pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Generalized Flow for B2B Sales Predictive Modeling: An Azure Machine Learning Approach
Authors: Alireza Rezazadeh
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Decision Making, Feature Engineering, Management

Predicting the outcome of sales opportunities is a core part of successful business management. Conventionally, making this prediction has relied mostly on subjective human evaluations in the process of sales decision making. In this paper, we addressed the problem of forecasting the outcome of business to business (B2B) sales by proposing a thorough data-driven Machine Learning (ML) workflow on a cloud-based computing platform: Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Service (Azure ML). This workflow consists of two pipelines: (1) An ML pipeline to train probabilistic predictive models on the historical sales opportunities data. In this pipeline, data is enriched with an extensive feature enhancement step and then used to train an ensemble of ML classification models in parallel. (2) A prediction pipeline to utilize the trained ML model and infer the likelihood of winning new sales opportunities along with calculating optimal decision boundaries. The effectiveness of the proposed workflow was evaluated on a real sales dataset of a major global B2B consulting firm. Our results implied that decision-making based on the ML predictions is more accurate and brings a higher monetary value.
Learning Task-Driven Control Policies via Information Bottlenecks
Authors: Vincent Pacelli, Anirudha Majumdar
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper presents a reinforcement learning approach to synthesizing task-driven control policies for robotic systems equipped with rich sensory modalities (e.g., vision or depth). Standard reinforcement learning algorithms typically produce policies that tightly couple control actions to the entirety of the system's state and rich sensor observations. As a consequence, the resulting policies can often be sensitive to changes in task-irrelevant portions of the state or observations (e.g., changing background colors). In contrast, the approach we present here learns to create a task-driven representation that is used to compute control actions. Formally, this is achieved by deriving a policy gradient-style algorithm that creates an information bottleneck between the states and the task-driven representation; this constrains actions to only depend on task-relevant information. We demonstrate our approach in a thorough set of simulation results on multiple examples including a grasping task that utilizes depth images and a ball-catching task that utilizes RGB images. Comparisons with a standard policy gradient approach demonstrate that the task-driven policies produced by our algorithm are often significantly more robust to sensor noise and task-irrelevant changes in the environment.
Plague Dot Text: Text mining and annotation of outbreak reports of the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1952)
Authors: Arlene Casey, Mike Bennett, Richard Tobin, Claire Grover, Iona Walker, Lukas Engelmann, Beatrice Alex
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Epidemiology, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

The design of models that govern diseases in population is commonly built on information and data gathered from past outbreaks. However, epidemic outbreaks are never captured in statistical data alone but are communicated by narratives, supported by empirical observations. Outbreak reports discuss correlations between populations, locations and the disease to infer insights into causes, vectors and potential interventions. The problem with these narratives is usually the lack of consistent structure or strong conventions, which prohibit their formal analysis in larger corpora. Our interdisciplinary research investigates more than 100 reports from the third plague pandemic (1894-1952) evaluating ways of building a corpus to extract and structure this narrative information through text mining and manual annotation. In this paper we discuss the progress of our ongoing exploratory project, how we enhance optical character recognition (OCR) methods to improve text capture, our approach to structure the narratives and identify relevant entities in the reports. The structured corpus is made available via Solr enabling search and analysis across the whole collection for future research dedicated, for example, to the identification of concepts. We show preliminary visualisations of the characteristics of causation and differences with respect to gender as a result of syntactic-category-dependent corpus statistics. Our goal is to develop structured accounts of some of the most significant concepts that were used to understand the epidemiology of the third plague pandemic around the globe. The corpus enables researchers to analyse the reports collectively allowing for deep insights into the global epidemiological consideration of plague in the early twentieth century.
Iterative Data Programming for Expanding Text Classification Corpora
Authors: Neil Mallinar, Abhishek Shah, Tin Kam Ho, Rajendra Ugrani, Ayush Gupta
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Denoising, Ensemble Learning, General Classification, Intent Recognition, Sentence, Sentence Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

Real-world text classification tasks often require many labeled training examples that are expensive to obtain. Recent advancements in machine teaching, specifically the data programming paradigm, facilitate the creation of training data sets quickly via a general framework for building weak models, also known as labeling functions, and denoising them through ensemble learning techniques. We present a fast, simple data programming method for augmenting text data sets by generating neighborhood-based weak models with minimal supervision. Furthermore, our method employs an iterative procedure to identify sparsely distributed examples from large volumes of unlabeled data. The iterative data programming techniques improve newer weak models as more labeled data is confirmed with human-in-loop. We show empirical results on sentence classification tasks, including those from a task of improving intent recognition in conversational agents.
Centimeter-Level Indoor Localization using Channel State Information with Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Jianyuan Yu, R. Michael Buehrer
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Indoor Localization

