pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
IoT based Smart Access Controlled Secure Smart City Architecture Using Blockchain
Authors: Rourab Paul, Nimisha Ghosh, Suman Sau, Amlan Chakrabarti, Prasant Mahapatra
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00

Standard security protocols like SSL, TLS, IPSec etc. have high memory and processor consumption which makes all these security protocols unsuitable for resource constrained platforms such as Internet of Things (IoT). Blockchain (BC) finds its efficient application in IoT platform to preserve the five basic cryptographic primitives, such as confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, availability and non-repudiation. Conventional adoption of BC in IoT platform causes high energy consumption, delay and computational overhead which are not appropriate for various resource constrained IoT devices. This work proposes a machine learning (ML) based smart access control framework in a public and a private BC for a smart city application which makes it more efficient as compared to the existing IoT applications. The proposed IoT based smart city architecture adopts BC technology for preserving all the cryptographic security and privacy issues. Moreover, BC has very minimal overhead on IoT platform as well. This work investigates the existing threat models and critical access control issues which handle multiple permissions of various nodes and detects relevant inconsistencies to notify the corresponding nodes. Comparison in terms of all security issues with existing literature shows that the proposed architecture is competitively efficient in terms of security access control.
Learning to Infer Entities, Properties and their Relations from Clinical Conversations
Authors: Nan Du, Mingqiu Wang, Linh Tran, Gang Li, Izhak Shafran
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Attribute, Relation Extraction

Recently we proposed the Span Attribute Tagging (SAT) Model (Du et al., 2019) to infer clinical entities (e.g., symptoms) and their properties (e.g., duration). It tackles the challenge of large label space and limited training data using a hierarchical two-stage approach that identifies the span of interest in a tagging step and assigns labels to the span in a classification step. We extend the SAT model to jointly infer not only entities and their properties but also relations between them. Most relation extraction models restrict inferring relations between tokens within a few neighboring sentences, mainly to avoid high computational complexity. In contrast, our proposed Relation-SAT (R-SAT) model is computationally efficient and can infer relations over the entire conversation, spanning an average duration of 10 minutes. We evaluate our model on a corpus of clinical conversations. When the entities are given, the R-SAT outperforms baselines in identifying relations between symptoms and their properties by about 32% (0.82 vs 0.62 F-score) and by about 50% (0.60 vs 0.41 F-score) on medications and their properties. On the more difficult task of jointly inferring entities and relations, the R-SAT model achieves a performance of 0.34 and 0.45 for symptoms and medications respectively, which is significantly better than 0.18 and 0.35 for the baseline model. The contributions of different components of the model are quantified using ablation analysis.
Initial investigation of an encoder-decoder end-to-end TTS framework using marginalization of monotonic hard latent alignments
Authors: Yusuke Yasuda, Xin Wang, Junichi Yamagishi
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

End-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis is a method that directly converts input text to output acoustic features using a single network. A recent advance of end-to-end TTS is due to a key technique called attention mechanisms, and all successful methods proposed so far have been based on soft attention mechanisms. However, although network structures are becoming increasingly complex, end-to-end TTS systems with soft attention mechanisms may still fail to learn and to predict accurate alignment between the input and output. This may be because the soft attention mechanisms are too flexible. Therefore, we propose an approach that has more explicit but natural constraints suitable for speech signals to make alignment learning and prediction of end-to-end TTS systems more robust. The proposed system, with the constrained alignment scheme borrowed from segment-to-segment neural transduction (SSNT), directly calculates the joint probability of acoustic features and alignment given an input text. The alignment is designed to be hard and monotonically increase by considering the speech nature, and it is treated as a latent variable and marginalized during training. During prediction, both the alignment and acoustic features can be generated from the probabilistic distributions. The advantages of our approach are that we can simplify many modules for the soft attention and that we can train the end-to-end TTS model using a single likelihood function. As far as we know, our approach is the first end-to-end TTS without a soft attention mechanism.
Bin-wise Temperature Scaling (BTS): Improvement in Confidence Calibration Performance through Simple Scaling Techniques
Authors: Byeongmoon Ji, Hyemin Jung, Jihyeun Yoon, Kyungyul Kim, Younghak Shin
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, image-classification, Image Classification, Prediction

