pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Private Protocols for U-Statistics in the Local Model and Beyond
Authors: James Bell, Aurélien Bellet, Adrià Gascón, tejas kulkarni
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Metric Learning

In this paper, we study the problem of computing $U$-statistics of degree $2$, i.e., quantities that come in the form of averages over pairs of data points, in the local model of differential privacy (LDP). The class of $U$-statistics covers many statistical estimates of interest, including Gini mean difference, Kendall's tau coefficient and Area under the ROC Curve (AUC), as well as empirical risk measures for machine learning problems such as ranking, clustering and metric learning. We first introduce an LDP protocol based on quantizing the data into bins and applying randomized response, which guarantees an $\epsilon$-LDP estimate with a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of $O(1/\sqrt{n}\epsilon)$ under regularity assumptions on the $U$-statistic or the data distribution. We then propose a specialized protocol for AUC based on a novel use of hierarchical histograms that achieves MSE of $O(\alpha^3/n\epsilon^2)$ for arbitrary data distribution. We also show that 2-party secure computation allows to design a protocol with MSE of $O(1/n\epsilon^2)$, without any assumption on the kernel function or data distribution and with total communication linear in the number of users $n$. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our protocols through experiments on synthetic and real datasets.
Spatio-Temporal Alignments: Optimal transport through space and time
Authors: Hicham Janati, Marco Cuturi, Alexandre Gramfort
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Comparing data defined over space and time is notoriously hard, because it involves quantifying both spatial and temporal variability, while at the same time taking into account the chronological structure of data. Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) computes an optimal alignment between time series in agreement with the chronological order, but is inherently blind to spatial shifts. In this paper, we propose Spatio-Temporal Alignments (STA), a new differentiable formulation of DTW, in which spatial differences between time samples are accounted for using regularized optimal transport (OT). Our temporal alignments are handled through a smooth variant of DTW called soft-DTW, for which we prove a new property: soft-DTW increases quadratically with time shifts. The cost matrix within soft-DTW that we use are computed using unbalanced OT, to handle the case in which observations are not normalized probabilities. Experiments on handwritten letters and brain imaging data confirm our theoretical findings and illustrate the effectiveness of STA as a dissimilarity for spatio-temporal data.
Intention Recognition of Pedestrians and Cyclists by 2D Pose Estimation
Authors: Zhijie Fang, Antonio M. López
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Pose Estimation, Autonomous Vehicles, Intent Detection, Pose Estimation

Anticipating the intentions of vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians and cyclists is critical for performing safe and comfortable driving maneuvers. This is the case for human driving and, thus, should be taken into account by systems providing any level of driving assistance, from advanced driver assistant systems (ADAS) to fully autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this paper, we show how the latest advances on monocular vision-based human pose estimation, i.e. those relying on deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), enable to recognize the intentions of such VRUs. In the case of cyclists, we assume that they follow traffic rules to indicate future maneuvers with arm signals. In the case of pedestrians, no indications can be assumed. Instead, we hypothesize that the walking pattern of a pedestrian allows to determine if he/she has the intention of crossing the road in the path of the ego-vehicle, so that the ego-vehicle must maneuver accordingly (e.g. slowing down or stopping). In this paper, we show how the same methodology can be used for recognizing pedestrians and cyclists' intentions. For pedestrians, we perform experiments on the JAAD dataset. For cyclists, we did not found an analogous dataset, thus, we created our own one by acquiring and annotating videos which we share with the research community. Overall, the proposed pipeline provides new state-of-the-art results on the intention recognition of VRUs.
Policy Optimization Through Approximate Importance Sampling
Authors: Marcin B. Tomczak, Dongho Kim, Peter Vrancx, Kee-Eung Kim
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control

Recent policy optimization approaches (Schulman et al., 2015a; 2017) have achieved substantial empirical successes by constructing new proxy optimization objectives. These proxy objectives allow stable and low variance policy learning, but require small policy updates to ensure that the proxy objective remains an accurate approximation of the target policy value. In this paper we derive an alternative objective that obtains the value of the target policy by applying importance sampling (IS). However, the basic importance sampled objective is not suitable for policy optimization, as it incurs too high variance in policy updates. We therefore introduce an approximation that allows us to directly trade-off the bias of approximation with the variance in policy updates. We show that our approximation unifies previously developed approaches and allows us to interpolate between them. We develop a practical algorithm by optimizing the introduced objective with proximal policy optimization techniques (Schulman et al., 2017). We also provide a theoretical analysis of the introduced policy optimization objective demonstrating bias-variance trade-off. We empirically demonstrate that the resulting algorithm improves upon state of the art on-policy policy optimization on continuous control benchmarks.
Semantic-aware Image Deblurring
Authors: Fuhai Chen, Rongrong Ji, Chengpeng Dai, Xiaoshuai Sun, Chia-Wen Lin, Jiayi Ji, Baochang Zhang, Feiyue Huang, Liujuan Cao
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Captioning, Image Deblurring

