pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Data Augmentation for Copy-Mechanism in Dialogue State Tracking
Authors: Xiaohui Song, Liangjun Zang, Yipeng Su, Xing Wu, Jizhong Han, Songlin Hu
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Dialogue State Tracking

While several state-of-the-art approaches to dialogue state tracking (DST) have shown promising performances on several benchmarks, there is still a significant performance gap between seen slot values (i.e., values that occur in both training set and test set) and unseen ones (values that occur in training set but not in test set). Recently, the copy-mechanism has been widely used in DST models to handle unseen slot values, which copies slot values from user utterance directly. In this paper, we aim to find out the factors that influence the generalization ability of a common copy-mechanism model for DST. Our key observations include: 1) the copy-mechanism tends to memorize values rather than infer them from contexts, which is the primary reason for unsatisfactory generalization performance; 2) greater diversity of slot values in the training set increase the performance on unseen values but slightly decrease the performance on seen values. Moreover, we propose a simple but effective algorithm of data augmentation to train copy-mechanism models, which augments the input dataset by copying user utterances and replacing the real slot values with randomly generated strings. Users could use two hyper-parameters to realize a trade-off between the performances on seen values and unseen ones, as well as a trade-off between overall performance and computational cost. Experimental results on three widely used datasets (WoZ 2.0, DSTC2, and Multi-WoZ 2.0) show the effectiveness of our approach.
Using Single-Step Adversarial Training to Defend Iterative Adversarial Examples
Authors: Guanxiong Liu, Issa Khalil, Abdallah Khreishah
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00

Adversarial examples have become one of the largest challenges that machine learning models, especially neural network classifiers, face. These adversarial examples break the assumption of attack-free scenario and fool state-of-the-art (SOTA) classifiers with insignificant perturbations to human. So far, researchers achieved great progress in utilizing adversarial training as a defense. However, the overwhelming computational cost degrades its applicability and little has been done to overcome this issue. Single-Step adversarial training methods have been proposed as computationally viable solutions, however they still fail to defend against iterative adversarial examples. In this work, we first experimentally analyze several different SOTA defense methods against adversarial examples. Then, based on observations from experiments, we propose a novel single-step adversarial training method which can defend against both single-step and iterative adversarial examples. Lastly, through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the SOTA single-step and iterative adversarial training defense. Compared with ATDA (single-step method) on CIFAR10 dataset, our proposed method achieves 35.67% enhancement in test accuracy and 19.14% reduction in training time. When compared with methods that use BIM or Madry examples (iterative methods) on CIFAR10 dataset, it saves up to 76.03% in training time with less than 3.78% degeneration in test accuracy.
Neural Architecture Search for Compressed Sensing Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction
Authors: Jiangpeng Yan, Shuo Chen, Yongbing Zhang, Xiu Li
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Image Reconstruction, Neural Architecture Search, SSIM

Recent works have demonstrated that deep learning (DL) based compressed sensing (CS) implementation can accelerate Magnetic Resonance (MR) Imaging by reconstructing MR images from sub-sampled k-space data. However, network architectures adopted in previous methods are all designed by handcraft. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithms can automatically build neural network architectures which have outperformed human designed ones in several vision tasks. Inspired by this, here we proposed a novel and efficient network for the MR image reconstruction problem via NAS instead of manual attempts. Particularly, a specific cell structure, which was integrated into the model-driven MR reconstruction pipeline, was automatically searched from a flexible pre-defined operation search space in a differentiable manner. Experimental results show that our searched network can produce better reconstruction results compared to previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of PSNR and SSIM with 4-6 times fewer computation resources. Extensive experiments were conducted to analyze how hyper-parameters affect reconstruction performance and the searched structures. The generalizability of the searched architecture was also evaluated on different organ MR datasets. Our proposed method can reach a better trade-off between computation cost and reconstruction performance for MR reconstruction problem with good generalizability and offer insights to design neural networks for other medical image applications. The evaluation code will be available at https://github.com/yjump/NAS-for-CSMRI.
Anypath Routing Protocol Design via Q-Learning for Underwater Sensor Networks
Authors: Yuan Zhou, Tao Cao, Wei Xiang
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning

As a promising technology in the Internet of Underwater Things, underwater sensor networks have drawn a widespread attention from both academia and industry. However, designing a routing protocol for underwater sensor networks is a great challenge due to high energy consumption and large latency in the underwater environment. This paper proposes a Q-learning-based localization-free anypath routing (QLFR) protocol to prolong the lifetime as well as reduce the end-to-end delay for underwater sensor networks. Aiming at optimal routing policies, the Q-value is calculated by jointly considering the residual energy and depth information of sensor nodes throughout the routing process. More specifically, we define two reward functions (i.e., depth-related and energy-related rewards) for Q-learning with the objective of reducing latency and extending network lifetime. In addition, a new holding time mechanism for packet forwarding is designed according to the priority of forwarding candidate nodes. Furthermore, a mathematical analysis is presented to analyze the performance of the proposed routing protocol. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the superiority performance of the proposed routing protocol in terms of the end-to-end delay and the network lifetime.
Notes on neighborhood semantics for logics of unknown truths and false beliefs
Authors: Jie Fan
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00

