pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TapirXLA: Embedding Fork-Join Parallelism into the XLA Compiler in TensorFlow Using Tapir
Authors: Tao B. Schardl, Siddharth Samsi
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, CPU

This work introduces TapirXLA, a replacement for TensorFlow's XLA compiler that embeds recursive fork-join parallelism into XLA's low-level representation of code. Machine-learning applications rely on efficient parallel processing to achieve performance, and they employ a variety of technologies to improve performance, including compiler technology. But compilers in machine-learning frameworks lack a deep understanding of parallelism, causing them to lose performance by missing optimizations on parallel computation. This work studies how Tapir, a compiler intermediate representation (IR) that embeds parallelism into a mainstream compiler IR, can be incorporated into a compiler for machine learning to remedy this problem. TapirXLA modifies the XLA compiler in TensorFlow to employ the Tapir/LLVM compiler to optimize low-level parallel computation. TapirXLA encodes the parallelism within high-level TensorFlow operations using Tapir's representation of fork-join parallelism. TapirXLA also exposes to the compiler implementations of linear-algebra library routines whose parallel operations are encoded using Tapir's representation. We compared the performance of TensorFlow using TapirXLA against TensorFlow using an unmodified XLA compiler. On four neural-network benchmarks, TapirXLA speeds up the parallel running time of the network by a geometric-mean multiplicative factor of 30% to 100%, across four CPU architectures.
CCKS 2019 Shared Task on Inter-Personal Relationship Extraction
Authors: Haitao Wang, Zhengqiu He, Tong Zhu, Hao Shao, Wenliang Chen, Min Zhang
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

The CCKS2019 shared task was devoted to inter-personal relationship extraction. Given two person entities and at least one sentence containing these two entities, participating teams are asked to predict the relationship between the entities according to a given relation list. This year, 358 teams from various universities and organizations participated in this task. In this paper, we present the task definition, the description of data and the evaluation methodology used during this shared task. We also present a brief overview of the various methods adopted by the participating teams. Finally, we present the evaluation results.
Nearly Tight Bounds for Robust Proper Learning of Halfspaces with a Margin
Authors: Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel M. Kane, Pasin Manurangsi
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

We study the problem of {\em properly} learning large margin halfspaces in the agnostic PAC model. In more detail, we study the complexity of properly learning $d$-dimensional halfspaces on the unit ball within misclassification error $\alpha \cdot \mathrm{OPT}_{\gamma} + \epsilon$, where $\mathrm{OPT}_{\gamma}$ is the optimal $\gamma$-margin error rate and $\alpha \geq 1$ is the approximation ratio. We give learning algorithms and computational hardness results for this problem, for all values of the approximation ratio $\alpha \geq 1$, that are nearly-matching for a range of parameters. Specifically, for the natural setting that $\alpha$ is any constant bigger than one, we provide an essentially tight complexity characterization. On the positive side, we give an $\alpha = 1.01$-approximate proper learner that uses $O(1/(\epsilon^2\gamma^2))$ samples (which is optimal) and runs in time $\mathrm{poly}(d/\epsilon) \cdot 2^{\tilde{O}(1/\gamma^2)}$. On the negative side, we show that {\em any} constant factor approximate proper learner has runtime $\mathrm{poly}(d/\epsilon) \cdot 2^{(1/\gamma)^{2-o(1)}}$, assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis.
Universal, transferable and targeted adversarial attacks
Authors: Junde Wu, Rao Fu
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00

Deep Neural Networks have been found vulnerable re-cently. A kind of well-designed inputs, which called adver-sarial examples, can lead the networks to make incorrectpredictions. Depending on the different scenarios, goalsand capabilities, the difficulties of the attacks are different.For example, a targeted attack is more difficult than a non-targeted attack, a universal attack is more difficult than anon-universal attack, a transferable attack is more difficultthan a nontransferable one. The question is: Is there existan attack that can meet all these requirements? In this pa-per, we answer this question by producing a kind of attacksunder these conditions. We learn a universal mapping tomap the sources to the adversarial examples. These exam-ples can fool classification networks to classify all of theminto one targeted class, and also have strong transferability.Our code is released at: xxxxx.
A Robust Image Watermarking System Based on Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Xin Zhong, Frank Y. Shih
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Digital image watermarking is the process of embedding and extracting watermark covertly on a carrier image. Incorporating deep learning networks with image watermarking has attracted increasing attention during recent years. However, existing deep learning-based watermarking systems cannot achieve robustness, blindness, and automated embedding and extraction simultaneously. In this paper, a fully automated image watermarking system based on deep neural networks is proposed to generalize the image watermarking processes. An unsupervised deep learning structure and a novel loss computation are proposed to achieve high capacity and high robustness without any prior knowledge of possible attacks. Furthermore, a challenging application of watermark extraction from camera-captured images is provided to validate the practicality as well as the robustness of the proposed system. Experimental results show the superiority performance of the proposed system as comparing against several currently available techniques.
Temporal Consistency Objectives Regularize the Learning of Disentangled Representations
Authors: Gabriele Valvano, Agisilaos Chartsias, Andrea Leo, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Disentanglement, Medical Image Analysis

