pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Human Perceptual Evaluations for Image Compression
Authors: Yash Patel, Srikar Appalaraju, R. Manmatha
Date: 2019-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Compression, MS-SSIM, SSIM

Recently, there has been much interest in deep learning techniques to do image compression and there have been claims that several of these produce better results than engineered compression schemes (such as JPEG, JPEG2000 or BPG). A standard way of comparing image compression schemes today is to use perceptual similarity metrics such as PSNR or MS-SSIM (multi-scale structural similarity). This has led to some deep learning techniques which directly optimize for MS-SSIM by choosing it as a loss function. While this leads to a higher MS-SSIM for such techniques, we demonstrate using user studies that the resulting improvement may be misleading. Deep learning techniques for image compression with a higher MS-SSIM may actually be perceptually worse than engineered compression schemes with a lower MS-SSIM.
Synthetic Elastography using B-mode Ultrasound through a Deep Fully-Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: R. R. Wildeboer, R. J. G. van Sloun, C. K. Mannaerts, P. H. Moraes, G. Salomon, M. C. Chammas, H. Wijkstra, M. Mischi
Date: 2019-08-09 00:00:00

Shear-wave elastography (SWE) permits local estimation of tissue elasticity, an important imaging marker in biomedicine. This recently-developed, advanced technique assesses the speed of a laterally-travelling shear wave after an acoustic radiation force "push" to estimate local Young's moduli in an operator-independent fashion. In this work, we show how synthetic SWE (sSWE) images can be generated based on conventional B-mode imaging through deep learning. Using side-by-side-view B-mode/SWE images collected in 50 patients with prostate cancer, we show that sSWE images with a pixel-wise mean absolute error of 4.5+/-0.96 kPa with regard to the original SWE can be generated. Visualization of high-level feature levels through t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding reveals substantial overlap between data from two different scanners. Qualitatively, we examined the use of the sSWE methodology for B-mode images obtained with a scanner without SWE functionality. We also examined the use of this type of network in elasticity imaging in the thyroid. Limitations of the technique reside in the fact that networks have to be retrained for different organs, and that the method requires standardization of the imaging settings and procedure. Future research will be aimed at development of sSWE as an elasticity-related tissue typing strategy that is solely based on B-mode ultrasound acquisition, and the examination of its clinical utility.
LSTM-based Flow Prediction
Authors: Hongzhi Wang, Yang song, Shihan Tang
Date: 2019-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In this paper, a method of prediction on continuous time series variables from the production or flow -- an LSTM algorithm based on multivariate tuning -- is proposed. The algorithm improves the traditional LSTM algorithm and converts the time series data into supervised learning sequences regarding industrial data's features. The main innovation of this paper consists in introducing the concepts of periodic measurement and time window in the industrial prediction problem, especially considering industrial data with time series characteristics. Experiments using real-world datasets show that the prediction accuracy is improved, 54.05% higher than that of traditional LSTM algorithm.
Concepts and Applications of Conformal Prediction in Computational Drug Discovery
Authors: Isidro Cortés-Ciriano, Andreas Bender
Date: 2019-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Decision Making, Drug Discovery

Estimating the reliability of individual predictions is key to increase the adoption of computational models and artificial intelligence in preclinical drug discovery, as well as to foster its application to guide decision making in clinical settings. Among the large number of algorithms developed over the last decades to compute prediction errors, Conformal Prediction (CP) has gained increasing attention in the computational drug discovery community. A major reason for its recent popularity is the ease of interpretation of the computed prediction errors in both classification and regression tasks. For instance, at a confidence level of 90% the true value will be within the predicted confidence intervals in at least 90% of the cases. This so called validity of conformal predictors is guaranteed by the robust mathematical foundation underlying CP. The versatility of CP relies on its minimal computational footprint, as it can be easily coupled to any machine learning algorithm at little computational cost. In this review, we summarize underlying concepts and practical applications of CP with a particular focus on virtual screening and activity modelling, and list open source implementations of relevant software. Finally, we describe the current limitations in the field, and provide a perspective on future opportunities for CP in preclinical and clinical drug discovery.
Behaviour Suite for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ian Osband, Yotam Doron, Matteo Hessel, John Aslanides, Eren Sezener, Andre Saraiva, Katrina McKinney, Tor Lattimore, Csaba Szepesvari, Satinder Singh, Benjamin Van Roy, Richard Sutton, David Silver, Hado van Hasselt
Date: 2019-08-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2020 1
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper introduces the Behaviour Suite for Reinforcement Learning, or bsuite for short. bsuite is a collection of carefully-designed experiments that investigate core capabilities of reinforcement learning (RL) agents with two objectives. First, to collect clear, informative and scalable problems that capture key issues in the design of general and efficient learning algorithms. Second, to study agent behaviour through their performance on these shared benchmarks. To complement this effort, we open source github.com/deepmind/bsuite, which automates evaluation and analysis of any agent on bsuite. This library facilitates reproducible and accessible research on the core issues in RL, and ultimately the design of superior learning algorithms. Our code is Python, and easy to use within existing projects. We include examples with OpenAI Baselines, Dopamine as well as new reference implementations. Going forward, we hope to incorporate more excellent experiments from the research community, and commit to a periodic review of bsuite from a committee of prominent researchers.
That which we call private
Authors: Úlfar Erlingsson, Ilya Mironov, Ananth Raghunathan, Shuang Song
Date: 2019-08-08 00:00:00

