pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Breast Cancer Detection Using Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Simon Hadush, Yaecob Girmay, Abiot Sinamo, Gebrekirstos Hagos
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Breast Cancer Detection, Medical Image Analysis, Region Proposal

Breast cancer is prevalent in Ethiopia that accounts 34% among women cancer patients. The diagnosis technique in Ethiopia is manual which was proven to be tedious, subjective, and challenging. Deep learning techniques are revolutionizing the field of medical image analysis and hence in this study, we proposed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for breast mass detection so as to minimize the overheads of manual analysis. CNN architecture is designed for the feature extraction stage and adapted both the Region Proposal Network (RPN) and Region of Interest (ROI) portion of the faster R-CNN for the automated breast mass abnormality detection. Our model detects mass region and classifies them into benign or malignant abnormality in mammogram(MG) images at once. For the proposed model, MG images were collected from different hospitals, locally.The images were passed through different preprocessing stages such as gaussian filter, median filter, bilateral filters and extracted the region of the breast from the background of the MG image. The performance of the model on test dataset is found to be: detection accuracy 91.86%, sensitivity of 94.67% and AUC-ROC of 92.2%.
Deep connections between learning from limited labels & physical parameter estimation -- inspiration for regularization
Authors: Bas Peters
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter estimation

Recently established equivalences between differential equations and the structure of neural networks enabled some interpretation of training of a neural network as partial-differential-equation (PDE) constrained optimization. We add to the previously established connections, explicit regularization that is particularly beneficial in the case of single large-scale examples with partial annotation. We show that explicit regularization of model parameters in PDE constrained optimization translates to regularization of the network output. Examination of the structure of the corresponding Lagrangian and backpropagation algorithm do not reveal additional computational challenges. A hyperspectral imaging example shows that minimum prior information together with cross-validation for optimal regularization parameters boosts the segmentation accuracy.
Self-Supervised Log Parsing
Authors: Sasho Nedelkoski, Jasmin Bogatinovski, Alexander Acker, Jorge Cardoso, Odej Kao
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Fault Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Log Parsing, Masked Language Modeling, Self-Supervised Learning

Logs are extensively used during the development and maintenance of software systems. They collect runtime events and allow tracking of code execution, which enables a variety of critical tasks such as troubleshooting and fault detection. However, large-scale software systems generate massive volumes of semi-structured log records, posing a major challenge for automated analysis. Parsing semi-structured records with free-form text log messages into structured templates is the first and crucial step that enables further analysis. Existing approaches rely on log-specific heuristics or manual rule extraction. These are often specialized in parsing certain log types, and thus, limit performance scores and generalization. We propose a novel parsing technique called NuLog that utilizes a self-supervised learning model and formulates the parsing task as masked language modeling (MLM). In the process of parsing, the model extracts summarizations from the logs in the form of a vector embedding. This allows the coupling of the MLM as pre-training with a downstream anomaly detection task. We evaluate the parsing performance of NuLog on 10 real-world log datasets and compare the results with 12 parsing techniques. The results show that NuLog outperforms existing methods in parsing accuracy with an average of 99% and achieves the lowest edit distance to the ground truth templates. Additionally, two case studies are conducted to demonstrate the ability of the approach for log-based anomaly detection in both supervised and unsupervised scenario. The results show that NuLog can be successfully used to support troubleshooting tasks. The implementation is available at https://github.com/nulog/nulog.
Generating Electronic Health Records with Multiple Data Types and Constraints
Authors: Chao Yan, Ziqi Zhang, Steve Nyemba, Bradley A. Malin
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Sharing electronic health records (EHRs) on a large scale may lead to privacy intrusions. Recent research has shown that risks may be mitigated by simulating EHRs through generative adversarial network (GAN) frameworks. Yet the methods developed to date are limited because they 1) focus on generating data of a single type (e.g., diagnosis codes), neglecting other data types (e.g., demographics, procedures or vital signs) and 2) do not represent constraints between features. In this paper, we introduce a method to simulate EHRs composed of multiple data types by 1) refining the GAN model, 2) accounting for feature constraints, and 3) incorporating key utility measures for such generation tasks. Our analysis with over $770,000$ EHRs from Vanderbilt University Medical Center demonstrates that the new model achieves higher performance in terms of retaining basic statistics, cross-feature correlations, latent structural properties, feature constraints and associated patterns from real data, without sacrificing privacy.
Statistically Guided Divide-and-Conquer for Sparse Factorization of Large Matrix
Authors: Kun Chen, Ruipeng Dong, Wanwan Xu, Zemin Zheng
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, regression, Time Series Analysis

