pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Certifiable Robustness to Graph Perturbations
Authors: Aleksandar Bojchevski, Stephan Günnemann
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12

Despite the exploding interest in graph neural networks there has been little effort to verify and improve their robustness. This is even more alarming given recent findings showing that they are extremely vulnerable to adversarial attacks on both the graph structure and the node attributes. We propose the first method for verifying certifiable (non-)robustness to graph perturbations for a general class of models that includes graph neural networks and label/feature propagation. By exploiting connections to PageRank and Markov decision processes our certificates can be efficiently (and under many threat models exactly) computed. Furthermore, we investigate robust training procedures that increase the number of certifiably robust nodes while maintaining or improving the clean predictive accuracy.
Recovering Bandits
Authors: Ciara Pike-Burke, Steffen Grünewälder
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Gaussian Processes

We study the recovering bandits problem, a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where the expected reward of each arm varies according to some unknown function of the time since the arm was last played. While being a natural extension of the classical bandit problem that arises in many real-world settings, this variation is accompanied by significant difficulties. In particular, methods need to plan ahead and estimate many more quantities than in the classical bandit setting. In this work, we explore the use of Gaussian processes to tackle the estimation and planing problem. We also discuss different regret definitions that let us quantify the performance of the methods. To improve computational efficiency of the methods, we provide an optimistic planning approximation. We complement these discussions with regret bounds and empirical studies.
Transfer Learning from Transformers to Fake News Challenge Stance Detection (FNC-1) Task
Authors: Valeriya Slovikovskaya
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Stance Detection, Transfer Learning

In this paper, we report improved results of the Fake News Challenge Stage 1 (FNC-1) stance detection task. This gain in performance is due to the generalization power of large language models based on Transformer architecture, invented, trained and publicly released over the last two years. Specifically (1) we improved the FNC-1 best performing model adding BERT sentence embedding of input sequences as a model feature, (2) we fine-tuned BERT, XLNet, and RoBERTa transformers on FNC-1 extended dataset and obtained state-of-the-art results on FNC-1 task.
VASE: Variational Assorted Surprise Exploration for Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Haitao Xu, Brendan McCane, Lech Szymanski
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Efficient Exploration, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Variational Inference

Exploration in environments with continuous control and sparse rewards remains a key challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, surprise has been used as an intrinsic reward that encourages systematic and efficient exploration. We introduce a new definition of surprise and its RL implementation named Variational Assorted Surprise Exploration (VASE). VASE uses a Bayesian neural network as a model of the environment dynamics and is trained using variational inference, alternately updating the accuracy of the agent's model and policy. Our experiments show that in continuous control sparse reward environments VASE outperforms other surprise-based exploration techniques.
Weakly Supervised Tracklet Person Re-Identification by Deep Feature-wise Mutual Learning
Authors: Zhirui Chen, Jianheng Li, Wei-Shi Zheng
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

The scalability problem caused by the difficulty in annotating Person Re-identification(Re-ID) datasets has become a crucial bottleneck in the development of Re-ID.To address this problem, many unsupervised Re-ID methods have recently been proposed.Nevertheless, most of these models require transfer from another auxiliary fully supervised dataset, which is still expensive to obtain.In this work, we propose a Re-ID model based on Weakly Supervised Tracklets(WST) data from various camera views, which can be inexpensively acquired by combining the fragmented tracklets of the same person in the same camera view over a period of time.We formulate our weakly supervised tracklets Re-ID model by a novel method, named deep feature-wise mutual learning(DFML), which consists of Mutual Learning on Feature Extractors (MLFE) and Mutual Learning on Feature Classifiers (MLFC).We propose MLFE by leveraging two feature extractors to learn from each other to extract more robust and discriminative features.On the other hand, we propose MLFC by adapting discriminative features from various camera views to each classifier. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed DFML over the state-of-the-art unsupervised models and even some supervised models on three Re-ID benchmark datasets.
Learning to Customize Model Structures for Few-shot Dialogue Generation Tasks
Authors: Yiping Song, Zequn Liu, Wei Bi, Rui Yan, Ming Zhang
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2020 6
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Diversity, Language Modelling, Meta-Learning