Modern techniques in the Internet of Things or autonomous driving require more accuracy positioning ever. Classic location techniques mainly adapt to outdoor scenarios, while they do not meet the requirement of indoor cases with multiple paths. Meanwhile as a feature robust to noise and time variations, Channel State Information (CSI) has shown its advantages over Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) at more accurate positioning. To this end, this paper proposes the neural network method to estimate the centimeter-level indoor positioning with real CSI data collected from linear antennas. It utilizes an amplitude of channel response or a correlation matrix as the input, which can highly reduce the data size and suppress the noise. Also, it makes use of the consistency in the user motion trajectory via Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and signal-noise ratio (SNR) information, which can further improve the estimation accuracy, especially in small datasize learning. These contributions all benefit the efficiency of the neural network, based on the results with other classic supervised learning methods.
Apportioned Margin Approach for Cost Sensitive Large Margin Classifiers
Authors: Lee-Ad Gottlieb, Eran Kaufman, Aryeh Kontorovich
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalization Bounds

We consider the problem of cost sensitive multiclass classification, where we would like to increase the sensitivity of an important class at the expense of a less important one. We adopt an {\em apportioned margin} framework to address this problem, which enables an efficient margin shift between classes that share the same boundary. The decision boundary between all pairs of classes divides the margin between them in accordance to a given prioritization vector, which yields a tighter error bound for the important classes while also reducing the overall out-of-sample error. In addition to demonstrating an efficient implementation of our framework, we derive generalization bounds, demonstrate Fisher consistency, adapt the framework to Mercer's kernel and to neural networks, and report promising empirical results on all accounts.
Multi-Objective Optimization for Size and Resilience of Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: Mihaela Dimovska, Travis Johnston, Catherine D. Schuman, J. Parker Mitchell, Thomas E. Potok
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00

Inspired by the connectivity mechanisms in the brain, neuromorphic computing architectures model Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) in silicon. As such, neuromorphic architectures are designed and developed with the goal of having small, low power chips that can perform control and machine learning tasks. However, the power consumption of the developed hardware can greatly depend on the size of the network that is being evaluated on the chip. Furthermore, the accuracy of a trained SNN that is evaluated on chip can change due to voltage and current variations in the hardware that perturb the learned weights of the network. While efforts are made on the hardware side to minimize those perturbations, a software based strategy to make the deployed networks more resilient can help further alleviate that issue. In this work, we study Spiking Neural Networks in two neuromorphic architecture implementations with the goal of decreasing their size, while at the same time increasing their resiliency to hardware faults. We leverage an evolutionary algorithm to train the SNNs and propose a multiobjective fitness function to optimize the size and resiliency of the SNN. We demonstrate that this strategy leads to well-performing, small-sized networks that are more resilient to hardware faults.
Combining 3D Model Contour Energy and Keypoints for Object Tracking
Authors: Bogdan Bugaev, Anton Kryshchenko, Roman Belov
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV 2018 9
Tasks: Object Tracking, Pose Estimation

We present a new combined approach for monocular model-based 3D tracking. A preliminary object pose is estimated by using a keypoint-based technique. The pose is then refined by optimizing the contour energy function. The energy determines the degree of correspondence between the contour of the model projection and the image edges. It is calculated based on both the intensity and orientation of the raw image gradient. For optimization, we propose a technique and search area constraints that allow overcoming the local optima and taking into account information obtained through keypoint-based pose estimation. Owing to its combined nature, our method eliminates numerous issues of keypoint-based and edge-based approaches. We demonstrate the efficiency of our method by comparing it with state-of-the-art methods on a public benchmark dataset that includes videos with various lighting conditions, movement patterns, and speed.
Bootstrapping a DQN Replay Memory with Synthetic Experiences
Authors: Wenzel Baron Pilar von Pilchau, Anthony Stein, Jörg Hähner
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