Image deblurring has achieved exciting progress in recent years. However, traditional methods fail to deblur severely blurred images, where semantic contents appears ambiguously. In this paper, we conduct image deblurring guided by the semantic contents inferred from image captioning. Specially, we propose a novel Structured-Spatial Semantic Embedding model for image deblurring (termed S3E-Deblur), which introduces a novel Structured-Spatial Semantic tree model (S3-tree) to bridge two basic tasks in computer vision: image deblurring (ImD) and image captioning (ImC). In particular, S3-tree captures and represents the semantic contents in structured spatial features in ImC, and then embeds the spatial features of the tree nodes into GAN based ImD. Co-training on S3-tree, ImC, and ImD is conducted to optimize the overall model in a multi-task end-to-end manner. Extensive experiments on severely blurred MSCOCO and GoPro datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of S3E-Deblur compared to the state-of-the-arts on both ImD and ImC tasks.
Learning deep forest with multi-scale Local Binary Pattern features for face anti-spoofing
Authors: Rizhao Cai, Changsheng chen
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Face Anti-Spoofing, Face Recognition

Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) is significant for the security of face recognition systems. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been introduced to the field of the FAS and have achieved competitive performance. However, CNN-based methods are vulnerable to the adversarial attack. Attackers could generate adversarial-spoofing examples to circumvent a CNN-based face liveness detector. Studies about the transferability of the adversarial attack reveal that utilizing handcrafted feature-based methods could improve security in a system-level. Therefore, handcrafted feature-based methods are worth our exploration. In this paper, we introduce the deep forest, which is proposed as an alternative towards CNNs by Zhou et al., in the problem of the FAS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at exploiting the deep forest in the problem of FAS. Moreover, we propose to re-devise the representation constructing by using LBP descriptors rather than the Grained-Scanning Mechanism in the original scheme. Our method achieves competitive results. On the benchmark database IDIAP REPLAY-ATTACK, 0\% Equal Error Rate (EER) is achieved. This work provides a competitive option in a fusing scheme for improving system-level security and offers important ideas to those who want to explore methods besides CNNs.
View Confusion Feature Learning for Person Re-identification
Authors: Fangyi Liu, Lei Zhang
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

Person re-identification is an important task in video surveillance that aims to associate people across camera views at different locations and time. View variability is always a challenging problem seriously degrading person re-identification performance. Most of the existing methods either focus on how to learn view invariant feature or how to combine view-wise features. In this paper, we mainly focus on how to learn view-invariant features by getting rid of view specific information through a view confusion learning mechanism. Specifically, we propose an end-toend trainable framework, called View Confusion Feature Learning (VCFL), for person Re-ID across cameras. To the best of our knowledge, VCFL is originally proposed to learn view-invariant identity-wise features, and it is a kind of combination of view-generic and view-specific methods. Classifiers and feature centers are utilized to achieve view confusion. Furthermore, we extract sift-guided features by using bag-of-words model to help supervise the training of deep networks and enhance the view invariance of features. In experiments, our approach is validated on three benchmark datasets including CUHK01, CUHK03, and MARKET1501, which show the superiority of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art approaches
Privacy-preserving and yet Robust Collaborative Filtering Recommender as a Service
Authors: Qiang Tang
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Privacy Preserving

Collaborative filtering recommenders provide effective personalization services at the cost of sacrificing the privacy of their end users. Due to the increasing concerns from the society and stricter privacy regulations, it is an urgent research challenge to design privacy-preserving and yet robust recommenders which offer recommendation services to privacy-aware users. Our analysis shows that existing solutions fall short in several aspects, including lacking attention to the precise output to end users and ignoring the correlated robustness issues. In this paper, we provide a general system structure for latent factor based collaborative filtering recommenders by formulating them into model training and prediction computing stages, and also describe a new security model. Aiming at pragmatic solutions, we first show how to construct privacy-preserving and yet robust model training stage based on existing solutions. Then, we propose two cryptographic protocols to realize a privacy-preserving prediction computing stage, depending on whether or not an extra proxy is involved. Different from standard Top-k recommendations, we alternatively let the end user retrieve the unrated items whose predictions are above a threshold, as a result of our privacy by design strategy. Experimental results show that our new protocols are quite efficient.
Gradient Information Guided Deraining with A Novel Network and Adversarial Training
Authors: Yinglong Wang, Haokui Zhang, Yu Liu, Qinfeng Shi, Bing Zeng
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Rain Removal