The sparse factorization of a large matrix is fundamental in modern statistical learning. In particular, the sparse singular value decomposition and its variants have been utilized in multivariate regression, factor analysis, biclustering, vector time series modeling, among others. The appeal of this factorization is owing to its power in discovering a highly-interpretable latent association network, either between samples and variables or between responses and predictors. However, many existing methods are either ad hoc without a general performance guarantee, or are computationally intensive, rendering them unsuitable for large-scale studies. We formulate the statistical problem as a sparse factor regression and tackle it with a divide-and-conquer approach. In the first stage of division, we consider both sequential and parallel approaches for simplifying the task into a set of co-sparse unit-rank estimation (CURE) problems, and establish the statistical underpinnings of these commonly-adopted and yet poorly understood deflation methods. In the second stage of division, we innovate a contended stagewise learning technique, consisting of a sequence of simple incremental updates, to efficiently trace out the whole solution paths of CURE. Our algorithm has a much lower computational complexity than alternating convex search, and the choice of the step size enables a flexible and principled tradeoff between statistical accuracy and computational efficiency. Our work is among the first to enable stagewise learning for non-convex problems, and the idea can be applicable in many multi-convex problems. Extensive simulation studies and an application in genetics demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.
Teacher-Student Domain Adaptation for Biosensor Models
Authors: Lawrence G. Phillips, David B. Grimes, Yihan Jessie Li
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Domain Adaptation

We present an approach to domain adaptation, addressing the case where data from the source domain is abundant, labelled data from the target domain is limited or non-existent, and a small amount of paired source-target data is available. The method is designed for developing deep learning models that detect the presence of medical conditions based on data from consumer-grade portable biosensors. It addresses some of the key problems in this area, namely, the difficulty of acquiring large quantities of clinically labelled data from the biosensor, and the noise and ambiguity that can affect the clinical labels. The idea is to pre-train an expressive model on a large dataset of labelled recordings from a sensor modality for which data is abundant, and then to adapt the model's lower layers so that its predictions on the target modality are similar to the original model's on paired examples from the source modality. We show that the pre-trained model's predictions provide a substantially better learning signal than the clinician-provided labels, and that this teacher-student technique significantly outperforms both a naive application of supervised deep learning and a label-supervised version of domain adaptation on a synthetic dataset and in a real-world case study on sleep apnea. By reducing the volume of data required and obviating the need for labels, our approach should reduce the cost associated with developing high-performance deep learning models for biosensors.
Calibration of Pre-trained Transformers
Authors: Shrey Desai, Greg Durrett
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: EMNLP 2020 11
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

Pre-trained Transformers are now ubiquitous in natural language processing, but despite their high end-task performance, little is known empirically about whether they are calibrated. Specifically, do these models' posterior probabilities provide an accurate empirical measure of how likely the model is to be correct on a given example? We focus on BERT and RoBERTa in this work, and analyze their calibration across three tasks: natural language inference, paraphrase detection, and commonsense reasoning. For each task, we consider in-domain as well as challenging out-of-domain settings, where models face more examples they should be uncertain about. We show that: (1) when used out-of-the-box, pre-trained models are calibrated in-domain, and compared to baselines, their calibration error out-of-domain can be as much as 3.5x lower; (2) temperature scaling is effective at further reducing calibration error in-domain, and using label smoothing to deliberately increase empirical uncertainty helps calibrate posteriors out-of-domain.
A Relaxed Inertial Forward-Backward-Forward Algorithm for Solving Monotone Inclusions with Application to GANs
Authors: Radu Ioan Bot, Michael Sedlmayer, Phan Tu Vuong
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00