Training the generative models with minimal corpus is one of the critical challenges for building open-domain dialogue systems. Existing methods tend to use the meta-learning framework which pre-trains the parameters on all non-target tasks then fine-tunes on the target task. However, fine-tuning distinguishes tasks from the parameter perspective but ignores the model-structure perspective, resulting in similar dialogue models for different tasks. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that can customize a unique dialogue model for each task in the few-shot setting. In our approach, each dialogue model consists of a shared module, a gating module, and a private module. The first two modules are shared among all the tasks, while the third one will differentiate into different network structures to better capture the characteristics of the corresponding task. The extensive experiments on two datasets show that our method outperforms all the baselines in terms of task consistency, response quality, and diversity.
On the Proof of Fixed-Point Convergence for Plug-and-Play ADMM
Authors: Ruturaj G. Gavaskar, Kunal. N. Chaudhury
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

In most state-of-the-art image restoration methods, the sum of a data-fidelity and a regularization term is optimized using an iterative algorithm such as ADMM (alternating direction method of multipliers). In recent years, the possibility of using denoisers for regularization has been explored in several works. A popular approach is to formally replace the proximal operator within the ADMM framework with some powerful denoiser. However, since most state-of-the-art denoisers cannot be posed as a proximal operator, one cannot guarantee the convergence of these so-called plug-and-play (PnP) algorithms. In fact, the theoretical convergence of PnP algorithms is an active research topic. In this letter, we consider the result of Chan et al. (IEEE TCI, 2017), where fixed-point convergence of an ADMM-based PnP algorithm was established for a class of denoisers. We argue that the original proof is incomplete, since convergence is not analyzed for one of the three possible cases outlined in the paper. Moreover, we explain why the argument for the other cases does not apply in this case. We give a different analysis to fill this gap, which firmly establishes the original convergence theorem.
Multi-resolution CSI Feedback with deep learning in Massive MIMO System
Authors: Zhilin Lu, Jintao Wang, Jian Song
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00

In massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, user equipment (UE) needs to send downlink channel state information (CSI) back to base station (BS). However, the feedback becomes expensive with the growing complexity of CSI in massive MIMO system. Recently, deep learning (DL) approaches are used to improve the reconstruction efficiency of CSI feedback. In this paper, a novel feedback network named CRNet is proposed to achieve better performance via extracting CSI features on multiple resolutions. An advanced training scheme that further boosts the network performance is also introduced. Simulation results show that the proposed CRNet outperforms the state-of-the-art CsiNet under the same computational complexity without any extra information. The open source codes are available at https://github.com/Kylin9511/CRNet
BottleNet++: An End-to-End Approach for Feature Compression in Device-Edge Co-Inference Systems
Authors: Jiawei Shao, Jun Zhang
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Edge-computing, Feature Compression

The emergence of various intelligent mobile applications demands the deployment of powerful deep learning models at resource-constrained mobile devices. The device-edge co-inference framework provides a promising solution by splitting a neural network at a mobile device and an edge computing server. In order to balance the on-device computation and the communication overhead, the splitting point needs to be carefully picked, while the intermediate feature needs to be compressed before transmission. Existing studies decoupled the design of model splitting, feature compression, and communication, which may lead to excessive resource consumption of the mobile device. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end architecture, named BottleNet++, that consists of an encoder, a non-trainable channel layer, and a decoder for more efficient feature compression and transmission. The encoder and decoder essentially implement joint source-channel coding via convolutional neural networks (CNNs), while explicitly considering the effect of channel noise. By exploiting the strong sparsity and the fault-tolerant property of the intermediate feature in a deep neural network (DNN), BottleNet++ achieves a much higher compression ratio than existing methods. Furthermore, by providing the channel condition to the encoder as an input, our method enjoys a strong generalization ability in different channel conditions. Compared with merely transmitting intermediate data without feature compression, BottleNet++ achieves up to 64x bandwidth reduction over the additive white Gaussian noise channel and up to 256x bit compression ratio in the binary erasure channel, with less than 2% reduction in accuracy. With a higher compression ratio, BottleNet++ enables splitting a DNN at earlier layers, which leads to up to 3x reduction in on-device computation compared with other compression methods.
Semantic Conditioned Dynamic Modulation for Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos
Authors: Yitian Yuan, Lin Ma, Jingwen Wang, Wei Liu, Wenwu Zhu
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Sentence, Temporal Sentence Grounding