The guarantees of security and privacy defenses are often strengthened by relaxing the assumptions made about attackers or the context in which defenses are deployed. Such relaxations can be a highly worthwhile topic of exploration---even though they typically entail assuming a weaker, less powerful adversary---because there may indeed be great variability in both attackers' powers and their context. However, no weakening or contextual discounting of attackers' power is assumed for what some have called "relaxed definitions" in the analysis of differential-privacy guarantees. Instead, the definitions so named are the basis of refinements and more advanced analyses of the worst-case implications of attackers---without any change assumed in attackers' powers. Because they more precisely bound the worst-case privacy loss, these improved analyses can greatly strengthen the differential-privacy upper-bound guarantees---sometimes lowering the differential-privacy epsilon by orders-of-magnitude. As such, to the casual eye, these analyses may appear to imply a reduced privacy loss. This is a false perception: the privacy loss of any concrete mechanism cannot change with the choice of a worst-case-loss upper-bound analysis technique. Practitioners must be careful not to equate real-world privacy with differential-privacy epsilon values, at least not without full consideration of the context.
Vision-based Navigation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jonáš Kulhánek, Erik Derner, Tim de Bruin, Robert Babuška
Date: 2019-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Efficient Neural Network, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Visual Navigation

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has been successfully applied to a variety of game-like environments. However, the application of deep RL to visual navigation with realistic environments is a challenging task. We propose a novel learning architecture capable of navigating an agent, e.g. a mobile robot, to a target given by an image. To achieve this, we have extended the batched A2C algorithm with auxiliary tasks designed to improve visual navigation performance. We propose three additional auxiliary tasks: predicting the segmentation of the observation image and of the target image and predicting the depth-map. These tasks enable the use of supervised learning to pre-train a large part of the network and to reduce the number of training steps substantially. The training performance has been further improved by increasing the environment complexity gradually over time. An efficient neural network structure is proposed, which is capable of learning for multiple targets in multiple environments. Our method navigates in continuous state spaces and on the AI2-THOR environment simulator outperforms state-of-the-art goal-oriented visual navigation methods from the literature.
Understanding Optical Music Recognition
Authors: Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, Jan Hajič jr., Alexander Pacha
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00

For over 50 years, researchers have been trying to teach computers to read music notation, referred to as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). However, this field is still difficult to access for new researchers, especially those without a significant musical background: few introductory materials are available, and furthermore the field has struggled with defining itself and building a shared terminology. In this tutorial, we address these shortcomings by (1) providing a robust definition of OMR and its relationship to related fields, (2) analyzing how OMR inverts the music encoding process to recover the musical notation and the musical semantics from documents, (3) proposing a taxonomy of OMR, with most notably a novel taxonomy of applications. Additionally, we discuss how deep learning affects modern OMR research, as opposed to the traditional pipeline. Based on this work, the reader should be able to attain a basic understanding of OMR: its objectives, its inherent structure, its relationship to other fields, the state of the art, and the research opportunities it affords.
Recent Trends in Deep Learning Based Personality Detection
Authors: Yash Mehta, Navonil Majumder, Alexander Gelbukh, Erik Cambria
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Personality Trait Recognition

Recently, the automatic prediction of personality traits has received a lot of attention. Specifically, personality trait prediction from multimodal data has emerged as a hot topic within the field of affective computing. In this paper, we review significant machine learning models which have been employed for personality detection, with an emphasis on deep learning-based methods. This review paper provides an overview of the most popular approaches to automated personality detection, various computational datasets, its industrial applications, and state-of-the-art machine learning models for personality detection with specific focus on multimodal approaches. Personality detection is a very broad and diverse topic: this survey only focuses on computational approaches and leaves out psychological studies on personality detection.
Transferring knowledge from monitored to unmonitored areas for forecasting parking spaces
Authors: Andrei Ionita, André Pomp, Michael Cochez, Tobias Meisen, Stefan Decker
Date: 2019-08-07 00:00:00

