pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Airbnb Price Prediction Using Machine Learning and Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Pouya Rezazadeh Kalehbasti, Liubov Nikolenko, Hoormazd Rezaei
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Clustering, Prediction, regression, Sentiment Analysis

Pricing a rental property on Airbnb is a challenging task for the owner as it determines the number of customers for the place. On the other hand, customers have to evaluate an offered price with minimal knowledge of an optimal value for the property. This paper aims to develop a reliable price prediction model using machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing techniques to aid both the property owners and the customers with price evaluation given minimal available information about the property. Features of the rentals, owner characteristics, and the customer reviews will comprise the predictors, and a range of methods from linear regression to tree-based models, support-vector regression (SVR), K-means Clustering (KMC), and neural networks (NNs) will be used for creating the prediction model.
CUNI Systems for the Unsupervised News Translation Task in WMT 2019
Authors: Ivana Kvapilíková, Dominik Macháček, Ondřej Bojar
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

In this paper we describe the CUNI translation system used for the unsupervised news shared task of the ACL 2019 Fourth Conference on Machine Translation (WMT19). We follow the strategy of Artexte et al. (2018b), creating a seed phrase-based system where the phrase table is initialized from cross-lingual embedding mappings trained on monolingual data, followed by a neural machine translation system trained on synthetic parallel data. The synthetic corpus was produced from a monolingual corpus by a tuned PBMT model refined through iterative back-translation. We further focus on the handling of named entities, i.e. the part of vocabulary where the cross-lingual embedding mapping suffers most. Our system reaches a BLEU score of 15.3 on the German-Czech WMT19 shared task.
Particle Swarm Optimisation for Evolving Deep Neural Networks for Image Classification by Evolving and Stacking Transferable Blocks
Authors: Bin Wang, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Neural Architecture Search, Reinforcement Learning, Transfer Learning

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been widely used in image classification tasks, but the process of designing CNN architectures is very complex, so Neural Architecture Search (NAS), automatically searching for optimal CNN architectures, has attracted more and more research interests. However, the computational cost of NAS is often too high to apply NAS on real-life applications. In this paper, an efficient particle swarm optimisation method named EPSOCNN is proposed to evolve CNN architectures inspired by the idea of transfer learning. EPSOCNN successfully reduces the computation cost by minimising the search space to a single block and utilising a small subset of the training set to evaluate CNNs during evolutionary process. Meanwhile, EPSOCNN also keeps very competitive classification accuracy by stacking the evolved block multiple times to fit the whole dataset. The proposed EPSOCNN algorithm is evaluated on CIFAR-10 dataset and compared with 13 peer competitors comprised of deep CNNs crafted by hand, learned by reinforcement learning methods and evolved by evolutionary computation approaches, which shows very promising results by outperforming all of the peer competitors with regard to the classification accuracy, number of parameters and the computational cost.
Task Classification Model for Visual Fixation, Exploration, and Search
Authors: Ayush Kumar, Anjul Tyagi, Michael Burch, Daniel Weiskopf, Klaus Mueller
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification

Yarbus' claim to decode the observer's task from eye movements has received mixed reactions. In this paper, we have supported the hypothesis that it is possible to decode the task. We conducted an exploratory analysis on the dataset by projecting features and data points into a scatter plot to visualize the nuance properties for each task. Following this analysis, we eliminated highly correlated features before training an SVM and Ada Boosting classifier to predict the tasks from this filtered eye movements data. We achieve an accuracy of 95.4% on this task classification problem and hence, support the hypothesis that task classification is possible from a user's eye movement data.
MoBiNet: A Mobile Binary Network for Image Classification
Authors: Hai Phan, Dang Huynh, Yihui He, Marios Savvides, Zhiqiang Shen
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

MobileNet and Binary Neural Networks are two among the most widely used techniques to construct deep learning models for performing a variety of tasks on mobile and embedded platforms.In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient scheme to exploit MobileNet binarization at activation function and model weights. However, training a binary network from scratch with separable depth-wise and point-wise convolutions in case of MobileNet is not trivial and prone to divergence. To tackle this training issue, we propose a novel neural network architecture, namely MoBiNet - Mobile Binary Network in which skip connections are manipulated to prevent information loss and vanishing gradient, thus facilitate the training process. More importantly, while existing binary neural networks often make use of cumbersome backbones such as Alex-Net, ResNet, VGG-16 with float-type pre-trained weights initialization, our MoBiNet focuses on binarizing the already-compressed neural networks like MobileNet without the need of a pre-trained model to start with. Therefore, our proposal results in an effectively small model while keeping the accuracy comparable to existing ones. Experiments on ImageNet dataset show the potential of the MoBiNet as it achieves 54.40% top-1 accuracy and dramatically reduces the computational cost with binary operators.
Artistic Domain Generalisation Methods are Limited by their Deep Representations
Authors: Padraig Boulton, Peter Hall
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