Temporal sentence grounding in videos aims to detect and localize one target video segment, which semantically corresponds to a given sentence. Existing methods mainly tackle this task via matching and aligning semantics between a sentence and candidate video segments, while neglect the fact that the sentence information plays an important role in temporally correlating and composing the described contents in videos. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic conditioned dynamic modulation (SCDM) mechanism, which relies on the sentence semantics to modulate the temporal convolution operations for better correlating and composing the sentence related video contents over time. More importantly, the proposed SCDM performs dynamically with respect to the diverse video contents so as to establish a more precise matching relationship between sentence and video, thereby improving the temporal grounding accuracy. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-arts with clear margins, illustrating the ability of SCDM to better associate and localize relevant video contents for temporal sentence grounding. Our code for this paper is available at https://github.com/yytzsy/SCDM .
LIMIT-BERT : Linguistic Informed Multi-Task BERT
Authors: Junru Zhou, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Shuailiang Zhang
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, POS, Semantic Parsing, Semantic Role Labeling

In this paper, we present a Linguistic Informed Multi-Task BERT (LIMIT-BERT) for learning language representations across multiple linguistic tasks by Multi-Task Learning (MTL). LIMIT-BERT includes five key linguistic syntax and semantics tasks: Part-Of-Speech (POS) tags, constituent and dependency syntactic parsing, span and dependency semantic role labeling (SRL). Besides, LIMIT-BERT adopts linguistics mask strategy: Syntactic and Semantic Phrase Masking which mask all of the tokens corresponding to a syntactic/semantic phrase. Different from recent Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks (MT-DNN) (Liu et al., 2019), our LIMIT-BERT is linguistically motivated and learning in a semi-supervised method which provides large amounts of linguistic-task data as same as BERT learning corpus. As a result, LIMIT-BERT not only improves linguistic tasks performance but also benefits from a regularization effect and linguistic information that leads to more general representations to help adapt to new tasks and domains. LIMIT-BERT obtains new state-of-the-art or competitive results on both span and dependency semantic parsing on Propbank benchmarks and both dependency and constituent syntactic parsing on Penn Treebank.
A neural document language modeling framework for spoken document retrieval
Authors: Li-Phen Yen, Zhen-Yu Wu, Kuan-Yu Chen
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Retrieval, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Recent developments in deep learning have led to a significant innovation in various classic and practical subjects, including speech recognition, computer vision, question answering, information retrieval and so on. In the context of natural language processing (NLP), language representations have shown giant successes in many downstream tasks, so the school of studies have become a major stream of research recently. Because the immenseness of multimedia data along with speech have spread around the world in our daily life, spoken document retrieval (SDR) has become an important research subject in the past decades. Targeting on enhancing the SDR performance, the paper concentrates on proposing a neural retrieval framework, which assembles the merits of using language modeling (LM) mechanism in SDR and leveraging the abstractive information learned by the language representation models. Consequently, to our knowledge, this is a pioneer study on supervised training of a neural LM-based SDR framework, especially combined with the pretrained language representation methods.
SPARQ-SGD: Event-Triggered and Compressed Communication in Decentralized Stochastic Optimization
Authors: Navjot Singh, Deepesh Data, Jemin George, Suhas Diggavi
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Stochastic Optimization

In this paper, we propose and analyze SPARQ-SGD, which is an event-triggered and compressed algorithm for decentralized training of large-scale machine learning models. Each node can locally compute a condition (event) which triggers a communication where quantized and sparsified local model parameters are sent. In SPARQ-SGD each node takes at least a fixed number ($H$) of local gradient steps and then checks if the model parameters have significantly changed compared to its last update; it communicates further compressed model parameters only when there is a significant change, as specified by a (design) criterion. We prove that the SPARQ-SGD converges as $O(\frac{1}{nT})$ and $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt{nT}})$ in the strongly-convex and non-convex settings, respectively, demonstrating that such aggressive compression, including event-triggered communication, model sparsification and quantization does not affect the overall convergence rate as compared to uncompressed decentralized training; thereby theoretically yielding communication efficiency for "free". We evaluate SPARQ-SGD over real datasets to demonstrate significant amount of savings in communication over the state-of-the-art.
RLINK: Deep Reinforcement Learning for User Identity Linkage
Authors: Xiaoxue Li, Yanan Cao, Yanmin Shang, Yangxi Li, Yanbing Liu, Jianlong Tan
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

