pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Understanding the Disharmony between Weight Normalization Family and Weight Decay: $ε-$shifted $L_2$ Regularizer
Authors: Li Xiang, Chen Shuo, Xia Yan, Yang Jian
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00

The merits of fast convergence and potentially better performance of the weight normalization family have drawn increasing attention in recent years. These methods use standardization or normalization that changes the weight $\boldsymbol{W}$ to $\boldsymbol{W}'$, which makes $\boldsymbol{W}'$ independent to the magnitude of $\boldsymbol{W}$. Surprisingly, $\boldsymbol{W}$ must be decayed during gradient descent, otherwise we will observe a severe under-fitting problem, which is very counter-intuitive since weight decay is widely known to prevent deep networks from over-fitting. In this paper, we \emph{theoretically} prove that the weight decay term $\frac{1}{2}\lambda||{\boldsymbol{W}}||^2$ merely modulates the effective learning rate for improving objective optimization, and has no influence on generalization when the weight normalization family is compositely employed. Furthermore, we also expose several critical problems when introducing weight decay term to weight normalization family, including the missing of global minimum and training instability. To address these problems, we propose an $\epsilon-$shifted $L_2$ regularizer, which shifts the $L_2$ objective by a positive constant $\epsilon$. Such a simple operation can theoretically guarantee the existence of global minimum, while preventing the network weights from being too small and thus avoiding gradient float overflow. It significantly improves the training stability and can achieve slightly better performance in our practice. The effectiveness of $\epsilon-$shifted $L_2$ regularizer is comprehensively validated on the ImageNet, CIFAR-100, and COCO datasets. Our codes and pretrained models will be released in https://github.com/implus/PytorchInsight.
Adversarial Margin Maximization Networks
Authors: Ziang Yan, Yiwen Guo, Chang-Shui Zhang
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00

The tremendous recent success of deep neural networks (DNNs) has sparked a surge of interest in understanding their predictive ability. Unlike the human visual system which is able to generalize robustly and learn with little supervision, DNNs normally require a massive amount of data to learn new concepts. In addition, research works also show that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples-maliciously generated images which seem perceptually similar to the natural ones but are actually formed to fool learning models, which means the models have problem generalizing to unseen data with certain type of distortions. In this paper, we analyze the generalization ability of DNNs comprehensively and attempt to improve it from a geometric point of view. We propose adversarial margin maximization (AMM), a learning-based regularization which exploits an adversarial perturbation as a proxy. It encourages a large margin in the input space, just like the support vector machines. With a differentiable formulation of the perturbation, we train the regularized DNNs simply through back-propagation in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results on various datasets (including MNIST, CIFAR-10/100, SVHN and ImageNet) and different DNN architectures demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous state-of-the-arts. Code and models for reproducing our results will be made publicly available.
RWF-2000: An Open Large Scale Video Database for Violence Detection
Authors: Ming Cheng, Kunjing Cai, Ming Li
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Recognition, Activity Recognition

In recent years, surveillance cameras are widely deployed in public places, and the general crime rate has been reduced significantly due to these ubiquitous devices. Usually, these cameras provide cues and evidence after crimes are conducted, while they are rarely used to prevent or stop criminal activities in time. It is both time and labor consuming to manually monitor a large amount of video data from surveillance cameras. Therefore, automatically recognizing violent behaviors from video signals becomes essential. This paper summarizes several existing video datasets for violence detection and proposes the RWF-2000 database with 2,000 videos captured by surveillance cameras in real-world scenes. Also, we present a new method that utilizes both the merits of 3D-CNNs and optical flow, namely Flow Gated Network. The proposed approach obtains an accuracy of 87.25% on the test set of our proposed database. The database and source codes are currently open to access.
Recent Advances in Algorithmic High-Dimensional Robust Statistics
Authors: Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel M. Kane
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Learning in the presence of outliers is a fundamental problem in statistics. Until recently, all known efficient unsupervised learning algorithms were very sensitive to outliers in high dimensions. In particular, even for the task of robust mean estimation under natural distributional assumptions, no efficient algorithm was known. Recent work in theoretical computer science gave the first efficient robust estimators for a number of fundamental statistical tasks, including mean and covariance estimation. Since then, there has been a flurry of research activity on algorithmic high-dimensional robust estimation in a range of settings. In this survey article, we introduce the core ideas and algorithmic techniques in the emerging area of algorithmic high-dimensional robust statistics with a focus on robust mean estimation. We also provide an overview of the approaches that have led to computationally efficient robust estimators for a range of broader statistical tasks and discuss new directions and opportunities for future work.
Explainable Ordinal Factorization Model: Deciphering the Effects of Attributes by Piece-wise Linear Approximation
Authors: Mengzhuo Guo, Zhongzhi Xu, Qingpeng Zhang, Xiuwu Liao, Jiapeng Liu
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, regression