There has been an increasing focus in learning interpretable feature representations, particularly in applications such as medical image analysis that require explainability, whilst relying less on annotated data (since annotations can be tedious and costly). Here we build on recent innovations in style-content representations to learn anatomy, imaging characteristics (appearance) and temporal correlations. By introducing a self-supervised objective of predicting future cardiac phases we improve disentanglement. We propose a temporal transformer architecture that given an image conditioned on phase difference, it predicts a future frame. This forces the anatomical decomposition to be consistent with the temporal cardiac contraction in cine MRI and to have semantic meaning with less need for annotations. We demonstrate that using this regularization, we achieve competitive results and improve semi-supervised segmentation, especially when very few labelled data are available. Specifically, we show Dice increase of up to 19\% and 7\% compared to supervised and semi-supervised approaches respectively on the ACDC dataset. Code is available at: https://github.com/gvalvano/sdtnet .
Translate and Label! An Encoder-Decoder Approach for Cross-lingual Semantic Role Labeling
Authors: Angel Daza, Anette Frank
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Decoder, Semantic Role Labeling

We propose a Cross-lingual Encoder-Decoder model that simultaneously translates and generates sentences with Semantic Role Labeling annotations in a resource-poor target language. Unlike annotation projection techniques, our model does not need parallel data during inference time. Our approach can be applied in monolingual, multilingual and cross-lingual settings and is able to produce dependency-based and span-based SRL annotations. We benchmark the labeling performance of our model in different monolingual and multilingual settings using well-known SRL datasets. We then train our model in a cross-lingual setting to generate new SRL labeled data. Finally, we measure the effectiveness of our method by using the generated data to augment the training basis for resource-poor languages and perform manual evaluation to show that it produces high-quality sentences and assigns accurate semantic role annotations. Our proposed architecture offers a flexible method for leveraging SRL data in multiple languages.
3D Anchor-Free Lesion Detector on Computed Tomography Scans
Authors: Ning Zhang, Dechun Wang, Xinzi Sun, Pengfei Zhang, Chenxi Zhang, Yu Cao, Benyuan Liu
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

Lesions are injuries and abnormal tissues in the human body. Detecting lesions in 3D Computed Tomography (CT) scans can be time-consuming even for very experienced physicians and radiologists. In recent years, CNN based lesion detectors have demonstrated huge potentials. Most of current state-of-the-art lesion detectors employ anchors to enumerate all possible bounding boxes with respect to the dataset in process. This anchor mechanism greatly improves the detection performance while also constraining the generalization ability of detectors. In this paper, we propose an anchor-free lesion detector. The anchor mechanism is removed and lesions are formalized as single keypoints. By doing so, we witness a considerable performance gain in terms of both accuracy and inference speed compared with the anchor-based baseline
A Zero Attention Model for Personalized Product Search
Authors: Qingyao Ai, Daniel N. Hill, S. V. N. Vishwanathan, W. Bruce Croft
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Retrieval

Product search is one of the most popular methods for people to discover and purchase products on e-commerce websites. Because personal preferences often have an important influence on the purchase decision of each customer, it is intuitive that personalization should be beneficial for product search engines. While synthetic experiments from previous studies show that purchase histories are useful for identifying the individual intent of each product search session, the effect of personalization on product search in practice, however, remains mostly unknown. In this paper, we formulate the problem of personalized product search and conduct large-scale experiments with search logs sampled from a commercial e-commerce search engine. Results from our preliminary analysis show that the potential of personalization depends on query characteristics, interactions between queries, and user purchase histories. Based on these observations, we propose a Zero Attention Model for product search that automatically determines when and how to personalize a user-query pair via a novel attention mechanism. Empirical results on commercial product search logs show that the proposed model not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art personalized product retrieval models, but also provides important information on the potential of personalization in each product search session.
Machine Learning and the Internet of Things Enable Steam Flood Optimization for Improved Oil Production
Authors: Mi Yan, Jonathan C. MacDonald, Chris T. Reaume, Wesley Cobb, Tamas Toth, Sarah S. Karthigan
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Recently developed machine learning techniques, in association with the Internet of Things (IoT) allow for the implementation of a method of increasing oil production from heavy-oil wells. Steam flood injection, a widely used enhanced oil recovery technique, uses thermal and gravitational potential to mobilize and dilute heavy oil in situ to increase oil production. In contrast to traditional steam flood simulations based on principles of classic physics, we introduce here an approach using cutting-edge machine learning techniques that have the potential to provide a better way to describe the performance of steam flood. We propose a workflow to address a category of time-series data that can be analyzed with supervised machine learning algorithms and IoT. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique for forecasting oil production in steam flood scenarios. Moreover, we build an optimization system that recommends an optimal steam allocation plan, and show that it leads to a 3% improvement in oil production. We develop a minimum viable product on a cloud platform that can implement real-time data collection, transfer, and storage, as well as the training and implementation of a cloud-based machine learning model. This workflow also offers an applicable solution to other problems with similar time-series data structures, like predictive maintenance.
Memorizing All for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
Authors: Hongxiao Bai, Hai Zhao, Junhan Zhao
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Relation, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Sentence