An important component of many Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms is the Experience Replay which serves as a storage mechanism or memory of made experiences. These experiences are used for training and help the agent to stably find the perfect trajectory through the problem space. The classic Experience Replay however makes only use of the experiences it actually made, but the stored samples bear great potential in form of knowledge about the problem that can be extracted. We present an algorithm that creates synthetic experiences in a nondeterministic discrete environment to assist the learner. The Interpolated Experience Replay is evaluated on the FrozenLake environment and we show that it can support the agent to learn faster and even better than the classic version.
Open-set learning with augmented categories by exploiting unlabelled data
Authors: Emile R. Engelbrecht, Johan A. du Preez
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Novelty Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Open Set Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Novel categories are commonly defined as those unobserved during training but present during testing. However, partially labelled training datasets can contain unlabelled training samples that belong to novel categories, meaning these can be present in training and testing. This research is the first to generalise between what we call observed-novel and unobserved-novel categories within a new learning policy called open-set learning with augmented category by exploiting unlabelled data or Open-LACU. After surveying existing learning policies, we introduce Open-LACU as a unified policy of positive and unlabelled learning, semi-supervised learning and open-set recognition. Subsequently, we develop the first Open-LACU model using an algorithmic training process of the relevant research fields. The proposed Open-LACU classifier achieves state-of-the-art and first-of-its-kind results.
Compositional Languages Emerge in a Neural Iterated Learning Model
Authors: Yi Ren, Shangmin Guo, Matthieu Labeau, Shay B. Cohen, Simon Kirby
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1

The principle of compositionality, which enables natural language to represent complex concepts via a structured combination of simpler ones, allows us to convey an open-ended set of messages using a limited vocabulary. If compositionality is indeed a natural property of language, we may expect it to appear in communication protocols that are created by neural agents in language games. In this paper, we propose an effective neural iterated learning (NIL) algorithm that, when applied to interacting neural agents, facilitates the emergence of a more structured type of language. Indeed, these languages provide learning speed advantages to neural agents during training, which can be incrementally amplified via NIL. We provide a probabilistic model of NIL and an explanation of why the advantage of compositional language exist. Our experiments confirm our analysis, and also demonstrate that the emerged languages largely improve the generalizing power of the neural agent communication.
Structural Inductive Biases in Emergent Communication
Authors: Agnieszka Słowik, Abhinav Gupta, William L. Hamilton, Mateja Jamnik, Sean B. Holden, Christopher Pal
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Sentence

In order to communicate, humans flatten a complex representation of ideas and their attributes into a single word or a sentence. We investigate the impact of representation learning in artificial agents by developing graph referential games. We empirically show that agents parametrized by graph neural networks develop a more compositional language compared to bag-of-words and sequence models, which allows them to systematically generalize to new combinations of familiar features.
A Two-Stream Symmetric Network with Bidirectional Ensemble for Aerial Image Matching
Authors: Jae-Hyun Park, Woo-Jeoung Nam, Seong-Whan Lee
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a novel method to precisely match two aerial images that were obtained in different environments via a two-stream deep network. By internally augmenting the target image, the network considers the two-stream with the three input images and reflects the additional augmented pair in the training. As a result, the training process of the deep network is regularized and the network becomes robust for the variance of aerial images. Furthermore, we introduce an ensemble method that is based on the bidirectional network, which is motivated by the isomorphic nature of the geometric transformation. We obtain two global transformation parameters without any additional network or parameters, which alleviate asymmetric matching results and enable significant improvement in performance by fusing two outcomes. For the experiment, we adopt aerial images from Google Earth and the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS). To quantitatively assess our result, we apply the probability of correct keypoints (PCK) metric, which measures the degree of matching. The qualitative and quantitative results show the sizable gap of performance compared to the conventional methods for matching the aerial images. All code and our trained model, as well as the dataset are available online.
CoVoST: A Diverse Multilingual Speech-To-Text Translation Corpus
Authors: Changhan Wang, Juan Pino, Anne Wu, Jiatao Gu
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation, Translation

Spoken language translation has recently witnessed a resurgence in popularity, thanks to the development of end-to-end models and the creation of new corpora, such as Augmented LibriSpeech and MuST-C. Existing datasets involve language pairs with English as a source language, involve very specific domains or are low resource. We introduce CoVoST, a multilingual speech-to-text translation corpus from 11 languages into English, diversified with over 11,000 speakers and over 60 accents. We describe the dataset creation methodology and provide empirical evidence of the quality of the data. We also provide initial benchmarks, including, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end many-to-one multilingual models for spoken language translation. CoVoST is released under CC0 license and free to use. We also provide additional evaluation data derived from Tatoeba under CC licenses.
Obstruction level detection of sewer videos using convolutional neural networks
Authors: Mario A. Gutierrez-Mondragon, Dario Garcia-Gasulla, Sergio Alvarez-Napagao, Jaume Brossa-Ordoñez, Rafael Gimenez-Esteban
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00

