pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Coherent and Controllable Outfit Generation
Authors: Kedan Li, Chen Liu, David Forsyth
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

When thinking about dressing oneself, people often have a theme in mind whether they're going to a tropical getaway or wish to appear attractive at a cocktail party. A useful outfit generation system should come up with clothing items that are compatible while matching a theme specified by the user. Existing methods use item-wise compatibility between products but lack an effective way to enforce a global constraint (e.g., style, occasion). We introduce a method that generates outfits whose items match a theme described by a text query. Our method uses text and image embeddings to represent fashion items. We learn a multimodal embedding where the image representation for an item is close to its text representation, and use this embedding to measure item-query coherence. We then use a discriminator to compute compatibility between fashion items. This strategy yields a compatibility prediction method that meets or exceeds the state of the art. Our method combines item-item compatibility and item-query coherence to construct an outfit whose items are (a) close to the query and (b) compatible with one another. Quantitative evaluation shows that the items in our outfits are tightly clustered compared to standard outfits. Furthermore, outfits produced by similar queries are close to one another, and outfits produced by very different queries are far apart. Qualitative evaluation shows that our method responds well to queries. A user study suggests that people understand the match between the queries and the outfits produced by our method.
A Joint Planning and Learning Framework for Human-Aided Decision-Making
Authors: Daoming Lyu, Fangkai Yang, Bo Liu, Steven Gustafson
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, General Knowledge, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Conventional reinforcement learning (RL) allows an agent to learn policies via environmental rewards only, with a long and slow learning curve, especially at the beginning stage. On the contrary, human learning is usually much faster because prior and general knowledge and multiple information resources are utilized. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{P}lanner-\textbf{A}ctor-\textbf{C}ritic architecture for hu\textbf{MAN}-centered planning and learning (\textbf{PACMAN}), where an agent uses prior, high-level, deterministic symbolic knowledge to plan for goal-directed actions. PACMAN integrates Actor-Critic algorithm of RL to fine-tune its behavior towards both environmental rewards and human feedback. To the best our knowledge, This is the first unified framework where knowledge-based planning, RL, and human teaching jointly contribute to the policy learning of an agent. Our experiments demonstrate that PACMAN leads to a significant jump-start at the early stage of learning, converges rapidly and with small variance, and is robust to inconsistent, infrequent, and misleading feedback.
Content-aware Density Map for Crowd Counting and Density Estimation
Authors: Mahdi Maktabdar Oghaz, Anish R. Khadka, Vasileios Argyriou, Paolo Remagnino
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Density Estimation

Precise knowledge about the size of a crowd, its density and flow can provide valuable information for safety and security applications, event planning, architectural design and to analyze consumer behavior. Creating a powerful machine learning model, to employ for such applications requires a large and highly accurate and reliable dataset. Unfortunately the existing crowd counting and density estimation benchmark datasets are not only limited in terms of their size, but also lack annotation, in general too time consuming to implement. This paper attempts to address this very issue through a content aware technique, uses combinations of Chan-Vese segmentation algorithm, two-dimensional Gaussian filter and brute-force nearest neighbor search. The results shows that by simply replacing the commonly used density map generators with the proposed method, higher level of accuracy can be achieved using the existing state of the art models.
Online Matrix Completion with Side Information
Authors: Mark Herbster, Stephen Pasteris, Lisa Tse
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12
Tasks: Matrix Completion

We give an online algorithm and prove novel mistake and regret bounds for online binary matrix completion with side information. The mistake bounds we prove are of the form $\tilde{O}(D/\gamma^2)$. The term $1/\gamma^2$ is analogous to the usual margin term in SVM (perceptron) bounds. More specifically, if we assume that there is some factorization of the underlying $m \times n$ matrix into $P Q^\intercal$ where the rows of $P$ are interpreted as "classifiers" in $\mathcal{R}^d$ and the rows of $Q$ as "instances" in $\mathcal{R}^d$, then $\gamma$ is the maximum (normalized) margin over all factorizations $P Q^\intercal$ consistent with the observed matrix. The quasi-dimension term $D$ measures the quality of side information. In the presence of vacuous side information, $D= m+n$. However, if the side information is predictive of the underlying factorization of the matrix, then in an ideal case, $D \in O(k + \ell)$ where $k$ is the number of distinct row factors and $\ell$ is the number of distinct column factors. We additionally provide a generalization of our algorithm to the inductive setting. In this setting, we provide an example where the side information is not directly specified in advance. For this example, the quasi-dimension $D$ is now bounded by $O(k^2 + \ell^2)$.
Pose Guided Fashion Image Synthesis Using Deep Generative Model
Authors: Wei Sun, Jawadul H. Bappy, Shanglin Yang, Yi Xu, Tianfu Wu, Hui Zhou
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Generation, Pose-Guided Image Generation, Virtual Try-on

