pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Relational Mimic for Visual Adversarial Imitation Learning
Authors: Lionel Blondé, Yichuan Charlie Tang, Jian Zhang, Russ Webb
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Relational Reasoning

In this work, we introduce a new method for imitation learning from video demonstrations. Our method, Relational Mimic (RM), improves on previous visual imitation learning methods by combining generative adversarial networks and relational learning. RM is flexible and can be used in conjunction with other recent advances in generative adversarial imitation learning to better address the need for more robust and sample-efficient approaches. In addition, we introduce a new neural network architecture that improves upon the previous state-of-the-art in reinforcement learning and illustrate how increasing the relational reasoning capabilities of the agent enables the latter to achieve increasingly higher performance in a challenging locomotion task with pixel inputs. Finally, we study the effects and contributions of relational learning in policy evaluation, policy improvement and reward learning through ablation studies.
MALA: Cross-Domain Dialogue Generation with Action Learning
Authors: Xinting Huang, Jianzhong Qi, Yu Sun, Rui Zhang
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Response Generation, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Text Generation

Response generation for task-oriented dialogues involves two basic components: dialogue planning and surface realization. These two components, however, have a discrepancy in their objectives, i.e., task completion and language quality. To deal with such discrepancy, conditioned response generation has been introduced where the generation process is factorized into action decision and language generation via explicit action representations. To obtain action representations, recent studies learn latent actions in an unsupervised manner based on the utterance lexical similarity. Such an action learning approach is prone to diversities of language surfaces, which may impinge task completion and language quality. To address this issue, we propose multi-stage adaptive latent action learning (MALA) that learns semantic latent actions by distinguishing the effects of utterances on dialogue progress. We model the utterance effect using the transition of dialogue states caused by the utterance and develop a semantic similarity measurement that estimates whether utterances have similar effects. For learning semantic actions on domains without dialogue states, MsALA extends the semantic similarity measurement across domains progressively, i.e., from aligning shared actions to learning domain-specific actions. Experiments using multi-domain datasets, SMD and MultiWOZ, show that our proposed model achieves consistent improvements over the baselines models in terms of both task completion and language quality.
Multi-channel Reverse Dictionary Model
Authors: Lei Zhang, Fanchao Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Yasheng Wang, Qun Liu, Maosong Sun
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Reverse Dictionary, Sentence

A reverse dictionary takes the description of a target word as input and outputs the target word together with other words that match the description. Existing reverse dictionary methods cannot deal with highly variable input queries and low-frequency target words successfully. Inspired by the description-to-word inference process of humans, we propose the multi-channel reverse dictionary model, which can mitigate the two problems simultaneously. Our model comprises a sentence encoder and multiple predictors. The predictors are expected to identify different characteristics of the target word from the input query. We evaluate our model on English and Chinese datasets including both dictionary definitions and human-written descriptions. Experimental results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and even outperforms the most popular commercial reverse dictionary system on the human-written description dataset. We also conduct quantitative analyses and a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our model. All the code and data of this work can be obtained on https://github.com/thunlp/MultiRD.
Self-Attention Network for Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition
Authors: Sangwoo Cho, Muhammad Hasan Maqbool, Fei Liu, Hassan Foroosh
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

Skeleton-based action recognition has recently attracted a lot of attention. Researchers are coming up with new approaches for extracting spatio-temporal relations and making considerable progress on large-scale skeleton-based datasets. Most of the architectures being proposed are based upon recurrent neural networks (RNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and graph-based CNNs. When it comes to skeleton-based action recognition, the importance of long term contextual information is central which is not captured by the current architectures. In order to come up with a better representation and capturing of long term spatio-temporal relationships, we propose three variants of Self-Attention Network (SAN), namely, SAN-V1, SAN-V2 and SAN-V3. Our SAN variants has the impressive capability of extracting high-level semantics by capturing long-range correlations. We have also integrated the Temporal Segment Network (TSN) with our SAN variants which resulted in improved overall performance. Different configurations of Self-Attention Network (SAN) variants and Temporal Segment Network (TSN) are explored with extensive experiments. Our chosen configuration outperforms state-of-the-art Top-1 and Top-5 by 4.4% and 7.9% respectively on Kinetics and shows consistently better performance than state-of-the-art methods on NTU RGB+D.
Tree pyramidal adaptive importance sampling
Authors: Javier Felip, Nilesh Ahuja, Omesh Tickoo
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00