The prediction reliability of neural networks is important in many applications. Specifically, in safety-critical domains, such as cancer prediction or autonomous driving, a reliable confidence of model's prediction is critical for the interpretation of the results. Modern deep neural networks have achieved a significant improvement in performance for many different image classification tasks. However, these networks tend to be poorly calibrated in terms of output confidence. Temperature scaling is an efficient post-processing-based calibration scheme and obtains well calibrated results. In this study, we leverage the concept of temperature scaling to build a sophisticated bin-wise scaling. Furthermore, we adopt augmentation of validation samples for elaborated scaling. The proposed methods consistently improve calibration performance with various datasets and deep convolutional neural network models.
Implicit Deep Latent Variable Models for Text Generation
Authors: Le Fang, Chunyuan Li, Jianfeng Gao, Wen Dong, Changyou Chen
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Response Generation, Style Transfer, Text Generation

Deep latent variable models (LVM) such as variational auto-encoder (VAE) have recently played an important role in text generation. One key factor is the exploitation of smooth latent structures to guide the generation. However, the representation power of VAEs is limited due to two reasons: (1) the Gaussian assumption is often made on the variational posteriors; and meanwhile (2) a notorious "posterior collapse" issue occurs. In this paper, we advocate sample-based representations of variational distributions for natural language, leading to implicit latent features, which can provide flexible representation power compared with Gaussian-based posteriors. We further develop an LVM to directly match the aggregated posterior to the prior. It can be viewed as a natural extension of VAEs with a regularization of maximizing mutual information, mitigating the "posterior collapse" issue. We demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our models in various text generation scenarios, including language modeling, unaligned style transfer, and dialog response generation. The source code to reproduce our experimental results is available on GitHub.
MVS^2: Deep Unsupervised Multi-view Stereo with Multi-View Symmetry
Authors: Yuchao Dai, Zhidong Zhu, Zhibo Rao, Bo Li
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

The success of existing deep-learning based multi-view stereo (MVS) approaches greatly depends on the availability of large-scale supervision in the form of dense depth maps. Such supervision, while not always possible, tends to hinder the generalization ability of the learned models in never-seen-before scenarios. In this paper, we propose the first unsupervised learning based MVS network, which learns the multi-view depth maps from the input multi-view images and does not need ground-truth 3D training data. Our network is symmetric in predicting depth maps for all views simultaneously, where we enforce cross-view consistency of multi-view depth maps during both training and testing stages. Thus, the learned multi-view depth maps naturally comply with the underlying 3D scene geometry. Besides, our network also learns the multi-view occlusion maps, which further improves the robustness of our network in handling real-world occlusions. Experimental results on multiple benchmarking datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our network and the excellent generalization ability.
Conditional Density Estimation Tools in Python and R with Applications to Photometric Redshifts and Likelihood-Free Cosmological Inference
Authors: Niccolò Dalmasso, Taylor Pospisil, Ann B. Lee, Rafael Izbicki, Peter E. Freeman, Alex I. Malz
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy, Density Estimation, Diagnostic, Model Selection, Photometric Redshift Estimation

It is well known in astronomy that propagating non-Gaussian prediction uncertainty in photometric redshift estimates is key to reducing bias in downstream cosmological analyses. Similarly, likelihood-free inference approaches, which are beginning to emerge as a tool for cosmological analysis, require a characterization of the full uncertainty landscape of the parameters of interest given observed data. However, most machine learning (ML) or training-based methods with open-source software target point prediction or classification, and hence fall short in quantifying uncertainty in complex regression and parameter inference settings. As an alternative to methods that focus on predicting the response (or parameters) $\mathbf{y}$ from features $\mathbf{x}$, we provide nonparametric conditional density estimation (CDE) tools for approximating and validating the entire probability density function (PDF) $\mathrm{p}(\mathbf{y}|\mathbf{x})$ of $\mathbf{y}$ given (i.e., conditional on) $\mathbf{x}$. As there is no one-size-fits-all CDE method, the goal of this work is to provide a comprehensive range of statistical tools and open-source software for nonparametric CDE and method assessment which can accommodate different types of settings and be easily fit to the problem at hand. Specifically, we introduce four CDE software packages in $\texttt{Python}$ and $\texttt{R}$ based on ML prediction methods adapted and optimized for CDE: $\texttt{NNKCDE}$, $\texttt{RFCDE}$, $\texttt{FlexCode}$, and $\texttt{DeepCDE}$. Furthermore, we present the $\texttt{cdetools}$ package, which includes functions for computing a CDE loss function for tuning and assessing the quality of individual PDFs, along with diagnostic functions. We provide sample code in $\texttt{Python}$ and $\texttt{R}$ as well as examples of applications to photometric redshift estimation and likelihood-free cosmological inference via CDE.
Parsing All: Syntax and Semantics, Dependencies and Spans
Authors: Junru Zhou, Zuchao Li, Hai Zhao
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020
Tasks: All, Semantic Parsing