In recent years, deep learning based methods have made significant progress in rain-removing. However, the existing methods usually do not have good generalization ability, which leads to the fact that almost all of existing methods have a satisfied performance on removing a specific type of rain streaks, but may have a relatively poor performance on other types of rain streaks. In this paper, aiming at removing multiple types of rain streaks from single images, we propose a novel deraining framework (GRASPP-GAN), which has better generalization capacity. Specifically, a modified ResNet-18 which extracts the deep features of rainy images and a revised ASPP structure which adapts to the various shapes and sizes of rain streaks are composed together to form the backbone of our deraining network. Taking the more prominent characteristics of rain streaks in the gradient domain into consideration, a gradient loss is introduced to help to supervise our deraining training process, for which, a Sobel convolution layer is built to extract the gradient information flexibly. To further boost the performance, an adversarial learning scheme is employed for the first time to train the proposed network. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art deraining methods quantitatively and qualitatively. In addition, without any modifications, our proposed framework also achieves good visual performance on dehazing.
Interpreting Deep Learning-Based Networking Systems
Authors: Zili Meng, Minhu Wang, Jiasong Bai, Mingwei Xu, Hongzi Mao, Hongxin Hu
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

While many deep learning (DL)-based networking systems have demonstrated superior performance, the underlying Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) remain blackboxes and stay uninterpretable for network operators. The lack of interpretability makes DL-based networking systems prohibitive to deploy in practice. In this paper, we propose Metis, a framework that provides interpretability for two general categories of networking problems spanning local and global control. Accordingly, Metis introduces two different interpretation methods based on decision tree and hypergraph, where it converts DNN policies to interpretable rule-based controllers and highlight critical components based on analysis over hypergraph. We evaluate Metis over several state-of-the-art DL-based networking systems and show that Metis provides human-readable interpretations while preserving nearly no degradation in performance. We further present four concrete use cases of Metis, showcasing how Metis helps network operators to design, debug, deploy, and ad-hoc adjust DL-based networking systems.
Estimating Density Models with Truncation Boundaries using Score Matching
Authors: Song Liu, Takafumi Kanamori, Daniel J. Williams
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation, Outlier Detection, parameter estimation

Truncated densities are probability density functions defined on truncated domains. They share the same parametric form with their non-truncated counterparts up to a normalizing constant. Since the computation of their normalizing constants is usually infeasible, Maximum Likelihood Estimation cannot be easily applied to estimate truncated density models. Score Matching (SM) is a powerful tool for fitting parameters using only unnormalized models. However, it cannot be directly applied here as boundary conditions used to derive a tractable SM objective are not satisfied by truncated densities. In this paper, we study parameter estimation for truncated probability densities using SM. The estimator minimizes a weighted Fisher divergence. The weight function is simply the shortest distance from a data point to the boundary of the domain. We show this choice of weight function naturally arises from minimizing the Stein discrepancy as well as upperbounding the finite-sample estimation error. The usefulness of our method is demonstrated by numerical experiments and a study on the Chicago crime data set. We also show that the proposed density estimation can correct the outlier-trimming bias caused by aggressive outlier detection methods.
Word Embedding Visualization Via Dictionary Learning
Authors: Juexiao Zhang, Yubei Chen, Brian Cheung, Bruno A. Olshausen
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Dictionary Learning

Co-occurrence statistics based word embedding techniques have proved to be very useful in extracting the semantic and syntactic representation of words as low dimensional continuous vectors. In this work, we discovered that dictionary learning can open up these word vectors as a linear combination of more elementary word factors. We demonstrate many of the learned factors have surprisingly strong semantic or syntactic meaning corresponding to the factors previously identified manually by human inspection. Thus dictionary learning provides a powerful visualization tool for understanding word embedding representations. Furthermore, we show that the word factors can help in identifying key semantic and syntactic differences in word analogy tasks and improve upon the state-of-the-art word embedding techniques in these tasks by a large margin.
Automated Multidisciplinary Design and Control of Hopping Robots for Exploration of Extreme Environments on the Moon and Mars
Authors: Himangshu Kalita, Jekan Thangavelautham
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

