pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient Deep Gaussian Process Models for Variable-Sized Input
Authors: Issam H. Laradji, Mark Schmidt, Vladimir Pavlovic, Minyoung Kim
Date: 2019-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaussian Processes, Uncertainty Quantification

Deep Gaussian processes (DGP) have appealing Bayesian properties, can handle variable-sized data, and learn deep features. Their limitation is that they do not scale well with the size of the data. Existing approaches address this using a deep random feature (DRF) expansion model, which makes inference tractable by approximating DGPs. However, DRF is not suitable for variable-sized input data such as trees, graphs, and sequences. We introduce the GP-DRF, a novel Bayesian model with an input layer of GPs, followed by DRF layers. The key advantage is that the combination of GP and DRF leads to a tractable model that can both handle a variable-sized input as well as learn deep long-range dependency structures of the data. We provide a novel efficient method to simultaneously infer the posterior of GP's latent vectors and infer the posterior of DRF's internal weights and random frequencies. Our experiments show that GP-DRF outperforms the standard GP model and DRF model across many datasets. Furthermore, they demonstrate that GP-DRF enables improved uncertainty quantification compared to GP and DRF alone, with respect to a Bhattacharyya distance assessment. Source code is available at https://github.com/IssamLaradji/GP_DRF.
PoreNet: CNN-based Pore Descriptor for High-resolution Fingerprint Recognition
Authors: Vijay Anand, Vivek Kanhangad
Date: 2019-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

With the development of high-resolution fingerprint scanners, high-resolution fingerprint-based biometric recognition has received increasing attention in recent years. This paper presents a pore feature-based approach for biometric recognition. Our approach employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) model, DeepResPore, to detect pores in the input fingerprint image. Thereafter, a CNN-based descriptor is computed for a patch around each detected pore. Specifically, we have designed a residual learning-based CNN, referred to as PoreNet that learns distinctive feature representation from pore patches. For verification, the match score is generated by comparing pore descriptors obtained from a pair of fingerprint images in bi-directional manner using the Euclidean distance. The proposed approach for high-resolution fingerprint recognition achieves 2.91% and 0.57% equal error rates (EERs) on partial (DBI) and complete (DBII) fingerprints of the benchmark PolyU HRF dataset. Most importantly, it achieves lower FMR1000 and FMR10000 values than the current state-of-the-art approach on both the datasets.
Randomized Algorithms for Data-Driven Stabilization of Stochastic Linear Systems
Authors: Mohamad Kazem Shirani Faradonbeh, Ambuj Tewari, George Michailidis
Date: 2019-05-16 00:00:00

Data-driven control strategies for dynamical systems with unknown parameters are popular in theory and applications. An essential problem is to prevent stochastic linear systems becoming destabilized, due to the uncertainty of the decision-maker about the dynamical parameter. Two randomized algorithms are proposed for this problem, but the performance is not sufficiently investigated. Further, the effect of key parameters of the algorithms such as the magnitude and the frequency of applying the randomizations is not currently available. This work studies the stabilization speed and the failure probability of data-driven procedures. We provide numerical analyses for the performance of two methods: stochastic feedback, and stochastic parameter. The presented results imply that as long as the number of statistically independent randomizations is not too small, fast stabilization is guaranteed.
Finding Rats in Cats: Detecting Stealthy Attacks using Group Anomaly Detection
Authors: Aditya Kuppa, Slawomir Grzonkowski, Muhammad Rizwan Asghar, Nhien-An Le-Khac
Date: 2019-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Attribute, Group Anomaly Detection, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding

Advanced attack campaigns span across multiple stages and stay stealthy for long time periods. There is a growing trend of attackers using off-the-shelf tools and pre-installed system applications (such as \emph{powershell} and \emph{wmic}) to evade the detection because the same tools are also used by system administrators and security analysts for legitimate purposes for their routine tasks. To start investigations, event logs can be collected from operational systems; however, these logs are generic enough and it often becomes impossible to attribute a potential attack to a specific attack group. Recent approaches in the literature have used anomaly detection techniques, which aim at distinguishing between malicious and normal behavior of computers or network systems. Unfortunately, anomaly detection systems based on point anomalies are too rigid in a sense that they could miss the malicious activity and classify the attack, not an outlier. Therefore, there is a research challenge to make better detection of malicious activities. To address this challenge, in this paper, we leverage Group Anomaly Detection (GAD), which detects anomalous collections of individual data points. Our approach is to build a neural network model utilizing Adversarial Autoencoder (AAE-$\alpha$) in order to detect the activity of an attacker who leverages off-the-shelf tools and system applications. In addition, we also build \textit{Behavior2Vec} and \textit{Command2Vec} sentence embedding deep learning models specific for feature extraction tasks. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our models on real-world datasets collected for a period of two months. The empirical results demonstrate that our approach is effective and robust in discovering targeted attacks, pen-tests, and attack campaigns leveraging custom tools.
Collaborative Interactive Learning -- A clarification of terms and a differentiation from other research fields
Authors: Tom Hanika, Marek Herde, Jochen Kuhn, Jan Marco Leimeister, Paul Lukowicz, Sarah Oeste-Reiß, Albrecht Schmidt, Bernhard Sick, Gerd Stumme, Sven Tomforde, Katharina Anna Zweig
Date: 2019-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

