pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Uncovering Sociological Effect Heterogeneity using Machine Learning
Authors: Jennie E. Brand, Jiahui Xu, Bernard Koch, Pablo Geraldo
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Individuals do not respond uniformly to treatments, events, or interventions. Sociologists routinely partition samples into subgroups to explore how the effects of treatments vary by covariates like race, gender, and socioeconomic status. In so doing, analysts determine the key subpopulations based on theoretical priors. Data-driven discoveries are also routine, yet the analyses by which sociologists typically go about them are problematic and seldom move us beyond our expectations, and biases, to explore new meaningful subgroups. Emerging machine learning methods allow researchers to explore sources of variation that they may not have previously considered, or envisaged. In this paper, we use causal trees to recursively partition the sample and uncover sources of treatment effect heterogeneity. We use honest estimation, splitting the sample into a training sample to grow the tree and an estimation sample to estimate leaf-specific effects. Assessing a central topic in the social inequality literature, college effects on wages, we compare what we learn from conventional approaches for exploring variation in effects to causal trees. Given our use of observational data, we use leaf-specific matching and sensitivity analyses to address confounding and offer interpretations of effects based on observed and unobserved heterogeneity. We encourage researchers to follow similar practices in their work on variation in sociological effects.
Language models and Automated Essay Scoring
Authors: Pedro Uria Rodriguez, Amir Jafari, Christopher M. Ormerod
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Essay Scoring

In this paper, we present a new comparative study on automatic essay scoring (AES). The current state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) neural network architectures are used in this work to achieve above human-level accuracy on the publicly available Kaggle AES dataset. We compare two powerful language models, BERT and XLNet, and describe all the layers and network architectures in these models. We elucidate the network architectures of BERT and XLNet using clear notation and diagrams and explain the advantages of transformer architectures over traditional recurrent neural network architectures. Linear algebra notation is used to clarify the functions of transformers and attention mechanisms. We compare the results with more traditional methods, such as bag of words (BOW) and long short term memory (LSTM) networks.
Bayesian Optimisation with Gaussian Processes for Premise Selection
Authors: Agnieszka Słowik, Chaitanya Mangla, Mateja Jamnik, Sean B. Holden, Lawrence C. Paulson
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimisation, Gaussian Processes

Heuristics in theorem provers are often parameterised. Modern theorem provers such as Vampire utilise a wide array of heuristics to control the search space explosion, thereby requiring optimisation of a large set of parameters. An exhaustive search in this multi-dimensional parameter space is intractable in most cases, yet the performance of the provers is highly dependent on the parameter assignment. In this work, we introduce a principled probablistic framework for heuristics optimisation in theorem provers. We present results using a heuristic for premise selection and The Archive of Formal Proofs (AFP) as a case study.
Towards a New Understanding of the Training of Neural Networks with Mislabeled Training Data
Authors: Herbert Gish, Jan Silovsky, Man-Ling Sung, Man-Hung Siu, William Hartmann, Zhuolin Jiang
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00

We investigate the problem of machine learning with mislabeled training data. We try to make the effects of mislabeled training better understood through analysis of the basic model and equations that characterize the problem. This includes results about the ability of the noisy model to make the same decisions as the clean model and the effects of noise on model performance. In addition to providing better insights we also are able to show that the Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimate of the parameters of the noisy model determine those of the clean model. This property is obtained through the use of the ML invariance property and leads to an approach to developing a classifier when training has been mislabeled: namely train the classifier on noisy data and adjust the decision threshold based on the noise levels and/or class priors. We show how our approach to mislabeled training works with multi-layered perceptrons (MLPs).
Application of Clustering Analysis for Investigation of Food Accessibility
Authors: Rahul Srinivas Sucharitha, Seokcheon Lee
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Access to food assistance programs such as food pantries and food banks needs focus in order to mitigate food insecurity. Accessibility to the food assistance programs is impacted by demographics of the population and geography of the location. It hence becomes imperative to define and identify food assistance deserts (Under-served areas) within a given region to find out the ways to improve the accessibility of food. Food banks, the supplier of food to the food agencies serving the people, can manage its resources more efficiently by targeting the food assistance deserts and increase the food supply in those regions. This paper will examine the characteristics and structure of the food assistance network in the region of Ohio by presenting the possible reasons of food insecurity in this region and identify areas wherein food agencies are needed or may not be needed. Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) clustering technique is employed to identify the possible reasons and address this problem of food accessibility.
Memory Management in Resource-Bounded Agents
Authors: Valentina Pitoni
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