In this article, we study logics of unknown truths and false beliefs under neighborhood semantics. We compare the relative expressivity of the two logics. It turns out that they are incomparable over various classes of neighborhood models, and the combination of the two logics are equally expressive as standard modal logic over any class of neighborhood models. We propose morphisms for each logic, which can help us explore the frame definability problem, show a general soundness and completeness result, and generalize some results in the literature. We axiomatize the two logics over various classes of neighborhood frames. Last but not least, we extend the results to the case of public announcements, which has good applications to Moore sentences and some others.
Global Convergence and Variance-Reduced Optimization for a Class of Nonconvex-Nonconcave Minimax Problems
Authors: Junchi Yang, Negar Kiyavash, Niao He
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00

Nonconvex minimax problems appear frequently in emerging machine learning applications, such as generative adversarial networks and adversarial learning. Simple algorithms such as the gradient descent ascent (GDA) are the common practice for solving these nonconvex games and receive lots of empirical success. Yet, it is known that these vanilla GDA algorithms with constant step size can potentially diverge even in the convex setting. In this work, we show that for a subclass of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives satisfying a so-called two-sided Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz inequality, the alternating gradient descent ascent (AGDA) algorithm converges globally at a linear rate and the stochastic AGDA achieves a sublinear rate. We further develop a variance reduced algorithm that attains a provably faster rate than AGDA when the problem has the finite-sum structure.
Efficient Sentence Embedding via Semantic Subspace Analysis
Authors: Bin Wang, Fenxiao Chen, Yuncheng Wang, C. -C. Jay Kuo
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Word Embeddings

A novel sentence embedding method built upon semantic subspace analysis, called semantic subspace sentence embedding (S3E), is proposed in this work. Given the fact that word embeddings can capture semantic relationship while semantically similar words tend to form semantic groups in a high-dimensional embedding space, we develop a sentence representation scheme by analyzing semantic subspaces of its constituent words. Specifically, we construct a sentence model from two aspects. First, we represent words that lie in the same semantic group using the intra-group descriptor. Second, we characterize the interaction between multiple semantic groups with the inter-group descriptor. The proposed S3E method is evaluated on both textual similarity tasks and supervised tasks. Experimental results show that it offers comparable or better performance than the state-of-the-art. The complexity of our S3E method is also much lower than other parameterized models.
"Wait, I'm Still Talking!" Predicting the Dialogue Interaction Behavior Using Imagine-Then-Arbitrate Model
Authors: Zehao Lin, Shaobo Cui, Guodun Li, Xiaoming Kang, Feng Ji, FengLin Li, Zhongzhou Zhao, Haiqing Chen, Yin Zhang
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00

Producing natural and accurate responses like human beings is the ultimate goal of intelligent dialogue agents. So far, most of the past works concentrate on selecting or generating one pertinent and fluent response according to current query and its context. These models work on a one-to-one environment, making one response to one utterance each round. However, in real human-human conversations, human often sequentially sends several short messages for readability instead of a long message in one turn. Thus messages will not end with an explicit ending signal, which is crucial for agents to decide when to reply. So the first step for an intelligent dialogue agent is not replying but deciding if it should reply at the moment. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel Imagine-then-Arbitrate (ITA) neural dialogue model to help the agent decide whether to wait or to make a response directly. Our method has two imaginator modules and an arbitrator module. The two imaginators will learn the agent's and user's speaking style respectively, generate possible utterances as the input of the arbitrator, combining with dialogue history. And the arbitrator decides whether to wait or to make a response to the user directly. To verify the performance and effectiveness of our method, we prepared two dialogue datasets and compared our approach with several popular models. Experimental results show that our model performs well on addressing ending prediction issue and outperforms baseline models.
Preference Modeling with Context-Dependent Salient Features
Authors: Amanda Bower, Laura Balzano
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00