Ordinal regression predicts the objects' labels that exhibit a natural ordering, which is important to many managerial problems such as credit scoring and clinical diagnosis. In these problems, the ability to explain how the attributes affect the prediction is critical to users. However, most, if not all, existing ordinal regression models simplify such explanation in the form of constant coefficients for the main and interaction effects of individual attributes. Such explanation cannot characterize the contributions of attributes at different value scales. To address this challenge, we propose a new explainable ordinal regression model, namely, the Explainable Ordinal Factorization Model (XOFM). XOFM uses the piece-wise linear functions to approximate the actual contributions of individual attributes and their interactions. Moreover, XOFM introduces a novel ordinal transformation process to assign each object the probabilities of belonging to multiple relevant classes, instead of fixing boundaries to differentiate classes. XOFM is based on the Factorization Machines to handle the potential sparsity problem as a result of discretizing the attribute scales. Comprehensive experiments with benchmark datasets and baseline models demonstrate that the proposed XOFM exhibits superior explainability and leads to state-of-the-art prediction accuracy.
There is Limited Correlation between Coverage and Robustness for Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Yizhen Dong, Peixin Zhang, Jingyi Wang, Shuang Liu, Jun Sun, Jianye Hao, Xinyu Wang, Li Wang, Jin Song Dong, Dai Ting
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Malware Detection

Deep neural networks (DNN) are increasingly applied in safety-critical systems, e.g., for face recognition, autonomous car control and malware detection. It is also shown that DNNs are subject to attacks such as adversarial perturbation and thus must be properly tested. Many coverage criteria for DNN since have been proposed, inspired by the success of code coverage criteria for software programs. The expectation is that if a DNN is a well tested (and retrained) according to such coverage criteria, it is more likely to be robust. In this work, we conduct an empirical study to evaluate the relationship between coverage, robustness and attack/defense metrics for DNN. Our study is the largest to date and systematically done based on 100 DNN models and 25 metrics. One of our findings is that there is limited correlation between coverage and robustness, i.e., improving coverage does not help improve the robustness. Our dataset and implementation have been made available to serve as a benchmark for future studies on testing DNN.
Coincidence, Categorization, and Consolidation: Learning to Recognize Sounds with Minimal Supervision
Authors: Aren Jansen, Daniel P. W. Ellis, Shawn Hershey, R. Channing Moore, Manoj Plakal, Ashok C. Popat, Rif A. Saurous
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Clustering, General Classification

Humans do not acquire perceptual abilities in the way we train machines. While machine learning algorithms typically operate on large collections of randomly-chosen, explicitly-labeled examples, human acquisition relies more heavily on multimodal unsupervised learning (as infants) and active learning (as children). With this motivation, we present a learning framework for sound representation and recognition that combines (i) a self-supervised objective based on a general notion of unimodal and cross-modal coincidence, (ii) a clustering objective that reflects our need to impose categorical structure on our experiences, and (iii) a cluster-based active learning procedure that solicits targeted weak supervision to consolidate categories into relevant semantic classes. By training a combined sound embedding/clustering/classification network according to these criteria, we achieve a new state-of-the-art unsupervised audio representation and demonstrate up to a 20-fold reduction in the number of labels required to reach a desired classification performance.
Reinforcement Learning for Market Making in a Multi-agent Dealer Market
Authors: Sumitra Ganesh, Nelson Vadori, Mengda Xu, Hua Zheng, Prashant Reddy, Manuela Veloso
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Market makers play an important role in providing liquidity to markets by continuously quoting prices at which they are willing to buy and sell, and managing inventory risk. In this paper, we build a multi-agent simulation of a dealer market and demonstrate that it can be used to understand the behavior of a reinforcement learning (RL) based market maker agent. We use the simulator to train an RL-based market maker agent with different competitive scenarios, reward formulations and market price trends (drifts). We show that the reinforcement learning agent is able to learn about its competitor's pricing policy; it also learns to manage inventory by smartly selecting asymmetric prices on the buy and sell sides (skewing), and maintaining a positive (or negative) inventory depending on whether the market price drift is positive (or negative). Finally, we propose and test reward formulations for creating risk averse RL-based market maker agents.
Generating Persona Consistent Dialogues by Exploiting Natural Language Inference
Authors: Haoyu Song, Wei-Nan Zhang, Jingwen Hu, Ting Liu
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Dialogue Generation, Natural Language Inference, Reinforcement Learning