The cross-depiction problem refers to the task of recognising visual objects regardless of their depictions; whether photographed, painted, sketched, {\em etc}. In the past, some researchers considered cross-depiction to be domain adaptation (DA). More recent work considers cross-depiction as domain generalisation (DG), in which algorithms extend recognition from one set of domains (such as photographs and coloured artwork) to another (such as sketches). We show that fixing the last layer of AlexNet to random values provides a performance comparable to state of the art DA and DG algorithms, when tested over the PACS benchmark. With support from background literature, our results lead us to conclude that texture alone is insufficient to support generalisation; rather, higher-order representations such as structure and shape are necessary.
Cooperative Beamforming with Predictive Relay Selection for Urban mmWave Communications
Authors: Anastasios Dimas, Dionysios S. Kalogerias, Athina P. Petropulu
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00

While millimeter wave (mmWave) communications promise high data rates, their sensitivity to blockage and severe signal attenuation presents challenges in their deployment in urban settings. To overcome these effects, we consider a distributed cooperative beamforming system, which relies on static relays deployed in clusters with similar channel characteristics, and where, at every time instance, only one relay from each cluster is selected to participate in beamforming to the destination. To meet the quality-of-service guarantees of the network, a key prerequisite for beamforming is relay selection. However, as the channels change with time, relay selection becomes a resource demanding task. Indeed, estimation of channel state information for all candidate relays, essential for relay selection, is a process that takes up bandwidth, wastes power and introduces latency and interference in the network. We instead propose a unique, predictive scheme for resource efficient relay selection, which exploits the special propagation patterns of the mmWave medium, and can be executed distributively across clusters, and in parallel to optimal beamforming-based communication. The proposed predictive scheme efficiently exploits spatiotemporal channel correlations with current and past networkwide Received Signal Strength (RSS), the latter being invariant to relay cluster size, measured sequentially during the operation of the system. Our numerical results confirm that our proposed relay selection strategy outperforms any randomized selection policy that does not exploit channel correlations, whereas, at the same time, it performs very close to an ideal scheme that uses complete, cluster size dependent RSS, and offers significant savings in terms of channel estimation overhead, providing substantially better network utilization, especially in dense topologies, typical in mmWave networks.
Deep Gradient Boosting -- Layer-wise Input Normalization of Neural Networks
Authors: Erhan Bilal
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been the dominant optimization method for training deep neural networks due to its many desirable properties. One of the more remarkable and least understood quality of SGD is that it generalizes relatively well on unseen data even when the neural network has millions of parameters. We hypothesize that in certain cases it is desirable to relax its intrinsic generalization properties and introduce an extension of SGD called deep gradient boosting (DGB). The key idea of DGB is that back-propagated gradients inferred using the chain rule can be viewed as pseudo-residual targets of a gradient boosting problem. Thus at each layer of a neural network the weight update is calculated by solving the corresponding boosting problem using a linear base learner. The resulting weight update formula can also be viewed as a normalization procedure of the data that arrives at each layer during the forward pass. When implemented as a separate input normalization layer (INN) the new architecture shows improved performance on image recognition tasks when compared to the same architecture without normalization layers. As opposed to batch normalization (BN), INN has no learnable parameters however it matches its performance on CIFAR10 and ImageNet classification tasks.
A Factored Generalized Additive Model for Clinical Decision Support in the Operating Room
Authors: Zhicheng Cui, Bradley A Fritz, Christopher R King, Michael S Avidan, Yixin Chen
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Additive models, Respiratory Failure

Logistic regression (LR) is widely used in clinical prediction because it is simple to deploy and easy to interpret. Nevertheless, being a linear model, LR has limited expressive capability and often has unsatisfactory performance. Generalized additive models (GAMs) extend the linear model with transformations of input features, though feature interaction is not allowed for all GAM variants. In this paper, we propose a factored generalized additive model (F-GAM) to preserve the model interpretability for targeted features while allowing a rich model for interaction with features fixed within the individual. We evaluate F-GAM on prediction of two targets, postoperative acute kidney injury and acute respiratory failure, from a single-center database. We find superior model performance of F-GAM in terms of AUPRC and AUROC compared to several other GAM implementations, random forests, support vector machine, and a deep neural network. We find that the model interpretability is good with results with high face validity.
EmoCo: Visual Analysis of Emotion Coherence in Presentation Videos
Authors: Haipeng Zeng, Xingbo Wang, Aoyu Wu, Yong Wang, Quan Li, Alex Endert, Huamin Qu
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Sentence