The field of collaborative interactive learning (CIL) aims at developing and investigating the technological foundations for a new generation of smart systems that support humans in their everyday life. While the concept of CIL has already been carved out in detail (including the fields of dedicated CIL and opportunistic CIL) and many research objectives have been stated, there is still the need to clarify some terms such as information, knowledge, and experience in the context of CIL and to differentiate CIL from recent and ongoing research in related fields such as active learning, collaborative learning, and others. Both aspects are addressed in this paper.
KitcheNette: Predicting and Recommending Food Ingredient Pairings using Siamese Neural Networks
Authors: Donghyeon Park, Keonwoo Kim, Yonggyu Park, Jungwoon Shin, Jaewoo Kang
Date: 2019-05-16 00:00:00

As a vast number of ingredients exist in the culinary world, there are countless food ingredient pairings, but only a small number of pairings have been adopted by chefs and studied by food researchers. In this work, we propose KitcheNette which is a model that predicts food ingredient pairing scores and recommends optimal ingredient pairings. KitcheNette employs Siamese neural networks and is trained on our annotated dataset containing 300K scores of pairings generated from numerous ingredients in food recipes. As the results demonstrate, our model not only outperforms other baseline models but also can recommend complementary food pairings and discover novel ingredient pairings.
Scalable Graph Embeddings via Sparse Transpose Proximities
Authors: Yuan Yin, Zhewei Wei
Date: 2019-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding

Graph embedding learns low-dimensional representations for nodes in a graph and effectively preserves the graph structure. Recently, a significant amount of progress has been made toward this emerging research area. However, there are several fundamental problems that remain open. First, existing methods fail to preserve the out-degree distributions on directed graphs. Second, many existing methods employ random walk based proximities and thus suffer from conflicting optimization goals on undirected graphs. Finally, existing factorization methods are unable to achieve scalability and non-linearity simultaneously. This paper presents an in-depth study on graph embedding techniques on both directed and undirected graphs. We analyze the fundamental reasons that lead to the distortion of out-degree distributions and to the conflicting optimization goals. We propose {\em transpose proximity}, a unified approach that solves both problems. Based on the concept of transpose proximity, we design \strap, a factorization based graph embedding algorithm that achieves scalability and non-linearity simultaneously. \strap makes use of the {\em backward push} algorithm to efficiently compute the sparse {\em Personalized PageRank (PPR)} as its transpose proximities. By imposing the sparsity constraint, we are able to apply non-linear operations to the proximity matrix and perform efficient matrix factorization to derive the embedding vectors. Finally, we present an extensive experimental study that evaluates the effectiveness of various graph embedding algorithms, and we show that \strap outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of effectiveness and scalability.
EENA: Efficient Evolution of Neural Architecture
Authors: Hui Zhu, Zhulin An, Chuanguang Yang, Kaiqiang Xu, Erhu Zhao, Yongjun Xu
Date: 2019-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, GPU, Neural Architecture Search

Latest algorithms for automatic neural architecture search perform remarkable but are basically directionless in search space and computational expensive in training of every intermediate architecture. In this paper, we propose a method for efficient architecture search called EENA (Efficient Evolution of Neural Architecture). Due to the elaborately designed mutation and crossover operations, the evolution process can be guided by the information have already been learned. Therefore, less computational effort will be required while the searching and training time can be reduced significantly. On CIFAR-10 classification, EENA using minimal computational resources (0.65 GPU-days) can design highly effective neural architecture which achieves 2.56% test error with 8.47M parameters. Furthermore, the best architecture discovered is also transferable for CIFAR-100.
Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models
Authors: Egor Zakharov, Aliaksandra Shysheya, Egor Burkov, Victor Lempitsky
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2019 10
Tasks: Meta-Learning, One-Shot Learning, Talking Head Generation