Consistency is one of the major challenges faced by dialogue agents. A human-like dialogue agent should not only respond naturally, but also maintain a consistent persona. In this paper, we exploit the advantages of natural language inference (NLI) technique to address the issue of generating persona consistent dialogues. Different from existing work that re-ranks the retrieved responses through an NLI model, we cast the task as a reinforcement learning problem and propose to exploit the NLI signals from response-persona pairs as rewards for the process of dialogue generation. Specifically, our generator employs an attention-based encoder-decoder to generate persona-based responses. Our evaluator consists of two components: an adversarially trained naturalness module and an NLI based consistency module. Moreover, we use another well-performed NLI model in the evaluation of persona-consistency. Experimental results on both human and automatic metrics, including the model-based consistency evaluation, demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms strong generative baselines, especially in the persona-consistency of generated responses.
Revenue Maximization of Airbnb Marketplace using Search Results
Authors: Jiawei Wen, Hossein Vahabi, Mihajlo Grbovic
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00

Correctly pricing products or services in an online marketplace presents a challenging problem and one of the critical factors for the success of the business. When users are looking to buy an item they typically search for it. Query relevance models are used at this stage to retrieve and rank the items on the search page from most relevant to least relevant. The presented items are naturally "competing" against each other for user purchases. We provide a practical two-stage model to price this set of retrieved items for which distributions of their values are learned. The initial output of the pricing strategy is a price vector for the top displayed items in one search event. We later aggregate these results over searches to provide the supplier with the optimal price for each item. We applied our solution to large-scale search data obtained from Airbnb Experiences marketplace. Offline evaluation results show that our strategy improves upon baseline pricing strategies on key metrics by at least +20% in terms of booking regret and +55% in terms of revenue potential.
Deception through Half-Truths
Authors: Andrew Estornell, Sanmay Das, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00

Deception is a fundamental issue across a diverse array of settings, from cybersecurity, where decoys (e.g., honeypots) are an important tool, to politics that can feature politically motivated "leaks" and fake news about candidates.Typical considerations of deception view it as providing false information.However, just as important but less frequently studied is a more tacit form where information is strategically hidden or leaked.We consider the problem of how much an adversary can affect a principal's decision by "half-truths", that is, by masking or hiding bits of information, when the principal is oblivious to the presence of the adversary. The principal's problem can be modeled as one of predicting future states of variables in a dynamic Bayes network, and we show that, while theoretically the principal's decisions can be made arbitrarily bad, the optimal attack is NP-hard to approximate, even under strong assumptions favoring the attacker. However, we also describe an important special case where the dependency of future states on past states is additive, in which we can efficiently compute an approximately optimal attack. Moreover, in networks with a linear transition function we can solve the problem optimally in polynomial time.
Partial-Order, Partially-Seen Observations of Fluents or Actions for Plan Recognition as Planning
Authors: Jennifer M. Nelson, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00

This work aims to make plan recognition as planning more ready for real-world scenarios by adapting previous compilations to work with partial-order, half-seen observations of both fluents and actions. We first redefine what observations can be and what it means to satisfy each kind. We then provide a compilation from plan recognition problem to classical planning problem, similar to original work by Ramirez and Geffner, but accommodating these more complex observation types. This compilation can be adapted towards other planning-based plan recognition techniques. Lastly we evaluate this method against an "ignore complexity" strategy that uses the original method by Ramirez and Geffner. Our experimental results suggest that, while slower, our method is equally or more accurate than baseline methods; our technique sometimes significantly reduces the size of the solution to the plan recognition problem, i.e, the size of the optimal goal set. We discuss these findings in the context of plan recognition problem difficulty and present an avenue for future work.
A Reduction from Reinforcement Learning to No-Regret Online Learning
Authors: Ching-An Cheng, Remi Tachet des Combes, Byron Boots, Geoff Gordon
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

We present a reduction from reinforcement learning (RL) to no-regret online learning based on the saddle-point formulation of RL, by which "any" online algorithm with sublinear regret can generate policies with provable performance guarantees. This new perspective decouples the RL problem into two parts: regret minimization and function approximation. The first part admits a standard online-learning analysis, and the second part can be quantified independently of the learning algorithm. Therefore, the proposed reduction can be used as a tool to systematically design new RL algorithms. We demonstrate this idea by devising a simple RL algorithm based on mirror descent and the generative-model oracle. For any $\gamma$-discounted tabular RL problem, with probability at least $1-\delta$, it learns an $\epsilon$-optimal policy using at most $\tilde{O}\left(\frac{|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|\log(\frac{1}{\delta})}{(1-\gamma)^4\epsilon^2}\right)$ samples. Furthermore, this algorithm admits a direct extension to linearly parameterized function approximators for large-scale applications, with computation and sample complexities independent of $|\mathcal{S}|$,$|\mathcal{A}|$, though at the cost of potential approximation bias.
LiDAR ICPS-net: Indoor Camera Positioning based-on Generative Adversarial Network for RGB to Point-Cloud Translation
Authors: Ali Ghofrani, Rahil Mahdian Toroghi, Seyed Mojtaba Tabatabaie, Seyed Maziar Tabasi
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Generative Adversarial Network, Position, Translation