Both syntactic and semantic structures are key linguistic contextual clues, in which parsing the latter has been well shown beneficial from parsing the former. However, few works ever made an attempt to let semantic parsing help syntactic parsing. As linguistic representation formalisms, both syntax and semantics may be represented in either span (constituent/phrase) or dependency, on both of which joint learning was also seldom explored. In this paper, we propose a novel joint model of syntactic and semantic parsing on both span and dependency representations, which incorporates syntactic information effectively in the encoder of neural network and benefits from two representation formalisms in a uniform way. The experiments show that semantics and syntax can benefit each other by optimizing joint objectives. Our single model achieves new state-of-the-art or competitive results on both span and dependency semantic parsing on Propbank benchmarks and both dependency and constituent syntactic parsing on Penn Treebank.
Charge-Based Prison Term Prediction with Deep Gating Network
Authors: Huajie Chen, Deng Cai, Wei Dai, Zehui Dai, Yadong Ding
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: feature selection, Prediction

Judgment prediction for legal cases has attracted much research efforts for its practice use, of which the ultimate goal is prison term prediction. While existing work merely predicts the total prison term, in reality a defendant is often charged with multiple crimes. In this paper, we argue that charge-based prison term prediction (CPTP) not only better fits realistic needs, but also makes the total prison term prediction more accurate and interpretable. We collect the first large-scale structured data for CPTP and evaluate several competitive baselines. Based on the observation that fine-grained feature selection is the key to achieving good performance, we propose the Deep Gating Network (DGN) for charge-specific feature selection and aggregation. Experiments show that DGN achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
Improving Utility and Security of the Shuffler-based Differential Privacy
Authors: Tianhao Wang, Bolin Ding, Min Xu, Zhicong Huang, Cheng Hong, Jingren Zhou, Ninghui Li, Somesh Jha
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00

When collecting information, local differential privacy (LDP) alleviates privacy concerns of users because their private information is randomized before being sent it to the central aggregator. LDP imposes large amount of noise as each user executes the randomization independently. To address this issue, recent work introduced an intermediate server with the assumption that this intermediate server does not collude with the aggregator. Under this assumption, less noise can be added to achieve the same privacy guarantee as LDP, thus improving utility for the data collection task. This paper investigates this multiple-party setting of LDP. We analyze the system model and identify potential adversaries. We then make two improvements: a new algorithm that achieves a better privacy-utility tradeoff; and a novel protocol that provides better protection against various attacks. Finally, we perform experiments to compare different methods and demonstrate the benefits of using our proposed method.
Adversarial Training Methods for Network Embedding
Authors: Quanyu Dai, Xiao Shen, Liang Zhang, Qiang Li, Dan Wang
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Link Prediction, Network Embedding, Node Classification

Network Embedding is the task of learning continuous node representations for networks, which has been shown effective in a variety of tasks such as link prediction and node classification. Most of existing works aim to preserve different network structures and properties in low-dimensional embedding vectors, while neglecting the existence of noisy information in many real-world networks and the overfitting issue in the embedding learning process. Most recently, generative adversarial networks (GANs) based regularization methods are exploited to regularize embedding learning process, which can encourage a global smoothness of embedding vectors. These methods have very complicated architecture and suffer from the well-recognized non-convergence problem of GANs. In this paper, we aim to introduce a more succinct and effective local regularization method, namely adversarial training, to network embedding so as to achieve model robustness and better generalization performance. Firstly, the adversarial training method is applied by defining adversarial perturbations in the embedding space with an adaptive $L_2$ norm constraint that depends on the connectivity pattern of node pairs. Though effective as a regularizer, it suffers from the interpretability issue which may hinder its application in certain real-world scenarios. To improve this strategy, we further propose an interpretable adversarial training method by enforcing the reconstruction of the adversarial examples in the discrete graph domain. These two regularization methods can be applied to many existing embedding models, and we take DeepWalk as the base model for illustration in the paper. Empirical evaluations in both link prediction and node classification demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Adapting Meta Knowledge Graph Information for Multi-Hop Reasoning over Few-Shot Relations
Authors: Xin Lv, Yuxian Gu, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Link Prediction, Meta-Learning

Multi-hop knowledge graph (KG) reasoning is an effective and explainable method for predicting the target entity via reasoning paths in query answering (QA) task. Most previous methods assume that every relation in KGs has enough training triples, regardless of those few-shot relations which cannot provide sufficient triples for training robust reasoning models. In fact, the performance of existing multi-hop reasoning methods drops significantly on few-shot relations. In this paper, we propose a meta-based multi-hop reasoning method (Meta-KGR), which adopts meta-learning to learn effective meta parameters from high-frequency relations that could quickly adapt to few-shot relations. We evaluate Meta-KGR on two public datasets sampled from Freebase and NELL, and the experimental results show that Meta-KGR outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in few-shot scenarios. Our code and datasets can be obtained from https://github.com/ THU-KEG/MetaKGR.
Fast and Accurate Network Embeddings via Very Sparse Random Projection
Authors: Haochen Chen, Syed Fahad Sultan, Yingtao Tian, Muhao Chen, Steven Skiena
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Network Embedding