Several recent works have shown how highly realistic human head images can be obtained by training convolutional neural networks to generate them. In order to create a personalized talking head model, these works require training on a large dataset of images of a single person. However, in many practical scenarios, such personalized talking head models need to be learned from a few image views of a person, potentially even a single image. Here, we present a system with such few-shot capability. It performs lengthy meta-learning on a large dataset of videos, and after that is able to frame few- and one-shot learning of neural talking head models of previously unseen people as adversarial training problems with high capacity generators and discriminators. Crucially, the system is able to initialize the parameters of both the generator and the discriminator in a person-specific way, so that training can be based on just a few images and done quickly, despite the need to tune tens of millions of parameters. We show that such an approach is able to learn highly realistic and personalized talking head models of new people and even portrait paintings.
Adversarially robust transfer learning
Authors: Ali Shafahi, Parsa Saadatpanah, Chen Zhu, Amin Ghiasi, Christoph Studer, David Jacobs, Tom Goldstein
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: Lifelong learning, Transfer Learning

Transfer learning, in which a network is trained on one task and re-purposed on another, is often used to produce neural network classifiers when data is scarce or full-scale training is too costly. When the goal is to produce a model that is not only accurate but also adversarially robust, data scarcity and computational limitations become even more cumbersome. We consider robust transfer learning, in which we transfer not only performance but also robustness from a source model to a target domain. We start by observing that robust networks contain robust feature extractors. By training classifiers on top of these feature extractors, we produce new models that inherit the robustness of their parent networks. We then consider the case of fine tuning a network by re-training end-to-end in the target domain. When using lifelong learning strategies, this process preserves the robustness of the source network while achieving high accuracy. By using such strategies, it is possible to produce accurate and robust models with little data, and without the cost of adversarial training. Additionally, we can improve the generalization of adversarially trained models, while maintaining their robustness.
Patch-based 3D Human Pose Refinement
Authors: Qingfu Wan, Weichao Qiu, Alan L. Yuille
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Pose Prediction

State-of-the-art 3D human pose estimation approaches typically estimate pose from the entire RGB image in a single forward run. In this paper, we develop a post-processing step to refine 3D human pose estimation from body part patches. Using local patches as input has two advantages. First, the fine details around body parts are zoomed in to high resolution for preciser 3D pose prediction. Second, it enables the part appearance to be shared between poses to benefit rare poses. In order to acquire informative representation of patches, we explore different input modalities and validate the superiority of fusing predicted segmentation with RGB. We show that our method consistently boosts the accuracy of state-of-the-art 3D human pose methods.
Leveraging Bayesian Analysis To Improve Accuracy of Approximate Models
Authors: Balasubramanya T. Nadiga, Chiyu Jiang, Daniel Livescu
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification, Variational Inference

We focus on improving the accuracy of an approximate model of a multiscale dynamical system that uses a set of parameter-dependent terms to account for the effects of unresolved or neglected dynamics on resolved scales. We start by considering various methods of calibrating and analyzing such a model given a few well-resolved simulations. After presenting results for various point estimates and discussing some of their shortcomings, we demonstrate (a) the potential of hierarchical Bayesian analysis to uncover previously unanticipated physical dependencies in the approximate model, and (b) how such insights can then be used to improve the model. In effect parametric dependencies found from the Bayesian analysis are used to improve structural aspects of the model. While we choose to illustrate the procedure in the context of a closure model for buoyancy-driven, variable-density turbulence, the statistical nature of the approach makes it more generally applicable. Towards addressing issues of increased computational cost associated with the procedure, we demonstrate the use of a neural network based surrogate in accelerating the posterior sampling process and point to recent developments in variational inference as an alternative methodology for greatly mitigating such costs. We conclude by suggesting that modern validation and uncertainty quantification techniques such as the ones we consider have a valuable role to play in the development and improvement of approximate models.
Best Arm Identification in Generalized Linear Bandits
Authors: Abbas Kazerouni, Lawrence M. Wein
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design

Motivated by drug design, we consider the best-arm identification problem in generalized linear bandits. More specifically, we assume each arm has a vector of covariates, there is an unknown vector of parameters that is common across the arms, and a generalized linear model captures the dependence of rewards on the covariate and parameter vectors. The problem is to minimize the number of arm pulls required to identify an arm that is sufficiently close to optimal with a sufficiently high probability. Building on recent progress in best-arm identification for linear bandits (Xu et al. 2018), we propose the first algorithm for best-arm identification for generalized linear bandits, provide theoretical guarantees on its accuracy and sampling efficiency, and evaluate its performance in various scenarios via simulation.
Accelerated Discovery of Sustainable Building Materials
Authors: Xiou Ge, Richard T. Goodwin, Jeremy R. Gregory, Randolph E. Kirchain, Joana Maria, Lav R. Varshney
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00