In artificial intelligence, multi agent systems constitute an interesting typology of society modeling, and have in this regard vast fields of application, which extend to the human sciences. Logic is often used to model such kind of systems as it is easier to verify the explainability and validation, so for this reason we have tried to manage agents' memory extending a previous work by inserting the concept of time.
A Human-Centered Data-Driven Planner-Actor-Critic Architecture via Logic Programming
Authors: Daoming Lyu, Fangkai Yang, Bo Liu, Steven Gustafson
Date: 2019-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent successes of Reinforcement Learning (RL) allow an agent to learn policies that surpass human experts but suffers from being time-hungry and data-hungry. By contrast, human learning is significantly faster because prior and general knowledge and multiple information resources are utilized. In this paper, we propose a Planner-Actor-Critic architecture for huMAN-centered planning and learning (PACMAN), where an agent uses its prior, high-level, deterministic symbolic knowledge to plan for goal-directed actions, and also integrates the Actor-Critic algorithm of RL to fine-tune its behavior towards both environmental rewards and human feedback. This work is the first unified framework where knowledge-based planning, RL, and human teaching jointly contribute to the policy learning of an agent. Our experiments demonstrate that PACMAN leads to a significant jump-start at the early stage of learning, converges rapidly and with small variance, and is robust to inconsistent, infrequent, and misleading feedback.
BSDAR: Beam Search Decoding with Attention Reward in Neural Keyphrase Generation
Authors: Iftitahu Ni'mah, Vlado Menkovski, Mykola Pechenizkiy
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Keyphrase Generation

This study mainly investigates two decoding problems in neural keyphrase generation: sequence length bias and beam diversity. We introduce an extension of beam search inference based on word-level and n-gram level attention score to adjust and constrain Seq2Seq prediction at test time. Results show that our proposed solution can overcome the algorithm bias to shorter and nearly identical sequences, resulting in a significant improvement of the decoding performance on generating keyphrases that are present and absent in source text.
Generative Dialog Policy for Task-oriented Dialog Systems
Authors: Tian Lan, Xian-Ling Mao, He-Yan Huang
Date: 2019-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

There is an increasing demand for task-oriented dialogue systems which can assist users in various activities such as booking tickets and restaurant reservations. In order to complete dialogues effectively, dialogue policy plays a key role in task-oriented dialogue systems. As far as we know, the existing task-oriented dialogue systems obtain the dialogue policy through classification, which can assign either a dialogue act and its corresponding parameters or multiple dialogue acts without their corresponding parameters for a dialogue action. In fact, a good dialogue policy should construct multiple dialogue acts and their corresponding parameters at the same time. However, it's hard for existing classification-based methods to achieve this goal. Thus, to address the issue above, we propose a novel generative dialogue policy learning method. Specifically, the proposed method uses attention mechanism to find relevant segments of given dialogue context and input utterance and then constructs the dialogue policy by a seq2seq way for task-oriented dialogue systems. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, we have publicly released our codes.
NeMo: a toolkit for building AI applications using Neural Modules
Authors: Oleksii Kuchaiev, Jason Li, Huyen Nguyen, Oleksii Hrinchuk, Ryan Leary, Boris Ginsburg, Samuel Kriman, Stanislav Beliaev, Vitaly Lavrukhin, Jack Cook, Patrice Castonguay, Mariya Popova, Jocelyn Huang, Jonathan M. Cohen
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

NeMo (Neural Modules) is a Python framework-agnostic toolkit for creating AI applications through re-usability, abstraction, and composition. NeMo is built around neural modules, conceptual blocks of neural networks that take typed inputs and produce typed outputs. Such modules typically represent data layers, encoders, decoders, language models, loss functions, or methods of combining activations. NeMo makes it easy to combine and re-use these building blocks while providing a level of semantic correctness checking via its neural type system. The toolkit comes with extendable collections of pre-built modules for automatic speech recognition and natural language processing. Furthermore, NeMo provides built-in support for distributed training and mixed precision on latest NVIDIA GPUs. NeMo is open-source https://github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo
Classifying Topological Charge in SU(3) Yang-Mills Theory with Machine Learning
Authors: Takuya Matsumoto, Masakiyo Kitazawa, Yasuhiro Kohno
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

We apply a machine learning technique for identifying the topological charge of quantum gauge configurations in four-dimensional SU(3) Yang-Mills theory. The topological charge density measured on the original and smoothed gauge configurations with and without dimensional reduction is used as inputs for the neural networks (NN) with and without convolutional layers. The gradient flow is used for the smoothing of the gauge field. We find that the topological charge determined at a large flow time can be predicted with high accuracy from the data at small flow times by the trained NN; for example, the accuracy exceeds $99\%$ with the data at $t/a^2\le0.3$. High robustness against the change of simulation parameters is also confirmed with a fixed physical volume. We find that the best performance is obtained when the spatial coordinates of the topological charge density are fully integrated out in preprocessing, which implies that our convolutional NN does not find characteristic structures in multi-dimensional space relevant for the determination of the topological charge.
Reinforcement Learning for Portfolio Management
Authors: Angelos Filos
Date: 2019-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Management, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Time Series Analysis