Emotions play a key role in human communication and public presentations. Human emotions are usually expressed through multiple modalities. Therefore, exploring multimodal emotions and their coherence is of great value for understanding emotional expressions in presentations and improving presentation skills. However, manually watching and studying presentation videos is often tedious and time-consuming. There is a lack of tool support to help conduct an efficient and in-depth multi-level analysis. Thus, in this paper, we introduce EmoCo, an interactive visual analytics system to facilitate efficient analysis of emotion coherence across facial, text, and audio modalities in presentation videos. Our visualization system features a channel coherence view and a sentence clustering view that together enable users to obtain a quick overview of emotion coherence and its temporal evolution. In addition, a detail view and word view enable detailed exploration and comparison from the sentence level and word level, respectively. We thoroughly evaluate the proposed system and visualization techniques through two usage scenarios based on TED Talk videos and interviews with two domain experts. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in gaining insights into emotion coherence in presentations.
Pyramid: Machine Learning Framework to Estimate the Optimal Timing and Resource Usage of a High-Level Synthesis Design
Authors: Hosein Mohammadi Makrani, Farnoud Farahmand, Hossein Sayadi, Sara Bondi, Sai Manoj Pudukotai Dinakarrao, Liang Zhao, Avesta Sasan, Houman Homayoun, Setareh Rafatirad
Date: 2019-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: High-Level Synthesis

The emergence of High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools shifted the paradigm of hardware design by making the process of mapping high-level programming languages to hardware design such as C to VHDL/Verilog feasible. HLS tools offer a plethora of techniques to optimize designs for both area and performance, but resource usage and timing reports of HLS tools mostly deviate from the post-implementation results. In addition, to evaluate a hardware design performance, it is critical to determine the maximum achievable clock frequency. Obtaining such information using static timing analysis provided by CAD tools is difficult, due to the multitude of tool options. Moreover, a binary search to find the maximum frequency is tedious, time-consuming, and often does not obtain the optimal result. To address these challenges, we propose a framework, called Pyramid, that uses machine learning to accurately estimate the optimal performance and resource utilization of an HLS design. For this purpose, we first create a database of C-to-FPGA results from a diverse set of benchmarks. To find the achievable maximum clock frequency, we use Minerva, which is an automated hardware optimization tool. Minerva determines the close-to-optimal settings of tools, using static timing analysis and a heuristic algorithm, and targets either optimal throughput or throughput-to-area. Pyramid uses the database to train an ensemble machine learning model to map the HLS-reported features to the results of Minerva. To this end, Pyramid re-calibrates the results of HLS to bridge the accuracy gap and enable developers to estimate the throughput or throughput-to-area of hardware design with more than 95% accuracy and alleviates the need to perform actual implementation for estimation.
A real-time iterative machine learning approach for temperature profile prediction in additive manufacturing processes
Authors: Arindam Paul, Mojtaba Mozaffar, Zijiang Yang, Wei-keng Liao, Alok Choudhary, Jian Cao, Ankit Agrawal
Date: 2019-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a manufacturing paradigm that builds three-dimensional objects from a computer-aided design model by successively adding material layer by layer. AM has become very popular in the past decade due to its utility for fast prototyping such as 3D printing as well as manufacturing functional parts with complex geometries using processes such as laser metal deposition that would be difficult to create using traditional machining. As the process for creating an intricate part for an expensive metal such as Titanium is prohibitive with respect to cost, computational models are used to simulate the behavior of AM processes before the experimental run. However, as the simulations are computationally costly and time-consuming for predicting multiscale multi-physics phenomena in AM, physics-informed data-driven machine-learning systems for predicting the behavior of AM processes are immensely beneficial. Such models accelerate not only multiscale simulation tools but also empower real-time control systems using in-situ data. In this paper, we design and develop essential components of a scientific framework for developing a data-driven model-based real-time control system. Finite element methods are employed for solving time-dependent heat equations and developing the database. The proposed framework uses extremely randomized trees - an ensemble of bagged decision trees as the regression algorithm iteratively using temperatures of prior voxels and laser information as inputs to predict temperatures of subsequent voxels. The models achieve mean absolute percentage errors below 1% for predicting temperature profiles for AM processes. The code is made available for the research community at https://github.com/paularindam/ml-iter-additive.
FingerNet: Pushing The Limits of Fingerprint Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Shervin Minaee, Elham Azimi, Amirali Abdolrashidi
Date: 2019-07-28 00:00:00