We introduce a relaxed inertial forward-backward-forward (RIFBF) splitting algorithm for approaching the set of zeros of the sum of a maximally monotone operator and a single-valued monotone and Lipschitz continuous operator. This work aims to extend Tseng's forward-backward-forward method by both using inertial effects as well as relaxation parameters. We formulate first a second order dynamical system which approaches the solution set of the monotone inclusion problem to be solved and provide an asymptotic analysis for its trajectories. We provide for RIFBF, which follows by explicit time discretization, a convergence analysis in the general monotone case as well as when applied to the solving of pseudo-monotone variational inequalities. We illustrate the proposed method by applications to a bilinear saddle point problem, in the context of which we also emphasize the interplay between the inertial and the relaxation parameters, and to the training of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs).
A Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach to Autonomous Separation Assurance
Authors: Marc Brittain, Xuxi Yang, Peng Wei
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A novel deep multi-agent reinforcement learning framework is proposed to identify and resolve conflicts among a variable number of aircraft in a high-density, stochastic, and dynamic sector. Currently the sector capacity is constrained by human air traffic controller's cognitive limitation. We investigate the feasibility of a new concept (autonomous separation assurance) and a new approach to push the sector capacity above human cognitive limitation. We propose the concept of using distributed vehicle autonomy to ensure separation, instead of a centralized sector air traffic controller. Our proposed framework utilizes Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) that we modify to incorporate an attention network. This allows the agents to have access to variable aircraft information in the sector in a scalable, efficient approach to achieve high traffic throughput under uncertainty. Agents are trained using a centralized learning, decentralized execution scheme where one neural network is learned and shared by all agents. The proposed framework is validated on three challenging case studies in the BlueSky air traffic control environment. Numerical results show the proposed framework significantly reduces offline training time, increases performance, and results in a more efficient policy.
The Engagement-Diversity Connection: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Spotify
Authors: David Holtz, Benjamin Carterette, Praveen Chandar, Zahra Nazari, Henriette Cramer, Sinan Aral
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

It remains unknown whether personalized recommendations increase or decrease the diversity of content people consume. We present results from a randomized field experiment on Spotify testing the effect of personalized recommendations on consumption diversity. In the experiment, both control and treatment users were given podcast recommendations, with the sole aim of increasing podcast consumption. Treatment users' recommendations were personalized based on their music listening history, whereas control users were recommended popular podcasts among users in their demographic group. We find that, on average, the treatment increased podcast streams by 28.90%. However, the treatment also decreased the average individual-level diversity of podcast streams by 11.51%, and increased the aggregate diversity of podcast streams by 5.96%, indicating that personalized recommendations have the potential to create patterns of consumption that are homogenous within and diverse across users, a pattern reflecting Balkanization. Our results provide evidence of an "engagement-diversity trade-off" when recommendations are optimized solely to drive consumption: while personalized recommendations increase user engagement, they also affect the diversity of consumed content. This shift in consumption diversity can affect user retention and lifetime value, and impact the optimal strategy for content producers. We also observe evidence that our treatment affected streams from sections of Spotify's app not directly affected by the experiment, suggesting that exposure to personalized recommendations can affect the content that users consume organically. We believe these findings highlight the need for academics and practitioners to continue investing in personalization methods that explicitly take into account the diversity of content recommended.
Modeling and solving a vehicle-sharing problem considering multiple alternative modes of transport
Authors: Miriam Enzi, Sophie N. Parragh, David Pisinger
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Motivated by the change in mobility patterns, we present a scheduling approach for a vehicle-sharing problem, considering several alternative modes of transport, from a company viewpoint with centralized planning. We consider vehicle-sharing in a company having one or more depots and a fixed number of users, i.e. employees. The users have appointments with a fixed location and fixed start and end times. A vehicle must be used for a full trip of a user from depot to depot. We aim at assigning vehicles to user trips so as to maximize savings compared to other modes of transport. We first consider that only one type of vehicle is used, and second that multiple vehicle types can be used. For the first case, we show that the vehicle-sharing problem can be formulated as a minimum-cost flow problem. Secondly, if multiple types of vehicles are available the problem can be formulated as a multi-commodity flow problem. These formulations make the problem applicable in daily operations due to efficient solution methods. We provide a comprehensive computational study for both cases on instances based on demographic, spatial, and economic data of Vienna. We show that our formulations for this problem solve these instances in a few seconds, which makes them usable in an online booking system. In the analysis we discuss different potential settings. We study the optimal composition of a shared fleet, restricted sets of modes of transport, and variations of the objective function.
Stop-and-Go: Exploring Backdoor Attacks on Deep Reinforcement Learning-based Traffic Congestion Control Systems
Authors: Yue Wang, Esha Sarkar, Wenqing Li, Michail Maniatakos, Saif Eddin Jabari
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent work has shown that the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in traffic could help reduce traffic jams. Deep reinforcement learning methods demonstrate good performance in complex control problems, including autonomous vehicle control, and have been used in state-of-the-art AV controllers. However, deep neural networks (DNNs) render automated driving vulnerable to machine learning-based attacks. In this work, we explore the backdooring/trojanning of DRL-based AV controllers. We develop a trigger design methodology that is based on well-established principles of traffic physics. The malicious actions include vehicle deceleration and acceleration to cause stop-and-go traffic waves to emerge (congestion attacks) or AV acceleration resulting in the AV crashing into the vehicle in front (insurance attack). We test our attack on single-lane and two-lane circuits. Our experimental results show that the backdoored model does not compromise normal operation performance, with the maximum decrease in cumulative rewards being 1%. Still, it can be maliciously activated to cause a crash or congestion when the corresponding triggers appear.
Identification and Classification of Phenomena in Multispectral Satellite Imagery Using a New Image Smoother Method and its Applications in Environmental Remote Sensing
Authors: M. Kiani
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: image smoothing