Implicit discourse relation recognition is a challenging task due to the absence of the necessary informative clue from explicit connectives. The prediction of relations requires a deep understanding of the semantic meanings of sentence pairs. As implicit discourse relation recognizer has to carefully tackle the semantic similarity of the given sentence pairs and the severe data sparsity issue exists in the meantime, it is supposed to be beneficial from mastering the entire training data. Thus in this paper, we propose a novel memory mechanism to tackle the challenges for further performance improvement. The memory mechanism is adequately memorizing information by pairing representations and discourse relations of all training instances, which right fills the slot of the data-hungry issue in the current implicit discourse relation recognizer. Our experiments show that our full model with memorizing the entire training set reaches new state-of-the-art against strong baselines, which especially for the first time exceeds the milestone of 60% accuracy in the 4-way task.
Variational Denoising Network: Toward Blind Noise Modeling and Removal
Authors: Zongsheng Yue, Hongwei Yong, Qian Zhao, Lei Zhang, Deyu Meng
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Noise Estimation, Variational Inference

Blind image denoising is an important yet very challenging problem in computer vision due to the complicated acquisition process of real images. In this work we propose a new variational inference method, which integrates both noise estimation and image denoising into a unique Bayesian framework, for blind image denoising. Specifically, an approximate posterior, parameterized by deep neural networks, is presented by taking the intrinsic clean image and noise variances as latent variables conditioned on the input noisy image. This posterior provides explicit parametric forms for all its involved hyper-parameters, and thus can be easily implemented for blind image denoising with automatic noise estimation for the test noisy image. On one hand, as other data-driven deep learning methods, our method, namely variational denoising network (VDN), can perform denoising efficiently due to its explicit form of posterior expression. On the other hand, VDN inherits the advantages of traditional model-driven approaches, especially the good generalization capability of generative models. VDN has good interpretability and can be flexibly utilized to estimate and remove complicated non-i.i.d. noise collected in real scenarios. Comprehensive experiments are performed to substantiate the superiority of our method in blind image denoising.
Flexible Conditional Image Generation of Missing Data with Learned Mental Maps
Authors: Benjamin Hou, Athanasios Vlontzos, Amir Alansary, Daniel Rueckert, Bernhard Kainz
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Conditional Image Generation, Decision Making, Diagnostic, Image Generation, SSIM

Real-world settings often do not allow acquisition of high-resolution volumetric images for accurate morphological assessment and diagnostic. In clinical practice it is frequently common to acquire only sparse data (e.g. individual slices) for initial diagnostic decision making. Thereby, physicians rely on their prior knowledge (or mental maps) of the human anatomy to extrapolate the underlying 3D information. Accurate mental maps require years of anatomy training, which in the first instance relies on normative learning, i.e. excluding pathology. In this paper, we leverage Bayesian Deep Learning and environment mapping to generate full volumetric anatomy representations from none to a small, sparse set of slices. We evaluate proof of concept implementations based on Generative Query Networks (GQN) and Conditional BRUNO using abdominal CT and brain MRI as well as in a clinical application involving sparse, motion-corrupted MR acquisition for fetal imaging. Our approach allows to reconstruct 3D volumes from 1 to 4 tomographic slices, with a SSIM of 0.7+ and cross-correlation of 0.8+ compared to the 3D ground truth.
Aesthetic Image Captioning From Weakly-Labelled Photographs
Authors: Koustav Ghosal, Aakanksha Rana, Aljosa Smolic
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Aesthetic Image Captioning, Benchmarking, Image Captioning