We consider the problem of estimating a ranking on a set of items from noisy pairwise comparisons given item features. We address the fact that pairwise comparison data often reflects irrational choice, e.g. intransitivity. Our key observation is that two items compared in isolation from other items may be compared based on only a salient subset of features. Formalizing this framework, we propose the salient feature preference model and prove a finite sample complexity result for learning the parameters of our model and the underlying ranking with maximum likelihood estimation. We also provide empirical results that support our theoretical bounds and illustrate how our model explains systematic intransitivity. Finally we demonstrate strong performance of maximum likelihood estimation of our model on both synthetic data and two real data sets: the UT Zappos50K data set and comparison data about the compactness of legislative districts in the US.
Tuning-free Plug-and-Play Proximal Algorithm for Inverse Imaging Problems
Authors: Kaixuan Wei, Angelica Aviles-Rivero, Jingwei Liang, Ying Fu, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Hua Huang
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICML 2020 1
Tasks: compressed sensing, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Denoising, Reinforcement Learning, Retrieval

Plug-and-play (PnP) is a non-convex framework that combines ADMM or other proximal algorithms with advanced denoiser priors. Recently, PnP has achieved great empirical success, especially with the integration of deep learning-based denoisers. However, a key problem of PnP based approaches is that they require manual parameter tweaking. It is necessary to obtain high-quality results across the high discrepancy in terms of imaging conditions and varying scene content. In this work, we present a tuning-free PnP proximal algorithm, which can automatically determine the internal parameters including the penalty parameter, the denoising strength and the terminal time. A key part of our approach is to develop a policy network for automatic search of parameters, which can be effectively learned via mixed model-free and model-based deep reinforcement learning. We demonstrate, through numerical and visual experiments, that the learned policy can customize different parameters for different states, and often more efficient and effective than existing handcrafted criteria. Moreover, we discuss the practical considerations of the plugged denoisers, which together with our learned policy yield state-of-the-art results. This is prevalent on both linear and nonlinear exemplary inverse imaging problems, and in particular, we show promising results on Compressed Sensing MRI and phase retrieval.
Private Stochastic Convex Optimization: Efficient Algorithms for Non-smooth Objectives
Authors: Raman Arora, Teodor V. Marinov, Enayat Ullah
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00

In this paper, we revisit the problem of private stochastic convex optimization. We propose an algorithm based on noisy mirror descent, which achieves optimal rates both in terms of statistical complexity and number of queries to a first-order stochastic oracle in the regime when the privacy parameter is inversely proportional to the number of samples.
Emergent Communication with World Models
Authors: Alexander I. Cowen-Rivers, Jason Naradowsky
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Grounding

We introduce Language World Models, a class of language-conditional generative model which interpret natural language messages by predicting latent codes of future observations. This provides a visual grounding of the message, similar to an enhanced observation of the world, which may include objects outside of the listening agent's field-of-view. We incorporate this "observation" into a persistent memory state, and allow the listening agent's policy to condition on it, akin to the relationship between memory and controller in a World Model. We show this improves effective communication and task success in 2D gridworld speaker-listener navigation tasks. In addition, we develop two losses framed specifically for our model-based formulation to promote positive signalling and positive listening. Finally, because messages are interpreted in a generative model, we can visualize the model beliefs to gain insight into how the communication channel is utilized.
Convex Shape Representation with Binary Labels for Image Segmentation: Models and Fast Algorithms
Authors: Shousheng Luo, Xue-Cheng Tai, Yang Wang
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We present a novel and effective binary representation for convex shapes. We show the equivalence between the shape convexity and some properties of the associated indicator function. The proposed method has two advantages. Firstly, the representation is based on a simple inequality constraint on the binary function rather than the definition of convex shapes, which allows us to obtain efficient algorithms for various applications with convexity prior. Secondly, this method is independent of the dimension of the concerned shape. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed representation approach, we incorporate it with a probability based model for object segmentation with convexity prior. Efficient algorithms are given to solve the proposed models using Lagrange multiplier methods and linear approximations. Various experiments are given to show the superiority of the proposed methods.
Training Question Answering Models From Synthetic Data
Authors: Raul Puri, Ryan Spring, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Answer Generation, Data Augmentation, Question Answering

Question and answer generation is a data augmentation method that aims to improve question answering (QA) models given the limited amount of human labeled data. However, a considerable gap remains between synthetic and human-generated question-answer pairs. This work aims to narrow this gap by taking advantage of large language models and explores several factors such as model size, quality of pretrained models, scale of data synthesized, and algorithmic choices. On the SQuAD1.1 question answering task, we achieve higher accuracy using solely synthetic questions and answers than when using the SQuAD1.1 training set questions alone. Removing access to real Wikipedia data, we synthesize questions and answers from a synthetic corpus generated by an 8.3 billion parameter GPT-2 model. With no access to human supervision and only access to other models, we are able to train state of the art question answering networks on entirely model-generated data that achieve 88.4 Exact Match (EM) and 93.9 F1 score on the SQuAD1.1 dev set. We further apply our methodology to SQuAD2.0 and show a 2.8 absolute gain on EM score compared to prior work using synthetic data.
A characterization of proportionally representative committees
Authors: Haris Aziz, Barton E. Lee
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00