This paper introduces Tree-Pyramidal Adaptive Importance Sampling (TP-AIS), a novel iterated sampling method that outperforms state-of-the-art approaches like deterministic mixture population Monte Carlo (DM-PMC), mixture population Monte Carlo (M-PMC) and layered adaptive importance sampling (LAIS). TP-AIS iteratively builds a proposal distribution parameterized by a tree pyramid, where each tree leaf spans a subspace that represents its importance density. After each new sample operation, a set of tree leaves are subdivided for improving the approximation of the proposal distribution to the target density. Unlike the rest of the methods in the literature, TP-AIS is parameter free and requires no tuning to achieve its best performance. We evaluate TP-AIS with different complexity randomized target probability density functions (PDF) and also analyze its application to different dimensions. The results are compared to state-of-the-art iterative importance sampling approaches and other baseline MCMC approaches using Normalized Effective Sample Size (N-ESS), Jensen-Shannon Divergence, and time complexity.
Distilling Structured Knowledge into Embeddings for Explainable and Accurate Recommendation
Authors: Yuan Zhang, Xiaoran Xu, Hanning Zhou, Yan Zhang
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00

Recently, the embedding-based recommendation models (e.g., matrix factorization and deep models) have been prevalent in both academia and industry due to their effectiveness and flexibility. However, they also have such intrinsic limitations as lacking explainability and suffering from data sparsity. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end joint learning framework to get around these limitations without introducing any extra overhead by distilling structured knowledge from a differentiable path-based recommendation model. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed framework can achieve state-of-the-art recommendation performance and meanwhile provide interpretable recommendation reasons.
Learning to Prevent Leakage: Privacy-Preserving Inference in the Mobile Cloud
Authors: Shuang Zhang, Liyao Xiang, CongCong Li, YiXuan Wang, Quanshi Zhang, Wei Wang, Bo Li
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, Privacy Preserving, Privacy Preserving Deep Learning

Powered by machine learning services in the cloud, numerous learning-driven mobile applications are gaining popularity in the market. As deep learning tasks are mostly computation-intensive, it has become a trend to process raw data on devices and send the deep neural network (DNN) features to the cloud, where the features are further processed to return final results. However, there is always unexpected leakage with the release of features, with which an adversary could infer a significant amount of information about the original data. We propose a privacy-preserving reinforcement learning framework on top of the mobile cloud infrastructure from the perspective of DNN structures. The framework aims to learn a policy to modify the base DNNs to prevent information leakage while maintaining high inference accuracy. The policy can also be readily transferred to large-size DNNs to speed up learning. Extensive evaluations on a variety of DNNs have shown that our framework can successfully find privacy-preserving DNN structures to defend different privacy attacks.
Benchmarking the Neural Linear Model for Regression
Authors: Sebastian W. Ober, Carl Edward Rasmussen
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: pproximateinference AABI Symposium 2019 12
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Benchmarking, model, regression, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The neural linear model is a simple adaptive Bayesian linear regression method that has recently been used in a number of problems ranging from Bayesian optimization to reinforcement learning. Despite its apparent successes in these settings, to the best of our knowledge there has been no systematic exploration of its capabilities on simple regression tasks. In this work we characterize these on the UCI datasets, a popular benchmark for Bayesian regression models, as well as on the recently introduced UCI "gap" datasets, which are better tests of out-of-distribution uncertainty. We demonstrate that the neural linear model is a simple method that shows generally good performance on these tasks, but at the cost of requiring good hyperparameter tuning.
CoulGAT: An Experiment on Interpretability of Graph Attention Networks
Authors: Burc Gokden
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention

We present an attention mechanism inspired from definition of screened Coulomb potential. This attention mechanism was used to interpret the Graph Attention (GAT) model layers and training dataset by using a flexible and scalable framework (CoulGAT) developed for this purpose. Using CoulGAT, a forest of plain and resnet models were trained and characterized using this attention mechanism against CHAMPS dataset. The learnable variables of the attention mechanism are used to extract node-node and node-feature interactions to define an empirical standard model for the graph structure and hidden layer. This representation of graph and hidden layers can be used as a tool to compare different models, optimize hidden layers and extract a compact definition of graph structure of the dataset.
Collective Entity Alignment via Adaptive Features
Authors: Weixin Zeng, Xiang Zhao, Jiuyang Tang, Xuemin Lin
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Alignment, Knowledge Graphs