In this paper a new method of image smoothing for satellite imagery and its applications in environmental remote sensing are presented. This method is based on the global gradient minimization over the whole image. With respect to the image discrete identity, the continuous minimization problem is discretized. Using the finite difference numerical method of differentiation, a simple yet efficient 5*5-pixel template is derived. Convolution of the derived template with the image in different bands results in the discrimination of various image elements. This method is extremely fast, besides being highly precise. A case study is presented for the northern Iran, covering parts of the Caspian Sea. Comparison of the method with the usual Laplacian template reveals that it is more capable of distinguishing phenomena in the image.
Optimal Image Smoothing and Its Applications in Anomaly Detection in Remote Sensing
Authors: M. Kiani
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, image smoothing

This paper is focused on deriving an optimal image smoother. The optimization is done through the minimization of the norm of the Laplace operator in the image coordinate system. Discretizing the Laplace operator and using the method of Euler-Lagrange result in a weighted average scheme for the optimal smoother. Satellite imagery can be smoothed by this optimal smoother. It is also very fast and can be used for detecting the anomalies in the image. A real anomaly detecting problem is considered for the Qom region in Iran. Satellite image in different bands are smoothed. Comparing the smoothed and original images in different bands, the maps of anomalies are presented. Comparison between the derived method and the existing methods reveals that it is more efficient in detecting anomalies in the region.
Two Tier Prediction of Stroke Using Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines
Authors: Jerrin Thomas Panachakel, Jeena R. S
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Cerebrovascular accident (CVA) or stroke is the rapid loss of brain function due to disturbance in the blood supply to the brain. Statistically, stroke is the second leading cause of death. This has motivated us to suggest a two-tier system for predicting stroke; the first tier makes use of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to predict the chances of a person suffering from stroke. The ANN is trained the using the values of various risk factors of stroke of several patients who had stroke. Once a person is classified as having a high risk of stroke, s/he undergoes another the tier-2 classification test where his/her neuro MRI (Magnetic resonance imaging) is analysed to predict the chances of stroke. The tier-2 uses Non-negative Matrix Factorization and Haralick Textural features for feature extraction and SVM classifier for classification. We have obtained an accuracy of 96.67% in tier-1 and an accuracy of 70% in tier-2.
Spectrum Sensing and Signal Identification with Deep Learning based on Spectral Correlation Function
Authors: Kürşat Tekbıyık, Özkan Akbunar, Ali Rıza Ekti, Ali Görçin, Güneş Karabulut Kurt, Khalid A. Qaraqe
Date: 2020-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Spectrum sensing is one of the means of utilizing the scarce source of wireless spectrum efficiently. In this paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN) model employing spectral correlation function which is an effective characterization of cyclostationarity property, is proposed for wireless spectrum sensing and signal identification. The proposed method classifies wireless signals without a priori information and it is implemented in two different settings entitled CASE1 and CASE2. In CASE1, signals are jointly sensed and classified. In CASE2, sensing and classification are conducted in a sequential manner. In contrary to the classical spectrum sensing techniques, the proposed CNN method does not require a statistical decision process and does not need to know the distinct features of signals beforehand. Implementation of the method on the measured overthe-air real-world signals in cellular bands indicates important performance gains when compared to the signal classifying deep learning networks available in the literature and against classical sensing methods. Even though the implementation herein is over cellular signals, the proposed approach can be extended to the detection and classification of any signal that exhibits cyclostationary features. Finally, the measurement-based dataset which is utilized to validate the method is shared for the purposes of reproduction of the results and further research and development.