In this thesis, we develop a comprehensive account of the expressive power, modelling efficiency, and performance advantages of so-called trading agents (i.e., Deep Soft Recurrent Q-Network (DSRQN) and Mixture of Score Machines (MSM)), based on both traditional system identification (model-based approach) as well as on context-independent agents (model-free approach). The analysis provides conclusive support for the ability of model-free reinforcement learning methods to act as universal trading agents, which are not only capable of reducing the computational and memory complexity (owing to their linear scaling with the size of the universe), but also serve as generalizing strategies across assets and markets, regardless of the trading universe on which they have been trained. The relatively low volume of daily returns in financial market data is addressed via data augmentation (a generative approach) and a choice of pre-training strategies, both of which are validated against current state-of-the-art models. For rigour, a risk-sensitive framework which includes transaction costs is considered, and its performance advantages are demonstrated in a variety of scenarios, from synthetic time-series (sinusoidal, sawtooth and chirp waves), simulated market series (surrogate data based), through to real market data (S\&P 500 and EURO STOXX 50). The analysis and simulations confirm the superiority of universal model-free reinforcement learning agents over current portfolio management model in asset allocation strategies, with the achieved performance advantage of as much as 9.2\% in annualized cumulative returns and 13.4\% in annualized Sharpe Ratio.
Understanding LSTM -- a tutorial into Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Ralf C. Staudemeyer, Eric Rothstein Morris
Date: 2019-09-12 00:00:00

Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM-RNN) are one of the most powerful dynamic classifiers publicly known. The network itself and the related learning algorithms are reasonably well documented to get an idea how it works. This paper will shed more light into understanding how LSTM-RNNs evolved and why they work impressively well, focusing on the early, ground-breaking publications. We significantly improved documentation and fixed a number of errors and inconsistencies that accumulated in previous publications. To support understanding we as well revised and unified the notation used.
Zero-shot Reading Comprehension by Cross-lingual Transfer Learning with Multi-lingual Language Representation Model
Authors: Tsung-Yuan Hsu, Chi-Liang Liu, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2019-09-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Reading Comprehension, Transfer Learning, Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer, Zero-Shot Learning

Because it is not feasible to collect training data for every language, there is a growing interest in cross-lingual transfer learning. In this paper, we systematically explore zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning on reading comprehension tasks with a language representation model pre-trained on multi-lingual corpus. The experimental results show that with pre-trained language representation zero-shot learning is feasible, and translating the source data into the target language is not necessary and even degrades the performance. We further explore what does the model learn in zero-shot setting.
SANVis: Visual Analytics for Understanding Self-Attention Networks
Authors: Cheonbok Park, Inyoup Na, Yongjang Jo, Sungbok Shin, Jaehyo Yoo, Bum Chul Kwon, Jian Zhao, Hyungjong Noh, Yeonsoo Lee, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2019-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Attention networks, a deep neural network architecture inspired by humans' attention mechanism, have seen significant success in image captioning, machine translation, and many other applications. Recently, they have been further evolved into an advanced approach called multi-head self-attention networks, which can encode a set of input vectors, e.g., word vectors in a sentence, into another set of vectors. Such encoding aims at simultaneously capturing diverse syntactic and semantic features within a set, each of which corresponds to a particular attention head, forming altogether multi-head attention. Meanwhile, the increased model complexity prevents users from easily understanding and manipulating the inner workings of models. To tackle the challenges, we present a visual analytics system called SANVis, which helps users understand the behaviors and the characteristics of multi-head self-attention networks. Using a state-of-the-art self-attention model called Transformer, we demonstrate usage scenarios of SANVis in machine translation tasks. Our system is available at http://short.sanvis.org
Street Crossing Aid Using Light-weight CNNs for the Visually Impaired
Authors: Samuel Yu, Heon Lee, Jung Hoon Kim
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, object-detection, Object Detection