Worldwide, sewer networks are designed to transport wastewater to a centralized treatment plant to be treated and returned to the environment. This process is critical for the current society, preventing waterborne illnesses, providing safe drinking water and enhancing general sanitation. To keep a sewer network perfectly operational, sampling inspections are performed constantly to identify obstructions. Typically, a Closed-Circuit Television system is used to record the inside of pipes and report the obstruction level, which may trigger a cleaning operative. Currently, the obstruction level assessment is done manually, which is time-consuming and inconsistent. In this work, we design a methodology to train a Convolutional Neural Network for identifying the level of obstruction in pipes, thus reducing the human effort required on such a frequent and repetitive task. We gathered a database of videos that are explored and adapted to generate useful frames to fed into the model. Our resulting classifier obtains deployment ready performances. To validate the consistency of the approach and its industrial applicability, we integrate the Layer-wise Relevance Propagation explainability technique, which enables us to further understand the behavior of the neural network for this task. In the end, the proposed system can provide higher speed, accuracy, and consistency in the process of sewer examination. Our analysis also uncovers some guidelines on how to further improve the quality of the data gathering methodology.
Pixel-wise Conditioned Generative Adversarial Networks for Image Synthesis and Completion
Authors: Cyprien Ruffino, Romain Hérault, Eric Laloy, Gilles Gasso
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Inpainting

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have proven successful for unsupervised image generation. Several works have extended GANs to image inpainting by conditioning the generation with parts of the image to be reconstructed. Despite their success, these methods have limitations in settings where only a small subset of the image pixels is known beforehand. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of conditioning GANs when very few pixel values are provided. We propose a modelling framework which results in adding an explicit cost term to the GAN objective function to enforce pixel-wise conditioning. We investigate the influence of this regularization term on the quality of the generated images and the fulfillment of the given pixel constraints. Using the recent PacGAN technique, we ensure that we keep diversity in the generated samples. Conducted experiments on FashionMNIST show that the regularization term effectively controls the trade-off between quality of the generated images and the conditioning. Experimental evaluation on the CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets evidences that our method achieves accurate results both visually and quantitatively in term of Fr\'echet Inception Distance, while still enforcing the pixel conditioning. We also evaluate our method on a texture image generation task using fully-convolutional networks. As a final contribution, we apply the method to a classical geological simulation application.
GTC: Guided Training of CTC Towards Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Recognition
Authors: Wenyang Hu, Xiaocong Cai, Jun Hou, Shuai Yi, Zhiping Lin
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Scene Text Recognition

Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and attention mechanism are two main approaches used in recent scene text recognition works. Compared with attention-based methods, CTC decoder has a much shorter inference time, yet a lower accuracy. To design an efficient and effective model, we propose the guided training of CTC (GTC), where CTC model learns a better alignment and feature representations from a more powerful attentional guidance. With the benefit of guided training, CTC model achieves robust and accurate prediction for both regular and irregular scene text while maintaining a fast inference speed. Moreover, to further leverage the potential of CTC decoder, a graph convolutional network (GCN) is proposed to learn the local correlations of extracted features. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that our end-to-end model achieves a new state-of-the-art for regular and irregular scene text recognition and needs 6 times shorter inference time than attentionbased methods.
Finite Time Analysis of Linear Two-timescale Stochastic Approximation with Markovian Noise
Authors: Maxim Kaledin, Eric Moulines, Alexey Naumov, Vladislav Tadic, Hoi-To Wai
Date: 2020-02-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Linear two-timescale stochastic approximation (SA) scheme is an important class of algorithms which has become popular in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly for the policy evaluation problem. Recently, a number of works have been devoted to establishing the finite time analysis of the scheme, especially under the Markovian (non-i.i.d.) noise settings that are ubiquitous in practice. In this paper, we provide a finite-time analysis for linear two timescale SA. Our bounds show that there is no discrepancy in the convergence rate between Markovian and martingale noise, only the constants are affected by the mixing time of the Markov chain. With an appropriate step size schedule, the transient term in the expected error bound is $o(1/k^c)$ and the steady-state term is ${\cal O}(1/k)$, where $c>1$ and $k$ is the iteration number. Furthermore, we present an asymptotic expansion of the expected error with a matching lower bound of $\Omega(1/k)$. A simple numerical experiment is presented to support our theory.