Generating a photorealistic image with intended human pose is a promising yet challenging research topic for many applications such as smart photo editing, movie making, virtual try-on, and fashion display. In this paper, we present a novel deep generative model to transfer an image of a person from a given pose to a new pose while keeping fashion item consistent. In order to formulate the framework, we employ one generator and two discriminators for image synthesis. The generator includes an image encoder, a pose encoder and a decoder. The two encoders provide good representation of visual and geometrical context which will be utilized by the decoder in order to generate a photorealistic image. Unlike existing pose-guided image generation models, we exploit two discriminators to guide the synthesis process where one discriminator differentiates between generated image and real images (training samples), and another discriminator verifies the consistency of appearance between a target pose and a generated image. We perform end-to-end training of the network to learn the parameters through back-propagation given ground-truth images. The proposed generative model is capable of synthesizing a photorealistic image of a person given a target pose. We have demonstrated our results by conducting rigorous experiments on two data sets, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Iterative Model-Based Reinforcement Learning Using Simulations in the Differentiable Neural Computer
Authors: Adeel Mufti, Svetlin Penkov, Subramanian Ramamoorthy
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We propose a lifelong learning architecture, the Neural Computer Agent (NCA), where a Reinforcement Learning agent is paired with a predictive model of the environment learned by a Differentiable Neural Computer (DNC). The agent and DNC model are trained in conjunction iteratively. The agent improves its policy in simulations generated by the DNC model and rolls out the policy to the live environment, collecting experiences in new portions or tasks of the environment for further learning. Experiments in two synthetic environments show that DNC models can continually learn from pixels alone to simulate new tasks as they are encountered by the agent, while the agents can be successfully trained to solve the tasks using Proximal Policy Optimization entirely in simulations.
An IoT Based Framework For Activity Recognition Using Deep Learning Technique
Authors: Ashwin Geet D'Sa, B. G. Prasad
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Human Activity Recognition

Activity recognition is the ability to identify and recognize the action or goals of the agent. The agent can be any object or entity that performs action that has end goals. The agents can be a single agent performing the action or group of agents performing the actions or having some interaction. Human activity recognition has gained popularity due to its demands in many practical applications such as entertainment, healthcare, simulations and surveillance systems. Vision based activity recognition is gaining advantage as it does not require any human intervention or physical contact with humans. Moreover, there are set of cameras that are networked with the intention to track and recognize the activities of the agent. Traditional applications that were required to track or recognize human activities made use of wearable devices. However, such applications require physical contact of the person. To overcome such challenges, vision based activity recognition system can be used, which uses a camera to record the video and a processor that performs the task of recognition. The work is implemented in two stages. In the first stage, an approach for the Implementation of Activity recognition is proposed using background subtraction of images, followed by 3D- Convolutional Neural Networks. The impact of using Background subtraction prior to 3D-Convolutional Neural Networks has been reported. In the second stage, the work is further extended and implemented on Raspberry Pi, that can be used to record a stream of video, followed by recognizing the activity that was involved in the video. Thus, a proof-of-concept for activity recognition using small, IoT based device, is provided, which can enhance the system and extend its applications in various forms like, increase in portability, networking, and other capabilities of the device.
Learning Execution through Neural Code Fusion
Authors: Zhan Shi, Kevin Swersky, Daniel Tarlow, Parthasarathy Ranganathan, Milad Hashemi
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: CPU, Transfer Learning

As the performance of computer systems stagnates due to the end of Moore's Law, there is a need for new models that can understand and optimize the execution of general purpose code. While there is a growing body of work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn representations of source code, these representations do not understand how code dynamically executes. In this work, we propose a new approach to use GNNs to learn fused representations of general source code and its execution. Our approach defines a multi-task GNN over low-level representations of source code and program state (i.e., assembly code and dynamic memory states), converting complex source code constructs and complex data structures into a simpler, more uniform format. We show that this leads to improved performance over similar methods that do not use execution and it opens the door to applying GNN models to new tasks that would not be feasible from static code alone. As an illustration of this, we apply the new model to challenging dynamic tasks (branch prediction and prefetching) from the SPEC CPU benchmark suite, outperforming the state-of-the-art by 26% and 45% respectively. Moreover, we use the learned fused graph embeddings to demonstrate transfer learning with high performance on an indirectly related task (algorithm classification).
Improving Unsupervised Subword Modeling via Disentangled Speech Representation Learning and Transformation
Authors: Siyuan Feng, Tan Lee
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Representation Learning, Speech Representation Learning