Fingerprint recognition has been utilized for cellphone authentication, airport security and beyond. Many different features and algorithms have been proposed to improve fingerprint recognition. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework for fingerprint recognition using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) which can jointly learn the feature representation and perform recognition. We train our model on a large-scale fingerprint recognition dataset, and improve over previous approaches in terms of accuracy. Our proposed model is able to achieve a very high recognition accuracy on a well-known fingerprint dataset. We believe this framework can be widely used for biometrics recognition tasks, making more scalable and accurate systems possible. We have also used a visualization technique to highlight the important areas in an input fingerprint image, that mostly impact the recognition results.
TopicSifter: Interactive Search Space Reduction Through Targeted Topic Modeling
Authors: Hannah Kim, Dongjin Choi, Barry Drake, Alex Endert, Haesun Park
Date: 2019-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Topic modeling is commonly used to analyze and understand large document collections. However, in practice, users want to focus on specific aspects or "targets" rather than the entire corpus. For example, given a large collection of documents, users may want only a smaller subset which more closely aligns with their interests, tasks, and domains. In particular, our paper focuses on large-scale document retrieval with high recall where any missed relevant documents can be critical. A simple keyword matching search is generally not effective nor efficient as 1) it is difficult to find a list of keyword queries that can cover the documents of interest before exploring the dataset, 2) some documents may not contain the exact keywords of interest but may still be highly relevant, and 3) some words have multiple meanings, which would result in irrelevant documents included in the retrieved subset. In this paper, we present TopicSifter, a visual analytics system for interactive search space reduction. Our system utilizes targeted topic modeling based on nonnegative matrix factorization and allows users to give relevance feedback in order to refine their target and guide the topic modeling to the most relevant results.
On the Robustness of Median Sampling in Noisy Evolutionary Optimization
Authors: Chao Bian, Chao Qian, Yang Yu, Ke Tang
Date: 2019-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Evolutionary algorithms (EAs) are a sort of nature-inspired metaheuristics, which have wide applications in various practical optimization problems. In these problems, objective evaluations are usually inaccurate, because noise is almost inevitable in real world, and it is a crucial issue to weaken the negative effect caused by noise. Sampling is a popular strategy, which evaluates the objective a couple of times, and employs the mean of these evaluation results as an estimate of the objective value. In this work, we introduce a novel sampling method, median sampling, into EAs, and illustrate its properties and usefulness theoretically by solving OneMax, the problem of maximizing the number of 1s in a bit string. Instead of the mean, median sampling employs the median of the evaluation results as an estimate. Through rigorous theoretical analysis on OneMax under the commonly used onebit noise, we show that median sampling reduces the expected runtime exponentially. Next, through two special noise models, we show that when the 2-quantile of the noisy fitness increases with the true fitness, median sampling can be better than mean sampling; otherwise, it may fail and mean sampling can be better. The results may guide us to employ median sampling properly in practical applications.
An Experiment on Measurement of Pavement Roughness via Android-Based Smartphones
Authors: Piyasak Thiandee, Boonsap Witchayangkoon, Sayan Sirimontree, Ponlathep Lertworawanich
Date: 2019-07-28 00:00:00

The study focuses on the experiment of using three different smartphones to collect acceleration data from vibration for the road roughness detection. The Android operating system is used in the application. The study takes place on asphaltic pavement of the expressway system of Thailand, with 9 km distance. The run vehicle has an inertial profiler with laser line sensors to record road roughness according to the IRI. The RMS and Machine Learning (ML) methods are used in this study. There is different ability of each smartphone to detect the vibration, thus different detected values are obtained. The results are compared to the IRI observation. ML method gives better result compared to RMS. This study finds little relationship between IRI and acceleration data from vibration collected from smartphones.
Fusing location and text features for sentiment classification
Authors: Wei Lun Lim, Chiung Ching Ho, Choo-Yee Ting
Date: 2019-07-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, General Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Geo-tagged Twitter data has been used recently to infer insights on the human aspects of social media. Insights related to demographics, spatial distribution of cultural activities, space-time travel trajectories for humans as well as happiness has been mined from geo-tagged twitter data in recent studies. To date, not much study has been done on the impact of the geolocation features of a Tweet on its sentiment. This observation has inspired us to propose the usage of geo-location features as a method to perform sentiment classification. In this method, the sentiment classification of geo-tagged tweets is performed by concatenating geo-location features and one-hot encoded word vectors as inputs for convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. The addition of language-independent features in the form of geo-location features has helped to enrich the tweet representation in order to combat the sparse nature of short tweet message. The results achieved has demonstrated that concatenating geo-location features to one-hot encoded word vectors can achieve higher accuracy as compared to the usage of word vectors alone for the purpose of sentiment classification.