Smart cities around the world have begun monitoring parking areas in order to estimate available parking spots and help drivers looking for parking. The current results are promising, indeed. However, existing approaches are limited by the high cost of sensors that need to be installed throughout the city in order to achieve an accurate estimation. This work investigates the extension of estimating parking information from areas equipped with sensors to areas where they are missing. To this end, the similarity between city neighborhoods is determined based on background data, i.e., from geographic information systems. Using the derived similarity values, we analyze the adaptation of occupancy rates from monitored- to unmonitored parking areas.
Continuous-Variable Quantum Key Distribution with a Real Local Oscillator and without Auxiliary Signals
Authors: Sebastian Kleis, Max Rueckmann, Christian G. Schaeffer
Date: 2019-08-02 00:00:00

Continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) is realized with coherent detection and is therefore very suitable for a cost-efficient implementation. The major challenge in CV-QKD is mitigation of laser phase noise at a signal to noise ratio of much less than 0 dB. So far, this has been achieved with a remote local oscillator or with auxiliary signals. For the first time, we experimentally demonstrate that CV-QKD can be performed with a real local oscillator and without auxiliary signals which is achieved by applying Machine Learning methods. It is shown that, with the most established discrete modulation protocol, the experimental system works down to a quantum channel signal to noise ratio of -19.1 dB. The performance of the experimental system allows CV-QKD at a key rate of 9.2 Mbit/s over a fiber distance of 26 km. After remote local oscillator and auxiliary signal aided CV-QKD, this could mark a starting point for a third generation of CV-QKD systems that are even more attractive for a wide implementation because they are almost identical to standard coherent systems.
Modeling Daily Pan Evaporation in Humid Climates Using Gaussian Process Regression
Authors: Sevda Shabani, Saeed Samadianfard, Mohammad Taghi Sattari, Shahab Shamshirband, Amir Mosavi, Tibor Kmet, Annamaria R. Varkonyi-Koczy
Date: 2019-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: GPR, regression

Evaporation is one of the main processes in the hydrological cycle, and it is one of the most critical factors in agricultural, hydrological, and meteorological studies. Due to the interactions of multiple climatic factors, the evaporation is a complex and nonlinear phenomenon; therefore, the data-based methods can be used to have precise estimations of it. In this regard, in the present study, Gaussian Process Regression, Nearest-Neighbor, Random Forest and Support Vector Regression were used to estimate the pan evaporation in the meteorological stations of Golestan Province, Iran. For this purpose, meteorological data including PE, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and sunny hours collected from the Gonbad-e Kavus, Gorgan and Bandar Torkman stations from 2011 through 2017. The accuracy of the studied methods was determined using the statistical indices of Root Mean Squared Error, correlation coefficient and Mean Absolute Error. Furthermore, the Taylor charts utilized for evaluating the accuracy of the mentioned models. We report that GPR for Gonbad-e Kavus Station with input parameters of T, W and S and GPR for Gorgan and Bandar Torkmen stations with input parameters of T, RH, W, and S had the most accurate performances and proposed for precise estimation of PE. Due to the high rate of evaporation in Iran and the lack of measurement instruments, the findings of the current study indicated that the PE values might be estimated with few easily measured meteorological parameters accurately.
From the User to the Medium: Neural Profiling Across Web Communities
Authors: Mohammad Akbari, Kunal Relia, Anas Elghafari, Rumi Chunara
Date: 2018-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Community Detection, Management

Online communities provide a unique way for individuals to access information from those in similar circumstances, which can be critical for health conditions that require daily and personalized management. As these groups and topics often arise organically, identifying the types of topics discussed is necessary to understand their needs. As well, these communities and people in them can be quite diverse, and existing community detection methods have not been extended towards evaluating these heterogeneities. This has been limited as community detection methodologies have not focused on community detection based on semantic relations between textual features of the user-generated content. Thus here we develop an approach, NeuroCom, that optimally finds dense groups of users as communities in a latent space inferred by neural representation of published contents of users. By embedding of words and messages, we show that NeuroCom demonstrates improved clustering and identifies more nuanced discussion topics in contrast to other common unsupervised learning approaches.
Topological Interpretation of Interactive Computation
Authors: Emanuela Merelli, Anita Wasilewska
Date: 2019-08-03 00:00:00

It is a great pleasure to write this tribute in honor of Scott A. Smolka on his 65th birthday. We revisit Goldin, Smolka hypothesis that persistent Turing machine (PTM) can capture the intuitive notion of sequential interaction computation. We propose a topological setting to model the abstract concept of environment. We use it to define a notion of a topological Turing machine (TTM) as a universal model for interactive computation and possible model for concurrent computation.
Recursion, Probability, Convolution and Classification for Computations
Authors: Mircea Namolaru, Thierry Goubier
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Classification, General Classification

