of optimality of the solutions. Multiple numerical simulations based on large, real-world electronic health record databases showcase the superiority of the decentralized federated learning compared with classic methods.
Robust Online Model Adaptation by Extended Kalman Filter with Exponential Moving Average and Dynamic Multi-Epoch Strategy
Authors: Abulikemu Abuduweili, Changliu Liu
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: L4DC 2020 6
Tasks: Prediction

High fidelity behavior prediction of intelligent agents is critical in many applications. However, the prediction model trained on the training set may not generalize to the testing set due to domain shift and time variance. The challenge motivates the adoption of online adaptation algorithms to update prediction models in real-time to improve the prediction performance. Inspired by Extended Kalman Filter (EKF), this paper introduces a series of online adaptation methods, which are applicable to neural network-based models. A base adaptation algorithm Modified EKF with forgetting factor (MEKF$_\lambda$) is introduced first, followed by exponential moving average filtering techniques. Then this paper introduces a dynamic multi-epoch update strategy to effectively utilize samples received in real time. With all these extensions, we propose a robust online adaptation algorithm: MEKF with Exponential Moving Average and Dynamic Multi-Epoch strategy (MEKF$_{\text{EMA-DME}}$). The proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods as demonstrated in experiments. The source code is open-sourced in the following link https://github.com/intelligent-control-lab/MEKF_MAME.
Predicting Lake Erie Wave Heights using XGBoost
Authors: Haoguo Hu, Philip Chu
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

Dangerous large wave put the coastal communities and vessels operating under threats and wave predictions are strongly needed for early warnings. While numerical wave models, such as WAVEWATCH III (WW3), are useful to provide spatially continuous information to supplement in situ observations, however, they often require intensive computational costs. An attractive alternative is machine-learning method, which can potentially provide comparable performance of numerical wave models but only requires a small fraction of computational costs. In this study, we applied and tested a novel machine learning method based on XGBoost for predicting waves in Lake Erie in 2016-2017. In this study, buoy data from 1994 to 2017 were processed for model training and testing. We trained the model with data from 1994-2015, then used the trained model to predict 2016 and 2017 wave features. The mean absolute error of wave height is about 0.11-0.18 m and the maximum error is 1.14-1.95 m, depending on location and year. For comparison, an unstructured WW3 model was implemented in Lake Erie for simulating wind generated waves. The WW3 results were compared with buoy data from National Data Buoy Center in Lake Erie, the mean absolute error of wave height is about 0.12-0.48 m and the maximum error is about 1.03-2.93 m. The results show that WW3 underestimates wave height spikes during strong wind events and The XGBoost improves prediction on wave height spikes. The XGBoost runs much faster than WW3. For a model year run on a supercomputer, WW3 needs 12 hours with 60 CPUs while XGBoost needs only 10 minutes with 1 CPU. In summary, the XGBoost provided comparable performance for our simulations in Lake Erie wave height and the computational time required was about 0.02 % of the numerical simulations.
Integrating Knowledge into End-to-End Speech Recognition from External Text-Only Data
Authors: Ye Bai, Jiangyan Yi, Jian-Hua Tao, Zhengqi Wen, Zhengkun Tian, Shuai Zhang
Date: 2019-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Sentence, Sequence-To-Sequence Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) models have achieved promising performance in speech recognition. However, because of the end-to-end training, an AED model is usually trained with speech-text paired data. It is challenging to incorporate external text-only data into AED models. Another issue of the AED model is that it does not use the right context of a text token while predicting the token. To alleviate the above two issues, we propose a unified method called LST (Learn Spelling from Teachers) to integrate knowledge into an AED model from the external text-only data and leverage the whole context in a sentence. The method is divided into two stages. First, in the representation stage, a language model is trained on the text. It can be seen as that the knowledge in the text is compressed into the LM. Then, at the transferring stage, the knowledge is transferred to the AED model via teacher-student learning. To further use the whole context of the text sentence, we propose an LM called causal cloze completer (COR), which estimates the probability of a token, given both the left context and the right context of it. Therefore, with LST training, the AED model can leverage the whole context in the sentence. Different from fusion based methods, which use LM during decoding, the proposed method does not increase any extra complexity at the inference stage. We conduct experiments on two scales of public Chinese datasets AISHELL-1 and AISHELL-2. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of leveraging external text-only data and the whole context in a sentence with our proposed method, compared with baseline hybrid systems and AED model based systems.