Entity alignment (EA) identifies entities that refer to the same real-world object but locate in different knowledge graphs (KGs), and has been harnessed for KG construction and integration. When generating EA results, current solutions treat entities independently and fail to take into account the interdependence between entities. To fill this gap, we propose a collective EA framework. We first employ three representative features, i.e., structural, semantic and string signals, which are adapted to capture different aspects of the similarity between entities in heterogeneous KGs. In order to make collective EA decisions, we formulate EA as the classical stable matching problem, which is further effectively solved by deferred acceptance algorithm. Our proposal is evaluated on both cross-lingual and mono-lingual EA benchmarks against state-of-the-art solutions, and the empirical results verify its effectiveness and superiority.
Cluster Analysis of High-Dimensional scRNA Sequencing Data
Authors: Jiawei Long, Yu Xia
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

With ongoing developments and innovations in single-cell RNA sequencing methods, advancements in sequencing performance could empower significant discoveries as well as new emerging possibilities to address biological and medical investigations. In the study, we will be using the dataset collected by the authors of Systematic comparative analysis of single cell RNA-sequencing methods. The dataset consists of single-cell and single nucleus profiling from three types of samples - cell lines, peripheral blood mononuclear cells, and brain tissue, which offers 36 libraries in six separate experiments in a single center. Our quantitative comparison aims to identify unique characteristics associated with different single-cell sequencing methods, especially among low-throughput sequencing methods and high-throughput sequencing methods. Our procedures also incorporate evaluations of every method's capacity for recovering known biological information in the samples through clustering analysis.
Semantic Regularization: Improve Few-shot Image Classification by Reducing Meta Shift
Authors: Da Chen, Yong-Liang Yang, Zunlei Feng, Xiang Wu, Mingli Song, Wenbin Li, Yuan He, Hui Xue, Feng Mao
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Few-Shot Image Classification, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Meta-Learning

Few-shot image classification requires the classifier to robustly cope with unseen classes even if there are only a few samples for each class. Recent advances benefit from the meta-learning process where episodic tasks are formed to train a model that can adapt to class change. However, these task sare independent to each other and existing works mainly rely on limited samples of individual support set in a single meta task. This strategy leads to severe meta shift issues across multiple tasks, meaning the learned prototypes or class descriptors are not stable as each task only involves their own support set. To avoid this problem, we propose a concise Semantic RegularizationNetwork to learn a common semantic space under the framework of meta-learning. In this space, all class descriptors can be regularized by the learned semantic basis, which can effectively solve the meta shift problem. The key is to train a class encoder and decoder structure that can encode the sample embedding features into the semantic domain with trained semantic basis, and generate a more stable and general class descriptor from the decoder. We evaluate our work by extensive comparisons with previous methods on three benchmark datasets (MiniImageNet, TieredImageNet, and CUB). The results show that the semantic regularization module improves performance by 4%-7% over the baseline method, and achieves competitive results over the current state-of-the-art models.
Feature engineering workflow for activity recognition from synchronized inertial measurement units
Authors: Andreas W. Kempa-Liehr, Jonty Oram, Andrew Wong, Mark Finch, Thor Besier
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, BIG-bench Machine Learning, Feature Engineering, General Classification, Human Activity Recognition, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

The ubiquitous availability of wearable sensors is responsible for driving the Internet-of-Things but is also making an impact on sport sciences and precision medicine. While human activity recognition from smartphone data or other types of inertial measurement units (IMU) has evolved to one of the most prominent daily life examples of machine learning, the underlying process of time-series feature engineering still seems to be time-consuming. This lengthy process inhibits the development of IMU-based machine learning applications in sport science and precision medicine. This contribution discusses a feature engineering workflow, which automates the extraction of time-series feature on based on the FRESH algorithm (FeatuRe Extraction based on Scalable Hypothesis tests) to identify statistically significant features from synchronized IMU sensors (IMeasureU Ltd, NZ). The feature engineering workflow has five main steps: time-series engineering, automated time-series feature extraction, optimized feature extraction, fitting of a specialized classifier, and deployment of optimized machine learning pipeline. The workflow is discussed for the case of a user-specific running-walking classification, and the generalization to a multi-user multi-activity classification is demonstrated.
Salient Object Detection with Purificatory Mechanism and Structural Similarity Loss
Authors: Jia Li, Jinming Su, Changqun Xia, Mingcan Ma, Yonghong Tian
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, object-detection, Object Detection, RGB Salient Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