Aesthetic image captioning (AIC) refers to the multi-modal task of generating critical textual feedbacks for photographs. While in natural image captioning (NIC), deep models are trained in an end-to-end manner using large curated datasets such as MS-COCO, no such large-scale, clean dataset exists for AIC. Towards this goal, we propose an automatic cleaning strategy to create a benchmarking AIC dataset, by exploiting the images and noisy comments easily available from photography websites. We propose a probabilistic caption-filtering method for cleaning the noisy web-data, and compile a large-scale, clean dataset "AVA-Captions", (230, 000 images with 5 captions per image). Additionally, by exploiting the latent associations between aesthetic attributes, we propose a strategy for training the convolutional neural network (CNN) based visual feature extractor, the first component of the AIC framework. The strategy is weakly supervised and can be effectively used to learn rich aesthetic representations, without requiring expensive ground-truth annotations. We finally show-case a thorough analysis of the proposed contributions using automatic metrics and subjective evaluations.
Exploiting Temporality for Semi-Supervised Video Segmentation
Authors: Radu Sibechi, Olaf Booij, Nora Baka, Peter Bloem
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, there has been remarkable progress in supervised image segmentation. Video segmentation is less explored, despite the temporal dimension being highly informative. Semantic labels, e.g. that cannot be accurately detected in the current frame, may be inferred by incorporating information from previous frames. However, video segmentation is challenging due to the amount of data that needs to be processed and, more importantly, the cost involved in obtaining ground truth annotations for each frame. In this paper, we tackle the issue of label scarcity by using consecutive frames of a video, where only one frame is annotated. We propose a deep, end-to-end trainable model which leverages temporal information in order to make use of easy to acquire unlabeled data. Our network architecture relies on a novel interconnection of two components: a fully convolutional network to model spatial information and temporal units that are employed at intermediate levels of the convolutional network in order to propagate information through time. The main contribution of this work is the guidance of the temporal signal through the network. We show that only placing a temporal module between the encoder and decoder is suboptimal (baseline). Our extensive experiments on the CityScapes dataset indicate that the resulting model can leverage unlabeled temporal frames and significantly outperform both the frame-by-frame image segmentation and the baseline approach.
Deep Bayesian Unsupervised Source Separation Based on a Complex Gaussian Mixture Model
Authors: Yoshiaki Bando, Yoko SASAKI, Kazuyoshi Yoshii
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00

This paper presents an unsupervised method that trains neural source separation by using only multichannel mixture signals. Conventional neural separation methods require a lot of supervised data to achieve excellent performance. Although multichannel methods based on spatial information can work without such training data, they are often sensitive to parameter initialization and degraded with the sources located close to each other. The proposed method uses a cost function based on a spatial model called a complex Gaussian mixture model (cGMM). This model has the time-frequency (TF) masks and direction of arrivals (DoAs) of sources as latent variables and is used for training separation and localization networks that respectively estimate these variables. This joint training solves the frequency permutation ambiguity of the spatial model in a unified deep Bayesian framework. In addition, the pre-trained network can be used not only for conducting monaural separation but also for efficiently initializing a multichannel separation algorithm. Experimental results with simulated speech mixtures showed that our method outperformed a conventional initialization method.
HARE: a Flexible Highlighting Annotator for Ranking and Exploration
Authors: Denis Newman-Griffis, Eric Fosler-Lussier
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: IJCNLP 2019 11
Tasks: Document Ranking

Exploration and analysis of potential data sources is a significant challenge in the application of NLP techniques to novel information domains. We describe HARE, a system for highlighting relevant information in document collections to support ranking and triage, which provides tools for post-processing and qualitative analysis for model development and tuning. We apply HARE to the use case of narrative descriptions of mobility information in clinical data, and demonstrate its utility in comparing candidate embedding features. We provide a web-based interface for annotation visualization and document ranking, with a modular backend to support interoperability with existing annotation tools. Our system is available online at https://github.com/OSU-slatelab/HARE.
Grounded Agreement Games: Emphasizing Conversational Grounding in Visual Dialogue Settings
Authors: David Schlangen
Date: 2019-08-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Visual Dialog

Where early work on dialogue in Computational Linguistics put much emphasis on dialogue structure and its relation to the mental states of the dialogue participants (e.g., Allen 1979, Grosz & Sidner 1986), current work mostly reduces dialogue to the task of producing at any one time a next utterance; e.g. in neural chatbot or Visual Dialogue settings. As a methodological decision, this is sound: Even the longest journey is a sequence of steps. It becomes detrimental, however, when the tasks and datasets from which dialogue behaviour is to be learned are tailored too much to this framing of the problem. In this short note, we describe a family of settings which still allow to keep dialogues simple, but add a constraint that makes participants care about reaching mutual understanding. In such agreement games, there is a secondary, but explicit goal besides the task level goal, and that is to reach mutual understanding about whether the task level goal has been reached. As we argue, this naturally triggers meta-semantic interaction and mutual engagement, and hence leads to richer data from which to induce models.