This study tackles unsupervised subword modeling in the zero-resource scenario, learning frame-level speech representation that is phonetically discriminative and speaker-invariant, using only untranscribed speech for target languages. Frame label acquisition is an essential step in solving this problem. High quality frame labels should be in good consistency with golden transcriptions and robust to speaker variation. We propose to improve frame label acquisition in our previously adopted deep neural network-bottleneck feature (DNN-BNF) architecture by applying the factorized hierarchical variational autoencoder (FHVAE). FHVAEs learn to disentangle linguistic content and speaker identity information encoded in speech. By discarding or unifying speaker information, speaker-invariant features are learned and fed as inputs to DPGMM frame clustering and DNN-BNF training. Experiments conducted on ZeroSpeech 2017 show that our proposed approaches achieve $2.4\%$ and $0.6\%$ absolute ABX error rate reductions in across- and within-speaker conditions, comparing to the baseline DNN-BNF system without applying FHVAEs. Our proposed approaches significantly outperform vocal tract length normalization in improving frame labeling and subword modeling.
Barack's Wife Hillary: Using Knowledge-Graphs for Fact-Aware Language Modeling
Authors: Robert L. Logan IV, Nelson F. Liu, Matthew E. Peters, Matt Gardner, Sameer Singh
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Modeling human language requires the ability to not only generate fluent text but also encode factual knowledge. However, traditional language models are only capable of remembering facts seen at training time, and often have difficulty recalling them. To address this, we introduce the knowledge graph language model (KGLM), a neural language model with mechanisms for selecting and copying facts from a knowledge graph that are relevant to the context. These mechanisms enable the model to render information it has never seen before, as well as generate out-of-vocabulary tokens. We also introduce the Linked WikiText-2 dataset, a corpus of annotated text aligned to the Wikidata knowledge graph whose contents (roughly) match the popular WikiText-2 benchmark. In experiments, we demonstrate that the KGLM achieves significantly better performance than a strong baseline language model. We additionally compare different language model's ability to complete sentences requiring factual knowledge, showing that the KGLM outperforms even very large language models in generating facts.
Combining Adversarial Training and Disentangled Speech Representation for Robust Zero-Resource Subword Modeling
Authors: Siyuan Feng, Tan Lee, Zhiyuan Peng
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Speech Representation Learning, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

This study addresses the problem of unsupervised subword unit discovery from untranscribed speech. It forms the basis of the ultimate goal of ZeroSpeech 2019, building text-to-speech systems without text labels. In this work, unit discovery is formulated as a pipeline of phonetically discriminative feature learning and unit inference. One major difficulty in robust unsupervised feature learning is dealing with speaker variation. Here the robustness towards speaker variation is achieved by applying adversarial training and FHVAE based disentangled speech representation learning. A comparison of the two approaches as well as their combination is studied in a DNN-bottleneck feature (DNN-BNF) architecture. Experiments are conducted on ZeroSpeech 2019 and 2017. Experimental results on ZeroSpeech 2017 show that both approaches are effective while the latter is more prominent, and that their combination brings further marginal improvement in across-speaker condition. Results on ZeroSpeech 2019 show that in the ABX discriminability task, our approaches significantly outperform the official baseline, and are competitive to or even outperform the official topline. The proposed unit sequence smoothing algorithm improves synthesis quality, at a cost of slight decrease in ABX discriminability.
On linear convergence of two decentralized algorithms
Authors: Yao Li, Ming Yan
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Decentralized algorithms solve multi-agent problems over a connected network, where the information can only be exchanged with the accessible neighbors. Though there exist several decentralized optimization algorithms, there are still gaps in convergence conditions and rates between decentralized and centralized algorithms. In this paper, we fill some gaps by considering two decentralized algorithms: EXTRA and NIDS. They both converge linearly with strongly convex objective functions. We will answer two questions regarding them. What are the optimal upper bounds for their stepsizes? Do decentralized algorithms require more properties on the functions for linear convergence than centralized ones? More specifically, we relax the required conditions for linear convergence of both algorithms. For EXTRA, we show that the stepsize is comparable to that of centralized algorithms. For NIDS, the upper bound of the stepsize is shown to be exactly the same as the centralized ones. In addition, we relax the requirement for the objective functions and the mixing matrices. We provide the linear convergence results for both algorithms under the weakest conditions.
Constrained Decoding for Neural NLG from Compositional Representations in Task-Oriented Dialogue
Authors: Anusha Balakrishnan, Jinfeng Rao, Kartikeya Upasani, Michael White, Rajen Subba
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Sentence