By the aid of attention mechanisms to weight the image features adaptively, recent advanced deep learning-based models encourage the predicted results to approximate the ground-truth masks with as large predictable areas as possible, thus achieving the state-of-the-art performance. However, these methods do not pay enough attention to small areas prone to misprediction. In this way, it is still tough to accurately locate salient objects due to the existence of regions with indistinguishable foreground and background and regions with complex or fine structures. To address these problems, we propose a novel convolutional neural network with purificatory mechanism and structural similarity loss. Specifically, in order to better locate preliminary salient objects, we first introduce the promotion attention, which is based on spatial and channel attention mechanisms to promote attention to salient regions. Subsequently, for the purpose of restoring the indistinguishable regions that can be regarded as error-prone regions of one model, we propose the rectification attention, which is learned from the areas of wrong prediction and guide the network to focus on error-prone regions thus rectifying errors. Through these two attentions, we use the Purificatory Mechanism to impose strict weights with different regions of the whole salient objects and purify results from hard-to-distinguish regions, thus accurately predicting the locations and details of salient objects. In addition to paying different attention to these hard-to-distinguish regions, we also consider the structural constraints on complex regions and propose the Structural Similarity Loss. In experiments, the proposed approach outperforms 19 state-of-the-art methods on six datasets with a notable margin at over 27FPS on a single NVIDIA 1080Ti GPU.
Balancing the Tradeoff between Profit and Fairness in Rideshare Platforms During High-Demand Hours
Authors: Vedant Nanda, Pan Xu, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, John P. Dickerson, Aravind Srinivasan
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Rideshare platforms, when assigning requests to drivers, tend to maximize profit for the system and/or minimize waiting time for riders. Such platforms can exacerbate biases that drivers may have over certain types of requests. We consider the case of peak hours when the demand for rides is more than the supply of drivers. Drivers are well aware of their advantage during the peak hours and can choose to be selective about which rides to accept. Moreover, if in such a scenario, the assignment of requests to drivers (by the platform) is made only to maximize profit and/or minimize wait time for riders, requests of a certain type (e.g. from a non-popular pickup location, or to a non-popular drop-off location) might never be assigned to a driver. Such a system can be highly unfair to riders. However, increasing fairness might come at a cost of the overall profit made by the rideshare platform. To balance these conflicting goals, we present a flexible, non-adaptive algorithm, \lpalg, that allows the platform designer to control the profit and fairness of the system via parameters $\alpha$ and $\beta$ respectively. We model the matching problem as an online bipartite matching where the set of drivers is offline and requests arrive online. Upon the arrival of a request, we use \lpalg to assign it to a driver (the driver might then choose to accept or reject it) or reject the request. We formalize the measures of profit and fairness in our setting and show that by using \lpalg, the competitive ratios for profit and fairness measures would be no worse than $\alpha/e$ and $\beta/e$ respectively. Extensive experimental results on both real-world and synthetic datasets confirm the validity of our theoretical lower bounds. Additionally, they show that $\lpalg$ under some choice of $(\alpha, \beta)$ can beat two natural heuristics, Greedy and Uniform, on \emph{both} fairness and profit.
Iterative and Adaptive Sampling with Spatial Attention for Black-Box Model Explanations
Authors: Bhavan Vasu, Chengjiang Long
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Deep neural networks have achieved great success in many real-world applications, yet it remains unclear and difficult to explain their decision-making process to an end-user. In this paper, we address the explainable AI problem for deep neural networks with our proposed framework, named IASSA, which generates an importance map indicating how salient each pixel is for the model's prediction with an iterative and adaptive sampling module. We employ an affinity matrix calculated on multi-level deep learning features to explore long-range pixel-to-pixel correlation, which can shift the saliency values guided by our long-range and parameter-free spatial attention. Extensive experiments on the MS-COCO dataset show that our proposed approach matches or exceeds the performance of state-of-the-art black-box explanation methods.
The CNN-based Coronary Occlusion Site Localization with Effective Preprocessing Method
Authors: YeongHyeon Park, Il Dong Yun, Si-Hyuck Kang
Date: 2019-12-18 00:00:00

The Coronary Artery Occlusion (CAO) acutely comes to human, and it highly threats the human's life. When CAO detected, Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) should be conducted timely. Before PCI, localizing the CAO is needed firstly, because the heart is covered with various arteries. We handle the three kinds of CAO in this paper and our purpose is not only localization of CAO but also improving the localizing performance via preprocessing method. We improve localization performance from a minimum of 0.150 to a maximum of 0.372 via our noise reduction and pulse extraction based method.