A well-known axiom for proportional representation is Proportionality of Solid Coalitions (PSC). We characterize committees satisfying PSC as possible outcomes of the Minimal Demand rule, which generalizes an approach pioneered by Michael Dummett.
The Pragmatic Turn in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)
Authors: Andrés Páez
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Explainable Models

In this paper I argue that the search for explainable models and interpretable decisions in AI must be reformulated in terms of the broader project of offering a pragmatic and naturalistic account of understanding in AI. Intuitively, the purpose of providing an explanation of a model or a decision is to make it understandable to its stakeholders. But without a previous grasp of what it means to say that an agent understands a model or a decision, the explanatory strategies will lack a well-defined goal. Aside from providing a clearer objective for XAI, focusing on understanding also allows us to relax the factivity condition on explanation, which is impossible to fulfill in many machine learning models, and to focus instead on the pragmatic conditions that determine the best fit between a model and the methods and devices deployed to understand it. After an examination of the different types of understanding discussed in the philosophical and psychological literature, I conclude that interpretative or approximation models not only provide the best way to achieve the objectual understanding of a machine learning model, but are also a necessary condition to achieve post-hoc interpretability. This conclusion is partly based on the shortcomings of the purely functionalist approach to post-hoc interpretability that seems to be predominant in most recent literature.
One-Class Graph Neural Networks for Anomaly Detection in Attributed Networks
Authors: Xuhong Wang, Baihong Jin, Ying Du, Ping Cui, Yupu Yang
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, General Classification, Graph Anomaly Detection, Graph Neural Network, One-Class Classification

Nowadays, graph-structured data are increasingly used to model complex systems. Meanwhile, detecting anomalies from graph has become a vital research problem of pressing societal concerns. Anomaly detection is an unsupervised learning task of identifying rare data that differ from the majority. As one of the dominant anomaly detection algorithms, One Class Support Vector Machine has been widely used to detect outliers. However, those traditional anomaly detection methods lost their effectiveness in graph data. Since traditional anomaly detection methods are stable, robust and easy to use, it is vitally important to generalize them to graph data. In this work, we propose One Class Graph Neural Network (OCGNN), a one-class classification framework for graph anomaly detection. OCGNN is designed to combine the powerful representation ability of Graph Neural Networks along with the classical one-class objective. Compared with other baselines, OCGNN achieves significant improvements in extensive experiments.
SURF: A Simple, Universal, Robust, Fast Distribution Learning Algorithm
Authors: Yi Hao, Ayush Jain, Alon Orlitsky, Vaishakh Ravindrakumar
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2020 12

Sample- and computationally-efficient distribution estimation is a fundamental tenet in statistics and machine learning. We present SURF, an algorithm for approximating distributions by piecewise polynomials. SURF is: simple, replacing prior complex optimization techniques by straight-forward {empirical probability} approximation of each potential polynomial piece {through simple empirical-probability interpolation}, and using plain divide-and-conquer to merge the pieces; universal, as well-known polynomial-approximation results imply that it accurately approximates a large class of common distributions; robust to distribution mis-specification as for any degree $d \le 8$, it estimates any distribution to an $\ell_1$ distance $< 3$ times that of the nearest degree-$d$ piecewise polynomial, improving known factor upper bounds of 3 for single polynomials and 15 for polynomials with arbitrarily many pieces; fast, using optimal sample complexity, running in near sample-linear time, and if given sorted samples it may be parallelized to run in sub-linear time. In experiments, SURF outperforms state-of-the art algorithms.
The Sample Complexity of Meta Sparse Regression
Authors: Zhanyu Wang, Jean Honorio
Date: 2020-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning, Multi-Task Learning, regression

This paper addresses the meta-learning problem in sparse linear regression with infinite tasks. We assume that the learner can access several similar tasks. The goal of the learner is to transfer knowledge from the prior tasks to a similar but novel task. For p parameters, size of the support set k , and l samples per task, we show that T \in O (( k log(p) ) /l ) tasks are sufficient in order to recover the common support of all tasks. With the recovered support, we can greatly reduce the sample complexity for estimating the parameter of the novel task, i.e., l \in O (1) with respect to T and p . We also prove that our rates are minimax optimal. A key difference between meta-learning and the classical multi-task learning, is that meta-learning focuses only on the recovery of the parameters of the novel task, while multi-task learning estimates the parameter of all tasks, which requires l to grow with T . Instead, our efficient meta-learning estimator allows for l to be constant with respect to T (i.e., few-shot learning).