Indoor positioning aims at navigation inside areas with no GPS-data availability and could be employed in many applications such as augmented reality, autonomous driving specially inside closed areas and tunnels. In this paper, a deep neural network-based architecture has been proposed to address this problem. In this regard, a tandem set of convolutional neural networks, as well as a Pix2Pix GAN network have been leveraged to perform as the scene classifier, scene RGB image to point cloud converter, and position regressor, respectively. The proposed architecture outperforms the previous works, including our recent work, in the sense that it makes data generation task easier and more robust against scene small variations, whilst the accuracy of the positioning is remarkably well, for both Cartesian position and quaternion information of the camera.
Character Keypoint-based Homography Estimation in Scanned Documents for Efficient Information Extraction
Authors: Kushagra Mahajan, Monika Sharma, Lovekesh Vig
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Homography Estimation, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Precise homography estimation between multiple images is a pre-requisite for many computer vision applications. One application that is particularly relevant in today's digital era is the alignment of scanned or camera-captured document images such as insurance claim forms for information extraction. Traditional learning based approaches perform poorly due to the absence of an appropriate gradient. Feature based keypoint extraction techniques for homography estimation in real scene images either detect an extremely large number of inconsistent keypoints due to sharp textual edges, or produce inaccurate keypoint correspondences due to variations in illumination and viewpoint differences between document images. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for aligning scanned or camera-captured document images using character based keypoints and a reference template. The algorithm is both fast and accurate and utilizes a standard Optical character recognition (OCR) engine such as Tesseract to find character based unambiguous keypoints, which are utilized to identify precise keypoint correspondences between two images. Finally, the keypoints are used to compute the homography mapping between a test document and a template. We evaluated the proposed approach for information extraction on two real world anonymized datasets comprised of health insurance claim forms and the results support the viability of the proposed technique.
Beyond Matérn: On A Class of Interpretable Confluent Hypergeometric Covariance Functions
Authors: Pulong Ma, Anindya Bhadra
Date: 2019-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

The Mat\'ern covariance function is a popular choice for prediction in spatial statistics and uncertainty quantification literature. A key benefit of the Mat\'ern class is that it is possible to get precise control over the degree of mean-square differentiability of the random process. However, the Mat\'ern class possesses exponentially decaying tails, and thus may not be suitable for modeling polynomially decaying dependence. This problem can be remedied using polynomial covariances; however one loses control over the degree of mean-square differentiability of corresponding processes, in that random processes with existing polynomial covariances are either infinitely mean-square differentiable or nowhere mean-square differentiable at all. We construct a new family of covariance functions called the \emph{Confluent Hypergeometric} (CH) class using a scale mixture representation of the Mat\'ern class where one obtains the benefits of both Mat\'ern and polynomial covariances. The resultant covariance contains two parameters: one controls the degree of mean-square differentiability near the origin and the other controls the tail heaviness, independently of each other. Using a spectral representation, we derive theoretical properties of this new covariance including equivalent measures and asymptotic behavior of the maximum likelihood estimators under infill asymptotics. The improved theoretical properties of the CH class are verified via extensive simulations. Application using NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 satellite data confirms the advantage of the CH class over the Mat\'ern class, especially in extrapolative settings.
Motion Reasoning for Goal-Based Imitation Learning
Authors: De-An Huang, Yu-Wei Chao, Chris Paxton, Xinke Deng, Li Fei-Fei, Juan Carlos Niebles, Animesh Garg, Dieter Fox
Date: 2019-11-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Motion Planning, Task and Motion Planning

We address goal-based imitation learning, where the aim is to output the symbolic goal from a third-person video demonstration. This enables the robot to plan for execution and reproduce the same goal in a completely different environment. The key challenge is that the goal of a video demonstration is often ambiguous at the level of semantic actions. The human demonstrators might unintentionally achieve certain subgoals in the demonstrations with their actions. Our main contribution is to propose a motion reasoning framework that combines task and motion planning to disambiguate the true intention of the demonstrator in the video demonstration. This allows us to robustly recognize the goals that cannot be disambiguated by previous action-based approaches. We evaluate our approach by collecting a dataset of 96 video demonstrations in a mockup kitchen environment. We show that our motion reasoning plays an important role in recognizing the actual goal of the demonstrator and improves the success rate by over 20%. We further show that by using the automatically inferred goal from the video demonstration, our robot is able to reproduce the same task in a real kitchen environment.