Generating fluent natural language responses from structured semantic representations is a critical step in task-oriented conversational systems. Avenues like the E2E NLG Challenge have encouraged the development of neural approaches, particularly sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models for this problem. The semantic representations used, however, are often underspecified, which places a higher burden on the generation model for sentence planning, and also limits the extent to which generated responses can be controlled in a live system. In this paper, we (1) propose using tree-structured semantic representations, like those used in traditional rule-based NLG systems, for better discourse-level structuring and sentence-level planning; (2) introduce a challenging dataset using this representation for the weather domain; (3) introduce a constrained decoding approach for Seq2Seq models that leverages this representation to improve semantic correctness; and (4) demonstrate promising results on our dataset and the E2E dataset.
Hardware Aware Neural Network Architectures using FbNet
Authors: Sai Vineeth Kalluru Srinivas, Harideep Nair, Vinay Vidyasagar
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Neural Architecture Search

We implement a differentiable Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method inspired by FBNet for discovering neural networks that are heavily optimized for a particular target device. The FBNet NAS method discovers a neural network from a given search space by optimizing over a loss function which accounts for accuracy and target device latency. We extend this loss function by adding an energy term. This will potentially enhance the ``hardware awareness" and help us find a neural network architecture that is optimal in terms of accuracy, latency and energy consumption, given a target device (Raspberry Pi in our case). We name our trained child architecture obtained at the end of search process as Hardware Aware Neural Network Architecture (HANNA). We prove the efficacy of our approach by benchmarking HANNA against two other state-of-the-art neural networks designed for mobile/embedded applications, namely MobileNetv2 and CondenseNet for CIFAR-10 dataset. Our results show that HANNA provides a speedup of about 2.5x and 1.7x, and reduces energy consumption by 3.8x and 2x compared to MobileNetv2 and CondenseNet respectively. HANNA is able to provide such significant speedup and energy efficiency benefits over the state-of-the-art baselines at the cost of a tolerable 4-5% drop in accuracy.
NeoNav: Improving the Generalization of Visual Navigation via Generating Next Expected Observations
Authors: Qiaoyun Wu, Dinesh Manocha, Jun Wang, Kai Xu
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Navigation

We propose improving the cross-target and cross-scene generalization of visual navigation through learning an agent that is guided by conceiving the next observations it expects to see. This is achieved by learning a variational Bayesian model, called NeoNav, which generates the next expected observations (NEO) conditioned on the current observations of the agent and the target view. Our generative model is learned through optimizing a variational objective encompassing two key designs. First, the latent distribution is conditioned on current observations and the target view, leading to a model-based, target-driven navigation. Second, the latent space is modeled with a Mixture of Gaussians conditioned on the current observation and the next best action. Our use of mixture-of-posteriors prior effectively alleviates the issue of over-regularized latent space, thus significantly boosting the model generalization for new targets and in novel scenes. Moreover, the NEO generation models the forward dynamics of agent-environment interaction, which improves the quality of approximate inference and hence benefits data efficiency. We have conducted extensive evaluations on both real-world and synthetic benchmarks, and show that our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art models in terms of success rate, data efficiency, and generalization.
Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors
Authors: Justine Zhang, Robert Filbin, Christine Morrison, Jaclyn Weiser, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil
Date: 2019-06-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7

Mental health counseling is an enterprise with profound societal importance where conversations play a primary role. In order to acquire the conversational skills needed to face a challenging range of situations, mental health counselors must rely on training and on continued experience with actual clients. However, in the absence of large scale longitudinal studies, the nature and significance of this developmental process remain unclear. For example, prior literature suggests that experience might not translate into consequential changes in counselor behavior. This has led some to even argue that counseling is a profession without expertise. In this work, we develop a computational framework to quantify the extent to which individuals change their linguistic behavior with experience and to study the nature of this evolution. We use our framework to conduct a large longitudinal study of mental health counseling conversations, tracking over 3,400 counselors across their tenure. We reveal that overall, counselors do indeed change their conversational behavior to become more diverse across interactions, developing an individual voice that distinguishes them from other counselors. Furthermore, a finer-grained investigation shows that the rate and nature of this diversification vary across functionally different conversational components.