The next frontier in solar system exploration will be missions targeting extreme and rugged environments such as caves, canyons, cliffs and crater rims of the Moon, Mars and icy moons. These environments are time capsules into early formation of the solar system and will provide vital clues of how our early solar system gave way to the current planets and moons. These sites will also provide vital clues to the past and present habitability of these environments. Current landers and rovers are unable to access these areas of high interest due to limitations in precision landing techniques, need for large and sophisticated science instruments and a mission assurance and operations culture where risks are minimized at all costs. Our past work has shown the advantages of using multiple spherical hopping robots called SphereX for exploring these extreme environments. Our previous work was based on performing exploration with a human-designed baseline design of a SphereX robot. However, the design of SphereX is a complex task that involves a large number of design variables and multiple engineering disciplines. In this work we propose to use Automated Multidisciplinary Design and Control Optimization (AMDCO) techniques to find near optimal design solutions in terms of mass, volume, power, and control for SphereX for different mission scenarios.
A Joint Model for IT Operation Series Prediction and Anomaly Detection
Authors: Run-Qing Chen, Guang-Hui Shi, Wan-Lei Zhao, Chang-Hui Liang
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Prediction, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Time Series Prediction, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Status prediction and anomaly detection are two fundamental tasks in automatic IT systems monitoring. In this paper, a joint model Predictor & Anomaly Detector (PAD) is proposed to address these two issues under one framework. In our design, the variational auto-encoder (VAE) and long short-term memory (LSTM) are joined together. The prediction block (LSTM) takes clean input from the reconstructed time series by VAE, which makes it robust to the anomalies and noise for prediction task. In the meantime, the LSTM block maintains the long-term sequential patterns, which are out of the sight of a VAE encoding window. This leads to the better performance of VAE in anomaly detection than it is trained alone. In the whole processing pipeline, the spectral residual analysis is integrated with VAE and LSTM to boost the performance of both. The superior performance on two tasks is confirmed with the experiments on two challenging evaluation benchmarks.
Exploring Hate Speech Detection in Multimodal Publications
Authors: Raul Gomez, Jaume Gibert, Lluis Gomez, Dimosthenis Karatzas
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

In this work we target the problem of hate speech detection in multimodal publications formed by a text and an image. We gather and annotate a large scale dataset from Twitter, MMHS150K, and propose different models that jointly analyze textual and visual information for hate speech detection, comparing them with unimodal detection. We provide quantitative and qualitative results and analyze the challenges of the proposed task. We find that, even though images are useful for the hate speech detection task, current multimodal models cannot outperform models analyzing only text. We discuss why and open the field and the dataset for further research.
Adversarial Learning of Deepfakes in Accounting
Authors: Marco Schreyer, Timur Sattarov, Bernd Reimer, Damian Borth
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, ERP

Nowadays, organizations collect vast quantities of accounting relevant transactions, referred to as 'journal entries', in 'Enterprise Resource Planning' (ERP) systems. The aggregation of those entries ultimately defines an organization's financial statement. To detect potential misstatements and fraud, international audit standards demand auditors to directly assess journal entries using 'Computer Assisted AuditTechniques' (CAATs). At the same time, discoveries in deep learning research revealed that machine learning models are vulnerable to 'adversarial attacks'. It also became evident that such attack techniques can be misused to generate 'Deepfakes' designed to directly attack the perception of humans by creating convincingly altered media content. The research of such developments and their potential impact on the finance and accounting domain is still in its early stage. We believe that it is of vital relevance to investigate how such techniques could be maliciously misused in this sphere. In this work, we show an adversarial attack against CAATs using deep neural networks. We first introduce a real-world 'thread model' designed to camouflage accounting anomalies such as fraudulent journal entries. Second, we show that adversarial autoencoder neural networks are capable of learning a human interpretable model of journal entries that disentangles the entries latent generative factors. Finally, we demonstrate how such a model can be maliciously misused by a perpetrator to generate robust 'adversarial' journal entries that mislead CAATs.
Is Multilingual BERT Fluent in Language Generation?
Authors: Samuel Rönnqvist, Jenna Kanerva, Tapio Salakoski, Filip Ginter
Date: 2019-10-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2019 9
Tasks: Diagnostic, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence, Text Generation

The multilingual BERT model is trained on 104 languages and meant to serve as a universal language model and tool for encoding sentences. We explore how well the model performs on several languages across several tasks: a diagnostic classification probing the embeddings for a particular syntactic property, a cloze task testing the language modelling ability to fill in gaps in a sentence, and a natural language generation task testing for the ability to produce coherent text fitting a given context. We find that the currently available multilingual BERT model is clearly inferior to the monolingual counterparts, and cannot in many cases serve as a substitute for a well-trained monolingual model. We find that the English and German models perform well at generation, whereas the multilingual model is lacking, in particular, for Nordic languages.