In this paper, we address an issue that the visually impaired commonly face while crossing intersections and propose a solution that takes form as a mobile application. The application utilizes a deep learning convolutional neural network model, LytNetV2, to output necessary information that the visually impaired may lack when without human companions or guide-dogs. A prototype of the application runs on iOS devices of versions 11 or above. It is designed for comprehensiveness, concision, accuracy, and computational efficiency through delivering the two most important pieces of information, pedestrian traffic light color and direction, required to cross the road in real-time. Furthermore, it is specifically aimed to support those facing financial burden as the solution takes the form of a free mobile application. Through the modification and utilization of key principles in MobileNetV3 such as depthwise seperable convolutions and squeeze-excite layers, the deep neural network model achieves a classification accuracy of 96% and average angle error of 6.15 degrees, while running at a frame rate of 16.34 frames per second. Additionally, the model is trained as an image classifier, allowing for a faster and more accurate model. The network is able to outperform other methods such as object detection and non-deep learning algorithms in both accuracy and thoroughness. The information is delivered through both auditory signals and vibrations, and it has been tested on seven visually impaired and has received above satisfactory responses.
Metric-Based Few-Shot Learning for Video Action Recognition
Authors: Chris Careaga, Brian Hutchinson, Nathan Hodas, Lawrence Phillips
Date: 2019-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Few-Shot Learning, General Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Temporal Action Localization, Video Classification

In the few-shot scenario, a learner must effectively generalize to unseen classes given a small support set of labeled examples. While a relatively large amount of research has gone into few-shot learning for image classification, little work has been done on few-shot video classification. In this work, we address the task of few-shot video action recognition with a set of two-stream models. We evaluate the performance of a set of convolutional and recurrent neural network video encoder architectures used in conjunction with three popular metric-based few-shot algorithms. We train and evaluate using a few-shot split of the Kinetics 600 dataset. Our experiments confirm the importance of the two-stream setup, and find prototypical networks and pooled long short-term memory network embeddings to give the best performance as few-shot method and video encoder, respectively. For a 5-shot 5-way task, this setup obtains 84.2% accuracy on the test set and 59.4% on a special "challenge" test set, composed of highly confusable classes.
Fault-Diagnosing SLAM for Varying Scale Change Detection
Authors: Sugimoto Takuma, Yamaguchi Kousuke, Tanaka Kanji
Date: 2019-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Change Detection, Fault Diagnosis, Memorization

In this paper, we present a new fault diagnosis (FD) -based approach for detection of imagery changes that can detect significant changes as inconsistencies between different sub-modules (e.g., self-localizaiton) of visual SLAM. Unlike classical change detection approaches such as pairwise image comparison (PC) and anomaly detection (AD), neither the memorization of each map image nor the maintenance of up-to-date place-specific anomaly detectors are required in this FD approach. A significant challenge that is encountered when incorporating different SLAM sub-modules into FD involves dealing with the varying scales of objects that have changed (e.g., the appearance of small dangerous obstacles on the floor). To address this issue, we reconsider the bag-of-words (BoW) image representation, by exploiting its recent advances in terms of self-localization and change detection. As a key advantage, BoW image representation can be reorganized into any different scaling by simply cropping the original BoW image. Furthermore, we propose to combine different self-localization modules with strong and weak BoW features with different discriminativity, and to treat inconsistency between strong and weak self-localization as an indicator of change. The efficacy of the proposed approach for FD with/without AD and/or PC was experimentally validated.
Mining Minimal Map-Segments for Visual Place Classifiers
Authors: Tanaka Kanji
Date: 2019-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation, Visual Place Recognition

In visual place recognition (VPR), map segmentation (MS) is a preprocessing technique used to partition a given view-sequence map into place classes (i.e., map segments) so that each class has good place-specific training images for a visual place classifier (VPC). Existing approaches to MS implicitly/explicitly suppose that map segments have a certain size, or individual map segments are balanced in size. However, recent VPR systems showed that very small important map segments (minimal map segments) often suffice for VPC, and the remaining large unimportant portion of the map should be discarded to minimize map maintenance cost. Here, a new MS algorithm that can mine minimal map segments from a large view-sequence map is presented. To solve the inherently NP hard problem, MS is formulated as a video-segmentation problem and the efficient point-trajectory based paradigm of video segmentation is used. The proposed map representation was implemented with three types of VPC: deep convolutional neural network, bag-of-words, and object class detector, and each was integrated into a Monte Carlo localization algorithm (MCL) within a topometric VPR framework. Experiments using the publicly available NCLT dataset thoroughly investigate the efficacy of MS in terms of VPR performance.
A simple discriminative training method for machine translation with large-scale features
Authors: Tian Xia, Shaodan Zhai, Shaojun Wang
Date: 2019-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Margin infused relaxed algorithms (MIRAs) dominate model tuning in statistical machine translation in the case of large scale features, but also they are famous for the complexity in implementation. We introduce a new method, which regards an N-best list as a permutation and minimizes the Plackett-Luce loss of ground-truth permutations. Experiments with large-scale features demonstrate that, the new method is more robust than MERT; though it is only matchable with MIRAs, it has a comparatively advantage, easier to implement.