Concrete is the most widely used engineered material in the world with more than 10 billion tons produced annually. Unfortunately, with that scale comes a significant burden in terms of energy, water, and release of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. As such, there is interest in creating concrete formulas that minimize this environmental burden, while satisfying engineering performance requirements. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have enabled machines to generate highly plausible artifacts, such as images of realistic looking faces. Semi-supervised generative models allow generation of artifacts with specific, desired characteristics. In this work, we use Conditional Variational Autoencoders (CVAE), a type of semi-supervised generative model, to discover concrete formulas with desired properties. Our model is trained using open data from the UCI Machine Learning Repository joined with environmental impact data computed using a web-based tool. We demonstrate CVAEs can design concrete formulas with lower emissions and natural resource usage while meeting design requirements. To ensure fair comparison between extant and generated formulas, we also train regression models to predict the environmental impacts and strength of discovered formulas. With these results, a construction engineer may create a formula that meets structural needs and best addresses local environmental concerns.
Drone Shadow Tracking
Authors: Xiaoyan Zou, Ruofan Zhou, Majed El Helou, Sabine Süsstrunk
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Shadow Detection, Shadow Removal

Aerial videos taken by a drone not too far above the surface may contain the drone's shadow projected on the scene. This deteriorates the aesthetic quality of videos. With the presence of other shadows, shadow removal cannot be directly applied, and the shadow of the drone must be tracked. Tracking a drone's shadow in a video is, however, challenging. The varying size, shape, change of orientation and drone altitude pose difficulties. The shadow can also easily disappear over dark areas. However, a shadow has specific properties that can be leveraged, besides its geometric shape. In this paper, we incorporate knowledge of the shadow's physical properties, in the form of shadow detection masks, into a correlation-based tracking algorithm. We capture a test set of aerial videos taken with different settings and compare our results to those of a state-of-the-art tracking algorithm.
Target Conditioned Sampling: Optimizing Data Selection for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Xinyi Wang, Graham Neubig
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Low Resource Neural Machine Translation, Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation, Low Resource NMT, Machine Translation, NMT, Sentence, Translation

To improve low-resource Neural Machine Translation (NMT) with multilingual corpora, training on the most related high-resource language only is often more effective than using all data available (Neubig and Hu, 2018). However, it is possible that an intelligent data selection strategy can further improve low-resource NMT with data from other auxiliary languages. In this paper, we seek to construct a sampling distribution over all multilingual data, so that it minimizes the training loss of the low-resource language. Based on this formulation, we propose an efficient algorithm, Target Conditioned Sampling (TCS), which first samples a target sentence, and then conditionally samples its source sentence. Experiments show that TCS brings significant gains of up to 2 BLEU on three of four languages we test, with minimal training overhead.
Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation
Authors: Jiaqi Guo, Zecheng Zhan, Yan Gao, Yan Xiao, Jian-Guang Lou, Ting Liu, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

We present a neural approach called IRNet for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL. IRNet aims to address two challenges: 1) the mismatch between intents expressed in natural language (NL) and the implementation details in SQL; 2) the challenge in predicting columns caused by the large number of out-of-domain words. Instead of end-to-end synthesizing a SQL query, IRNet decomposes the synthesis process into three phases. In the first phase, IRNet performs a schema linking over a question and a database schema. Then, IRNet adopts a grammar-based neural model to synthesize a SemQL query which is an intermediate representation that we design to bridge NL and SQL. Finally, IRNet deterministically infers a SQL query from the synthesized SemQL query with domain knowledge. On the challenging Text-to-SQL benchmark Spider, IRNet achieves 46.7% accuracy, obtaining 19.5% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches. At the time of writing, IRNet achieves the first position on the Spider leaderboard.
Optimisation of Overparametrized Sum-Product Networks
Authors: Martin Trapp, Robert Peharz, Franz Pernkopf
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00

It seems to be a pearl of conventional wisdom that parameter learning in deep sum-product networks is surprisingly fast compared to shallow mixture models. This paper examines the effects of overparameterization in sum-product networks on the speed of parameter optimisation. Using theoretical analysis and empirical experiments, we show that deep sum-product networks exhibit an implicit acceleration compared to their shallow counterpart. In fact, gradient-based optimisation in deep tree-structured sum-product networks is equal to gradient ascend with adaptive and time-varying learning rates and additional momentum terms.
Exploring helical dynamos with machine learning
Authors: Farrukh Nauman, Joonas Nättilä
Date: 2019-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, BIG-bench Machine Learning, regression

We use ensemble machine learning algorithms to study the evolution of magnetic fields in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence that is helically forced. We perform direct numerical simulations of helically forced turbulence using mean field formalism, with electromotive force (EMF) modeled both as a linear and non-linear function of the mean magnetic field and current density. The form of the EMF is determined using regularized linear regression and random forests. We also compare various analytical models to the data using Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling. Our results demonstrate that linear regression is largely successful at predicting the EMF and the use of more sophisticated algorithms (random forests, MCMC) do not lead to significant improvement in the fits. We conclude that the data we are looking at is effectively low dimensional and essentially linear. Finally, to encourage further exploration by the community, we provide all of our simulation data and analysis scripts as open source IPython notebooks.