The main motivation of this work was practical, to offer computationally and theoretical scalable ways to structuring large classes of computation. It started from attempts to optimize R code for machine learning/artificial intelligence algorithms for huge data sets, that due to their size, should be handled into an incremental (online) fashion. Our target are large classes of relational (attribute based), mathematical (index based) or graph computations. We wanted to use powerful computation representations that emerged in AI (artificial intelligence)/ML (machine learning) as BN (Bayesian networks) and CNN (convolution neural networks). For the classes of computation addressed by us, and for our HPC (high performance computing) needs, the current solutions for translating computations into such representation need to be extended. Our results show that the classes of computation targeted by us, could be tree-structured, and a probability distribution (defining a DBN, i.e. Dynamic Bayesian Network) associated with it. More ever, this DBN may be viewed as a recursive CNN (Convolution Neural Network). Within this tree-like structure, classification in classes with size bounded (by a parameterizable may be performed. These results are at the core of very powerful, yet highly practically algorithms for restructuring and parallelizing the computations. The mathematical background required for an in depth presentation and exposing the full generality of our approach) is the subject of a subsequent paper. In this paper, we work in an limited (but important) framework that could be understood with rudiments of linear algebra and graph theory. The focus is in applicability, most of this paper discuss the usefulness of our approach for solving hard compilation problems related to automatic parallelism.
Syntax-aware Semantic Role Labeling without Parsing
Authors: Rui Cai, Mirella Lapata
Date: 2019-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: TACL 2019 3
Tasks: ARC, Semantic Role Labeling

In this paper we focus on learning dependency aware representations for semantic role labeling without recourse to an external parser. The backbone of our model is an LSTM-based semantic role labeler jointly trained with two auxiliary tasks: predicting the dependency label of a word and whether there exists an arc linking it to the predicate. The auxiliary tasks provide syntactic information that is specific to semantic role labeling and are learned from training data (dependency annotations) without relying on existing dependency parsers, which can be noisy (e.g., on out-of-domain data or infrequent constructions). Experimental results on the CoNLL-2009 benchmark dataset show that our model outperforms the state of the art in English, and consistently improves performance in other languages, including Chinese, German, and Spanish.
No Word is an Island---A Transformation Weighting Model for Semantic Composition
Authors: Corina Dima, Dani{\"e}l de Kok, Neele Witte, Erhard Hinrichs
Date: 2019-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: TACL 2019 3
Tasks: Semantic Composition

Composition models of distributional semantics are used to construct phrase representations from the representations of their words. Composition models are typically situated on two ends of a spectrum. They either have a small number of parameters but compose all phrases in the same way, or they perform word-specific compositions at the cost of a far larger number of parameters. In this paper we propose transformation weighting (TransWeight), a composition model that consistently outperforms existing models on nominal compounds, adjective-noun phrases, and adverb-adjective phrases in English, German, and Dutch. TransWeight drastically reduces the number of parameters needed compared with the best model in the literature by composing similar words in the same way.
Multiattentive Recurrent Neural Network Architecture for Multilingual Readability Assessment
Authors: Ion Madrazo Azpiazu, Maria Soledad Pera
Date: 2019-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: TACL 2019 3

We present a multiattentive recurrent neural network architecture for automatic multilingual readability assessment. This architecture considers raw words as its main input, but internally captures text structure and informs its word attention process using other syntax- and morphology-related datapoints, known to be of great importance to readability. This is achieved by a multiattentive strategy that allows the neural network to focus on specific parts of a text for predicting its reading level. We conducted an exhaustive evaluation using data sets targeting multiple languages and prediction task types, to compare the proposed model with traditional, state-of-the-art, and other neural network strategies.
Learning Scene Geometry for Visual Localization in Challenging Conditions
Authors: Nathan Piasco, Desire Sidibe, Valerie Gouet-Brunet，Cedric Demonceaux1
Date: 2019-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2019 5
Tasks: Image-Based Localization, Visual Localization

We propose a new approach for outdoor large scale image based localization that can deal with challenging scenarios like cross-season, cross-weather, day/night and longterm localization. The key component of our method is a new learned global image descriptor, that can effectively benefit from scene geometry information during training. At test time, our system is capable of inferring the depth map related to the query image and use it to increase localization accuracy.We are able to increase recall@1 performances by 2.15% on cross-weather and long-term localization scenario and by 4.24% points on a challenging winter/summer localization sequence versus state-of-the-art methods. Our method can also use weakly annotated data to localize night images across a reference dataset of daytime images.