User identity linkage is a task of recognizing the identities of the same user across different social networks (SN). Previous works tackle this problem via estimating the pairwise similarity between identities from different SN, predicting the label of identity pairs or selecting the most relevant identity pair based on the similarity scores. However, most of these methods ignore the results of previously matched identities, which could contribute to the linkage in following matching steps. To address this problem, we convert user identity linkage into a sequence decision problem and propose a reinforcement learning model to optimize the linkage strategy from the global perspective. Our method makes full use of both the social network structure and the history matched identities, and explores the long-term influence of current matching on subsequent decisions. We conduct experiments on different types of datasets, the results show that our method achieves better performance than other state-of-the-art methods.
Parameter Sharing Decoder Pair for Auto Composing
Authors: Xu Zhao
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Auto Composing is an active and appealing research area in the past few years, and lots of efforts have been put into inventing more robust models to solve this problem. With the fast evolution of deep learning techniques, some deep neural network-based language models are becoming dominant. Notably, the transformer structure has been proven to be very efficient and promising in modeling texts. However, the transformer-based language models usually contain huge number of parameters and the size of the model is usually too large to put in production for some storage limited applications. In this paper, we propose a parameter sharing decoder pair (PSDP), which reduces the number of parameters dramatically and at the same time maintains the capability of generating understandable and reasonable compositions. Works created by the proposed model are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model.
RIGA: Covert and Robust White-Box Watermarking of Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Tianhao Wang, Florian Kerschbaum
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Inference Attack

Watermarking of deep neural networks (DNN) can enable their tracing once released by a data owner. In this paper, we generalize white-box watermarking algorithms for DNNs, where the data owner needs white-box access to the model to extract the watermark. White-box watermarking algorithms have the advantage that they do not impact the accuracy of the watermarked model. We propose Robust whIte-box GAn watermarking (RIGA), a novel white-box watermarking algorithm that uses adversarial training. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed watermarking algorithm not only does not impact accuracy, but also significantly improves the covertness and robustness over the current state-of-art.
Energy-Inspired Models: Learning with Sampler-Induced Distributions
Authors: Dieterich Lawson, George Tucker, Bo Dai, Rajesh Ranganath
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Variational Inference

Energy-based models (EBMs) are powerful probabilistic models, but suffer from intractable sampling and density evaluation due to the partition function. As a result, inference in EBMs relies on approximate sampling algorithms, leading to a mismatch between the model and inference. Motivated by this, we consider the sampler-induced distribution as the model of interest and maximize the likelihood of this model. This yields a class of energy-inspired models (EIMs) that incorporate learned energy functions while still providing exact samples and tractable log-likelihood lower bounds. We describe and evaluate three instantiations of such models based on truncated rejection sampling, self-normalized importance sampling, and Hamiltonian importance sampling. These models outperform or perform comparably to the recently proposed Learned Accept/Reject Sampling algorithm and provide new insights on ranking Noise Contrastive Estimation and Contrastive Predictive Coding. Moreover, EIMs allow us to generalize a recent connection between multi-sample variational lower bounds and auxiliary variable variational inference. We show how recent variational bounds can be unified with EIMs as the variational family.
A Self Validation Network for Object-Level Human Attention Estimation
Authors: Zehua Zhang, Chen Yu, David Crandall
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2019 12
Tasks: Object

Due to the foveated nature of the human vision system, people can focus their visual attention on a small region of their visual field at a time, which usually contains only a single object. Estimating this object of attention in first-person (egocentric) videos is useful for many human-centered real-world applications such as augmented reality applications and driver assistance systems. A straightforward solution for this problem is to pick the object whose bounding box is hit by the gaze, where eye gaze point estimation is obtained from a traditional eye gaze estimator and object candidates are generated from an off-the-shelf object detector. However, such an approach can fail because it addresses the where and the what problems separately, despite that they are highly related, chicken-and-egg problems. In this paper, we propose a novel unified model that incorporates both spatial and temporal evidence in identifying as well as locating the attended object in firstperson videos. It introduces a novel Self Validation Module that enforces and leverages consistency of the where and the what concepts. We evaluate on two public datasets, demonstrating that Self Validation Module significantly benefits both training and testing and that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Towards a Predictive Patent Analytics and Evaluation Platform
Authors: Nebula Alam, Khoi-Nguyen Tran, Sue Ann Chen, John Wagner, Josh Andres, Mukesh Mohania
Date: 2019-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

The importance of patents is well recognised across many regions of the world. Many patent mining systems have been proposed, but with limited predictive capabilities. In this demo, we showcase how predictive algorithms leveraging the state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning techniques can be used to improve understanding of patents for inventors, patent evaluators, and business analysts alike. Our demo video is available at http://ibm.biz/ecml2019-demo-patent-analytics