We present FastRP, a scalable and performant algorithm for learning distributed node representations in a graph. FastRP is over 4,000 times faster than state-of-the-art methods such as DeepWalk and node2vec, while achieving comparable or even better performance as evaluated on several real-world networks on various downstream tasks. We observe that most network embedding methods consist of two components: construct a node similarity matrix and then apply dimension reduction techniques to this matrix. We show that the success of these methods should be attributed to the proper construction of this similarity matrix, rather than the dimension reduction method employed. FastRP is proposed as a scalable algorithm for network embeddings. Two key features of FastRP are: 1) it explicitly constructs a node similarity matrix that captures transitive relationships in a graph and normalizes matrix entries based on node degrees; 2) it utilizes very sparse random projection, which is a scalable optimization-free method for dimension reduction. An extra benefit from combining these two design choices is that it allows the iterative computation of node embeddings so that the similarity matrix need not be explicitly constructed, which further speeds up FastRP. FastRP is also advantageous for its ease of implementation, parallelization and hyperparameter tuning. The source code is available at https://github.com/GTmac/FastRP.
DCMN+: Dual Co-Matching Network for Multi-choice Reading Comprehension
Authors: Shuailiang Zhang, Hai Zhao, Yuwei Wu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Xi Zhou, Xiang Zhou
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Reading Comprehension, Sentence

Multi-choice reading comprehension is a challenging task to select an answer from a set of candidate options when given passage and question. Previous approaches usually only calculate question-aware passage representation and ignore passage-aware question representation when modeling the relationship between passage and question, which obviously cannot take the best of information between passage and question. In this work, we propose dual co-matching network (DCMN) which models the relationship among passage, question and answer options bidirectionally. Besides, inspired by how human solve multi-choice questions, we integrate two reading strategies into our model: (i) passage sentence selection that finds the most salient supporting sentences to answer the question, (ii) answer option interaction that encodes the comparison information between answer options. DCMN integrated with the two strategies (DCMN+) obtains state-of-the-art results on five multi-choice reading comprehension datasets which are from different domains: RACE, SemEval-2018 Task 11, ROCStories, COIN, MCTest.
Virtual Thin Slice: 3D Conditional GAN-based Super-resolution for CT Slice Interval
Authors: Akira Kudo, Yoshiro Kitamura, Yuanzhong Li, Satoshi Iizuka, Edgar Simo-Serra
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Diversity, SSIM, Super-Resolution

Many CT slice images are stored with large slice intervals to reduce storage size in clinical practice. This leads to low resolution perpendicular to the slice images (i.e., z-axis), which is insufficient for 3D visualization or image analysis. In this paper, we present a novel architecture based on conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) with the goal of generating high resolution images of main body parts including head, chest, abdomen and legs. However, GANs are known to have a difficulty with generating a diversity of patterns due to a phenomena known as mode collapse. To overcome the lack of generated pattern variety, we propose to condition the discriminator on the different body parts. Furthermore, our generator networks are extended to be three dimensional fully convolutional neural networks, allowing for the generation of high resolution images from arbitrary fields of view. In our verification tests, we show that the proposed method obtains the best scores by PSNR/SSIM metrics and Visual Turing Test, allowing for accurate reproduction of the principle anatomy in high resolution. We expect that the proposed method contribute to effective utilization of the existing vast amounts of thick CT images stored in hospitals.
EventCap: Monocular 3D Capture of High-Speed Human Motions using an Event Camera
Authors: Lan Xu, Weipeng Xu, Vladislav Golyanik, Marc Habermann, Lu Fang, Christian Theobalt
Date: 2019-08-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6

The high frame rate is a critical requirement for capturing fast human motions. In this setting, existing markerless image-based methods are constrained by the lighting requirement, the high data bandwidth and the consequent high computation overhead. In this paper, we propose EventCap --- the first approach for 3D capturing of high-speed human motions using a single event camera. Our method combines model-based optimization and CNN-based human pose detection to capture high-frequency motion details and to reduce the drifting in the tracking. As a result, we can capture fast motions at millisecond resolution with significantly higher data efficiency than using high frame rate videos. Experiments on our new event-based fast human motion dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our method, as well as its robustness to challenging lighting conditions.